The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, by Isaiah Berlin – review

To expand the quote that gives this book its title: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." It's from Kant, and Isaiah Berlin seized upon it many times as a stick with which to beat those who would try to build heaven on earth, or fit humanity into a straitjacket of their own design. Famously – the incident became a crucial part of the story he told about himself – he had seen, when a child in Riga, a policeman being dragged off by a mob of revolutionaries in 1917. This instilled in him for ever a horror of such violent solutions to humanity's problems.

It never stopped him from thinking about such solutions, though, and although he has been castigated for not paying enough attention to Hitler or Stalin, he spent a great deal of time pondering the roots of totalitarianism. This volume, in which his thoughts on these matters came to their peak of refinement, was first published in 1990, but now appears with enough new material (some 50-odd pages of appendices, and a foreword by John Banville) to justify your replacing it if you already have a copy. If you don't have a copy, get this one, now. For someone who was so urbane – one is beginning to feel that his works on history are now the interludes between his letters – it is perhaps surprising how stirring Berlin's historical writings can be.

Part of the trick is to get into the mind of the kind of person who repelled him. We are watching a sort of fascination at work. When he describes the Viscount de Bonald, a contemporary of counter-Enlightenment philosopher Joseph de Maistre, we get a strong sense of the man and his mind: "He taught that natural sciences were tissues of coherent falsehoods, that the desire for individual liberty was a form of original sin, and that all possession of absolute secular power, whether by monarchs or popular assemblies, was founded on blasphemous rejection of divine authority, whose sole representative was the Roman Church." (You can recognise the mindset today, albeit disconnected from Catholicism, in all sorts of places.) There is a kind of relish in this description, and he kept returning to the theme, by way of explaining the roots of fascism. The essay "Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism" is the centrepiece of this book, and makes for essential reading.

The final essay, "The Bent Twig" (note the phrase's relationship to the title of this book), contains Berlin's thoughts on nationalism – which, originating in East Prussia around the beginning of the 18th century, could be said to be the point at which history starts curdling unpleasantly. In the run-up to this notion, he first mentions those rationalists who thought that humanity could be run on almost mathematical principles.

"These were the optimists," Berlin says. Then he gets on to the pessimists, starting with Heine in 1832, warning the French that "one fine day their German neighbours, fired by a terrible combination of absolutist metaphysics, historical memories and resentments, fanaticism and savage strength and fury, would fall upon them, and would destroy the great monuments of Western civilisation." Once "the demonic powers of ancient German pantheism" – Heine's words – had been let loose, "then let the French beware: the French Revolution will seem like a peaceful idyll." (Berlin's words.)

Now that is pretty good stuff. First, congratulations to Heine, who would appear to have only been unable to foresee what kind of uniforms the Nazis would be wearing, but also to Berlin, for condensing these thoughts in such a stirring and chilling fashion.

There's an easy fluency to Berlin's writing (it's so fluent, that sometimes you notice he hasn't actually closed off a sentence properly, but you've been so carried away it doesn't matter); but there is also a relish in his descriptions of history's bogeymen. History with a whiff of sulphur about it: which is, alas for us, how it should be.