Responding To Isaiah Berlin's Challenges

With the the continuous advance of globalization, liberalism has become an increasingly hot topic among Chinese scholars. Therefore, it's increasingly necessary for Marxism to make a dialogue with liberalism. As a typical western liberalist, Berlin attributed the origin of totalitarianism reflected by the former Soviet Union socialist practice to Marxism. Then he blamed the Marxism liberalism. In Berlin's opinion, the core character of Marxism lies in the historical determinism, which is based on the denial of the freedom of humans, regards the law of history as the core content and treats the construction of inclusive ultimate system as the fundamental destination The social practice,which is under the guide of historical determination, has some traits of autocracy unavoidably. The criticism of Berlin results in the doubt of Marxism by some people without their own position and influences people's wise judgment and reasonable choice of reality. Therefore, making response to his blame and make historical recurrence of Marxist liberalism is not only a theoretical requirement, but also of vital reality importance.Berlin's criticism of Marx mainly originates from the international communist campaigns historically, especially the socialist practice of former Soviet Union. Berlin believes that the Marxists in former Soviet Union have acted in accordance with the core concepts of Marx and developes the Marxism theory on the basis of facts comprehensively. The logic resulted from this is that the historical mistakes made by former Soviet Union is those of Marx and the criticism of its totalitarianism is that of Marx. Proceeding from the deduction, Berlin has always been blended the criticism of totalitarian with that of Marx. Because as for Berlin, Marx not only acts as the theoretical origin of totalitarianism, but Marx and Marxists are totally the same on the natural level of depriving personal freedom. They both put individuals within the framework of country and society on the basis of a set of transcendental ideas. They try to realize the individual purpose of managing history development by replacing the personal autonomous selection with the objectivity of historical law. Based on the idea of despising humanity, Berlin constructed the narrow personal image of Marx by using the totalitarian theory. From the arrogant "German headmaster" to the cold-blooded "hard heart", the whole personality of Marx was denied by Berlin with no exception.The indiscriminate criticism of Berlin erases the independence of Marxist philosophy in aspect of content, violates dialectical unity of logic and history in aspect of method and is unacceptable in aspect of form. However, only when we go deep into the construction of Berlin's thought and the philosophical basis cited by it, can Berlin's questioning be explained. Despite Berlin believes in the "check and balance theory" of the two kinds of freedom, the individualism, empiricism and the metaphysic basis of humanity diversification determines the fact that Berlin has a tendency towards the legitimacy of negative liberty unavoidably. From Constant to Mill, the style of liberty in modern people has been fully demonstrated here. The safeguard of private sector and the vigilance of interference in state propels Berlin to take extremely hostile and offending attitudes towards all totalitarianism doctrines. The totalitarianism, which is characterized by state reason, is the expanded individual reason existed in the positive liberal form in Berlin's perspective. The independent requirement of individual reason has provided possibilities of the violation of state reason. Therefore, the concern about positive liberty of Berlin and the criticism of totalitarianism are synchronous.Although Berlin makes firm criticism of all the factors hindering freedom in the perspective of liberalism, this kind of criticism not only demonstrates freedom, but also generates contradictions that cannot be overcome by itself. The criticism of positive freedom leads to not only the internal conflict of two kinds of freedom but also the nervous tendency of liberalism and value pluralism. As for the particular value orientation of liberalism, pluralism is a kind of equality theory with neutral value. Regarding the incommensurability of value as the premise, pluralism attempts to find a path of balancing values among various values. The pluralists acknowledge the incommensurability of various kinds of values and every choice of value means the lose of its value. This is the inherent foundation of extreme objection to value choice from value pluralists. Despite Berlin has declared his point of pluralism repeatedly, his favor for negative freedom has explicitly demonstrated his liberalist principle and resulted in the inner tension between liberalism and pluralism, thus revealing his theoretical dilemma that is difficult to conceal.Distinct from Berlin's individualist liberalism, Marx has always set the main body of freedom as the populous masses of the people. Because as for Marx, the master of history is neither the random "individual" nor the abstract "common people", but the masses who engage in realistic activities."Practical persons " constitutes the starting points both historically and logically. To grasp the freedom of people in the dimension of reality gives freedom the content of existentialism, thus making Marx put more emphasis on the reality and content of freedom. Taking this as a main line, the freedom, which combines form and content as well as individual and society, develops what is useful in the pure form of freedom and atomic individual freedom and discards the opposite aspects in them. The freedom, which is based on practice, has achieved real and rich characteristics in the historical combination of individual and humans, existence and essence, as well as definiteness and indefiniteness.Through the concept of freedom of Marx, what we see in fact is the distortion by Berlin of the true thought of Marx. On the one hand, the confusion of Marx and the Marxist who have become dogmatized and vulgarized leads to the possible fact that Berlin would replace the criticism of Marx with that of the later Marxists. On the other hand, due to the lacking in full understanding of historical materialism, Berlin evacuates the rationality of Marxist dialectics, thus pushing the Marxist theory back to the level of mechanistic determinism. In view of this misunderstanding, Berlin blames the shortages of socialist practices to the Marxist theory and criticizes Marx himself for the shortcomings of the later Marxists. Therefore, in order to give explicit and true appearance to Marx and make response to Berlin's blame, it is urgently necessary to make distinctions between Marx and later Marxists as well as dialectical determinism and mechanistic determinism.From the above, various Marxisms make it possible historically for Berlin to get a better understanding of Marx, the truth of whose theory is actually overshadowed by such theories. Judging from his criticism of the socialistic practice, Berlin's arguments hold water. The failure of socialistic failure was attributed to the stereotyped understanding of Marxism, thereby distorting the spiritual core of the Marxism. Therefor, we are inspired to take into consideration not only his texts, but also the context of the time so as to make creative explanations of Marxism when treating the theory. Only in this way can we avoid making Marxism mire in the trouble of doctrinairism again and inject vigor and vitality into the development of Marxism.