Isaiah Berlin.

• Author: Wolfson, Adam

The best known anecdote about Isaiah Berlin refers to the occasion during World War II when his work at the British embassy in Washington caught the attention of Winston Churchill. The Prime Minister expressed a wish to meet Berlin, and this was arranged. At the lunch that followed, Churchill asked: "Berlin, what do you think is your most important piece you've done for us lately?" The surprising response: "White Christmas." The invitation had been sent in error to the wrong I. Berlin.

Funny as it is-especially as one contemplates Churchill's bewilderment at the answer - and familiar as it has become, the story is also especially apt today. In recalling and celebrating Berlin, it is important to make sure that we have the right man.

When Berlin died last November, there was a cascade of adulatory essays and obituaries, all of them well deserved. Yet there is a sense in which, once again, the wrong Berlin was being celebrated; or if not exactly the wrong Berlin then only a half of him showed up in the many commemorative essays about his life. His contributions to the history of political thought were extolled, especially his brilliant "Two Concepts of Liberty" and his memorable essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." His studies of romanticism were appreciated, and the renewed interest he sparked in such neglected thinkers as Vico and Herder was applauded. Some focused on his support of Zionism. Others commented on his early work in analytical philosophy, while a few recalled his lively personal essays on FDR, Einstein, Churchill, and Akhmatova. But very few of his admirers, or detractors for that matter, bothered to mention what was undeniably important about the man: his unique grasp of the horrors of communism and his unwavering conviction that Western intellectuals must oppose communism or, at the very least, not confuse it with liberalism.

Berlin's critique of communism was nearly unmatched in the West. He saw, before most did, that communism was as liable to undertake sadistic genocidal campaigns as any fascist regime - a proposition that many liberals even today refuse to accept. In his 1959 essay "European Unity and its Vicissitudes", he captured the genocidal logic inherent in Marxism by speaking hauntingly in its own voice:

It is idle for the progressives to try to save their reactionary brothers from defeat: the doomed men cannot hear them, and their destruction is certain. All men will not be saved: the proletariat, justly intent upon its own salvation, had best ignore the fate of their oppressors; even if they wish to return good for evil, they cannot save their enemies from 'liquidation.' They are 'expendable' - their destruction can be neither averted nor regretted by a rational being, for it is the price that mankind must pay for the progress of reason itself: the road to the gates of Paradise is necessarily strewn with corpses.

Some of his admirers last fall, most notably Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post and Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books, did not overlook Berlin's anti-communism. But a few such as Stuart Hampshire did, while Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Leon Wieseltier, and Marilyn Berger for the New York Times settled for general allusions to his opposition to "monism" or "totalitarianism" or "holism", at least for the most part. A...