...from the theologian David Hart Bentley in this week's TLS, explaining his judgment that Berlin is "fraudulent":
I was moved to the more intemperate word by reading his short book The Magus of the North, putatively about Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88), a volume universally deplored by Hamann scholars as a bumptious tour de force of ignorance and casual slander. It is clear that Berlin hadn’t much notion of what Hamann thought about anything, and clearly hadn’t consulted the scholarly literature....
In a sense, however, that book was an expression of the real problem with Berlin. He was a man whose learning was broad(-ish) but rarely deep. He wrote a good deal about philosophy and philosophers, but was himself possessed of very little in the way of philosophical sophistication. The result was that he tended to reduce the subjects of his work to simplified and rather vaguely impressionistic sketches. There is a definite intellectual laziness in his evaluations of the topics he discusses. Many of his essays, consequently, turn out to be little more substantial than senior common room chatter or an after-dinner talk delivered to an aldermen’s association over the port and cheese.
This is not an especially grave sin, but neither is it an especially admirable virtue. He was a generalist committed to a very particular and somewhat simplistic narrative of “Enlightenment” and he interpreted almost all of intellectual history through that fabulous ideal. As is inevitable when one looks at everything through a narrow and tinted lens, his view of the things he wrote about was often distorted, monochromatic and devoid of all those nuances that rigorous scholars insist on bringing to light.
(Thanks to David Gordon for the pointer.)
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