The Books of My Life: Isaac and Isaiah

I have long had an interest in culture, ideology, the social and cultural construction of identity and community, social and cultural movements, and culture wars. David Caute's Issac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic (London: Yale University Press, 2013) serves up these and more.

On one level Caute's Isaac and Isaiah is a biography of the Isaac and Isaiah of the title, Polish born Marxist Issac Deutscher, author of well-known biographies of Stalin and Trotsky, and liberal political theorist and Russian born Isaiah Berlin. But Caute's book is more than just a biography of Deutscher and Berlin. Both Deutscher and Berlin, in Caute's book, serve as key symbols around who a host of noted others, including George Orwell, E.H. Carr, Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and Hannah Arendt, a host of noted Cold War events, and a host of familiar Cold War controversies, intersect and swirl. Caute's book is thus part history of the Cold War and the roles Deutscher and Berlin played in it, part cultural history--it explores the culture of Marxism and liberalism--part intellectual history--it puts Deutscher and Berlin in broad intellectual contexts--part academic history--Berlin was a fellow at All Souls, Oxford and Deutscher lectured in universities in Europe, the UK, and the US--part Jewish history--both Deutscher and Berlin were East European Jews who escaped from Hitler and Stalin respectively settling in England and who had personal and political interests in the Israel--part history of communism and anti-communism--Deutscher saw himself as a renegade Marxist who saw Stalinism as a detour from Leninism while Berlin had a hatred of Soviet communism and saw Stalinism as a continuation of Leninism--part critique of Deutscher, Berlin, and the Cold War, and part expose of Berlin's black balling of Deutcher's appointment in Soviet Studies at the new University of Sussex in 1963. By books end neither Deutscher or Berlin come off as saints though Deutscher was never the purveyor of ad hominems that Berlin, in private correspondence, was and who, on several occasions, expressed his hatred of Deurscher, who he regarded as the worst sort of apologist and polemicist imaginable

I enjoyed Caute's Isaac and Isaiah immensely. I highly recommend it particularly for those with interests like those mentioned above and for those interested, in particular, in the history of the Cold War and its ideologies.