APPLIED DARWINISM:

[A]mong the many isms formed in the crucible of the French Revolution, nationalism proved to have greatest lasting power. From communism to totalitarianism, socialism to liberalism, it is the last great ism standing. For Berlin, the sources of this durability reside in our very nature. "The desire to belong to a community or to some kind of unit, which ... has been national in the last 400 years," Berlin once said, "is a basic human need or desire." This, for Berlin, was less an argument than an acknowledgment--it is, quite simply, how we are built. The need for community is the common grain running through the crooked timber that constitutes humankind.

As for his definition of nationalism, Berlin could prove as hard to pin down as the concept he was hunting. Even sympathetic critics observed that he could contradict himself not just from one article to the next but at times within the same article. Moreover, Berlin did not offer taxonomies as much as he offered tales. His writings on nationalism, with their usual cascades of clauses and subclauses, are discursive and often digressive. (No doubt, Berlin would have agreed with Herodotus's claim that his own many digressions are his history.) Finally, as a student of nationalism, he was more comfortable in the company of those who thought and wrote about it instead of those who channeled and acted upon it.

Nevertheless, Berlin presents a largely coherent account of nationalism, one that he builds out from four fundamental claims. First, nationalism claims that all human beings belong to particular groups whose way of life--language, customs, and culture--differ from one another. The critical corollary is that members of this group simply cannot be understood outside the group that has formed and informed them. Second, it portrays the group as a kind of biological organism, one whose development and ends are primordial. Should the group encounter certain values that are not its own, its own must prevail.

Consequently--and this is the third claim--nationalism declares that the beliefs and principles of this group are to be privileged precisely because they are the group's. There is no higher or greater standard. Finally and fatefully, it holds that a group has the right to force other groups to yield should they come into conflict with it. "Nothing that obstructs that which I recognize as my--that is, my nation's--supreme goal, can be allowed to have equal value with it," Berlin wrote.

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