Interview by Julian Baggini

While western philosophy has become increasingly uninterested in theological arguments, western religions have tended not to return the disfavour. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, is a famously intellectual man who reads and writes widely in philosophy, and Pope John Paul II was a philosopher before he was a pontiff. But arguably the most philosophical religious leader, in Britain at least, is the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks.

Read his latest book, The House We Build Together, and you’ll find it crammed with references to thinkers as diverse as George Berkeley, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum. Its intellectual territory he has inhabited for decades, but it is a long way from his North London childhood.

“Here was a house where there was a television in every room, where we took the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, and there weren’t many books, and my teenage rebellion was into books,” he told me when we met at his residence in Maida Vale. “We lived in Finchley and that was close enough to wander around Hampstead in the second-hand bookshops and what you found was Locke and Hume. All those books I bought as a kid are there,” he says, pointing at his bookshelves. “Both Locke and Hume were very engaging writers. That was a feature of British philosophical writing, not only was it quite empiricist, it was down to earth linguistically as well.”  

Another prized find was Bertrand Russell.

“He could do either end of the spectrum, but when he got engaging he was seriously engaging. That’s a tradition that we must never lose, what the French call haute vulgarisation, this business of taking academic ideas and making them available to people.”

Although Sacks talks of books as his rebellion, education and learning were highly valued in his family. “My late father had to leave school at the age of 14 and he never complained but it hurt him a lot. He had a very good mind, not a philosophical mind but a mathematical mind and an aesthetic one. He had much better taste in literature and music than I have. So for us we had this extraordinary privilege of knowing that we were going to go further than the guy who sold textiles in the east end of London.”

Sacks turned to philosophy because “I just wanted to make sense of it all.” However, that “was of course destined to come crashing against the limits of linguistic philosophy at the end of the sixties which really just didn’t claim to answer that kind of question at all.”

The crash occurred at Cambridge, where he read moral sciences, as philosophy was then idiosyncratically called. Nevertheless, Sacks still got a great deal out of his undergraduate studies, “number one this rigid insistence on clarity of thought and validity of argumentation. You could see that that was universally applicable, just to think straight.”

Number two was the personal encounter with a range of tutors, most notably Roger Scruton and Bernard Williams, his first doctoral supervisor.

“I was going through a hugely religious phase. After I had finished my undergraduate career I went to Israel and got involved with some Jewish mystics, and Bernard Williams was not only a lapsed catholic but he was also an atheist.” Williams, however, was the epitome of “academic openness and rigour – he never attacked my views, he just wanted me to express them clearly. I think that was a lasting lesson.”

Another philosopher who left his mark was Anthony Quinton, an “extraordinarily elegant man. One thing about philosophers, they have a wonderful sense of humour. Bernard Williams and Tony Quinton could have been as famous as Morecambe and Wise.”

By the early seventies, Sacks had committed to write a doctorate on the concepts of sincerity and authenticity, but that plan was abandoned, partly because of “the aridity of Oxbridge philosophy at that particular point” but also because Lionel Trilling published his book, Sincerity and Authenticity, in 1971. “I read it and said that’s done, forget it.”

Sacks then taught at Middlesex Polytechnic (now university) for a few years. “In those days I think it had the biggest philosophy department in Britain.” Among the faculty were a young Jonathan Rée and David Conway, who would later have Sacks as his Rabbi. When Sacks says that Conway’s book on wisdom “is one of the reasons that Antony Flew became a theist,” I suggest that Flew is actually more of a deist.

“Oh he’s a deist, absolutely,” he agrees, “so is David. I can handle deism, it’s halfway there.”

Sacks went on to do his PhD on Rabbinic jurisprudence at Kings College, London. But having more or less given up philosophy, he found his enthusiasm renewed when he read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. “The sky suddenly lit up again. Alistair Macintyre just simply inspired me to see philosophy through its history, which eventually, when I became chief rabbi, led to a wonderful friendship with the late Isaiah Berlin, who was probably the first person to bring back history of ideas to Britain.”

There was also a second track in his philosophical development.

“When I became chief rabbi I suddenly realised that I had to have a relationship with a lot of politicians.” The first of these was with the then Prime Minister John Major, who called Sacks in after reading a newspaper article he had written about the killing of the toddler James Bulger. He went on to have “quite close friendships with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.”

“I suddenly realised I was getting drawn into politics. Now political philosophy, significant in Oxford, was not on the moral science syllabus at Cambridge. So I had never come across political philosophy and I suddenly realised that I had to get down where I was coming from and I did a lot reading between ‘93 and ‘96 when I wrote The Politics of Hope.”

As well as MacIntyre, Sacks discovered Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor. “I got to meet all of them, I think. I just like knowing philosophers as well as reading them.”

What the thinkers he mentioned have in common is an interest in the importance of community, history and cultural particularity. In contrast, a lot of liberal political philosophers appear to work by establishing abstract principles and rolling things out from there. It’s a distinction Sacks recognises from the work of JL Talmon.

“Talmon draws this distinction between English and Scottish liberalism and continental liberalism, the continental being very abstract first principles, atomic individual, and the British being very empirical, going with the grain of tradition and so on.”

For a rabbi, deeply aware of the history of Europe’s Jews, this is no merely academic matter.

“I was very struck by the fact that at the end of the day I’m Jewish and at the end of the day there are sentences in the work of most of the great European philosophers that in retrospect one cannot but see as anti-Semitic. That begins with Voltaire, and it continues through Kant and Fichte and Hegel and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Frege and certainly Heidegger, and it’s a constant strand. My predecessor as chief rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, was named after Immanuel Kant. And yet Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as the vampires of society and called for the euthanasia of Judaism. We know some of Kant’s best friends were Jewish, specifically Moses Mendelssohn, and I would never dream of calling Kant an anti-Semite, but there are sentences there which in retrospect you can see. Therefore I had this very specific feeling that somehow Britain and America had gone through the modern experience without this huge, basic structural anti-Semitism whereas continental Europe had had it.”

Sacks calls this “universalist thrust of continental philosophy” “the flight from particularity” and sees its consequences for European Jewry as disastrous. “Since Judaism is a particularist monotheism, it had to fail to fit into the Enlightenment paradigm, and since you are born Jewish rather than going through confirmation, it had to fail the Kantian test not only of universalisability but also of autonomy.”

The Scottish and English enlightenments, in contrast, were more accepting of particularity, partly because they were less antithetical to religion.

“The heroes of British and American enlightenment were the books of the Bible. The heroes of continental enlightenment were les philosophes. Biblical rationality is rooted in what even Christian theologians call the scandal of particularity.”

The British Enlightenment also has the advantage for Sacks of being more supportive of civil society, “as an arena of families, communities, charities, voluntary associations and so on … whereas for Hegel, civil society was the arena of egoism and hence something very negative. So since Jews have always lived in civil society, as I say in The Politics of Hope, they are the only people who survived as a society without a state.”

The erosion of civil society is a theme Sacks has often returned to. “I see these three institutions – the state, the market and civil society – and politics goes wrong if you don’t maintain a balance between the three. What had happened as far as I could see, over half a century, accelerating in the sixties, was this loss of the third sector.”

“Civil society erodes if there’s not that much work for it,” he says, adding “If I go down that road I’ll start sounding as if I objected to the sixties.”

In part, that’s because he does. “There was that sudden worldwide failure of one generation to hand on its wisdom to the next, the first generation to say to its children, ‘you know better than we do. Let’s face it guys, we messed up. We were responsible for two world wars.’”

Again, Sacks’s thinking on this issue has been informed by his Jewishness. “This was an area in which Jews could enter the public arena and say, ‘guys, you know, we’re not prescriptive, because we don’t believe you have to be Jewish to get to heaven, but at least from our experience these things actually matter and without them you are not ontologically rooted.’”

Sacks is painfully aware, however, that such views put him in some company he would rather not keep.

“In England, this line of thought is associated with Edmund Burke, and I’ve just been very keen to keep at the forefront of my mind that one generation can hand on to the next not only its traditions but its unrealised ideals. So you can have a radical communitarianism as well as a conservative communitarianism, but I didn’t really get that voice in Britain, whereas you tend to get that voice in America.”

Sacks’s own voice brings together virtues of philosophy – in particular the use of a series of clear, forensic distinctions – with a more rabbinical, story-telling approach which uses metaphors and parables. Is this something that he does consciously?

“Totally, totally. I try to communicate at all different levels. I was head of an academic institution, Jews College, which was a degree-awarding part of London University when I headed it. It was also the centre for Rabbinic training in Britain. Academic discourse was actually my first language so all my early books are totally unreadable. When I was head of Jews College I did what no other head has ever done, and it is quite an old institution: I became a congregational Rabbi. One day a week, a very limited engagement, but I realised that if I stayed within academia I would lose my ability to communicate with people. And there’s one thing about a Jewish community – they do not suffer rabbis gladly. If you’re extremely obscure you do not get away with it, they’ll hackle you, they’ll do all sorts of stuff. So I became a rabbi and that taught me how to get some quite difficult ideas across in very, very simple ways.

“For me the issue is, can you communicate a thing six different ways at different levels, because if they don’t get it this way, maybe they’ll get it that way.”

The key metaphor in his latest book is one which offers three models for how society treats newcomers: the country house, the hotel, and the titular “Home We Build Together”. The country house model sees most citizens as essentially guests of the host. This is fine up to a point, but there is an inherent discrepancy of status between those who offer hospitality and those who accept it. On the hotel model, newcomers are on a par with long term residents, but the hotel is home for no one, and there is no sense of a genuine shared space. When society is a home we build together, however, everyone is equal, in what they contribute and take, and as a result, everyone belongs.

It’s a beguiling parable, although it provides more of an ideal to aspire to than a practical model for what we should actually do. However, when he first floated the idea, at a talk for the think tank Demos, it struck a chord.

“To my amazement, because I attached no great significance to it, I was getting back stuff from cabinet members. I don’t know how they got hold of it. I think a transcript was made and Demos sent it around, and all of a sudden they were talking about it and I saw that I had solved a problem for them. Now if you’ve solved a problem, at least set it out, as I tried to set it out. I never believe I am right on anything, but I do believe I have a responsibility to make the case and if one starts a debate then that’s my highest aspiration. That’s why I wrote that book, because of that metaphor thing which seemed to help people, because we’re all facing the problem of how do you move on without moving back?”

One problem for building this shared “how” is that there seem to be fundamental differences between conservatives and liberals, particularly when it comes to family and relationships. Sacks, however, is keen to distinguish between the desirability of political liberalism, which tolerates difference, and liberalism in one’s own life. He is personally conservative and politically liberal, a possible combination you sense he thinks people too often miss.

For example, I mentioned Stephen Law’s book, The War for Children’s Minds, in which Law mentions Sacks as being on the side of traditional values in education, which he clearly in some sense is.

“He hit me over the head,” says Sacks. “It was wildly out. It was just wild because the first thing a Jewish child is taught is how to ask questions. That’s how one of our holiest rituals begins: at Passover a child asks questions. So were never non-critical towards traditions.”

Sacks also insists he has a great deal of respect for secular ethics.

“My experience of people like Bernard Williams just gives me enormous respect for secularist thought. When I was studying with Bernard Williams in 1970, he said to me ‘I don’t know how to do ethics.’ One year later out came Morality. He was one of the greats and it is clear that he was an extremely scrupulous ethicist but wouldn’t have anything to do with any religiously-based ethical system.”

My time nearly up, I wanted to finish by asking Sacks what he thought the enduring value of philosophy in his own life was, and what he thought its value should be in society at large.

“The continuing value of philosophy is, number one, as GK Chesterton called it, ‘thought thought through’. Just to be clear, consistent, coherent, to expose your arguments to refutation. … Philosophy is a constant keeper of the conscience at least of thinking straight.

“Secondly, obviously it is a public square, and therefore we will always find ourselves having to develop a shared language with people of views very different from our own. Somewhere Alistair Macintyre says, although I was never able to track it down, ‘of any institution ask not only what it does but of what conversations is it the arena.’ I think philosophy departments should be like that, albeit in some cases multi-disciplinary, but the philosopher keeps all the multi-disciplinary guys in order.

“Thirdly, I think when philosophy regained its history it became ok for people to speak within a particular tradition and thus open up and renew that tradition for a wider audience than the sector of the like-minded, and that’s what I try to do in some of my books, as Reinhold Niebuhr did in America. And yes we have had conversations with people we don’t agree with at all. I’ve never met Peter Singer but I doubt we’d tick off the same list of desiderata, but because of philosophy we are part of the same discourse.”

The home we build together needs a language we speak together. As the chief rabbi who is also a leading public intellectual shows, philosophy may be able to provide that lingua franca.

The House We Build Together by Jonathan Sacks is published by Continuum.