Book description
Eight of the nine pieces in
The Sense of Reality
are published here for the first time. The range is characteristically
wide: realism in history; judgement in politics; the special right of
philosophers to self-expression; the history of socialism; the nature
and impact of Marxism; the radical cultural revolution instigated by
romanticism; the Russian notion of artistic commitment; the origins and
practice of nationalism. The title essay, starting from the
impossibility of recreating a bygone epoch, provides a superb
centrepiece. Sir Isaiah Berlin, O. M., was born in Riga, Latvia, in
1909. He came to England in 1919 and was educated at St Paul's School
and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a a Fellow of All
Souls College (1932-8, 1950-67), a Fellow of New College (1938-50),
Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory (1957-67), first
President of Wolfson College (1966-75), and President of the British
Academy from 1974 to 1978. His achievements as a historian and expositor
of ideas earned him the Erasmus, Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes, and his
lifelong defence of civil liberties earned him the Jerusalem Prize. He
died in 1997.
