Book description
Berlin's main theme in these essays is the importance in the history
of ideas of dissenters whose thinking still challenges conventional
wisdom - among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen and Sorel.
With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, he brings to life
original minds that swam against the current of their times, and in
the process offers a powerful defence of variety in our visions of
life.
Roger Hausheer's introduction surveys Berlin's whole oeuvre, and the
full bibliography of his pubication has been updated for this Pimlico edition.
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.
