Book description
'I was exhausted at the end, & yet I am sure that if ever I saw
& heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.'
So wrote a listener to her friend after attending one of the
lectures based on the book. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age
is the text Berlin wrote for four of the lectures, delivered in 1952.
He revised what he had written extensively afterwards but never
published it. It is his longest work and also the only connected
account he gave of his key insights into the history of the ideas that
dominate the political arguments of our own time.
As he put it in his Prologue, 'The age of which we speak was
singularly rich in original conceptions; they transformed our world,
and the words in which they were formulated speak to us still'.
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When
he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he
witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921
his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul's School and
Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a Fellow of All Souls,
a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and
founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of
the British Academy. His published work includes
Karl Marx
,
Russian Thinkers
,
Concepts and Categories
,
Against the Current
,
Personal Impressions
,
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
,
The Sense of Reality
,
The Proper Study of Mankind
,
The Roots of Romanticism
,
The Power of Ideas
,
Three Critics of the Enlightenment
,
Freedom and its Betrayal
, and
Liberty and The Soviet Mind
. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus,
Lippincott, and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for
his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.
