Book description
The Roots of Romanticism
is the long-awaited text of Isaiah Berlin's most celebrated set of
lectures, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965 and heard
since by a much wider audience on BBC radio. For Berli, the Romantics
set in train a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of
itself. They destroyed the traditional notion of objective truth in
ethicsm with incalculable, all-pervasive results. In his unscripted
tour de force
Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define romanticism, distils its
essence, traces its development, and shows how its legacy permeates our
outlook today. 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.
