Book description
This book brings together for the first time three major studies from
Isaiah Berlin's central intellectual project - to explain the opposition
to the excessively scientific French Enlightenment by getting under the
skin of its critics and giving a sympathetic account of their views. The
contributions of these particular critics could hardly be more
important. Giambattista Vico estabished that the humanties are and must
remain crucially different from the sciences: J G Herder - sometimes
called the father of European nationalism - originated populism,
expressionism and pluralism (an idea which Berlin enriched and made
powerfully his own); and the anti-rationalist J G Hamann lit the fuse of
romanticism, the major movement to arise out of the various currents of
hostility to Enlightenment thought. The issue between the advocates of
the Enlightenment and these critics is today at least as fundamental as
it was in its beginnings. With his customary humane understanding,
Berlin analyses the ideas of three deeply original but unregarded
thinkers, and demonstrates their disturbing relevance to the central
issues of today's world.
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, captial Latvia, in 1909. When he was
six, his family moved to Russia: there in 1917, in Petrograd, he
witnessed both the Social Democratic and the Bolshevik Revolutions.
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 other main
publications are Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, 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 and The
Power of Ideas. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was
awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he was also
received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil
liberties. He died in 1997.
