"A celebrated master of the spoken as well as the written word, Isaiah Berlin here gives us a rare memoir in the form of a dialogue." "Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow (...) these ideals to flourish, and those that threaten them." "Berlin here intersperses insights into the development of his ideas and political philosophy with rich personal reminiscences. He discusses Machiavelli, Marx, Vico, Herder, and Herzen, among others, and their influence over him." "As he leads us from Petrograd to Oxford, Washington, Moscow, London, and Jerusalem, he speaks of his friends and contemporaries: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Igor Stravinsky, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and many others. He tells of his moving encounters with Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Chaim Weizmann, and of his passion for music and literature." "Frank and engaging, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin is a remarkable record of one of the great intellectual odysseys of our time."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political pluralism. In the Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our present century: between the (...) Platonic belief in absolute Truth and the lure of authoritarianism between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century fascism between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant--and sometimes genocidal--nationalism that convulses the modern world. (shrink)

The essays collected in this new volume reveal Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid and accessible. He was constitutionally incapable of writing with the opacity of the specialist, but these shorter, more introductory pieces provide the perfect starting-point for the reader new to his work. Those who are already familiar with his writing will also be grateful for this further addition to his collected essays. The connecting theme of these essays, as in the case of earlier volumes, is (...) the crucial social and political role--past, present and future--of ideas, and of their progenitors. A rich variety of subject-matters is represented--from philosophy to education, from Russia to Israel, from Marxism to romanticism--so that the truth of Heine's warning is exemplified on a broad front. It is a warning that Berlin often referred to, and provides an answer to those who ask, as from time to time they do, why intellectual history matters. Among the contributions are "My Intellectual Path," Berlin's last essay, a retrospective autobiographical survey of his main preoccupations and "Jewish Slavery and Emancipation," the classic statement of his Zionist views, long unavailable in print. His other subjects include the Enlightenment, Giambattista Vico, Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, G.V. Plekhanov, the Russian intelligentsia, the idea of liberty, political realism, nationalism, and historicism. The book exhibits the full range of his enormously wide expertise and demonstrates the striking and enormously engaging individuality, as well as the power, of his own ideas. "Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilization."--Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty , 1958. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is heralded as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century and this editied work by a group of distinguished scholars is an examination of an Humean liberal intellectual. Isaiah Berlin's legacy still excites intense scholarly debate.

Liberty is an expanded edition of Isaiah Berlin's classic of liberalism, Four Essays on Liberty. Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has incorporated a fifth essay, as Berlin wished, and added further pieces on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are available together for the first time. He also describes the gestation of the book and throws further biographical light on Berlin's preoccupation with liberty in appendices drawn from his unpublished writings.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

"Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century", Historical Inevitability", "Two Concepts of Liberty", "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life". These four essays deal with the various aspects of individual liberty, including the distinction between positive and negative liberty and the necessity of rejecting determinism if we wish to keep hold of the notions of human responsibility and freedom.

The masterly essay on Tolstoy’s view of history, in which Sir Isaiah Berlin underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year “For anyone wanting to understand the twists and turns of the history of ideas, this book will be indispensable.”―John Gray, New York Times Book Review The Sense of Reality was the last new collection of essays published by Isaiah Berlin in his lifetime. All informed by Berlin’s lifelong fascination with the history of ideas, these engaging studies range widely: the subjects explored include realism in history; judgment in politics; (...) the history of socialism; the nature and impact of Marxism; the radical cultural revolution instigated by the Romantics; Russian notions of artistic commitment; and the origins and practice of nationalism. The title essay, taking its cue from the impossibility of recreating a bygone epoch, is a superb centerpiece. Now with a new foreword by Timothy Snyder and a new appendix comprising a previously unpublished essay on the great Russian critic Vissarion Belinksy and a previously uncollected lecture on utopianism, The Sense of Reality is a rich and illuminating collection from one of the most seductive writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration gathers tributes, reflections, and commentaries on the great thinker and his philosophy, politics, and life-including contributions from Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, Ronald Dworkin, Stephen Spender, and many others. "Some [essays], like Joseph Brodsky's tribute, are touchingly personal. Others, like G. A. Cohen's 'Isaiah's Marx, and Mine,' mingle personal reminiscences with a more theoretical look at Berlin's ideas. . . . The volume is a fitting tribute to a thinker famed for his erudition, (...) eclecticism, and clarity of style."--Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor "One of the many merits of this rich and rewarding collection is the sense-very imperfectly conveyed here-it transmits of the tone of Berlin's writings and conversation, of the multiplicity of his interests and the variety of his achievements. . . . The essays testify to the character of Berlin's mind as a luminous prism, in which the cultural traditions of Russia, England and Judaism are marvelously refracted."--John Gray, Times Literary Supplement "[T]he collection testifies to the learning and profundity of Berlin's thought and, by way both of reminiscence and influence, to the charm and gaity of its expression."--Anthony Quinton, The Times of London. (shrink)

This lecture insisted upon negative liberty as the political complement to the human capacity for free choice, and made matching metaphysical claims: the nature of being, and especially the conflicts amongst values, were inconsistent with totalitarian claims. Berlin, arguing along this line, provided an account of the perversion of positive liberty into a warrant for such claims, discussed nationalism, and emphasized the value‐pluralism, now linked so frequently with his name.

This short story, written when Berlin was twelve, is his first surviving essay. It reveals the disposition that found expression in his more mature work. Berlin contrasts the settled life of ‘a cosy little home’ with the crude consequentialism of Commissar Uritsky and its destructive effects. The story is a morality tale: Uritsky meets his just end.

These essays are not marginal ruminations, but rather Berlin's most important studies in the history of ideas.

'Life is not worth living unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends,' wrote Isaiah Berlin to a correspondent. Flourishing inaugurates a keenly awaited edition of Berlin's letters that might well adopt this remark as an epigraph. Berlin's life was enormously worth living, both for himself and for us; and fortunately he said a great deal to his friends on paper as well as in person. The indiscretions- only part of the story, of course- are not (...) those of Everyman. Berlin is one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century, the most famous English thinker of the post- war era, and the focus of growing interest and discussion. Above all, he is one of the best modern exponents of the disappearing art of letter- writing. When this volume opens Berlin is eighteen, a pupil at St Paul's School, London. He becomes an undergraduate at Oxford, then a Fellow of All Souls, where he writes his famous biography of Karl Marx. He then moves to New College to teach philosophy, and after the outbreak of the World War 2 sails to America in somewhat mysterious circumstances with Guy Burgess. He stays in the USA, working for the British Government, until July 1946, when he returns to Oxford. Berlin's letters are marvellously accessible, and as entertaining as a novel. During the two decades covered here we see his personality and career growing and blooming. In America he writes a regular telegram to his anxious parents, often saying just 'Flourishing'; the word is entirely apt, not only for his wartime experience, but for the whole of his early life, vividly displayed in this book in all its multi-faceted delightfulness. (shrink)

About the philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 1668- 1774 and Johann Gottfried Herder, 1774-1803.

This remarkable collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciations of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world, sometimes both.

This essay examines the origins of three political doctrines of the twentieth‐century—Communism, Fascism, and Marxism—which Berlin linked through attributing to them the assumption that human life tended in ‘only one direction’. He contrasted this briefly with his own view that human goals were really various and ‘at times incompatible’.

Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were broadcast by the BBC in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years later. They comprise one of Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and on the history of ideas--views that later found expression in such famous works as "Two Concepts of Liberty," and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. (...) Working with BBC transcripts and Berlin's annotated drafts, Henry Hardy has recreated these lectures, which consolidated the forty-three-year-old Berlin's growing reputation as a man who could speak about intellectual matters in an accessible and involving way. In his lucid examination of sometimes complex ideas, Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defense of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's most influential ideas and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helve;tius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative Maistre bringing up the rear. These thinkers gave to freedom a new dimension of power--power that, Berlin argues, has historically brought about less, not more, individual liberty. These lectures show Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the hour-long broadcasts and found themselves mesmerized by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. One listener, a leading historian of ideas who was then a schoolboy, was to recount that the lectures "excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes." This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share. (shrink)

Stremlenie k idealu -- Chuvstvo realʹnosti -- Estestvennai︠a︡ li nauka istorii︠a︡? -- Dva ponimanii︠a︡ svobody -- Dzhambattista Viko i istorii︠a︡ kulʹtury -- Zhozef de Mestr i istoki fashizma -- Protivniki prosveshchenii︠a︡ -- Nat︠s︡ionalizm : vcherashnee upushchenie i segodni︠a︡shni︠a︡i︠a︡ sila -- Marksizm i Internat︠s︡ionala v XIX veke.

‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, New York Review of Books The title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, Building: Letters 1960–75, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with (...) a series of essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance. Berlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind. Affirming is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004. (shrink)

Berlin's presidential address to the Aristotelian Society dealt with one important gap in his conceptual wall against totalitarianism. If to be free implied knowledge and the exercise of reason, then the distinction between negative and positive views of liberty might be hard to maintain. Berlin argued that knowledge does not always liberate, which implies that freedom does not always depend on knowledge.

'People are my landscape', Isaiah Berlin liked to say, and nowhere is the truth of this observation more evident than in his letters. He is a fascinated watcher of human beings in all their variety, and revels in describing them to his many correspondents. His letters combine ironic social comedy and a passionate concern for individual freedom. His interpretation of political events, historical and contemporary, and his views on how life should be lived, are always grounded in the (...) personal, and his fiercest condemnation is reserved for purveyors of grand abstract theories that ignore what people are really like. This second volume of Berlin's letters takes up the story when, after war service in the United States, he returns to life as an Oxford don. Against the background of post-war austerity, the letters chart years of academic frustration and self-doubt, the intellectual explosion when he moves from philosophy to the history of ideas, his growing national fame as broadcaster and lecturer, the publication of some of his best-known works, his election to a professorship, and his reaction to knighthood. Berlin's visits to American universities, where he sees McCarthyism at work, and his journeys eastward - to Europe, Palestine (and later Israel) and the Soviet Union - inspire acute and often very funny pen-pictures. His political contacts yield an inside view of major world events - the creation of Israel, the Suez Crisis, the Cold War. Many letters provide illuminating, accessible commentary on his ideas. These are the years, too, of momentous developments in his private life: the bachelor don's loss of sexual innocence, the emotional turmoil of his father's death, his courtship of a married woman and transformation into husband and stepfather. Above all, these revealing letters vividly display Berlin's effervescent personality - often infuriating, but always irresistible. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin; I—The Presidential Address: “From Hope and Fear Set Free”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 64, Issue 1, 1 June 1964, Pages 1–30.

The counter-enlightenment.--The originality of Machiavelli.--The divorce between the sciences and the humanities.--Vico's concept of knowledge.--Vico and the ideal of the enlightenment.--Montesquieu.--Hume and the sources of German anti-rationalism.--Herzen and his memoirs.--The life and opinions of Moses Hess.--Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the search for identity.--The "naïveté" of Verdi.--Georges Sorel.--Nationalism.--A bibliography of Isaiah Berlin.

This short essay is a summary of the main theses of Berlin's ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, and thus provides a brief introduction to his views.

The first publication of this major work by Isaiah Berlin, regarded by many as the twentieth century’s greatest thinker. It is the only text he ever wrote in which he laid out in one connected account most of his key insights about the “romantic age.”.

Berlin's intense consciousness of the plurality of values, the nature of historical understanding, and the fragility of human freedom premeates essays ranging from his early debates on logical positivism to his later work.

This item of 1951 gives insight into the development of Berlin's thinking about liberty and related themes. He identified the crucial importance of ‘the Kantian morality’ for his purposes, and contrasted this with consequentialists, Hegel and Marx.

"This volume sheds considerable light on Berlin's thinking and clarifies some of the central themes of his philosophy. After an introductory memoir, the book is divided into four sections. The first is a selection from the correspondence conducted between Berlin and Polanowska-Sygulska from 1983 to 1997. These letters are published here in their entirety for the first time. The second section comprises two interviews Berlin gave in 1991 for Polish periodicals. Next come edited transcripts of a number (...) of conversations recorded between 1986 and 1995. In one of these, Berlin tellingly recalls his childhood and youth. In other exchanges, he is pressed to be more concise about some of his most contested views, particularly his concepts of liberty and value pluralism, and to respond to criticism of these ideas by a wide range of authors. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin's Karl Marx is considered the classic short account of the life and thought of the theorist of the socialist revolution. With a new Introduction by Alan Ryan that elucidates the enduring value of this work and its place in Marxist scholarship, this is a compelling history of ideas as well as a portrait of one of the twentieth century's most incendiary thinkers.

Isaiah Berlin's intellectual biography of Karl Marx has long been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the life and thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more "direct, deliberate, and powerful" influence on mankind than any other nineteenth-century thinker. A brilliantly lucid work of synthesis and exposition, the book introduces Marx's ideas and sets them in their context, explains why they were revolutionary in political and intellectual terms, and paints a memorable (...) portrait of Marx's dramatic life and outsized personality. Berlin takes readers through Marx's years of adolescent rebellion and post-university communist agitation, the personal high point of the 1848 revolutions, and his later years of exile, political frustration, and intellectual effort. Critical yet sympathetic, Berlin's account illuminates a life without reproducing a legend. New features of this thoroughly revised edition include references for Berlin's quotations and allusions, Terrell Carver's assessment of the distinctiveness of Berlin's book, and a revised guide to further reading. (shrink)