"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 plurality. In "The
Crooked Timber of Humanity" he exposes the links between the ideas
of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own
time: 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.
This new edition features a revised text that supplants all
previous versions, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist
John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his
defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides
rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously
uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand
Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy."
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