Isaiah Berlin (1909-97) was recognized as Britain's most
distinguished historian of ideas. Many of his essays discussed
thinkers of what this book calls the 'long Enlightenment' (from
Vico in the eighteenth century to Marx and Mill in the nineteenth,
with Machiavelli as a precursor). Yet he is particularly associated
with the concept of the 'Counter-Enlightenment', comprising those
thinkers (Herder, Hamann, and even Kant) who in Berlin's view
reacted against the Enlightenment's naive rationalism, scientism
and progressivism, its assumption that human beings were basically
homogeneous and could be rendered happy by the remorseless
application of scientific reason. Berlin's 'Counter-Enlightenment'
has received critical attention, but no-one has yet analysed the
understanding of the Enlightenment on which it rests. Isaiah Berlin
and the Enlightenment explores the development of Berlin's
conception of the Enlightenment, noting its curious narrowness, its
ambivalence, and its indebtedness to a specific German intellectual
tradition. Contributors to the book examine his comments on
individual writers, showing how they were inflected by his
questionable assumptions, and arguing that some of the writers he
assigned to the 'Counter-Enlightenment' have closer affinities to
the Enlightenment than he recognized. By locating Berlin in the
history of Enlightenment studies, this book also makes a
contribution to defining the historical place of his work and to
evaluating his intellectual legacy.
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