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In this collection of remarkable biographical portraits, the
great essayist and intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin brings to
life a wide range of prominent twentieth-century thinkers,
politicians, and writers. These include Winston Churchill, Franklin
D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, Virginia Woolf,
Aldous Huxley, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova. With the
exception of Roosevelt, Berlin met them all, and he knew many of
them well. Other figures recalled here include the Zionist Yitzhak
Sadeh, the U.S. Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, the
classicist and wit Maurice Bowra, the philosopher J. L. Austin, and
the literary critic Edmund Wilson. For this edition, ten new pieces
have been added, including portraits of David Ben-Gurion, Maynard
and Lydia Keynes, and Stephen Spender, as well as Berlin's
autobiographical reflections on Jewish Oxford and his Oxford
undergraduate years. Rich and enlightening, "Personal Impressions"
is a vibrant demonstration of Berlin's belief that ideas truly live
only through people.
"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big
thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from
the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah
Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of
history, the subject of the epilogue to "War and Peace." Although
there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it
to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are
fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate
everything to a central, all-embracing system. Applied to Tolstoy,
the saying illuminates a paradox that helps explain his philosophy
of history: Tolstoy was a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog.
One of Berlin's most celebrated works, this extraordinary essay
offers profound insights about Tolstoy, historical understanding,
and human psychology.
This new edition features a revised text that supplants all
previous versions, English translations of the many passages in
foreign languages, a new foreword in which Berlin biographer
Michael Ignatieff explains the enduring appeal of Berlin's essay,
and a new appendix that provides rich context, including excerpts
from reviews and Berlin's letters, as well as a startling new
interpretation of Archilochus's epigram.
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.
This collection of pen-portraits of the renowned public
intellectual Isaiah Berlin, published to mark the centenary of his
birth, brings him vividly to life from many vantage-points:
essential reading for all who seek to understand the full range of
his impact. Isaiah Berlin was born a century ago. One of the most
celebrated British thinkers of the twentieth century, he was a
tireless champion of freedom and diversity against control and
conformity. His generous, open vision of life is displayed with
special immediacy in his brilliant pen-portraits of contemporaries,
Personal Impressions, in which he sees the point of radically
differing personalities, enters into their distinctive outlooks,
and describeshis encounters with them, in arrestingly idiosyncratic
prose. The Book of Isaiah turns the tables on Berlin, offering a
series of personal impressions of him and his ideas by a range of
people who knew him, or have been affected by his work. This
multi-faceted testimony enriches and supplements Michael
Ignatieff's celebrated authorised biography. The volume includes
tributes written when Berlin died, essays specially commissioned
from friends and from students of his work, and a previously
unpublished family memoir by Berlin's father, which preserves for
his son, and for posterity, the story of his Hasidic forebears, and
of the many relatives murdered by the Nazis. The result is a
collection indispensable both for existing enthusiasts and for
those who are curious to learn about Berlin's unique, compelling
appeal. HENRY HARDY is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and one
of Isaiah Berlin's Literary Trustees.
In "The Roots of Romanticism," one of the twentieth century's
most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that
changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and
eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures are a bravura
intellectual performance. Isaiah Berlin surveys the many attempts
to define romanticism, distills its essence, traces its
developments from its first stirrings to its apotheosis, and shows
how it still permeates our outlook. He ranges over a cast of some
of the greatest thinkers and artists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, including Kant, Rousseau, Diderot, Schiller,
the Schlegels, Novalis, Goethe, Blake, Byron, and Beethoven. The
ideas and attitudes of these and other figures, Berlin argues,
helped to shape twentieth-century nationalism, existentialism,
democracy, totalitarianism, and our ideas about heroic individuals,
self-fulfillment, and the exalted place of art.
This new edition, illustrated for the first time, also features
a new foreword by philosopher John Gray, in which he discusses
Berlin's belief that the influence of romanticism has been
unpredictable and contradictory in the extreme, fuelling
anti-liberal political movements but also reinvigorating
liberalism; a revised text; and a new appendix that includes some
of Berlin's correspondence about the lectures and the reactions to
them.
"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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Russian Thinkers (Paperback, 2 Rev Ed)
Isaiah Berlin; Edited by Aileen Kelly, Henry Hardy; Introduction by Aileen Kelly
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R350
R287
Discovery Miles 2 870
Save R63 (18%)
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Required reading for fans of Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of
Utopia"-the landmark investigation into Russian history and thought
Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively
as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. "Russian
Thinkers" is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's
outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In
addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in
his most famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Berlin considers
the social and political circumstances that produced such men as
Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian
intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, "the largest
single Russian contribution to social change in the world."
Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth
century - a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and
plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation.
His ideas - especially his reasoned rejection of excessive
certainty and political despotism - have become even more prescient
and vital today. But who was the man behind such influential views?
In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling story of a
decades-long collaboration between Berlin and his editor, Henry
Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work
into print. Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than
people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his
struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to
have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the
self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of
a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human
predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained
largely out of view.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Isaiah Berlin's The Sense of Reality contains an important body of previously unknown work by one of our century's leading historians of ideas, and one of the finest essayists writing in English. Eight of the nine pieces included here are published for the first time, and their range is characteristically wide: the subjects explored include realism in history; judgement 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, starting from the impossibility of historians being able to recreate a bygone epoch, is a superb centerpiece.
In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of
the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the
importance of dissenters in the history of ideas--among them
Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual
powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original
minds that swam against the current of their times--and still
challenge conventional wisdom.
In a new foreword to this corrected edition, which also includes
a new appendix of letters in which Berlin discusses and further
illuminates some of its topics, noted essayist Mark Lilla argues
that Berlin's decision to give up a philosophy fellowship and
become a historian of ideas represented not an abandonment of
philosophy but a decision to do philosophy by other, perhaps
better, means. "His instinct told him," Lilla writes, "that you
learn more about an idea as an idea when you know something about
its genesis and understand why certain people found it compelling
and were spurred to action by it." This collection of fascinating
intellectual portraits is a rich demonstration of that belief.
These celebrated lectures constitute one of Isaiah Berlin's most
concise, accessible, and convincing presentations of his views on
human freedom--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. When they were
broadcast on BBC radio in 1952, the lectures created a sensation
and confirmed Berlin's reputation as an intellectual who could
speak to the public in an appealing and compelling way. A recording
of only one of the lectures has survived, but Henry Hardy has
recreated them all here from BBC transcripts and Berlin's annotated
drafts. Hardy has also added, as an appendix to this new edition, a
revealing text of "Two Concepts" based on Berlin's earliest
surviving drafts, which throws light on some of the issues raised
by the essay. And, in a new foreword, historian Enrique Krauze
traces the origin of Berlin's idea of negative freedom to his
rejection of the notion that the creation of the State of Israel
left Jews with only two choices: to emigrate to Israel or to
renounce Jewish identity.
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