Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas - Second EditionIn 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. |
From inside the book
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... French Revolution. But their common conviction that something had gone terribly wrong in philosophy inspired them to. 1Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve [first published posthumously in 1954] (Paris, 1987), 295–6 (my translation); cf ...
... French defender of revolutionary violence. It is a book that can be profitably read front to back, or back to front. Either way, it shows that the intellectual issues central to the Counter-Enlightenment have also been central to modern ...
... French Enlightenment. For these, too, were thinkers who understood perfectly the goals and methods of their opponents, and to whom Berlin has subsequently turned and devoted a deep and sympathetic understanding. Yet he is entirely free ...
... French Enlightenment, whose central doctrines were held to be devitalising distortions of the truth, masking more than they illuminated. Despite their many differences, the thinkers of the French Enlightenment held in common a stock of ...
... French thinker is quite rightly thought of as one of the true fathers of the French Enlightenment. Despite Montesquieu's use of metaphysical concepts such as natural law and natural purpose, his approach was essentially empirical and ...
Contents
ix | |
xxi | |
xxiii | |
xxix | |
xxxi | |
1 | |
The Originality of Machiavelli | 33 |
The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities | 101 |
Hume and the Sources of German AntiRationalism | 204 |
Herzen and His Memoirs | 236 |
The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess | 267 |
Benjamin Disraeli Karl Marx and the Search for Identity | 317 |
The Naivety of Verdi | 361 |
Georges Sorel | 373 |
Past Neglect and Present Power | 420 |
Appendix to the Second Edition | 449 |
Vicos Concept of Knowledge | 140 |
Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment | 151 |
Montesquieu | 164 |
Index | 467 |
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Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas - Second Edition Isaiah Berlin Limited preview - 2013 |