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
Results 1-5 of 69
... Hamann and Herder in Frederick the Great's Prussia, or the vicomte de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre in exile after the French Revolution. But their common conviction that something had gone terribly wrong in philosophy inspired them to.
... Hamann, whose angry, brilliant, quasi-mystical writings inspired the German Romantics and modern philosophical anti-rationalism: Hamann speaks for those who hear the cry of the toad beneath the harrow1 [...]. His own cry came from an ...
... Hamann underwent a religious crisis while living alone in London, after which he turned violently against the German Aufklärer, including his old friend Immanuel Kant. But on that trip he also discovered David Hume's scepticism and ...
... Hamann was what put him on the path to the Critique of Pure Reason. But in the history of ideas one mainly studies interesting failures. Which, as scientists know, is more fruitful than studying success. Why do philosophers get things ...
... Hamann, Herder (London and Princeton, 2000); Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (London and Princeton, 2002); Liberty (Oxford, New York etc., 2004); The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism (Washington, 2004); ...
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 |