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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... historian of ideas. It's a very good story. I've often wished, though, that he hadn't told it. Berlin's account of his decision baffled friends and colleagues back at Oxford, and left the impression that he had taken a step down the ...
... historians, who seem determined to place thinkers into such narrow social contexts that the wider significance of their ideas disappears. There's a deflationary impulse behind their work that is difficult to fathom. Berlin had no ...
... historian of ideas roughly what laboratories are to scientists (though, mercifully, nothing in history can be made to repeat itself). One can sit at a seminar table and try to work out the truth-conditions of an assertion and the ...
... historian of ideas, rarely come together in one man. This doubtless explains in part why there has never been more than a handful of genuine historians of ideas, and why the history of ideas itself, as a reputable discipline with ...
... historians of ideas. The history of ideas, then, is a comparatively late-born and highly sophisticated child of advanced civilisation. At the earliest, it may be thought to have come into being during the last half of the eighteenth ...
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 |