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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... liberals are liberal when it comes to their critics. Berlin was. He let them talk and he listened, even if what they expressed came out in shouts or laments, or he found their ultimate views, like Joseph de Maistre's, utterly hateful ...
... Liberal Mind: Two Communications and a Reply', Partisan Review 16 no. 6 (June 1949), 649–65, at 663–5, and in the same author's Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York, 1958), 244; in Lewis White Beck, Early German ...
... liberal thought and practice, what had once seemed novel and arresting became commonplace, and successive social and political thinkers looked back on him as a distinguished predecessor with nothing new to say to them. Yet, looking back ...
... liberal consciences, not because of his alleged immorality and Satanism, but because, by advancing an alternative system of morality to that prevalent in his own day and since, he was perhaps the very first thinker to cast doubts, at ...
... liberal rationalism, cosmopolitanism, science, progress and rational organisation: a battle waged throughout the nineteenth century by the great unsettling rebels, Fourier, Proudhon, Stirner, Kierkegaard, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Tolstoy ...
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 |