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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... Myth of an Ideal World' and 'The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism', which appear in The Crooked Timber of Humanity (in effect a companion volume to this one), together with three essays that appeared after the present volume was first ...
... myths, poetry and religion of socalled primitive men are not, as Voltaire and the Encyclopedists typically believed, the first childlike stammering of truths more clearly and more fully formulated by later rational thinkers, but rather ...
... mythology; he made himself its leader, basing his own claims to aristocracy upon the antiquity of his race, which he stressed again and again in his writings; he saw himself as leading it into a coalition with the exploited masses ...
... myth he thus created that by its spell he was able to bind together his heterogeneous followers, affecting British political thought and practice 'for many fateful decades'.1 Yet this act of comprehensive psychological self ...
... myths to rally oppressed and insulted spirits, not least those of the authors of the doctrines themselves. When Berlin turns from these two masterful, myth-making figures, with Introduction • lxv.
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 |