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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... tradition at least, from Plato to our own day, the overwhelming majority of systematic thinkers of all schools, whether rationalists, idealists, phenomenalists, positivists or empiricists, have, despite their many radical differences ...
... tradition at least, has been central for more than two thousand years; a view the shortcomings of which struck him ... traditions of the West. To this literally world-transforming current of ideas, from which so many modern movements of ...
... tradition stretching back to antiquity; and in the modern era thinkers from Bodin to Montesquieu, by emphasising the vast variety of customs, mores, institutions, general outlooks and beliefs, had administered a series of gentle shocks ...
... essentially concerned with the individual, to a more ancient tradition, that of the Greek polis or of republican Rome – an essentially collective or communal morality according to which to be a human being and to l • Roger Hausheer.
... tradition, and transmuted them into something like their opposites. He represents the most uncompromising backlash of human dignity and the ideals of warmth, love and spontaneity against the spirit-crushing abstractions of the ...
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 |