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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... universal political ideals. The book ends with a sobering reflection on how legitimate national feeling, which Berlin sympathised with and thought would persist, could metastasise into nationalistic ideologies bent on erasing Foreword • xv.
... universal and immutable, common to all rational, sentient beings. Once they had been discovered and duly analysed, certain fundamental truths about men would be fixed for all time. The vital step taken by Kant was given a revolutionary ...
... universal human nature, identical in all places and times. For Hamann and Herder, and the many later thinkers directly or indirectly influenced by their radical innovations, the insidious enemies were the more fanatical and dogmatic ...
... universal unifying frameworks, within which everything that exists could be shown to be systematically – i.e. logically or causally – interconnected, vast structures in which there should be no gaps left open for spontaneous, unattended ...
... universal, final solutions to human problems, and no ultimate rational standards or criteria for adjudicating between human ends. There was something essentially subversive of Enlightenment dogma in this attitude, and his distrust of ...
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 |