An anthology of Isaiah Berlin's best and most representative work, drawn from a lifetime's writing by this most distinguished philosopher and historian of ideas.
Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909.
When he was six, his family moved to Russia, and in Petrograd in
1917 Berlin witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and
Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents emigrated to England, where
he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi
College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York,
Washington, Moscow and Leningrad, he remained at Oxford thereafter
- as a Fellow of All Souls, then of New College, as Chichele
Professor of Social and Political Theory, and as founding President
of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British
Academy.
His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts
and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The
Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of
Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the
Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind
and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the
history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli
Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong
defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.
He speaks with such infectious energy that he sweeps us up and
carries us with him into territory that had seemed inaccessible. He
becomes everyman's guide to everything exciting in the history of
ideas
*New York Review of Books*
A restatement of liberalism in a form by which the world could
live
*Observer*
His uniqueness can be very well sampled in this admirable
selection... Large as it is, it can serve only to stimulate the
appetite
*Evening Standard*
The pleasure in reading Berlin lies in the clarity of the argument,
in the laying out of his monumental sentences and paragraphs each
of which is complete in itself while part of the greater and
seemingly irrefutable whole which is gradually and massively
revealed
*Observer*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |