Oxford Paperbacks
4 total works
This enthusiastically received collection contains Isaiah Berlin's appreciation of seventeen people of unusual distinction in the intellectual or political world - sometimes in both. The names of many of them are familiar - Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Albert Einstein, L. B. Namier, J. L. Austin, Maurice Bowra. With the exception of Roosevelt he met them all, and he knew many of them well.
For this new edition four new portraits have been added, including recollections of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. The volume ends with a vivid and moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956.
For this new edition four new portraits have been added, including recollections of Virginia Woolf and Edmund Wilson. The volume ends with a vivid and moving account of Berlin's meetings in Russia with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova in 1945 and 1956.
Henry Hardy
This is a collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin. His main theme is the importance in the history of thought of dissenters whose ideas still challenge conventional wisdom. Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Hamann, Herzen and Georges Sorel are the central examples. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation he brings to life the ideas of men with original minds who swam against the current of their times and often made entirely new contributions to our intellectual heritage. The book also constitutes a powerful defence of variety - of values, of interpretations of reality and visions of life. It is completed by a full bibliography of Isaiah Berlin's publications, updated for this edition. It is one of four volumes of "Selected Writings", which comprise a comprehensive collection of Berlin's work.
The four essays are `Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century'; `Historical Inevitability', which the Economist described as `a magnificent assertion of the reality of human freedom, of the role of free choice in history'; `Two Concepts of Liberty', a ringing manifesto for pluralism and individual freedom; and `John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life'. There is also a long and masterly introduction written specially for this collection, in which the author replies to his critics. This book is intended for students from undergraduate level upwards studying philosopohy, history, politics. Admirers of Isaiah Berlin's writings.