Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas

by Isaiah Berlin

Book Overview

In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance in the history of thought of dissenters whose ideas still challenge conventional wisdom--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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691090262
• ISBN13: 9780691090269
• Release Date: November 2001
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.0" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Do you want to make a step to understand the present world?

If you think the present world is full of contradictions, of opposing philosophies, and that it might be doomed, please give a chance at this set of essais by Isaiah Berlin. Not only his writing is clear and flowing, but his argumentation is very enlightening. Isaiah Berlin will never be controversial. He will never take a strong position. He will let you decide. Like an archeologist, he put back to life the ideas who were considered crazy at their time, and now looked much more reasonable. Even the introduction by Roger Hausheer gives you a lecherous taste of what is inside. And I was not disappointed. Thinking that there are ten more books on essays by Berlin, my head is spining. Did he not say already everything in this one...?

The special joy of seeing a great mind work

Itis simply a great pleasure to read Isaiah Berlin. His richness in thought, his verbal fluency his strong sense of values and clear understanding of the historical context in which he is presenting the ideas- all this combines to make reading him an adventure of the mind. In this work the third group of his essays put together by his faithful student and friend Henry Hardy the theme is those thinkers who go against the current, who walk their own way, hear their own drummer. Macchiavelli, Vico,Hume,Montesquieu, Herzen, Disraeli,Moses Hess, Verdi, and Marx, Sorel are all interpreted here . There is an essay on' The Counter- Enlightentment, one on The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, one on ' Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power. The introduction to the volume is written by Roger Hausher. As with all the writings of Berlin one will learn a great deal by reading this work- and have great pleasure in doing so.

Brilliant!

Sir Isaiah Berlin was the greatest exponent of Liberal Pluralismin the 20th Century. "Against The Current" is probably his best collection of essays. The essays on Verdi and George Sorel are worth the price of the book alone. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You will not regret it.

A core text of modern liberal pluralism

One of the great, and certainly at least in some quarters most influential, books of historical/ philosophical/ social thinking of the century. An argument for liberal pluralism, not as an abstract theory, but as a pragmatic necessity in the absence of the possibility of theoretical justification. Berlin almost obsessively (except that obsessive is the last word you could imagine applying to Isaiah Berlin) reiterates implicitly, in a collection of, originally independently published, essays on European intellectual history, his ironically simple thesis that the world is complex and contradictory, and not reducible to the terms of simple moral, social or policial ideas. Further, his prose, which - like his thinking - is in the tradition of Hume and Diderot, makes him an unalloyed pleasure to read.