Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas - Second Edition

Drinking Berlin is like receiving wine from a sommelier - special, personal and precious. Chapters -The Counter-EnlightenmentThe Originality of MachiavelliThe Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities Vico’s Concept of KnowledgeVico and the Ideal of the EnlightenmentMontesquieuHume and the Sources of German Anti-RationalismHerzen and His MemoirsThe Life and Opinions of Moses HessBenjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for IdentityThe ‘Naivety’ of VerdiGeorges SorelNationalism: Past Neglect and Present PowerFrom introduction by Mark Lilla: ''Either way, it shows that the intellectual issues central to the Counter-Enlightenment have also been central to modern historical experience, down to the momentous, horrifying developments that intruded into Berlin’s own twentieth-century life. In the essay on Herzen and his memoirs, My Past and Thoughts, we are plunged into the swirl of revolutionary activity in mid-eighteenth century Europe and Russia, in the company of a lucid pessimist committed to socialism but distrustful of violent fanatics convinced they have discerned the final goal of history.''''We see what can happen to such people in the essay on Sorel, which traces the bloody-minded politics of the will from belle époque anarchism to Italian Fascism, then to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and even the Black Panthers (it was written in 1971).''''Other essays introduce us to Moses Hess and Benjamin Disraeli, whose very different Jewish lives illustrate the moral and psychological complexities of reconciling pre-given communal belonging with 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 the identity of others.'' Well said.A few pages later Lilla continues: ''In a sense, Berlin’s ‘cases’ in the history of ideas are closer in spirit to the modern sciences than much of what passes for philosophy today. Scientists are empiricists. Asked whether a mechanical part will crack under freezing conditions, their first instinct is to plunge it into an ice bucket and see what happens. Biography and history are to the philosophically inclined historian of ideas roughly what laboratories are to scientists (though, mercifully, nothing in history can be made to repeat itself).''''One can sit at a seminar table and try to work out the truth-conditions of an assertion and the inferences that can be reasonably drawn from it. One can also look to the inferences people actually have drawn from it under different conditions, what they thought it implied, and what it inspired them to do. The results can be surprising.''I think this is the essence and glory of Berlin. He explains what he thinks these men believed and taught. Then presents what actually happened with their ideas. Fascinating!Berlin is not the easiest read. Educated vocabulary and assumes knowledge with the epoch. Nevertheless, Berlin grows on you as the insight connects with the vision. I think his conclusions regarding these ideas and thinkers is provoking. This presentation of the ideas - behind both European history and our time, provide some of the best explanations available.The twelve page preface by Lilla and a twenty-two page introduction by Housheer are great. These two essays alone are worth the price of the book!Dozens of footnotes. (Links worked great on the kindle app on my iPad.) Includes six page appendix of Berlin's letters.

This is a good selection of representative essays in the history of ideas by Isaiah Berlin. The good news is that it is Isaiah Berlin. The bad news is that it is Isaiah Berlin. I'll go against the grain and say that, frankly, the more Berlin that I read, the less impressed I am.I have two problems with Berlin. The first is that his stock in trade is sweeping generalization, piling emotive summary upon emotive summary. After a while, you begin to suspect that, under the guise of giving you the Big Picture, all he's really giving you is a lot of arm-waving.The second problem is that Berlin is a bad writer. Yes, yes. He is a strong master of a big vocabulary, and all of his sentences, no matter how complex and convoluted, are syntactically correct. He never uses the wrong word or makes a grammatical mistake. But his sentences, almost all of them, and there are a lot of them, go on and on, piling clause on clause and then in mid-sentence you get something like "in contrast to..." and then more and more clauses that describe, in excruciating and unnecessary detail, all of the features that do NOT describe whoever or whatever, so many words ago, was the actual subject of the sentence. Sort of like that last sentence, only worse. So if you really try to read Berlin (and not just allow yourself to be sweep along by the tsumai of his words), you essentially have to decode, parse, disentangle each and every sentence.So, the bottom line is that I started out interested in Berlin, and wanting to like him, and in the end found that very difficult to do.For a good contrast with Berlin's style of history of ideas, I'd recommend taking a look at Arthur O. Lovejoy's "The Great Chain of Being" or something by M. H. Abrams like "Natural Supernaturalism". Lovejoy invented the discipline of the history of ideas, and "The Great Chain of Being" is his masterpiece. If you read it, you will see what careful scholarship in the history of ideas looks like.So I say, by all means read Berlin. You CAN learn from him. But if you're like me, after a little while, you just can't read any more. It just all blurs together into feeling and rhetoric, and you will find that, when the dust is settled, you walk away actually not knowing or understanding much more than you did when you walked in.

Fascinating collection of essays by the noted historian of philosophy and politics, Isaiah Berlin. The excellent work "The Originality of Machiavelli" is worth the price of the book. I would also recommend "The Divorce Between the Sciences and the Humanities", the two essays on Vico, and "Georges Sorel". This was my first Berlin, and I will want to read more.

I am not a conservative, on the contrary, and some of Berlin's thoughts a don't share 100%. This book is a bitt an old fashioned one, but it is of very good substance and shows the usual solid scholarship of this writer.Among many interesting analysis, I found interesting the way Berlin deals with some writers contemporary of the Enlightenment that are considered as representing a less important aspect of the culture, but that in reality are individually quite interesting, such as Giambattista Vico, the least understood of the "side writers" of his time.

I like this author.

This material is awesome! Read this book, if you like to learn a little bit more about politics and freedom.

Great

Excellent

Em resumo, neste livro o filósofo apresenta faces desconhecidas e que fogem ao senso comum de diversos pensadores famosos.