Bøger af Isaiah Berlin

Berlin's letters are marvellously accessible, and as entertaining. In America, during the war, he writes a regular telegram to his anxious parents, often saying just 'Flourishing'; the word fits not only his wartime experience, but the whole of his early life, vividly displayed in this book in all its multi-faceted delightfulness.

These essays focus on the social and political role - past, present and future - of ideas and of their progenitors. Contents include "My Intellectual Path", an autobiographical survey of Berlin's main preoccupations, and "Jewish Slavery and Emancipation", the classic statement of his Zionist views.

Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and the history of ideas, views which later found expression in such famous works as 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics.

Although Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known.

Eight of the nine pieces in The Sense of Reality are published here for the first time. The range is characteristically wide: realism in history; the history of socialism; the radical cultural revolution instigated by romanticism; The title essay, starting from the impossibility of recreating a bygone epoch, provides a superb centrepiece.

Berlin's main theme in these essays is the importance in the history of ideas of dissenters whose thinking still challenges conventional wisdom - among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen and Sorel.