Against the current : essays in the history of ideas
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Bibliographic Information
Against the current : essays in the history of ideas
Princeton University Press, 2013
2nd ed
- : pbk
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Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas--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--and still challenge conventional wisdom. In a new foreword to this corrected edition, which also includes a new appendix of letters in which Berlin discusses and further illuminates some of its topics, noted essayist Mark Lilla argues that Berlin's decision to give up a philosophy fellowship and become a historian of ideas represented not an abandonment of philosophy but a decision to do philosophy by other, perhaps better, means. "His instinct told him," Lilla writes, "that you learn more about an idea as an idea when you know something about its genesis and understand why certain people found it compelling and were spurred to action by it." This collection of fascinating intellectual portraits is a rich demonstration of that belief.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Mark Lilla ix Author's Note xxi Editor's Preface xxiii Note on References xxix Introduction by Roger Hausheer xxxi The Counter-Enlightenment 1 The Originality of Machiavelli 33 The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities 101 Vico's Concept of Knowledge 140 Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment 151 Montesquieu 164 Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism 204 Herzen and His Memoirs 236 The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess 267 Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity 317 The 'Naivety' of Verdi 361 Georges Sorel 373 Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power 420 Appendix to the Second Edition 449 Index 467
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