Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought

by Isaiah Berlin, William Galston (Foreword), Joshua L. Cherniss (Introduction)

This new edition features the previously unpublished delivery text of Berlin's inaugural lecture as a professor at Oxford, which derives from this volume and stands as the briefest and most pithy version of his famous essay Two Concepts of Liberty.

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age is the only book in which the great intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin lays out in one continuous account most of his key insights about the period he made his own. Written for a series of lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1952, and heavily revised and expanded by Berlin afterward, the book argues that the political ideas of 1760-1830 are still largely ours, down to the language and metaphors they are expressed in. Berlin provides a vivid account of some of the era's most influential thinkers, including Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Helvetius, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Schelling. Written in Berlin's characteristically accessible style, "this" is his longest single text. Distilling his formative early work and containing much that is not to be found in his famous essays, the book is of great interest both for what it reveals about the continuing influence of Romantic political thinking and for what it shows about the development of Berlin's own influential thought.

The book has been carefully prepared by Berlin's longtime editor Henry Hardy, and Joshua L. Cherniss provides an illuminating introduction that sets it in the context of Berlin's life and work.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Politics, Nonfiction, Romanticism

407 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Sir Isaiah Berlin was a philosopher and historian of ideas, regarded as one of the leading liberal thinkers of the twentieth century. He excelled as an essayist, lecturer and conversationalist; and as a brilliant speaker who delivered, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material, whether for a lecture series at Oxford University or as a broadcaster on the BBC Third Programme, usually without a script. Many of his essays and lectures were later collected in book form.

Born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire, he was the first person of Jewish descent to be elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he helped to found Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. Berlin's work on liberal theory has had a lasting influence.

Berlin is best known for his essay Two Concepts of Liberty, delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford. He defined negative liberty as the absence of constraints on, or interference with, agents' possible action. Greater "negative freedom" meant fewer restrictions on possible action. Berlin associated positive liberty with the idea of self-mastery, or the capacity to determine oneself, to be in control of one's destiny. While Berlin granted that both concepts of liberty represent valid human ideals, as a matter of history the positive concept of liberty has proven particularly susceptible to political abuse.

Berlin contended that under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel (all committed to the positive concept of liberty), European political thinkers often equated liberty with forms of political discipline or constraint. This became politically dangerous when notions of positive liberty were, in the nineteenth century, used to defend nationalism, self-determination and the Communist idea of collective rational control over human destiny. Berlin argued that, following this line of thought, demands for freedom paradoxically become demands for forms of collective control and discipline – those deemed necessary for the "self-mastery" or self-determination of nations, classes, democratic communities, and even humanity as a whole. There is thus an elective affinity, for Berlin, between positive liberty and political totalitarianism.

Conversely, negative liberty represents a different, perhaps safer, understanding of the concept of liberty. Its proponents (such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) insisted that constraint and discipline were the antithesis of liberty and so were (and are) less prone to confusing liberty and constraint in the manner of the philosophical harbingers of modern totalitarianism. It is this concept of Negative Liberty that Isaiah Berlin supported. It dominated heavily his early chapters in his third lecture.

This negative liberty is central to the claim for toleration due to incommensurability. This concept is mirrored in the work of Joseph Raz.

Berlin's espousal of negative liberty, his hatred of totalitarianism and his experience of Russia in the revolution and through his contact with the poet Anna Akhmatova made him an enemy of the Soviet Union and he was one of the leading public intellectuals in the ideological battle against Communism during the Cold War.

Reviews

[Macoco G.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este libro te abre la mente....

[Daniel Lopes · Rating 3 out of 5]

para quem leu livros posteriores do Berlin, este é dispensável. para quem ainda está conhecendo o autor, é uma ótima dica.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age by Isaiah Berlin




This book continues my investigation into the roots of Marxism. Since Marx was influenced by Hegel, and Hegel was influenced by Romanticism, understanding Marx involves understanding Romanticism.

In undertaking this investigation, I thought it might be worthwhile to read what intellectual historian/political theorist Isaiah Berlin had to say about Romanticism. Berlin is someone who has a great deal of name recognition with me, but I don’t know why. Certainly, I’ve been hearing about “the hedgehog and the fox” [1]for my entire life, but I don’t really know what the phrase is supposed to mean.[2] I thought I could double down by reading Berlin’s observations on Romanticism.

This may not be the best Berlin book to start with. The Political Ideas of the Romantic Age (“PIRA”) started out as lectures given by Berlin in 1950 at Bryn Mawr. Berlin intended to do his own “double-down”: give a lecture; turn the lecture into his magnum opus. However, Berlin didn’t write the book. He spent the 1950s promising that he was close to finishing his magnum opus, only to table the project in the early 1960s. When he retired in the 1990s, he declared that he would now finish that pesky book, which he didn’t. A colleague, Henry Hardy, took Berlin’s notes and put them into some kind of order with Berlin’s minimal involvement, and PIRA was the result.

The two introductions to PIRA give fair warning. Hardy's introduction points out that much of PIRA treats topics and subjects that Berlin had addressed in prior books. Having just read The Roots of Romanticism, I can affirm this observation. The introduction by Joshua L. Cherniss begins with the observation that Berlin was a “fundamentally unsystematic thinker.” He also warns that because Berlin was not trained as a professional historian, some of his historical claims are “often at best flawed and oversimplified, at worst….The reader searching for scrupulously and exactly accurate historical reconstruction should not consult Berlin.”

Well, okay, then.

PIRA is great for sweeping gestures, name-dropping, and broad caricatures.

Berlin also has one annoying writing tic. Let me show you.

Here is the original paragraph:

But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the influence mainly of the Protestant doctrine of the inner light contained within each immortal soul, there developed the notion that this world of divine tranquility incapable of being disturbed by the storms, or worn down by the failures, of the material world, was to be found neither in the remote past, nor in the remote future, nor among some happy tribe of innocent aborigines described in the real and imaginary travellers’ tales of which there were a great many in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, nor in some ineffable region at which theology, or the pronouncements of mystics, could only darkly hint, but resided in the realm of the human spirit itself, accessible to every man in the course of his terrestrial life.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 214-215). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Got that? Did you wade your way through all the clauses?

Here is how the paragraph breaks down:

[But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the influence mainly of the Protestant doctrine of the inner light contained within each immortal soul, there developed the notion that this world of divine tranquility …

incapable of being disturbed by the storms, or worn down by the failures, of the material world, was to be found neither in the remote past, nor in the remote future, nor among some happy tribe of innocent aborigines described in the real and imaginary travellers’ tales of which there were a great many in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, nor in some ineffable region at which theology, or the pronouncements of mystics, could only darkly hint,…..

but resided in the realm of the human spirit itself, accessible to every man in the course of his terrestrial life.]

Or more succinctly:

[But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the influence mainly of the Protestant doctrine of the inner light contained within each immortal soul, there developed the notion that this world of divine tranquility … but resided in the realm of the human spirit itself, accessible to every man in the course of his terrestrial life.]

In other words, during the Enlightenment, under the influence of Protestantism, some people believed that the true refuge of human beings from the cares of the world lay in the soul. [3]

Of course, Berlin’s style has style. It is dramatic and rhetorical. It carries the audience along, but if you are reading, you can easily lose the thread. I developed the habit of finding the end of the subject, skipping past the middle part, locating the “but” clause, and reading from that point. PIRA is filled with paragraphs where the middle part is filled with subclauses after subclauses, never ending, always breeding new subclauses, in a cascade, or, better still, a flowing river, a veritable Orinoco flow, of words.




Nonetheless, for all the problems with PIRA, there is still some value in it. Berlin was a creative thinker and a gifted communicator. He spent decades thinking about the political ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. He also spent decades talking about these political ideas. His flaws are convertible to his strengths in enthusiastically painting a picture of the age that fascinated him. He is not systematic, and he expects people to know the various names he drops, but that tendency ought to make people get busy catching up to him.

Although Berlin was not a systematic thinker, a reader who pays careful attention can pick out the threads of what Berlin was talking about. The reader has to be careful in giving Berlin’s claims about a given thinker too much weight. Berlin obviously simplified for his lectures; lectures are not the place to get deep into the weeds. Berlin is not necessarily wrong in his observations, but he may not be entirely correct in all the nuances.

Forewarned is forearmed.

I. Politics as a descriptive science
Berlin begins his book by setting the issue as follows:

THE CENTRAL ISSUE of political philosophy is the question ‘Why should any man obey any other man or body of men?’ – or (what amounts to the same in the final analysis) ‘Why should any man or body of men ever interfere with other men?’

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 21-22). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

In short, according to Berlin, freedom is the central issue of political philosophy.

The Enlightenment sought to address this issue systematically. Berlin offers his often-used triadic structure of Western thinking, i.e., a true account must be (a) intelligible, (b) capable of demonstrative proof, and (c) comprehensive – consisting of propositions applicable to all realms of enquiry.

From this observation, Berlin wanders through the works of various philosophers of the 17th through 19th centuries. I think the gist of Berlin’s presentation is that the Enlightenment sought to present the issue of human politics as a machine, but the problem with this approach is that it presupposes teleology, i.e., that the machine has some determinate end. The problem with this is that teleological ends were passe by the 18th century.

Natural law was based on teleology:

Such notions as natural law, natural rights, the code of nature, the discovery of solutions, ‘in accordance with natural principles’, to aesthetic, economic, social, psychological problems, derive from an unquestioned teleological assumption that all things belong to an unalterable order, some ‘higher’ than others in the hierarchy, and develop along lines, or in pursuit of inner purposes, ‘implanted’ in them from birth.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (p. 59). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Another problem was that the description of the way something “is” – the empirical facts – does not translate into an “ought” – the way things should be. A description about how freedom works does not translate into the proposition that freedom ought to be respected.

Teleology was problematic:

After duly denouncing teleology as absurd anthropomorphism, they proceed to speak, quite blandly, of being given the answers sometimes by nature, sometimes by reason; and the two often seem almost identical.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (p. 87). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Berlin views moral propositions as commandments. This was also problematic for Enlightenment thinkers:

In the old days the answer was ‘God has ordered you to do so. Do it.’ To say of an act that it was right was to say that it had been so commanded: but now that God had been relegated to the status of a First Mover, who, having wound up our world like a clock, took no further interest in it, this was no longer open. Whose wishes and orders were, then, to be regarded as relevant? What were the ‘facts’, the public data, to which the answers to these questions should relate? Was there a realm of political facts (or for that matter moral or aesthetic facts) in which the proposition ‘Men should obey the majority’ or ‘Monarchy is the best form of government’ or ‘Every man has a natural right to life, liberty, property, security’ or ‘To tell a lie is always unconditionally wrong’ could find their analogues, to which they corresponded or failed to correspond, as there plainly was a realm which physics purported to describe, which contained those entities and relationships by which the statements of physicists were verified or falsified, or rendered less or more probable?

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 76-77). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Ultimately, there is a contradiction in the Enlightenment’s reliance on Nature and Natural Law while denying that there is a teleological end toward which conduct ought to be directed:

But unless we accept a teleological interpretation of the universe for which there cannot be any empirical warrant, and which the sciences therefore abandoned as a sterile and cramping category long ago, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the proposition that some ultimate ends are more rational than others has no clear meaning. Ends may be bad or good, immediate or remote, social or individual, hallowed by tradition or bold and revolutionary, mutually compatible or incompatible, normal or abnormal, attainable or utopian, fruitful or self-defeating, variable and subjective or invariant and accepted by entire societies or cultures, or the whole of humanity itself at all times, but they are not rational or irrational in the usual sense in which the word is used.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (p. 108). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

II. The Idea of Freedom
In this chapter, Berlin replays his famous “two ideas of freedom” presentation. One idea of freedom is “negative freedom,” which exists when other people are prevented from interfering with a person’s plan or conduct:

Freedom is thus in its primary sense a negative concept; to demand freedom is to demand the absence of human activities which cross my own; and the general discussion of this topic has always consciously or unconsciously presupposed this meaning of the term.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (p. 114). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Another definition of freedom involves a “positive” sense of freedom, where people are made qualified or able to accomplish their plans or fulfill their desires:

Theologians and philosophers have used the word in many other senses: in particular that in which a man may be said to be unfree when he is acting ‘irrationally’; for example, when he is said to be ‘a slave to his passions’ or ‘a victim of his own delusions’ – the sense in which men are said to ‘free’ themselves from errors or an obsessive infatuation, or hitherto irresistible physical or social inclinations. Whatever the value of such a use of the word – and it is by now virtually an intrinsic part of the normal usage of modern European languages – this meaning of the terms ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery’ is still felt to be somewhat analogical or even metaphorical, and rightly so.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 114-115). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

This sense of freedom requires a deeper understanding of purpose, which presupposes rationality. Berlin writes:

To be free is to fulfil one’s wishes; one can fulfil one’s wishes only if one knows how to do so effectively, that is, if one understands the nature of the world in which one lives; if this world has a pattern and a purpose, to ignore this central fact is to court disaster, since any action undertaken either in ignorance of, or without attention to, or, most foolish of all, in opposition to, the plan of the universe is bound to end in frustration, because the universe will defeat the individual who ignores or defies it. If freedom is a fulfilment of wishes, and such fulfilment depends upon understanding of the world plan, freedom is inconceivable without submission to the plan. Freedom, therefore, becomes identical with a certain kind of ‘rational’ submission.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 115-116). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Rationality is the road to freedom. Rationality is also the goal: “The inanimate seeks to become animate, to become sentient; the sentient to become rational. Everywhere there is an ascending order.”

Freedom is self-mastery, which can involve following the dictates of reason or conscience:

In one way only: Rousseau has found the mysterious, the unique point of intersection of the two scales of value. Men must freely want that which alone is right for them to want, which must be one and the same for all right-minded men. If there is one and only one proper course of conduct for a man in a given situation, Rousseau believed in common with the rest of the eighteenth century, then in some way, by using reason, by following nature, by listening to the inner voice of conscience, which is but nature speaking from within; by doing what your innermost heart – nature’s vicegerent – ordained, you could discover what this unique course was.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (p. 147). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

And:

Most important of all, liberty remains intact and indeed becomes capable of the richest development; for liberty is the untrammelled self-development of a soul in that direction in which it wishes to go, free from artificial obstacles or coercion exercised by others. A man doing what he deems to be right, because the inner voice of conscience tells him to do so, is acting freely, doing what he wishes, fulfilling his nature, behaving not under the pressure of fear or ignorance or the threat of violence, but because his whole being strives in that direction; he is, as we say, ‘at his best’, ‘most himself’, when so acting; it is when he is acting under coercion, or is blinded by emotion, or some more purely physical cause, that ‘he is not being truly himself’, that he declares afterwards that he had not been at his best. When a man does what is right he is certainly obeying rules; and yet he is free because he does what he most of all wishes to do.

So the great coincidence is achieved: he is free, as free as a moral being can desire to be, free from his own unworthy impulses, his self-interests, his sectional or accidental or ill-considered aims; he is expressing his innermost self as richly as an artist in a moment of creation. Yet in this very act he is obeying the rational rules embodied in the laws of his community, the purpose of which is to generalise his intuitions of what is right, punishing him and others if later, through an access of weakness or egoism, they disregard them.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 148-149). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

The problem of political despotism is found in the idea of positive freedom. If following reason is the way that freedom is found, then those who know what reason entails can claim that they are forcing someone to be free by forcing them to follow their understanding of reason:

For freedom is after all only doing what I want; what I want is that which will satisfy my nature; and what I ‘really’ want is what will satisfy my ‘real’ nature – my rational nature – for satisfying my irrational impulses will not ‘really’ satisfy me, but leave me distraught and hungry for further sensations. My rational needs, qua rational, are those needs which any rational being would have in my condition, and to the extent to which I am not wholly rational, I know what these needs are less well than someone else more rational than I. Therefore his prescription for me will do more to realise my true, that is, rational, nature than anything I may conceive as a proper course of action for myself or others. Therefore his dictates liberate me more than my own. Therefore my freedom consists in obedience to him. Hence freedom is obedience – a secular version of the great religious view that God’s ‘service is perfect freedom’,1 since God knows what is best for me and for the world.

Berlin, Isaiah. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought - Updated Edition (pp. 155-156). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

[Rosenkavalier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avvertenze per il lettore generalista

Non ho né le conoscenze, né la presunzione per scrivere un commento al libro di Berlin che possa risultare utile a qualcuno.
Quindi, mi limito a qualche avvertenza ad altri lettori generalisti come il sottoscritto.

Il libro si compone di quattro saggi tra loro collegati, originariamente scritti come lezioni universitarie.
Affrontarli senza una base di studi di filosofia, anche solo a livello liceale, mi pare sinceramente arduo.
Si tenga conto che il sottoscritto ha studiato in un modesto liceo di provincia, il cui titolare della cattedra di filosofia ritenne opportuno - per dire - impostare lo studio di Platone sull’elenco di titoli dei Dialoghi, da imparare a memoria (Critone, o dell’importanza delle leggi, etc.). Il titolare aveva anche qualche problema con la bottiglia, o meglio lui ci andava d’accordissimo, era la bottiglia a creargli dei problemi.

Non è comunque indispensabile conoscere approfonditamente gli autori di cui Berlin parla, perché le teorie sono illustrate con chiarezza e da un angolo visuale specifico, ossia la posizione di ciascuno rispetto alla domanda fondamentale per l’autore in tema di filosofia politica: “Perché si dovrebbe obbedire a un altro uomo o a un gruppo di uomini?”.
Quindi, se non ricordate granchè della metafisica di Fichte o non avete mai sentito parlare di Herder, questo non dovrebbe scoraggiarvi. Al massimo, tenetevi nei dintorni di una Garzantina o di Wikipedia, o del vostro manuale di storia della filosofia.
Quanto agli autori maggiori, come Hume, Kant, Rousseaue Hegel, vale quanto detto sopra: l’angolo visuale rimane quello limitato dell’oggetto delle lezioni.

L'autore è uno dei "grandi vecchi" del pensiero liberale, l'impostazione è dichiarata.
Il libro è scritto, a mio parere, molto bene. Spesso ci sono ripetizioni nelle argomentazioni, che credo dipendano dallo scopo originale degli scritti. Comunque, lungi dal rendere pesante la lettura, possono risultare utili per non perdere il filo delle argomentazioni. Proprio quello che Berlin si proponeva di ottenere con i suoi studenti.
Spesso filtrano le simpatie (e soprattutto le antipatie) personali dell’autore, a cui (per esempio) Rousseau non era molto gradito.

Per gli appassionati di storia contemporanea, il quarto saggio in particolare è interessante perché getta luce sulle origini culturali profonde del pensiero tedesco dell’ottocento, che ha avuto non poca parte nel creare le condizioni favorevoli all’affermazione dell’autoritarismo prussiano degli Hoenzollern e, in seguito, del nazionalsocialismo.

In conclusione, è una lettura certamente impegnativa, ma affascinante e, nei limiti in cui ha senso usare questo termine per un saggio, coinvolgente.

[WaldenOgre · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my opinion, if you've read other important works by Isaiah Berlin, such as The Roots of Romanticism, Freedom and Its Betrayal, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment, then reading this book is not really necessary, since it is essentially an earlier — and in some sense unfinished — version of those later works.

Yet even though I have long been familiar with the ideas of those great thinkers and their historical consequences, I still find myself enjoying the way they unfold in Berlin’s narrative. There is, to be sure, a certain beauty not only in his reasoning but also in his expression.

Besides all this, the introduction written by Joshua L. Cherniss alone is excellent, and one of his remarks on Isaiah Berlin is particularly insightful and precise:“He was often ambivalent, but he was not uncertain. His judgments were complex and qualified; but he was constantly judging even as he sought to understand.”

[Marco den Ouden · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent history of philosophy from the great liberal thinker. Much food for thought. I am very much interested in exploring more of Berlin's thought.

[Ana Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Se você se interessa por saber como chegamos a pensar como pensamos e de onde vem nossos paradigmas de visão de mundo, este livro é pra você! Isaiah Berlin investiga a história das ideias que tem profundas consequências práticas para nós por seus efeitos políticos. Liberdade, totalitarismo, liberalismo, esquerda, indivíduos e grupos... o que nos parece conceitos a priori, são na verdade frutos de séculos de pensamentos.

Ler este livro é como assistir a uma aula - as ideias vão sendo construídas, se conectando, se complementando até que sem perceber o sentido final é revelado. Então, se parecer que você não está entendendo é porque ainda não chegou lá!

Não é preciso ter conhecimentos prévios profundos de filosofia, mas um mínimo de entendimento dos acontecimentos históricos e das principais vertentes políticas é necessário para fazer as conexões do autor.

[James Bechtel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars.

[Biblioteca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Avvertenze per il lettore generalista

Non ho n�� le conoscenze, n�� la presunzione per scrivere un commento al libro di Berlin che possa risultare utile a qualcuno.
Quindi, mi limito a qualche avvertenza ad altri lettori generalisti come il sottoscritto.

Il libro si compone di quattro saggi tra loro collegati, originariamente scritti come lezioni universitarie.
Affrontarli senza una base di studi di filosofia, anche solo a livello liceale, mi pare sinceramente arduo.
Si tenga conto che il sottoscritto ha studiato in un modesto liceo di provincia, il cui titolare della cattedra di filosofia ritenne opportuno - per dire - impostare lo studio di Platone sull���elenco di titoli dei Dialoghi, da imparare a memoria (Critone, o dell���importanza delle leggi, etc.). Il titolare aveva anche qualche problema con la bottiglia, o meglio lui ci andava d���accordissimo, era la bottiglia a creargli dei problemi.

Non �� comunque indispensabile conoscere approfonditamente gli autori di cui Berlin parla, perch�� le teorie sono illustrate con chiarezza e da un angolo visuale specifico, ossia la posizione di ciascuno rispetto alla domanda fondamentale per l���autore in tema di filosofia politica: ���Perch�� si dovrebbe obbedire a un altro uomo o a un gruppo di uomini?���.
Quindi, se non ricordate granch�� della metafisica di Fichte o non avete mai sentito parlare di Herder, questo non dovrebbe scoraggiarvi. Al massimo, tenetevi nei dintorni di una Garzantina o di Wikipedia, o del vostro manuale di storia della filosofia.
Quanto agli autori maggiori, come Hume, Kant, Rousseaue Hegel, vale quanto detto sopra: l���angolo visuale rimane quello limitato dell���oggetto delle lezioni.

L'autore �� uno dei "grandi vecchi" del pensiero liberale, l'impostazione �� dichiarata.
Il libro �� scritto, a mio parere, molto bene. Spesso ci sono ripetizioni nelle argomentazioni, che credo dipendano dallo scopo originale degli scritti. Comunque, lungi dal rendere pesante la lettura, possono risultare utili per non perdere il filo delle argomentazioni. Proprio quello che Berlin si proponeva di ottenere con i suoi studenti.
Spesso filtrano le simpatie (e soprattutto le antipatie) personali dell���autore, a cui (per esempio) Rousseau non era molto gradito.

Per gli appassionati di storia contemporanea, il quarto saggio in particolare �� interessante perch�� getta luce sulle origini culturali profonde del pensiero tedesco dell���ottocento, che ha avuto non poca parte nel creare le condizioni favorevoli all���affermazione dell���autoritarismo prussiano degli Hoenzollern e, in seguito, del nazionalsocialismo.

In conclusione, �� una lettura certamente impegnativa, ma affascinante e, nei limiti in cui ha senso usare questo termine per un saggio, coinvolgente.