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The Proper Study of Mankind
Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of our time and one of its finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated here the reader will find Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"; his penetrating portraits of contemporaries from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevelt; his essays on liberty and his exposition of pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to scientific method; and his brilliant studies of such intellectual originals as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder.
637 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Isaiah Berlin
200 books780 followersSir 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.
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.
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November 16, 2012Berlin is an intellectual stud—wise, thoughtful, cautious and, ultimately, uplifting. The opening essay is a sterling introduction to the tenor of the displaced Riganite: a firm declaration against the tempting lure of dogma and ideology, against the piebald dream of utopian perfection achievable by rational and scientific methods served by a priesthood of lever-pulling technicians; an illusory end that so often is sought through sanguinary means. The first batch of essays serve to build a base for Berlin's more detailed examinations that (presumably) follow. These make for dense reading, the pages thick with intertwined, muscular prose as Berlin probes, dissects, and crafts arguments for and against the assimilation of the humanities into the rigorous, rational structures of the sciences; the continued existence of political theory in a world without unified or singular ends; the complementary relationship between the increase in a man's knowledge with that of his freedom, and what, in this context, his liberty actually encompasses; and an examination—transcribed from a 1953 lecture at the London School of Economics—of the reality inherent to the claims of Historical Necessity that underlies so much progressive theory and dogma.
So far, Berlin's no scratchy record—he's capital B brilliant (though non-capitalized in adjectival function at the nonce, obviously and so on and so forth, indeed and wherefore, lest the milk be spoiled, etc. and to that sort of end) and immensely thought-provoking, but a touch dry and—for myself at least—intense and time-consuming, in that ofttimes paragraphs, even pages, need to be returned to and re-read to retain the gist of the current, or subsequent, argument*. I'm one of those oddballs who simply must read a book of essays in sequential order—no matter the temptation to tackle the famously good stuff many chapters ahead—and thus, having scaled the foundational bases, I'm prepared to ascend to the to truly meaty parts.
*In part, this is due to the fact that Berlin, more than most, perhaps any, author whom I have, or perhaps shall, in the future, near or distant, having then the leisure, perhaps, to pursue, or at least to strive after, the time available, or, better said, set aside for, the munificent pursuit of reading pleasure, uses commas, endless commas, boatloads, floating up and down, or down and up, perhaps, easier said than envisioned, commas in massive amounts such that, by the end, or at least the penultimate, that is finalized, portions of the sentence, or phrase, or subordinate clause, you have become so entangled, so enmeshed, so thoroughly, that is to say, fully, or completely, swarmed by these drooling periods, or pooping dots, that you have totally, entirely, in the fullest measure of this word, forgotten what the gist, or origin, or at least, if we must return to it, the intent, or meaning, of the sentence is, or was, or perhaps even was meant to be.
So far, Berlin's no scratchy record—he's capital B brilliant (though non-capitalized in adjectival function at the nonce, obviously and so on and so forth, indeed and wherefore, lest the milk be spoiled, etc. and to that sort of end) and immensely thought-provoking, but a touch dry and—for myself at least—intense and time-consuming, in that ofttimes paragraphs, even pages, need to be returned to and re-read to retain the gist of the current, or subsequent, argument*. I'm one of those oddballs who simply must read a book of essays in sequential order—no matter the temptation to tackle the famously good stuff many chapters ahead—and thus, having scaled the foundational bases, I'm prepared to ascend to the to truly meaty parts.
*In part, this is due to the fact that Berlin, more than most, perhaps any, author whom I have, or perhaps shall, in the future, near or distant, having then the leisure, perhaps, to pursue, or at least to strive after, the time available, or, better said, set aside for, the munificent pursuit of reading pleasure, uses commas, endless commas, boatloads, floating up and down, or down and up, perhaps, easier said than envisioned, commas in massive amounts such that, by the end, or at least the penultimate, that is finalized, portions of the sentence, or phrase, or subordinate clause, you have become so entangled, so enmeshed, so thoroughly, that is to say, fully, or completely, swarmed by these drooling periods, or pooping dots, that you have totally, entirely, in the fullest measure of this word, forgotten what the gist, or origin, or at least, if we must return to it, the intent, or meaning, of the sentence is, or was, or perhaps even was meant to be.
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October 21, 2024This is a very rich book, it offers a great insight into the writing and understanding of history. It's impossible to cover all angles Berlin deals with, but the main one is his relentless attempt to show that tackling history with great theories and purely scientific methods ignores reality. One of the explanations is that the very act of writing history, compiling a story is not a perfectly logical activity; in reality, practical and intuitive aspects play a much larger role than (academic) methodical applications. For instance, the urge to give the story a coherence and unity, and especially the urge to look teleologically at history (to reconstruct backwards starting from the result), are so strong that this approach does injustice to the reality of the past.
In his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" he describes how in many ways the reality of the past has a great "thickness" that is impossible to reconstruct, to the frustration of Tolstoy (his starting point for the essay). Moreover, we ourselves are so inextricably intertwined with our own "thick" history (past and present), that we can not possibly extract ourselves from it, and consequentely every scientific approach aimed at objective information is an illusion. According to Berlin, ultimately we can only appeal to a kind of wisdom of life, "a sensitiviness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed", through which we intuitively can say sensible things about the past.
What Berlin says, makes sense; we cannot just wipe it off the table. But, too me, he is so extremely obsessed to prove the relativity of all scientific knowledge, that he ends up at the other extreme. And that's unfortunate; perhaps the point is to find the right middle ground: a marriage between scientific methods, transparent goals and intuition.
Addendum: much of what Berlin wrote about (in the 1950s and 1960s) has been recuperated and enlarged by the constructivist school and the linguistic/narrative turn. So in hindsight, his essays can seem a bit outdated. But that doesn't diminish his value as a pioneer!
In his famous essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" he describes how in many ways the reality of the past has a great "thickness" that is impossible to reconstruct, to the frustration of Tolstoy (his starting point for the essay). Moreover, we ourselves are so inextricably intertwined with our own "thick" history (past and present), that we can not possibly extract ourselves from it, and consequentely every scientific approach aimed at objective information is an illusion. According to Berlin, ultimately we can only appeal to a kind of wisdom of life, "a sensitiviness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed", through which we intuitively can say sensible things about the past.
What Berlin says, makes sense; we cannot just wipe it off the table. But, too me, he is so extremely obsessed to prove the relativity of all scientific knowledge, that he ends up at the other extreme. And that's unfortunate; perhaps the point is to find the right middle ground: a marriage between scientific methods, transparent goals and intuition.
Addendum: much of what Berlin wrote about (in the 1950s and 1960s) has been recuperated and enlarged by the constructivist school and the linguistic/narrative turn. So in hindsight, his essays can seem a bit outdated. But that doesn't diminish his value as a pioneer!
December 23, 2020
I didn't know Isaiah Berlin at all until the mid' 1990's, when I took a subscription on the New York Review of Books. Berlin regularly published articles in it. I was immediately very impressed by his wise, personal and very authoritative way of thinking and looking at the world. Up until now I never read a larger work by his hand, so this anthology makes up for this neglect.
What strikes is that Berlin wasn't a systembuilder, he didn't develop a huge system of thinking nor introduced a new way of thinking. On the contrary, his articles more look like footnotes on certain phenomena, striking personalities and current affairs.
Nevertheless, his work has a relative strong homogenity: Berlin seems to be the hero of the resistance against nominalistic thinking, the typical western view (since the Greeks) that reality is one and indivisible, and is seizable in a rational scheme. His strongest prose he uses in his battle against scientism, the conviction that the whole reality is intelligble through scientific methods, and thus also is seizable. I can follow the arguments of Berlin, but to my conviction he has gone too far; he confines science a bit too much to positivism, and ignores the evolution of the past 50 years within science (where subjectivity and intuition partly have been integrated).
Berlin makes a very clear distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of men, and is most radical in his defense of the writing of history: this never can be a science, and scientific methods can only be used as auxiliary instruments. According to Berlin there is absolutely no room for patterns (leave alone laws) in history. Personnaly, I think he is way too radical in this, although I can understand his concerns.
In several articles Berlin states that rational (and especially scientific) thinking is too "meager" to seize the "thickness" (i.e. complex, multilayered) of reality. Instead he promotes intuition, a sense of reality and wisdom as more effective ways of dealing with reality. Again, I see what he means, but I have my doubts about where these "methods" can lead to.
In short: Berlin is a very impressive and challenging thinker, who questions a lot of what we still hold for evident. But I'm rather sceptic about what he has to offer instead.
What strikes is that Berlin wasn't a systembuilder, he didn't develop a huge system of thinking nor introduced a new way of thinking. On the contrary, his articles more look like footnotes on certain phenomena, striking personalities and current affairs.
Nevertheless, his work has a relative strong homogenity: Berlin seems to be the hero of the resistance against nominalistic thinking, the typical western view (since the Greeks) that reality is one and indivisible, and is seizable in a rational scheme. His strongest prose he uses in his battle against scientism, the conviction that the whole reality is intelligble through scientific methods, and thus also is seizable. I can follow the arguments of Berlin, but to my conviction he has gone too far; he confines science a bit too much to positivism, and ignores the evolution of the past 50 years within science (where subjectivity and intuition partly have been integrated).
Berlin makes a very clear distinction between the sciences of nature and the sciences of men, and is most radical in his defense of the writing of history: this never can be a science, and scientific methods can only be used as auxiliary instruments. According to Berlin there is absolutely no room for patterns (leave alone laws) in history. Personnaly, I think he is way too radical in this, although I can understand his concerns.
In several articles Berlin states that rational (and especially scientific) thinking is too "meager" to seize the "thickness" (i.e. complex, multilayered) of reality. Instead he promotes intuition, a sense of reality and wisdom as more effective ways of dealing with reality. Again, I see what he means, but I have my doubts about where these "methods" can lead to.
In short: Berlin is a very impressive and challenging thinker, who questions a lot of what we still hold for evident. But I'm rather sceptic about what he has to offer instead.
June 2, 2011
It would be difficult to overestimate this book's influence on my own political thought. My journey towards the likes of Hayek, Rothbard, and von Mises began at Berlin's "Two Concepts of Liberty" and any belief I may have had in the use of the state to perfect people died when I learned a simple truth: the "good" is not unitary. If a decision has to be made between competing goods, that is a decision best left in the hands of the individual most of the time.
Also some wonderful insights into Machiavelli and the Counter-Enlightenment. Go read this book.
Also some wonderful insights into Machiavelli and the Counter-Enlightenment. Go read this book.
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March 30, 2014Sometimes I think of big thick books about history and philosophy as intellectual arm wrestling matches-- I'm throwing my weight against ideas, trying to figure out the author's strategy. When I read Isaiah Berlin, I'm playing ping-pong with a genius, and I'm being outfoxed.
Big ideas, big thinkers, many of whom no one reads anymore (Herder, Hamann)... all told in an eloquent and precise book, and all the more appropriate reading for an era when totalitarianism comes in the form of markets and electronic circuitry, less so in jackboots and parade tanks.
And if you really want to intimidate people, I can't think of a better way than carrying around a 700-page tome called "THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND" and reading it at your desk and on the subway.
Big ideas, big thinkers, many of whom no one reads anymore (Herder, Hamann)... all told in an eloquent and precise book, and all the more appropriate reading for an era when totalitarianism comes in the form of markets and electronic circuitry, less so in jackboots and parade tanks.
And if you really want to intimidate people, I can't think of a better way than carrying around a 700-page tome called "THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND" and reading it at your desk and on the subway.
February 7, 2016
There is much to admire in Isaiah Berlin. He deals with thick concepts but he is easy to read. He is clear. He also analyzes phenomenon from a variety of angles, being pretty well informed and widely read. He is also a proponent of the end of modernism, understanding the reason and concept originate with latent content, and that often the narrative structure is inappropriate to contexts outside of the originating situation. He shows us this often.
But there is an intellectual limit to his examinations. He doesn't want to be wrong, so he never takes a strong stand. Instead, he spends time digging through past contexts and situations in order to find the roots of concepts, a kind of genealogical analysis ala Nietzsche, but also Foucault and some Deleuze as well. He never gets as abstract as these guys, but he does use history to disarm ideas the way Marx might.
So he is proponent of the limits of reason as well, but he seems to miss how technology, economics and philosophy match together. This isn't because he isn't well read, its because he sticks with the content of his study too much. He lets the contemporary boundaries of areas to determine much of what he is able to examine. He seems to stick with Herder as an anti-enlightenment thinking, believing that all progress is naught, that there is nothing new under the sun. This is a depressing position to take, but it is disingenuous because it is a limit on reason that relies on reason to understand its own limit. A contradiction.
To some degree Berlin takes a superficial reading of Kant. Not a hard thing to do, since Kant is so difficult, but this makes he wonder if he takes superficial readings of others too? Perhaps. Berlin misses the critique of reason in Kant wherein all rationality is substantiated on nothing. Nietzsche realized this, and saw in this nothingness of Being the hope for a better future, one of constant revolution and reinvention -- pure tyrannical freedom, whereas Kant saw sublime unity in faith. Berlin instead sees in this nothingness a non-future in which the past is reiterated anew. And this makes Berlin a mainstay of existential nihilism, although he doesn't seem to go so dark, since he continues to learn and study anyway. I think Berlin was good as a philosopher but he, like many philosophers, have an incomplete picture because much of the new thought was being developed in other fields of math, physics, archeology, and so on. In this sense, Berlin was too trapped within his own tradition... and like many others within his tradition he went to the end of it, and stayed there too long to see anything other than the end of everything.
But there is an intellectual limit to his examinations. He doesn't want to be wrong, so he never takes a strong stand. Instead, he spends time digging through past contexts and situations in order to find the roots of concepts, a kind of genealogical analysis ala Nietzsche, but also Foucault and some Deleuze as well. He never gets as abstract as these guys, but he does use history to disarm ideas the way Marx might.
So he is proponent of the limits of reason as well, but he seems to miss how technology, economics and philosophy match together. This isn't because he isn't well read, its because he sticks with the content of his study too much. He lets the contemporary boundaries of areas to determine much of what he is able to examine. He seems to stick with Herder as an anti-enlightenment thinking, believing that all progress is naught, that there is nothing new under the sun. This is a depressing position to take, but it is disingenuous because it is a limit on reason that relies on reason to understand its own limit. A contradiction.
To some degree Berlin takes a superficial reading of Kant. Not a hard thing to do, since Kant is so difficult, but this makes he wonder if he takes superficial readings of others too? Perhaps. Berlin misses the critique of reason in Kant wherein all rationality is substantiated on nothing. Nietzsche realized this, and saw in this nothingness of Being the hope for a better future, one of constant revolution and reinvention -- pure tyrannical freedom, whereas Kant saw sublime unity in faith. Berlin instead sees in this nothingness a non-future in which the past is reiterated anew. And this makes Berlin a mainstay of existential nihilism, although he doesn't seem to go so dark, since he continues to learn and study anyway. I think Berlin was good as a philosopher but he, like many philosophers, have an incomplete picture because much of the new thought was being developed in other fields of math, physics, archeology, and so on. In this sense, Berlin was too trapped within his own tradition... and like many others within his tradition he went to the end of it, and stayed there too long to see anything other than the end of everything.
December 27, 2020
Isaiah Berlin is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, but unlike Heidegger or Sartre, he writes essays rather than lengthy books, and his style is clear rather than turgid. His work is also grounded in an exhaustive knowledge of 19th century European thought, which allows him to discern the larger patterns that mark the history of ideas.
So first, what possible relevance can the ideas of the 19th century have for us here and now, trapped in the morass of the 21st century? Unlike technology, ideas percolate slowly through societies, often taking hundreds of years to fully flower. One of those, as Berlin points out in an essay of the same name, is nationalism, which we consider as a given but really didn't exist as an idea until after 1850. Nationalism, of course, is a driving force in modern geopolitics, but Berlin makes it clear it's a new development in history, and by extension, will at some point fade into historical irrelevance just as the ideas of monarchies and empires have already done.
"The Proper Study of Mankind" is full of such thought-provoking concepts, though there is some repetition of Berlin's primary theme that there is no perfect society, no perfect government, no one magic wand of a solution that will set humanity on a path to a glorious utopian future where evil is erased and good is rewarded.
Berlin's most famous essay, "The Fox and the Hedgehog," is included, but "Political Liberty and Pluralism" could come from today's headlines, and "The Originality of Machiavelli" is a brilliant analysis of a thinker who is usually unconsciously reviled without being read, or considered in depth.
The essay format also allows readers to step away whenever the mood suits, and not lose the thread of Berlin's view of how the modern world came to be. And that thread, primarily, is that the ideas of the 19th century are still being digested and dealt with now, in the 2020s, and unless we understand their origins, we will continue to struggle to solve the problems they present.
So first, what possible relevance can the ideas of the 19th century have for us here and now, trapped in the morass of the 21st century? Unlike technology, ideas percolate slowly through societies, often taking hundreds of years to fully flower. One of those, as Berlin points out in an essay of the same name, is nationalism, which we consider as a given but really didn't exist as an idea until after 1850. Nationalism, of course, is a driving force in modern geopolitics, but Berlin makes it clear it's a new development in history, and by extension, will at some point fade into historical irrelevance just as the ideas of monarchies and empires have already done.
"The Proper Study of Mankind" is full of such thought-provoking concepts, though there is some repetition of Berlin's primary theme that there is no perfect society, no perfect government, no one magic wand of a solution that will set humanity on a path to a glorious utopian future where evil is erased and good is rewarded.
Berlin's most famous essay, "The Fox and the Hedgehog," is included, but "Political Liberty and Pluralism" could come from today's headlines, and "The Originality of Machiavelli" is a brilliant analysis of a thinker who is usually unconsciously reviled without being read, or considered in depth.
The essay format also allows readers to step away whenever the mood suits, and not lose the thread of Berlin's view of how the modern world came to be. And that thread, primarily, is that the ideas of the 19th century are still being digested and dealt with now, in the 2020s, and unless we understand their origins, we will continue to struggle to solve the problems they present.
July 18, 2021
I won't lie, at times this book was a struggle and I had to be in a very particular mindset in order to be able to plunge through it - but I have finished (admittedly skipping 3 of the chapters because I was just not engaged at all), and I am proud.
There is so much information and philosophy in this collection of essays that I can't review the whole lot - especially since I've been dipping in and out since January. Ultimately, it is Berlin's fascinating discussions of the history of ideas which kept me coming back for the level of intellectual depth that this volume offers. His engagement in debates about the concept of 'Scientific History' and the 'Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities' felt particularly relevant to current events (as well as my own interests), and his investigations of Machiavelli, Herder, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt's own theories of history were so insightful and interesting.
I learned a lot from this book, but it's certainly now time to take a mental break with some much-needed fiction.
There is so much information and philosophy in this collection of essays that I can't review the whole lot - especially since I've been dipping in and out since January. Ultimately, it is Berlin's fascinating discussions of the history of ideas which kept me coming back for the level of intellectual depth that this volume offers. His engagement in debates about the concept of 'Scientific History' and the 'Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities' felt particularly relevant to current events (as well as my own interests), and his investigations of Machiavelli, Herder, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt's own theories of history were so insightful and interesting.
I learned a lot from this book, but it's certainly now time to take a mental break with some much-needed fiction.
June 29, 2020
It’s such an incredibly rich and dense cross-section of Berlin’s career. You get two of the Four Essays on Liberty essays, several essays on the philosophy of history, and some thoughts on Russian literature. If you read the bibliography on the back, it shows you the various collections this book pulls from. If you’re new to Isaiah Berlin, it’s an excellent starting point beyond the Four Essays on Liberty that are deservedly praised. My favorite, unexpectedly, was his essay on Machiavelli.
August 31, 2017
Ich bin ein Berliner.
December 14, 2021
This was a highly rewarding book for someone who is still trying to get clear about what his notions of history and ethics amount to, and as someone who really wants to be clear about the vital things that my own society seems to be so childishly flippant about. At a time when people are screaming and waving placards about their 'freedom' and their 'rights', with kneejerk reactions against law and government, it increasingly appals me how few of my fellow citizens have actually stopped and thought about these things properly, and seen the difficult and gnarly depths that these questions lead a sincere searcher into.
I've taken off one star because when Isaiah does get round to making a point of his own, something that as primarily a presenter of other thinkers' ideas he does seldom, he has a tedious way of repeating it a hundred different ways. However, it is worth persisting through these sections because he does us the great service of revealing the thought of a host of thinkers, and of their influence on others, and on our own times and the issues of our times. He has read a vast number of obscure books by now obscure authors, plus their commentators, so that we don't have to. He calls what he does the history of ideas. I'm much more used to thinking of the history of ideas in the terms that were presented to me as a youngster by Bronowski's Ascent of Man, and subsequently with respect to the evolution of scientific thought. Berlin's history of ideas is definitely much more that of ideas of history, culture and society, with politics as central. The world he takes me into is most closely similar to that of Hannah Arendt, who I think of as a political scientist. As with Arendt, I feel I will be devoting more time to his work in the medium term.
One thing I was acutely conscious of whilst reading the book was that there was very little wisdom from the past, at least as reflected by Berlin, to help us think about the strange issues of our own time when the illusoriness of the whole idea of culture seems to be asserting itself. One of Berlin's and his chosen thinkers' persistent themes is around the notion of culture and it's relations to a state, a nation and a language group. He also implicitly accepts the idea of sub-cultures such as class or educational background. But we are living in a strange time where the idea that we each belong to a cultural community that sees the world in a fundamentally agreed upon way is being submerged into a chaotic field of more or less transient memes. We live in times when even friends and relatives are becoming strangers to us, and not just over one big divisive issue, like religion or slavery, but about the very nature of reality and what can be truly asserted about it. Post truth (when was there ever pre-truth?), conspiracism, anti-science, irrationalism; these forces are pushing individuals into ever tighter little information silos of their own. The idea that there is anything that we all might agree upon has become almost unthinkable. I did not find Berlin could point at much that related to those particular current concerns, though there must have been times when equivalent phenomena prevailed.
I've taken off one star because when Isaiah does get round to making a point of his own, something that as primarily a presenter of other thinkers' ideas he does seldom, he has a tedious way of repeating it a hundred different ways. However, it is worth persisting through these sections because he does us the great service of revealing the thought of a host of thinkers, and of their influence on others, and on our own times and the issues of our times. He has read a vast number of obscure books by now obscure authors, plus their commentators, so that we don't have to. He calls what he does the history of ideas. I'm much more used to thinking of the history of ideas in the terms that were presented to me as a youngster by Bronowski's Ascent of Man, and subsequently with respect to the evolution of scientific thought. Berlin's history of ideas is definitely much more that of ideas of history, culture and society, with politics as central. The world he takes me into is most closely similar to that of Hannah Arendt, who I think of as a political scientist. As with Arendt, I feel I will be devoting more time to his work in the medium term.
One thing I was acutely conscious of whilst reading the book was that there was very little wisdom from the past, at least as reflected by Berlin, to help us think about the strange issues of our own time when the illusoriness of the whole idea of culture seems to be asserting itself. One of Berlin's and his chosen thinkers' persistent themes is around the notion of culture and it's relations to a state, a nation and a language group. He also implicitly accepts the idea of sub-cultures such as class or educational background. But we are living in a strange time where the idea that we each belong to a cultural community that sees the world in a fundamentally agreed upon way is being submerged into a chaotic field of more or less transient memes. We live in times when even friends and relatives are becoming strangers to us, and not just over one big divisive issue, like religion or slavery, but about the very nature of reality and what can be truly asserted about it. Post truth (when was there ever pre-truth?), conspiracism, anti-science, irrationalism; these forces are pushing individuals into ever tighter little information silos of their own. The idea that there is anything that we all might agree upon has become almost unthinkable. I did not find Berlin could point at much that related to those particular current concerns, though there must have been times when equivalent phenomena prevailed.
January 25, 2012
Categorizing this book onto a shelf in Goodreads is difficult. It is so rich and varied in content. It is a collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin covering a tremendous range of topics. Each essay is essentially a dissertation for an MPhil in itself. The one on Machiavelli is incredible in its breadth of scope. The amount of reading Berlin had to do in order to summarize the scholarly literature is incredible. The essay on two forms of liberty (negative, i.e., Locke/Bentham/et al., and positive, i.e., Rousseau/Marx/et al.) was excellent and exposes the internal contradictions particularly in positive liberty--in a way so prescient regarding the development of technocratic tyranny.
January 20, 2019
Somewhere I read Berlin's works are no longer in style. If that's the case, perhaps it is just because he discusses some obscure thinkers such as Vico, de Maistre, and Herder among others. I've been reading an essay here and there for many years and finally finished the last one I am interested in, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which has been my introduction to Tolstoy's worldview. Berlin has a crystal clear writing style that made this essay, as well as his others, a real joy to read. This particular essay now makes me want to read War and Peace, which was certainly not something I planned on doing.
February 26, 2018
Arguably the most important political and literary philosopher/critic of the 20th century. His essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox" (about Tolstoy) is worth the price of admission. Like George Steiner, Berlin will throw dozens of references at you -- Kant, Wittgenstein, Hume, and a dozen others in a single paragraph -- as he builds an unassilable case for human liberty in an era of totalitarianism, and traces the origins of both through the European Enlightment and German Romanticism, among other intellectual movement.
September 10, 2017
There is not much to really say about this one. It only took me a while because I keep picking up books from the library and putting this on the back burner so to speak. This collection of essays is both inspiring and inspired. It demonstrates quite well the lucidity and power of his thought in a wide range of different things, though he seems to mostly focus on literary subjects. Reading his analysis of Machiavelli's The Prince was quite interesting. Nothing much else really sticks out in my memory, but I feel rather ill and shall cut this short.
Currently reading
October 27, 2010He writes as he spoke as he thought: in perfectly constructed long complex sentences with parentheses, subordinate clauses and footnotes; it is, therefore, a slow read but very rewarding. I think his ideas on what is freedom are of vital and current importance in the world of social and political unrest that is evolving.
July 16, 2016
This fascinating anthology of essays illuminates the mind of one of the most celebrated offspring of The Enlightenment, the 20th century's Isaiah Berlin. There is a great deal of information in here on the last 400 years of Western thought and a careful consideration of some of the great minds of his time. Recommended for careful, slow reading.
March 16, 2010
"The Concept of Scientific History"--Berlin brilliantly attacks the idea that history is among the social sciences. Braudel nods.
"The Originality of Machiavelli"--great piece.
"The Counter-Enlightenment"--will read soon.
"The Originality of Machiavelli"--great piece.
"The Counter-Enlightenment"--will read soon.
September 13, 2016
The essential Berlin. It contains some of his most famous essays like his "Two Concepts of Liberty" along with "The Originality of Machiavelli" which is my personal favourite. For anyone interested in the history of ideas, Berlin is a must read.
December 24, 2019
These essays are amazing in their profundity and clarity. Berlin has a way of exploring historical ideas in a way that does justice to their complexity at the same time as it makes them clear and three-dimensional. His commitment to pluralism on many levels is fearless.
October 12, 2011
Ich bin ein Berliner.
January 20, 2021
I should’ve just read “The Fox and the Hedgehog.”
December 28, 2025
I remember reading Berlin's review of Vico and Herder in the collection of essays and found it fascinating. I picked it up again and read the opening, which I found particularly resonated with me at this current moment.
This essay is titled 'The Pursuit of the Ideal', and it clarified some questions and concerns I had about how to live with other people that have different world views and different goals in life and the ways that we achieve these – 'some found [the right path] in churches, some in laboratories; some believed in intuition, others in experiment or mystical visions...' Berlin confirms that, for everyone, we ask questions about what our purpose is in life, as individuals, and as communities. And yet the answers can seem out of reach – but that does not stop us from trying. 'Hegel and Marx thought there were no timeless truths,' Berlin reminds the reader, 'human horizons altered with each new with each new step in the evolutionary ladder...history was moved by conflicts of forces...conflicts which took the forms of was, revolutions, violent upheavals of nations, classes, cultures'.
While these conflicts may be seen as hinderances, they are essentially part of change, and the human condition: 'These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are...If we are told are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle...We must say that a world in which in which incompatible values are are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken..But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act'. His comments on our pursuits suggest that tensions and uncertainty are thoroughly apart of life. Again, he urges that 'some among the great goods cannot live together. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may contain irreparable loss'. And a reminder that to be uncertain, to exist within tensions, is not a bad thing: 'happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal'.
It is essential to our experience that we look for answers and not proscribe a 'final solution', change is inevitable even once our ends have been met as new problems emerge. He quotes Kant who said that 'out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made'. Collisions can be 'minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair'.
This essay reminds you that conflicts should be accepted as inevitable. Ultimately, I think this encourages greater tolerance and helps one to recognise that certainty in one's conduct with others is not a standard that can be set.
This essay is titled 'The Pursuit of the Ideal', and it clarified some questions and concerns I had about how to live with other people that have different world views and different goals in life and the ways that we achieve these – 'some found [the right path] in churches, some in laboratories; some believed in intuition, others in experiment or mystical visions...' Berlin confirms that, for everyone, we ask questions about what our purpose is in life, as individuals, and as communities. And yet the answers can seem out of reach – but that does not stop us from trying. 'Hegel and Marx thought there were no timeless truths,' Berlin reminds the reader, 'human horizons altered with each new with each new step in the evolutionary ladder...history was moved by conflicts of forces...conflicts which took the forms of was, revolutions, violent upheavals of nations, classes, cultures'.
While these conflicts may be seen as hinderances, they are essentially part of change, and the human condition: 'These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are...If we are told are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle...We must say that a world in which in which incompatible values are are not in conflict is a world altogether beyond our ken..But it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act'. His comments on our pursuits suggest that tensions and uncertainty are thoroughly apart of life. Again, he urges that 'some among the great goods cannot live together. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may contain irreparable loss'. And a reminder that to be uncertain, to exist within tensions, is not a bad thing: 'happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal'.
It is essential to our experience that we look for answers and not proscribe a 'final solution', change is inevitable even once our ends have been met as new problems emerge. He quotes Kant who said that 'out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made'. Collisions can be 'minimised by promoting and preserving an uneasy equilibrium, which is constantly threatened and in constant need of repair'.
This essay reminds you that conflicts should be accepted as inevitable. Ultimately, I think this encourages greater tolerance and helps one to recognise that certainty in one's conduct with others is not a standard that can be set.
December 26, 2025
This is the embodiment of a boring book written in dead prose. Terribly repetitive and filled with unnecessary comments within comments inside the same sentence. Berlin's ideas are not difficult to follow, are not complex, and are not very novel--and that's the main issue: the whole book reads like a long blog post from someone who desperately wants you to feel like they know their stuff.
The different moments where Berlin mentions Hegel reveal a superficial understanding. If you know your way through Hegel, these moments will only deflate your trust in the author.
Most of the essays could be either condensed into a single idea or a few paragraphs. Instead, Berlin does his best to drag them for several relentlessly boring pages, adding very little to what the reader might already know just by existing in reality. So, in short: if you're a normal functioning adult, almost nothing in these essays should be a surprise to you.
The different moments where Berlin mentions Hegel reveal a superficial understanding. If you know your way through Hegel, these moments will only deflate your trust in the author.
Most of the essays could be either condensed into a single idea or a few paragraphs. Instead, Berlin does his best to drag them for several relentlessly boring pages, adding very little to what the reader might already know just by existing in reality. So, in short: if you're a normal functioning adult, almost nothing in these essays should be a surprise to you.
March 12, 2024
This book consists of a series of essay by an exceptionally erudite individual but the essay that truly caught my attention was the final one about FDR . I was especially taken by the current relevance of the following "He did not sacrifice fundamental political principles to a desire to retain power; he did not whip up evil passions merely in order to avenge himself upon those whom he disliked or wished or crush, or because it was an atmosphere in which he found it convenient to operate; he saw to it that his administration was in the van of public opinion and drew it on instead of being dragged by it; he made the majority of his fellow citizens prouder to be Americans than they had been before." This is sorely lacking in modern American Republican politics.
March 4, 2024
Isaiah Berlin has given detailed accounts of the thoughts of various well known philosophers in the the 18th and 19th century on various topics of grave importance such as - freedom, equality, nationalism, and so on. The discourses help the reader in understanding important questions of humanity from different point of views.
On the flip side, i found the writing style of the author - with large continuous sentences - too cumbersome to understand and demanding heavy concentration from the reader.
On the flip side, i found the writing style of the author - with large continuous sentences - too cumbersome to understand and demanding heavy concentration from the reader.
March 17, 2021
Some good writing, I read this in three days; it neatly coincided with my re-reading of Alexander Pope's "Essay on Man", which famously proclaimed, "Whatever is, IS JUST!" - which is a statement that Isaiah Berlin seeks to refute in this book of essays.
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December 27, 2020Essential for it's concepts of positive / negative liberty, but also for the essay in favor of political science.
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April 28, 2021Just read parts of
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