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

Berlin, Isaiah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691156107 ISBN 13: 9780691156101

Verlag: PRINCETON UNIV PR, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Isaiah Berlin was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and, from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin's literary trustees. He has edited several other volumes by Berlin and is currently preparing Berlin's letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

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"A Jewish refugee from Bolshevik Russia who found a home in the British establishment, Isaiah Berlin was always drawn to the traffic between insiders and outsiders, between fugitive experiences and dominant norms. We see this attraction in these classic essays: not only in his article on nationalism, which he saw as the work of non-nationals, but also in his continuous effort to introduce strange figures into the canon and to make canonical figures strange. Paddling against the current, Berlin made us feel the full extent and depth of its force."--Corey Robin, City University of New York

"An excellent new edition. Mark Lilla's bracing foreword elegantly reminds philosophers why they need to read Berlin, and the judiciously chosen letters from Berlin's personal correspondence illuminate the thinking behind some of his most celebrated essays."--Jan-Werner Mueller, Princeton University

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AGAINST THE CURRENT

ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

By ISAIAH BERLIN, Henry Hardy

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2013 Isaiah Berlin
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-15610-1

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

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Counter-Enlightenment

I

Opposition to the central ideas of the French Enlightenment,and of its allies and disciples in other Europeancountries, is as old as the movement itself. The proclamation ofthe autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences,based on observation as the sole reliable method of knowledge,and the consequent rejection of the authority of revelation,sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition,prescription, and every form of non-rational and transcendentsource of knowledge, was naturally opposed by the Churchesand religious thinkers of many persuasions. But such opposition,largely because of the absence of common ground between themand the philosophers of the Enlightenment, made relatively littleheadway, save by stimulating repressive steps against the spreadingof ideas regarded as dangerous to the authority of Church orState. More formidable was the relativist and sceptical traditionthat went back to the ancient world. The central doctrines ofthe progressive French thinkers, whatever their disagreementsamong themselves, rested on the belief, rooted in the ancientdoctrine of natural law, that human nature was fundamentallythe same in all times and places; that local and historical variationswere unimportant compared with the constant central corein terms of which human beings could be defined as a species,like animals, or plants, or minerals; that there were universalhuman goals; that a logically connected structure of laws andgeneralisations susceptible of demonstration and verificationcould be constructed and replace the chaotic amalgam of ignorance,mental laziness, guesswork, superstition, prejudice, dogma,fantasy, and, above all, the 'interested error' maintained by therulers of mankind and largely responsible for the blunders, vicesand misfortunes of humanity.

It was further believed that methods similar to those ofNewtonian physics, which had achieved such triumphs in therealm of inanimate nature, could be applied with equal success tothe fields of ethics, politics and human relationships in general, inwhich little progress had been made; with the corollary that oncethis had been effected, it would sweep away irrational and oppressivelegal systems and economic policies the replacement ofwhich by the rule of reason would rescue men from political andmoral injustice and misery and set them on the path of wisdom,happiness and virtue. Against this, there persisted the doctrinethat went back to the Greek sophists, Protagoras, Antiphon andCritias, that beliefs involving value-judgements, and the institutionsfounded upon them, rested not on discoveries of objectiveand unalterable natural facts, but on human opinion, which wasvariable and differed between different societies and at differenttimes; that moral and political values, and in particular justiceand social arrangements in general, rested on fluctuating humanconvention. This was summed up by the sophist quoted byAristotle who declared that whereas fire burned both here andin Persia, human institutions change under our very eyes. Itseemed to follow that no universal truths, established by scientificmethods, that is, truths that anyone could verify by the useof proper methods, anywhere, at any time, could in principle beestablished in human affairs.

This tradition reasserted itself strongly in the writings of suchsixteenth-century sceptics as Cornelius Agrippa, Montaigneand Charron, whose influence is discernible in the sentimentsof thinkers and poets in the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. Suchscepticism came to the aid of those who denied the claims of thenatural sciences or of other universal rational schemas and advocatedsalvation in pure faith, like the great Protestant reformersand their followers, and the Jansenist wing of the Roman Church.The rationalist belief in a single coherent body of logicallydeduced conclusions, arrived at by universally valid principles ofthought and founded upon carefully sifted data of observation orexperiment, was further shaken by sociologically minded thinkersfrom Bodin to Montesquieu. These writers, using the evidence ofboth history and the new literature of travel and exploration innewly discovered lands, Asia and the Americas, emphasised thevariety of human customs and especially the influence of dissimilarnatural factors, particularly geographical ones, upon thedevelopment of different human societies, leading to differencesof institutions and outlook, which in their turn generated widedifferences of belief and behaviour. This was powerfully reinforcedby the revolutionary doctrines of David Hume, especially by hisdemonstration that no logical links existed between truths of factand such a priori truths as those of logic or mathematics, whichtended to weaken or dissolve the hopes of those who, under theinfluence of Descartes and his followers, thought that a singlesystem of knowledge, embracing all provinces and answering allquestions, could be established by unbreakable chains of logicalargument from universally valid axioms, not subject to refutationor modification by any experience of an empirical kind.

Nevertheless, no matter how deeply relativity about humanvalues or the interpretation of social, including historical, factsentered the thought of social thinkers of this type, they...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRINCETON UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691156107
• ISBN 13: 9780691156101
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 584
• Herausgeber: Hardy Henry
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar