{"title":"Books by Isaiah Berlin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780099582762","title":"The Proper Study Of Mankind","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e‘He becomes everyman’s guide to everything exciting in the history of ideas’ \u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIsaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, and one of the finest writers. \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Proper Study Of Mankind\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e selects some of his best essays in which his insights both illuminate the past and offer a key to the burning issues of today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe full (and enormous) range of his work is represented here, from the exposition of his most distinctive doctrine - pluralism - to studies of Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Churchill and Roosevelt. In these pages he encapsulates the principal movements that characterise the modern age: romanticism, historicism, Fascism, relativism, irrationalism and nationalism. His ideas are always tied to the people who conceived them, so that abstractions are brought alive. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eEDITED BY HENRY HARDY AND ROGER HAUSHEER AND WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY ANDREW MARR\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56224211763573,"sku":"9780099582762","price":30.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780099582762_20760611-cb4a-4ec0-82e7-25ef6c367a58.jpg?v=1786011342"},{"product_id":"9780141442204","title":"Russian Thinkers","description":"\u003cb\u003eA unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFew, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, \"The Hedgehog and the Fox,\" Berlin considers the social and political circumstances that produced such men as Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, \"the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ePenguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56225111834997,"sku":"9780141442204","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780141442204_72b84225-b061-41a6-9830-a4d825c8fa37.jpg?v=1786011625"},{"product_id":"9780712666909","title":"Against the Current","description":"\u003cp\u003eBerlin's main theme in these essays is the importance in the history of ideas of dissenters whose thinking still challenges conventional wisdom - among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, he brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times, and in the process offers a powerful defence of variety in our visions of life. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRoger Hausheer's introduction surveys Berlin's whole oeuvre, and the full bibliography of his pubication has been updated for this Pimlico edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294508396917,"sku":"9780712666909","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780712666909_b36cbb62-1cf4-4428-9110-2453678554e8.jpg?v=1786015083"},{"product_id":"9780691156507","title":"Karl Marx – Thoroughly Revised Fifth Edition","description":"Isaiah Berlin's intellectual biography of Karl Marx has long been recognized as one of the best concise accounts of the life and thought of the man who had, in Berlin's words, a more \"direct, deliberate, and powerful\" influence on mankind than any other nineteenth-century thinker. A brilliantly lucid work of synthesis and exposition, the book introduces Marx's ideas and sets them in their context, explains why they were revolutionary in political and intellectual terms, and paints a memorable portrait of Marx's dramatic life and outsized personality. Berlin takes readers through Marx's years of adolescent rebellion and post-university communist agitation, the personal high point of the 1848 revolutions, and his later years of exile, political frustration, and intellectual effort. Critical yet sympathetic, Berlin's account illuminates a life without reproducing a legend. New features of this thoroughly revised edition include references for Berlin's quotations and allusions, Terrell Carver's assessment of the distinctiveness of Berlin's book, and a revised guide to further reading.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294518423925,"sku":"9780691156507","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780691156507_44e63639-6372-468f-ab35-897fc3147241.jpg?v=1786014713"},{"product_id":"9780712668422","title":"Freedom And Its Betrayal","description":"\u003cp\u003eIsaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were delivered on the BBC's Third Programme in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years on. Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and the history of ideas, views which later found expression in such famous works as 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn his lucid examinations of sometimes difficult ideas Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defence of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's ideas, and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helvétius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative traditionalist Maistre bringing up the rear. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eFreedom and its Betrayal\u003c\/i\u003e shows Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the broadcasts and found themselves mesmerised by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. A leading historian of ideas, who was then a schoolboy, records that the lectures 'excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes'. This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294556893557,"sku":"9780712668422","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780712668422_b4d4a3a8-d590-4d4d-b4b6-8063c384ba5b.jpg?v=1786015095"},{"product_id":"9780712665445","title":"The Roots of Romanticism","description":"\u003ci\u003eThe Roots of Romanticism\u003c\/i\u003e is the long-awaited text of Isaiah Berlin's most celebrated set of lectures, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965 and heard since by a much wider audience on BBC radio. For Berli, the Romantics set in train a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notion of objective truth in ethicsm with incalculable, all-pervasive results. In his unscripted \u003ci\u003etour de force \u003c\/i\u003eBerlin surveys the myriad attempts to define romanticism, distils its essence, traces its development, and shows how its legacy permeates our outlook today.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56294710968693,"sku":"9780712665445","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780712665445_11057b80-15e6-4f35-a56a-4b060e47aa31.jpg?v=1786015069"},{"product_id":"9781474619707","title":"The Hedgehog And The Fox","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Brilliant. Searching and profound' \u003cb\u003eE.H. Carr, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'When reading Isaiah Berlin we breathe an altogether different air' \u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Beautifully written' \u003cb\u003eW. H. Auden, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eNew Yorker\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'Ingenious. Exactly what good critical writing should be' \u003cb\u003eMax Beloff, \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eGuardian\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor Isaiah Berlin, there is a fundamental distinction in mankind: those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things - foxes - and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system - hedgehogs. It can be applied to the greatest creative minds: Dante, Ibsen and Proust are hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Joyce are foxes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet when Berlin reaches the case of Tolstoy, he finds a fox by nature, but a hedgehog by conviction; a duality which holds the key to understanding Tolstoy's work, illuminating a paradox of his philosophy of history and showing why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWith a foreword by Michael Ignatieff\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eA W\u0026amp;N Essential\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56301542146421,"sku":"9781474619707","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781474619707_87f409dc-45d5-4f87-9237-226bc943aa84.jpg?v=1786020984"},{"product_id":"9781845952082","title":"The Crooked Timber Of Humanity","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.' Immanuel Kant\u003cbr\u003eIsaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century - an activist of the intellect who marshalled vast erudition and eloquence in defence of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In \u003ci\u003eThe Crooked Timber of Humanity\u003c\/i\u003e he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the Platonic belief in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenth-century reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentieth-century Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militant - and sometimes genocidal - nationalism that convulses the modern world. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis new edition features a revised text, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defence of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters and previously uncollected writings by Berlin, notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's \u003ci\u003eA History of Western Philosophy\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307772653941,"sku":"9781845952082","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781845952082_f36cff2e-99d1-473e-aaa3-c5a9645b981d.jpg?v=1786029626"},{"product_id":"9781845952136","title":"Three Critics of the Enlightenment","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis book brings together three major studies from Isaiah Berlin's central intellectual project – to explain the opposition to the excessively scientistic French Enlightenment by getting under the skin of its critics and giving a sympathetic account of their views. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe contributions of these particular critics could hardly be more important. Giambattista Vico estabished that the humanties are and must remain crucially different from the sciences: J G Herder – sometimes called the father of European nationalism – originated populism, expressionism and pluralism (an idea which Berlin enriched and made powerfully his own); and the anti-rationalist J.G. Hamann lit the fuse of romanticism, the major movement to arise out of the various currents of hostility to Enlightenment thought. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe intellectual tension that existed between Enlightenment advocates and these critics is as crucial today as it was at its inception. With his customary humane understanding, Berlin analyses the ideas of three deeply original but often neglected thinkers, and demonstrates their disturbing relevance to the central issues of today's world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis new edition includes three previously uncollected pieces on Vico, an interesting passage excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful letters responding to two reviewers of that same edition.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56313051578741,"sku":"9781845952136","price":20.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781845952136_fa7e5e9d-6d0c-4b50-86a3-b0e3d58a1f8a.jpg?v=1786029627"},{"product_id":"concepts-and-categories","title":"Concepts and Categories","description":"\u003cp\u003eAlthough Isaiah Berlin liked to say that he left philosophy for the history of ideas after the Second World War, there is a decided continuity between his more purely philosophical writings, most of which are collected in this volume, and the more historical work for which he is better known. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIncluded here are Berlin's early arguments against logical positivism and later essays which more evidently reflect his life-long interest in political theory, intellectual history and the philosophy of history. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn two related pieces he gives his view on the philosopher's task, to uncover the various models - the concepts and categories - that we bring to our experience, and that help to form it. In his own words 'The goal of philosophy is always the same, to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not wildly, in the dark.'\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481453535605,"sku":"9780712665520","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780712665520.jpg?v=1786089715"},{"product_id":"power-of-ideas","title":"The Power Of Ideas","description":"\u003cp\u003e'Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor's study could destroy a civilisation' - Isaiah Berlin, \u003ci\u003eTwo Concepts of Liberty\u003c\/i\u003e, 1958.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe nineteen essays collected here show Isaiah Berlin at his most lucid: these short, introductory pieces provide the perfect starting point for the reader new to his work. Their linking theme is the crucial social and political role of ideas, and of their progenitors. The subjects vary widely - from philosophy to education, from Russia to Israel, from Marxism to romanticism - and the appositeness of Heine's warning is exemplified on a broad front. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe contents include Berlin's last essay - a retrospective autobiographical survey and the classic statement of his Zionist views. As a whole the book exhibits the full range of his expertise, and demonstrates the enormously engaging individuality, as well as the power, of his own ideas.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57481454420341,"sku":"9780712665544","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780712665544.jpg?v=1786089716"},{"product_id":"affirming","title":"Affirming","description":"‘IB was one of the great affirmers of our time.’ John Banville, \u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe title of this final volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters is echoed by John Banville’s verdict in his review of its predecessor, \u003ci\u003eBuilding: Letters 1960–75\u003c\/i\u003e, which saw Berlin publish some of his most important work, and create, in Oxford’s Wolfson College, an institutional and architectural legacy. In the period covered by this new volume (1975–97) he consolidates his intellectual legacy with a series of essay collections. These generate many requests for clarification from his readers, and stimulate him to reaffirm and sometimes refine his ideas, throwing substantive new light on his thought as he grapples with human issues of enduring importance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBerlin’s comments on world affairs, especially the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the collapse of Communism, are characteristically acute. This is also the era of the Northern Ireland Troubles, the Iranian revolution, the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, and wars in the Falkland Islands, the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. Berlin scrutinises the leading politicians of the day, including Reagan, Thatcher and Gorbachev, and draws illuminating sketches of public figures, notably contrasting the personas of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrey Sakharov. He declines a peerage, is awarded the Agnelli Prize for ethics, campaigns against philistine architecture in London and Jerusalem, helps run the National Gallery and Covent Garden, and talks at length to his biographer. He reflects on the ideas for which he is famous – especially liberty and pluralism – and there is a generous leavening of the conversational brilliance for which he is also renowned, as he corresponds with friends about politics, the academic world, music and musicians, art and artists, and writers and their work, always displaying a Shakespearean fascination with the variety of humankind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAffirming\u003c\/i\u003e is the crowning achievement both of Berlin’s epistolary life and of the widely acclaimed edition of his letters whose first volume appeared in 2004.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57490136564085,"sku":"9781845952259","price":29.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781845952259.jpg?v=1786442024"},{"product_id":"political-ideas-in-the-romantic-age","title":"Political Ideas In The Romantic Age","description":"\u003cp\u003e'I was exhausted at the end, \u0026amp; yet I am sure that if ever I saw \u0026amp; heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.' \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo wrote a listener to her friend after attending one of the lectures based on the book. \u003ci\u003ePolitical Ideas in the Romantic Age\u003c\/i\u003e is the text Berlin wrote for four of the lectures, delivered in 1952. He revised what he had written extensively afterwards but never published it. It is his longest work and also the only connected account he gave of his key insights into the history of the ideas that dominate the political arguments of our own time. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs he put it in his Prologue, 'The age of which we speak was singularly rich in original conceptions; they transformed our world, and the words in which they were formulated speak to us still'.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57490139316597,"sku":"9781844139262","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781844139262.jpg?v=1786442026"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-isaiah-berlin.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}