Against the Current : : Essays in the History of Ideas - Second Edition / / Isaiah Berlin; ed. by Henry Hardy.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Berlin, Isaiah,
• HerausgeberIn: Hardy, Henry,
• MitwirkendeR: Hausheer, Roger,; Lilla, Mark,; Matthews, Douglas,; Mill, J. S.,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: Second edition with a New foreword by Mark Lilla
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (584 p.)

In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas--among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times--and still challenge conventional wisdom. In a new foreword to this corrected edition, which also includes a new appendix of letters in which Berlin discusses and further illuminates some of its topics, noted essayist Mark Lilla argues that Berlin's decision to give up a philosophy fellowship and become a historian of ideas represented not an abandonment of philosophy but a decision to do philosophy by other, perhaps better, means. "His instinct told him," Lilla writes, "that you learn more about an idea as an idea when you know something about its genesis and understand why certain people found it compelling and were spurred to action by it." This collection of fascinating intellectual portraits is a rich demonstration of that belief.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Author's Note -- Editor's Preface -- Note on References -- Introduction -- The Counter-Enlightenment -- The Originality of Machiavelli -- The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities -- Vico’s Concept of Knowledge -- Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment -- Montesquieu -- Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism -- Herzen and His Memoirs -- The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess -- Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity -- The ‘Naivety’ of Verdi -- Georges Sorel -- Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power -- Appendix to the Second Edition -- Index