The Crooked Timber of Humanity : : Chapters 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,
• MitwirkendeR: Banville, John,
• HerausgeberIn: Hardy, Henry,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: Second edition with a New foreword by John Banville
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (384 p.) :; 1 halftone. 1 table.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."--Immanuel Kant Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century--an activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity 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. This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword -- Editor’s Preface -- Note on References -- The Pursuit of the Ideal -- The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West -- Giambattista Vico and Cultural History -- Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought -- Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism -- Appendix: Violence and Terror -- European Unity and Its Vicissitudes -- The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World -- The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism -- Appendix to the Second Edition -- Index