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Rating: 
Summary: The best of the best
Review: In this volume Henry Hardy Isaiah Berlin's faithful pupil and editor brings together some of the best essays from the previous volumes of Berlin essays he supervised the publication of. There are essays on 'The Pursuit of the Ideal ' on ' Philosophical Foundations' on 'Freedom and Determinism' on 'Political Liberty and Pluralism' on 'The History of Ideas ' on 'Russian Writers '
on' Romanticism and Rationalism' and on ' Twentieth Century Figures'
The volume contains Berlin's most well- known essays including the essay on 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' the one on ' Machiavelli' and the one ' On Historical Determinism'.
This is a selection of the best writing of a person who is without question one a most significant modern political thinker and historian of ideas.
Berlin's love of ideas, his vast knowledge, his tremendous verbal energy and skill, his humane understanding of character, his original consideration of fundamental historical periods and processes are all at work here.
This is a volume which should be in the library of every person who wishes to think about history and politics seriously.
Rating:
Summary: A fabulous collection of essays
Review: Isaiah Berlin probably is one of the 20th century's most underrated thinkers. A truely learned man he brought his insight in the history of ideas, reflecting on the elightenment and freedom, the golden age of Russian literature, and rubbing shoulders with the high and the mighty. All of these facets are displayed here. Mr. Hardy has done an exceptional job at assembling these essays. My favorite being "The Hedgehog and the Fox." In this essay, Berlin explores the natures of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky is the hedgehog who knows one thing really well. Tolstoy is the fox, reflecting his epic sweep and universal understanding of humanity. In a nutshell, Berlin's political philosophy is strongly lined up on the side of freedom and the dignity of the individual. Not exactly in favor in these days of extremist bland thinking. My one complaint is that there is so much more to Berlin than these exceptional essays. If 20th century philosophy is to be remembered as more than an unpleasant memory, it will be as the time of the age of Berlin.
Rating:
Summary: A fabulous collection of essays
Review: Isaiah Berlin probably is one of the 20th century's most underrated thinkers. A truely learned man he brought his insight in the history of ideas, reflecting on the elightenment and freedom, the golden age of Russian literature, and rubbing shoulders with the high and the mighty. All of these facets are displayed here. Mr. Hardy has done an exceptional job at assembling these essays. My favorite being "The Hedgehog and the Fox." In this essay, Berlin explores the natures of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky is the hedgehog who knows one thing really well. Tolstoy is the fox, reflecting his epic sweep and universal understanding of humanity. In a nutshell, Berlin's political philosophy is strongly lined up on the side of freedom and the dignity of the individual. Not exactly in favor in these days of extremist bland thinking. My one complaint is that there is so much more to Berlin than these exceptional essays. If 20th century philosophy is to be remembered as more than an unpleasant memory, it will be as the time of the age of Berlin.
Rating:
Summary: Includes summaries of some long conversations
Review: Isaiah Berlin wrote a lot of essays, as the size of this book, THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND, absolutely demonstrates. Near the middle of the book is an essay, "The Originality of Machiavelli," which shows how well Berlin could categorize intellectual activities into various kinds of significance."His distrust of unworldly attitudes, absolute principles divorced from empirical observation, is fanatically strong - almost romantic in its violence; the vision of the great prince playing upon human beings like an instrument intoxicates him. He assumes that different societies must always be at war with each other, since they have differing purposes. He sees history as an endless process of cut-throat competition, . . ." (p. 318). The index is great, and even has an entry for "Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich . . . conversation with Stalin." Pasternak wanted to talk to Stalin, but the question which Stalin put to Pasternak, "whether he was present when a lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandel'shtam" (p. 533) was not what Pasternak wanted to talk about. Pasternak wanted to talk to Stalin "about ultimate issues, about life and death." (p. 534). After Stalin put down the receiver, "Pasternak tried to ring back but, not surprisingly, failed to get through to the leader." (p. 534). Stalin had been quick to decide where that conversation was going, and cut it short by observing, "If I were Mandel'shtam's friend, I should have known better how to defend him." (p. 534). It is not obvious that Stalin would have appreciated a defense which asserted that the poem about Stalin was more true than anything else that Pasternak had ever seen, read, or heard, and any decent country would have comedians that would constantly broadcast such ideas on the radio 24/7 until the invention of TV would allow people to watch movies like "Forrest Gump" in the comfort of their own homes. Stalin has been rightly condemned for being hopelessly authoritarian when judging humor that was aimed at his sorry self, and Isaiah Berlin sees the pattern as one that Russia was particularly prone to suffer indefinitely. "Whatever the differences between the old and the new Russia, suspicion and persecution of writers and artists were common to both." (p. 537). Berlin's account of his conversations with Anna Akhmatova strive to reflect what culture means for people who actively create work like Heine's comment, "I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom." (p. 537). We are now such a comic society on a global level that pop mock rap on the internet can pick on the soldier's mentality in a hilarious way, but it is good to be able to read Isaiah Berlin to account for how much such humor matters.
Rating:
Summary: Includes summaries of some long conversations
Review: Isaiah Berlin wrote a lot of essays, as the size of this book, THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND, absolutely demonstrates. Near the middle of the book is an essay, "The Originality of Machiavelli," which shows how well Berlin could categorize intellectual activities into various kinds of significance. "His distrust of unworldly attitudes, absolute principles divorced from empirical observation, is fanatically strong - almost romantic in its violence; the vision of the great prince playing upon human beings like an instrument intoxicates him. He assumes that different societies must always be at war with each other, since they have differing purposes. He sees history as an endless process of cut-throat competition, . . ." (p. 318). The index is great, and even has an entry for "Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich . . . conversation with Stalin." Pasternak wanted to talk to Stalin, but the question which Stalin put to Pasternak, "whether he was present when a lampoon about himself, Stalin, was recited by Mandel'shtam" (p. 533) was not what Pasternak wanted to talk about. Pasternak wanted to talk to Stalin "about ultimate issues, about life and death." (p. 534). After Stalin put down the receiver, "Pasternak tried to ring back but, not surprisingly, failed to get through to the leader." (p. 534). Stalin had been quick to decide where that conversation was going, and cut it short by observing, "If I were Mandel'shtam's friend, I should have known better how to defend him." (p. 534). It is not obvious that Stalin would have appreciated a defense which asserted that the poem about Stalin was more true than anything else that Pasternak had ever seen, read, or heard, and any decent country would have comedians that would constantly broadcast such ideas on the radio 24/7 until the invention of TV would allow people to watch movies like "Forrest Gump" in the comfort of their own homes. Stalin has been rightly condemned for being hopelessly authoritarian when judging humor that was aimed at his sorry self, and Isaiah Berlin sees the pattern as one that Russia was particularly prone to suffer indefinitely. "Whatever the differences between the old and the new Russia, suspicion and persecution of writers and artists were common to both." (p. 537). Berlin's account of his conversations with Anna Akhmatova strive to reflect what culture means for people who actively create work like Heine's comment, "I may not deserve to be remembered as a poet, but surely as a soldier in the battle for human freedom." (p. 537). We are now such a comic society on a global level that pop mock rap on the internet can pick on the soldier's mentality in a hilarious way, but it is good to be able to read Isaiah Berlin to account for how much such humor matters.
Rating:
Summary: hedgehog and fox
Review: The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing -Archilochus, 8th century BC Never have the readers of the New York Times been more humbled and mystified than the November day in 1997 when the paper ran a front page obituary for the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. You could hear the collective gasp and feel the pull of the intake of breath as thousands of folks who pride themselves on being "in the know" turned to one another and asked, across a table laid with grapefruit halves and bran cereal,, "Was I supposed to know who Isaiah Berlin was? I've never heard of him." The answer is that there was no real reason most of us would have heard of him, though we'd likely read a couple of his book reviews. He was after all a philosopher who never produced a magnum opus summarizing his worldview. His reputation really rested on a couple of amusing anecdotes, one oft-cited essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, and on his talents as a conversationalist, which would obviously only have been known to an elite few. Oddly enough, he has experienced a significant revival of interest since his death, but he is basically still just known for this essay. If, like me, you finally forced yourself to read War and Peace and were simply mystified by several of the historic and battle scenes, this essay is a godsend. Though many critics, and would would assume almost all readers, have tended to just ignore these sections of the book, Berlin examines them in light of Tolstoy's philosophy of history and makes a compelling case that Tolstoy intended the action of these scenes to be confusing. As Berlin uses the fox and hedgehog analogy, a hedgehog is an author who has a unified vision which he follows in his writing ("...a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance...") , a fox has no central vision nor organizing principle; his writings are varied, even contradictory. Berlin argues that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, that he longed for a central idea to organize around, but so distrusted the capacity of human reason to discern such an idea, that he ended up knocking down what he saw as faulty ideas, without ever settling on one of his own. According to Berlin, in War and Peace, Tolstoy used the chaotic swirl of events to dispel a "great illusion" : "that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events." Or as he puts it later, Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life : ...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world... This idea is strikingly similar to the argument that F. A. Hayek made almost a century later in his great book The Road to Serfdom, though Hayek made it in opposition to centralized government planning. Tolstoy's earlier development of this theme makes him a pivotal figure in the critique of reason and a much more significant figure than I'd ever realized in the history of conservative thought. I'd liked War and Peace more than I expected to when I first read it--despite not grasping what he was about in these sections of the book--and I'm quite anxious to reread it now in light of Berlin's really enlightening analysis. I've no idea how to judge the rest of Berlin's work or how he ranks as a philosopher, but you can't ask more of literary criticism than that it explain murky bits, that it engender or rekindle interest in an otherwise musty-seeming work, and that it take a potentially dated book and make us realize that it is still relevant. This essay succeeds on all those levels. In this instance at least, Isaiah Berlin warrants his hefty reputation. GRADE : A+
Rating:
Summary: hedgehog and fox
Review: The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing -Archilochus, 8th century BC Never have the readers of the New York Times been more humbled and mystified than the November day in 1997 when the paper ran a front page obituary for the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin. You could hear the collective gasp and feel the pull of the intake of breath as thousands of folks who pride themselves on being "in the know" turned to one another and asked, across a table laid with grapefruit halves and bran cereal,, "Was I supposed to know who Isaiah Berlin was? I've never heard of him." The answer is that there was no real reason most of us would have heard of him, though we'd likely read a couple of his book reviews. He was after all a philosopher who never produced a magnum opus summarizing his worldview. His reputation really rested on a couple of amusing anecdotes, one oft-cited essay, The Hedgehog and the Fox, and on his talents as a conversationalist, which would obviously only have been known to an elite few. Oddly enough, he has experienced a significant revival of interest since his death, but he is basically still just known for this essay. If, like me, you finally forced yourself to read War and Peace and were simply mystified by several of the historic and battle scenes, this essay is a godsend. Though many critics, and would would assume almost all readers, have tended to just ignore these sections of the book, Berlin examines them in light of Tolstoy's philosophy of history and makes a compelling case that Tolstoy intended the action of these scenes to be confusing. As Berlin uses the fox and hedgehog analogy, a hedgehog is an author who has a unified vision which he follows in his writing ("...a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance...") , a fox has no central vision nor organizing principle; his writings are varied, even contradictory. Berlin argues that Tolstoy was a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, that he longed for a central idea to organize around, but so distrusted the capacity of human reason to discern such an idea, that he ended up knocking down what he saw as faulty ideas, without ever settling on one of his own. According to Berlin, in War and Peace, Tolstoy used the chaotic swirl of events to dispel a "great illusion" : "that individuals can, by the use of their own resources, understand and control the course of events." Or as he puts it later, Tolstoy perceived a "central tragedy" of human life : ...if only men would learn how little the cleverest and most gifted among them can control, how little they can know of all the multitude of factors the orderly movement of which is the history of the world... This idea is strikingly similar to the argument that F. A. Hayek made almost a century later in his great book The Road to Serfdom, though Hayek made it in opposition to centralized government planning. Tolstoy's earlier development of this theme makes him a pivotal figure in the critique of reason and a much more significant figure than I'd ever realized in the history of conservative thought. I'd liked War and Peace more than I expected to when I first read it--despite not grasping what he was about in these sections of the book--and I'm quite anxious to reread it now in light of Berlin's really enlightening analysis. I've no idea how to judge the rest of Berlin's work or how he ranks as a philosopher, but you can't ask more of literary criticism than that it explain murky bits, that it engender or rekindle interest in an otherwise musty-seeming work, and that it take a potentially dated book and make us realize that it is still relevant. This essay succeeds on all those levels. In this instance at least, Isaiah Berlin warrants his hefty reputation. GRADE : A+
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