The Crooked Timber of Humanity:
Chapters in the History of Ideas
Isaiah Berlin
Edited by Henry Hardy

Paper | 1998 | $27.95 / £16.95
288 pp. | 6 x 9

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"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 pluralism. In the Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our present century: 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.

Isaiah Berlin was, until his death in 1997, 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 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 He has edited several other volumes by Berlin, and is currently preparing Berlin's letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

Reviews:

"A beautifully patterned tapestry of philosophical thought.... A history of ideas that possesses all the drama of a novel, all the immediacy of headline news."--The New York Times

"The perfect guide through the complex radical changes that have swept Western societies.... A brilliant, convincing work ... humane, compassionate, important."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Overwhelming intelligence ... [Berlin's] mind is captivating.... His reflections ... strike at the heart of our most parroted beliefs."--Washington Post Book World

Table of Contents:

Editor's Preface
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
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
Index

Other Princeton books by Isaiah Berlin:

• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas.
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays.
• Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.
• Personal Impressions.
• Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought.
• The Power of Ideas.
• The Roots of Romanticism.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder.

Other Princeton books by Henry Hardy:

• Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas.
• Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays.
• Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty.
• Personal Impressions.
• Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought.
• The Power of Ideas.
• The Roots of Romanticism.
• Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder.

Link:

• Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library

Subject Areas:

• Philosophy
• Political Philosophy

Hardcover published by Knopf in 1991

Paper: Not for sale in the Commonwealth (except Canada)

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For customers in the U.S., Canada, Latin America, Asia, and Australia
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