Sir Isaiah Berlin was the greatest exponent of Liberal Pluralism
in the 20th Century. "Against The Current" is probably his best collection of essays. The essays on Verdi and George Sorel are worth the price of the book alone. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You will not regret it.

In this, his most accessible work, Berlin deals with a host of subjects. The volume contains one of the truly great critical essays on Machiavelli, a brilliant parallel lives exposition of Marx and Disraeli, the classic essay on the Counter-Enlightenment and an amazing 'Hedgehog and Fox'-like analysis of Verdi. Yet again Berlin shows us his gift of imaginative insight - what Vico called 'entrare' - that allows him apparent access to minds, ideologies and cultures utterly alien to his own. He also shows us his gifts as a musician and rhetoriceur, using all his old tricks of repitition and word association. This is, as is usual in his works, as much a flaw as a blessing,and his 'entrare' often ends on a note achingly reminiscent of his own political pluralism, but for all that it is still a masterly collection.

"Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas" has long been out of print and is hard to find in the used market. I wish some publisher would reprint it--I'm sure it would sell well. It was my introduction to this wonderful, careful, rational thinker and his ideas on pluralism, among many other topics. I'm not smart enough to summarize his thought for public consumption; you must read him for yourself. If you are a warm, loving, human being who is interested in how we got to our present intellectual condition, after reading him you will be a convert. Libraries often have "Against the Current," but you can also find great riches in his other books, some of which Amazon.com will be happy to send to you. Put his name in Keyword Search and check out the numerous titles they carry. (No, I'm not a salesman, just a fan.) I can recommend "Crooked Timber of Humanity" as a good start. For a (still) fresh reading of the life of Karl Marx read Berlin's biography of him. Enrich your life; READ ISAIAH BERLIN!!!

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.

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.

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+

Isaiah Berlin was not only a skillful writer covering fascinating topics of the History of Ideas. He was also best at enganging in a stimulating and (given his vast knowledge) educating intellectual conversation. Mr. Jahanbegloo's book is one of the few proofs of this less known aspect of Berlin. Having been out of print for a long while, the paperback edition is out there now, finally. Read how Berlin vividly describes his youth and student years, how he got into the History of Ideas, how Oxford was like after the War, what he thinks of Hannah Arendt, communism and nationalism, etc. If not Berlin's best known books, certainly his most entertaining. This poses a serious problem: you will devour it in a day and wish there was a sequel...

Can't wait to see this one. Lilla and Dworkin is like a collaboration between Ken Vandermark and Wynton Marsalis.

Berlin's essays provide some of the most original arguments for the priority of individual liberty, and particularly so-called negative rights, those that give us the right to be left alone. His writing is at once lucid and colorful. An essential volume for those interested in freedom.

All of Isaiah Berlin's books are good. But this one is his best.

"The Sense of Reality" is a collection of nine brilliant essays on "ideas and their history." Each essay is a powerhouse of intellectual electricity!

In a style that is stimulating, compelling--and, in the end, irresistible--Berlin writes about ideas with all the nervous energy of an enthusiast.

Yet he is clear to the end. He is a great explainer. He distinguishes one thing from another. He takes on the knots, unties them, and lets go of the rope.

The effect on the reader is one of exhilarating liberation. One can breathe a little freer. At the same time, one must breathe a little harder. Up here, at high altitude, in the Sierras of the cerebellum, the air is crisp as paper. And our guide, our cicerone, our Isaiah, keeps us skipping--at a dizzying pace!--from mountaintop to mountaintop.

As the pages turn, they envelop the reader in a whirlpool of words that round up the ideas--only to plunge them into a deep sea of profound thought. Once again, we gasp for air.

Indeed, it seems that, wherever Berlin takes us--the mountains, seas, skies, stars of the mind--we are left dazzled, breathless, tottering on the edge of horizons that become elastic, expansive, infinite . . .

In the title essay, Berlin writes of the "disturbing experience," the "electric shock," of "genuinely profound insight"--which he likens to the touching of nerves deeply embedded in our most private thoughts and basic beliefs.

This is not Science. This is the Humanities. Not the mechanics of Newton. But the Pensees of Pascal. Not knowledge. But knowing that "there is too much we do not know, but dimly surmise."

Very well. But what does Berlin mean by the "sense of reality"? In his essay "Political Judgement," he drops a few more clues. It is "a sense of direct acquaintance with the texture of life." Or: "natural wisdom, imaginative understanding, insight, perceptiveness, and...intuition." Or: "practical wisdom,...a sense of what will 'work' and what will not. It is a capacity...for synthesis rather than analysis, for knowledge in the sense in which trainers know their animals, or parents their children, or conductors their orchestras, as opposed to that in which chemists know the contents of their test tubes, or mathematicians know the rules that their symbols obey."

Outside the sphere of science--i.e., in real life (personal and political)--the scientific method fails. But a "sense of reality" can work. Really? Why? How can that be? Perhaps it is because a "sense of reality" allows one to grope, feel, touch, grasp...the important things in life..., which slip through the fingers of science.

The search for truth, or for what works, whether by scientific method, or by a "sense of reality," is one thing. But will is another. Will asserts and expresses not truth but self.

According to Berlin, will manifests itself individually in Romanticism ("The Romantic Revolution") and collectively in Nationalism ("Kant as an Unfamiliar Source of Nationalism").

Berlin tsks the enlightened rationalists for failing to anticipate the rise of nationalism. But who can foresee the unpredictable? Who can see the invisible? Will is wind--a forceful, violent, overpowering impulse that cannot be grasped.

Will without strength, however, is of no effect. The strong devour the weak. This truism is so obvious that it is almost always overlooked. But Berlin does not overlook it. He brings it to light. You can feel the fire in his essay on Indian Nationalism ("Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality"). And these flames from the east are reflected in the west by writers such as Machiavelli, de Maistre, de Sade, Nietzsche, and other "irrationalists" who see sharp teeth glistening behind big smiles.

Being strong of will, but weak of strength, I am drawn to Berlin's discussion of the disgusting emotions: shame, humiliation, degradation, frustrated desire, and a desperate need for recognition. Berlin holds up the mirror, and I see myself--my own desperate need for recognition compelling me to write this review!

Regardless, I read Berlin not to gain knowledge, but to hone my wits--and sharpen my teeth! The important thing is not to remember what he wrote, but to profit from reading him. And the profit I get from reading Berlin is this: I look deeper, see clearer, and believe less.

I come away from this book with a keener "sense of reality"--and a more open sense of wonder. Wonder! Not at the glittering galaxies of human achievement. But at the void, the abyss, the infinite space of the unknowable . . .

In the final analysis, there is no final analysis. Berlin does not wrap up, tie down, nail shut. Rather, he picks locks, pries open, leaves ajar...

There is no "closure"--i.e., no death--in these pages. Reading them, one gets the feeling that Berlin likes his human beings free and alive. And that puts him at odds with those deadly human engineers who like cadavers and control.

Michael Ignatieff did an excellent job with this biography of Sir Isaiah Berlin - one of the XXth-century most erudite and insightful thinkers. What attracts me about this book is the fact that it is not only about Berlin's outward life, which was so filled with events. But it is also about his inward life - life of his spirit, mind, and ideas. Which life was more amazing hard to judge. He was born in the middle class Jewish family. His family home was in the Baltic city of Riga, then in the Russian Empire. After few years in Petrograd (where he witnessed the Revolution) he went to England as a teenager and consequently rose to the position of the most celebrated British intellectual in Oxford. Berlin's life was long and basically happy. Some of his less fortunate relatives had perished in Riga, and Berlin sometimes was embarrassed how fortunate he was compared to others. Ignatieff had been meeting with Berlin for ten years in London to record his memories and to write his biography, which, according to Berlin's terms wouldn't be published while he was still alive. Another attractive feature of the book for me was both (Ignatieff and Berlin) love for Russian culture. Berlin new Russia deeply, was steeped in Russian culture and language. His favorite writers were mostly Russian, particularly he admired Ivan Tugrenev. Ignatieff didn't mention this in this book, but from his other book ('The Russian Album'), it is clear why he felt particular empathy for Berlin - Ignatieff's father came to Canada from Russia. His father had to go to exile after the Russian revolution almost at the same age as Berlin. There is clearly a deep Russian connection, which united these too men (besides their Oxford connection). Although Berlin thought all his life about idea of liberty, he wasn't a liberal, at least not in the modern English meaning of the word. He was a free thinker, who refused to subscribe to any ideology. He was 'peddling his own canoe' all his life, gaining enemies on the left and on the right. Unique thing about him was how he combined his British, Jewish, and Russian sides in himself without compromising any of these thee faucet of his life, but rather tapping from them creativity and insight.
A must read for anyone interested in Berlin's life, history of ideas, and Russian history buffs.
However, I am removing one star because of the author's several slippages about historic detail. Thus, for example, on page 30 Ignatieff seem to forget that Soviet Union hasn't been yet in existence in 1920 (there was Soviet Russia). Otherwise, this is a book of merit.

Michael Ignatieff spent many hours with Isaiah Berlin over the ten years before Berlin's death, aged 88, in 1997, and the frank portrait that emerges in this book is of a very human intellectual with a deep attachment to liberty. The book traces Berlin's life from his early years in Riga and revolutionary St. Petersburg, and his family's flight to England, to his sure rise through the hallowed halls of Oxford and the Foreign Office to the very pinnacles of the British academic establishment. Berlin quickly put aside the sterility of formal philosophical debate and engaged himself in a life-long study of the history of ideas, and in particular the evolution of liberal thought. Berlin's overwhelming interest was in people, and the book catalogues his varied encounters with a gallery of huge personalities over the course of the century. The reader catches glimpses of Churchill, Kennedy, and literary giants such as Anna Akhmatova. Berlin's persona is part Russian Jew, part Englishman of letters, and Ignatieff draws out the contradictions and felicitous harmonies in this cultural mixture. Berlin had an unerring knack for being in the right place at the right time, and in distilling Berlin's extraordinary life, Ignatieff provides a lively overview of a century of ideas. An excellent read.

I just finished reading "Isaiah Berlin" and must say that it is one of the finest books I have ever read. The story of Mr. Berlin's life if fascinating, from his childhoon in Russia and England, to his education, his service in the Foreign Office during WWII, his meetings with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, his career as an Oxford don, etc. Mr. Ignatieff tells the story, interspersed with the substance of his developing philosophical views, with warmth and insight. Even if you care not for philosophy (and I generally do not), this book deserves attention simply because it is a wonderful life and well told.

Berlin is an interesting and I agree knowing commentator, but one gets the feeling that he understands there is something awry in Communism, but he's not quite sure what. His ideas of freedom are on the mark, but in the post-Communist world they don't quite get to the point. I highly reccomend papal biographer and political pholosopher George Weigel's recent commentaties, (available online). Liberalism was not and is not a sufficient answer to utopian ideology, which Berlin nevertheless correctly asserts will inevitably degenerate into totalitatianism. Even more, in the post-cold war world, relativism has usurped "true" freedom, which presents perhaps an even more dangerous problem than the Soviet one.

This book provides an excellent introduction to the history of Russian thought. I supplemented it with the pertinent chapters of Billington's "The Icon and the Axe" to piece together a general outline of the evolution of Russian political philosophy. Maybe I didn't pay enough attention to Berlin's own philosophizing, but then that wasn't my objective. I found one of his general observations about Russian thought to be particularly useful, i.e. the tendency to follow an idea through to its fullest consequences, no matter how extreme or objectionable. The book nicely sets the stage for how Marxism was able to take hold, showing that it was in some ways an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, intellectual development. The problem is, now that the book has allowed me to cobble together a general framework of Russian thought, the only possible next step is to start directly reading Hegel and Marx! And who wouldn't try to put off a daunting task like that?

This is one of these intellectual & spiritual odysseys of the mind that, after you've digested them, remain embedded in the protoplasm of your mental being. All the Russian 19th century greats (except Pushkin and Dostoevsky ) are here: Herzen, Belinsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bakunin. In a book so saturated with ideas, it is not easy to make a pick- my favorite ones are:

-the hedgehog and the fox metaphor ("The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"). Human beings are categorized as either "hedgehogs" (whose lives are embodiment of a single, central vision of reality according to which they "feel", breathe, experience and think- "system addicts", in short. Examples include Plato, Dante, Proust and Nietzsche.) or "foxes" ( who live rather centrifugal than centripetal lives, pursue many divergent ends and, generally, possess a sense of reality that prevents them from formulating a definite grand system of "everything"-simply because they "know" that life is too complex to be squeezed into any Procrustean unitary scheme. Montaigne, Balzac, Goethe and Shakespeare are, in various degrees, foxes.)

-precarious position of liberalism-something Berlin was well aware of. A "non-belief belief", liberalism certainly doesn't satisfy "deeper" human needs; also, it managed, following its very nature, to stay away from planned genocides & siren songs of totalitarian power. Yet- Berlin has failed (maybe due to the "history of ideas" nature of this compilation of essays) to answer more fundamental questions plaguing liberal mindset: is it fit to grapple with the 20th/21st century burning issues ? Or- has it mutated into a dark parody of itself, making a pact with postmodern imperial power(s) as represented by X-Filesque military & financial "Free World" greedy elites which batten on the unenviable position of the much of the globe (Latin America, Africa, East Europe & the greater part of Asia) ?

-on strong side, essays on Herzen (Berlin's hero), Turgenev ("Fathers and Children" controversy) and Bakunin (juxtaposed to Herzen) are fresh, universal & not dated at all. Tolstoy is covered unsurpassably, and I doubt it can be done better. On the other hand, some essays, like those on Russia and 1848 revolutions, German Romanticism and Russian populism, although brilliantly weaven, are, in my opinion, more of historical interest than pertinent to our contemporary metastable anxiety condition.

Be as it may: this is an exquisite intellectual tapestry. Buy it.

This is a powerful essay. But, by the time an informed reader reaches its crescendo coda on p.81, one...in figurative blare of trumpets, flash of lightning and roar of thunder...submits an exhausted but triumphant AMEN!... Or a thoroughly disgusted and unconvinced BS! Why? Because essentially the essay asserts the primacy of LOGOS as key to true knowledge and understanding within The Western Tradition. I concur because I ally myself with those whom Sir Isaiah Berlin playfully terms the "hedgehogs"...thinkers/seekers who by a metaphysical act of faith (and humility)concede the existence of a Principle of Intelligibility that is guarantor of subsistent Truth and Order. "Foxes"...empirical, physical-science minded folks who deny an Ultimately ORDERING PRINCIPLE, PLAN, or GOD...are posed over against hedgehogs as people who may "know" very much (yet may believe in NADA). Tolstoy is averred to be among the latter...but wanted desperately...like DOSTOYEVSKY...to be among the former. As more, perhaps of a "squirrel" than either of these polar giants, I propose that interest in this essay is a fairly clear (and yes, scholarly but NOT pedantic) exposition of ideas that are important in this era of DECONSTRUCTION. Many thinkers are dabbling in both distortion and denial of fundamental propositions in metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. These are having PRACTICAL consequences in our attitudes toward sexuality, education, law and even language itself. Names like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Foucault and Derrida are preeminent among anti-logos "foxes". Names ranging all the way back from Augustine to Einstein and Hawkings rank as preeminent "hedgehogs". "God does not play dice with the Universe," the Main ALBERT once proposed. If I have loaded the dice in this review a bit, it still does not prevent an eager empiricist or deconstructionist from taking-on Berlin's viewpoint as one of the most accomplished philosophical/political essayists of the 20th Century. To wit: Tolstoy...and other seminal deconstructionists-empiricists...tried too hard. But ironically didn't try hard enough! Try this essay; see what you think; it will make you do so: hedgehog, fox or squirrel...

Sir Isaiah Berlin has written a critical acclaim of the historic views of famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy as expressed in one of his masterpieces "War and Piece". In 'The Hedgehog and The Fox' (1953), Dr. Berlin compares and contracts the monist and pluralist historical philosophies. According to Archilochus "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This can be interpreted that there is a philosophy of a single undiminished holistic truth or principle governing all history, or there is a myriad little ideas, truths and inclinations which together govern mens historical experience.

Tolstoy, according to Berlin, is a fox (whose talent is by the way in precisely being a fox), who is however convinced in the ways of the hedgehog. Tolstoy is at his greatest when he describes the subtle undertones of human existence, these barely perceptible little differences which makes living so full and colorful, range of emotions and feelings. He does not believe, however, that this is all that is, and insists on some ill-defined fundamental truth. This makes his writing wooden, unhistorical, and simplistic at times.

Berlin makes a perceptive observations on the interest of Tolstoy's in some of the figures of Counter-Enlightenment (such as Maestre and Vico). These proponents of the view of the world which denies all-pervasive powers of reductionist science and allocates the central place to a simple idea (e.g. Christian moral idea) are closer to Tolstoy; and from this point of view and interest Tolstoy's last "religious" period owes its inspiration. Berlin shows Tolstoy as a tragic genius riddled with contradictions and frustrations of misapprehension of his enormous talents in inability to say what he wanted to say the most - paint a true picture of human historical experience.

Style of Berlin's polemic is as always colorful, insightful, supremely observant and scholarly. Essay is no longer then 75 pages and would make for a delightful Sunday afternoon reading. Highly recommended!

I really want to disagree with the reviewer below who said that this book is "overly academic" and "not interesting to someone without a serous research interest in Tolstoy". C'mon.

This is a HIGHLY readable book though probably only one that should be read after having read 'War and Peace'. In combination, the boring sections of 'War and Peace' and this book provide a pretty interesting dialogue and line of thought that can be comprehended by most anyone.....

This is a beautiful book and one that can be appreciated by tons the teeming multitudes and not just self-righteous undergraduates at small colleges in Massachusetts. Berlin is a very readable philosopher, which explains much of the reason WHY he is held in such esteem in the Anglo-American philosophical community....

Finally, who could ever say that this little tiny red book was worth neither the effort nor the expense. A must-buy.

In the years before Lenin and the harsh, bleak application of socialist thought to autocracy there existed a group of philosophers who believed in the beauty of the commune and its cooperation with a Republican government. Britain had Robert Owen and his factory town, the French had Fourier (the phalanstery) and Proudhon among others, and the Russians had Herzen. Here existed a time where the leading academics saw folly in violent revolution, and Herzen was by no means a demogogue willing to mobilize the Russian peasants in a siege of Moscow like a simple Pugachev or a Decembrist.

This perhaps explains Herzen's stern dislike of Marx and Engels, for he saw too much of the Robespierre in them and their ideas.

Herzen believed in democracy almost in a modern American sense. Indeed, much of the work is laced with arguments in disfavor to the flowering of socialism in Europe, citing particularly the cruelty of the police in France during 1848: "The Latin world does not like freedom, it only likes to sue for it." Certainly the tendencies of the Germans were no more progressive either. Instead at one point in the text the author suggests that those who "can put off from himself the old Adam of Europe and be born again a new Jonathan had better take the first steamer to some place in Wisconsin or Kansas."

The selections and abridgement of the text emphasize Herzen's basic belief about reform: revolution is gradual. One has to breed engrained stupidity out of the ruling class and make laws that better everyone, like the English and Americans. Laws make a better society, not people: "The Englishman's liberty is more in his institutions than in himself or his conscience. His freedom is the 'common law.'"

The text covers the demise of Herzen, culminating in his rejection on his deathbed by the new revolutionary ("terrorist") camps in Russia, headed ideologically by Chernyshevsky and best seen in the widespread incendiary and murderous practices of Sergei Nechaev. These are all topics of the years after Herzen's death, the tragic history of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the prelude to the pall of 1917.

A worthwile read for anyone with an interest in 19th century history - or Russian thought. Herzen's narrative begins with Napoleon's retreat from Moscow and winds on through Nichlos II's reign to the larger events of Napoleon the III's Europe. At times a witty and fascinating account of both Russia and Europe during a crucial era, Herzen occasionally drifts off into somewhat tedious personal speculation.

Herzen is one of the many authors whom Americans never are exposed to and rightfully should be. He was a great thinker; he writes lucidly (although tending toward personal speculation.... you've got to remember-- he was living at a similar time to Tolstoy who does the same thing....) and CAN BE surprisingly contemporary for someone so long dead....

It's understandable why Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Solzenitzen (sp?) are much more widely read than he is: they are better novellists and never got cursed by the fact that they were socialists (such a dirty word in the US!) BUT, Herzen is definately someone whom anyone trying to pawn themselves off as a psuedo-intellectual should read.

One problem with this book: some of his best stuff is obviously just not in here (as it is his memoirs....) His philosophy is brilliant; some of his letters to his son are as moving as any I can think of (excepting perhaps Rilke's to the young poet...)

His memoirs are a definate must-read.... for whomever is reading this review.... Just buy the book!