Martin Gardner has an excellent review of this book in his collection of essays, _The Night is Large_, and I can add little to what he says.

The opening essay is a short, partly autobiographical account of how Berlin came to embrace his distinctive pluralism. It provides the clearest, most concise explanation I have seen to date of why Marxism and its ilk are wrong. His essay on de Maistre is longer than its subject deserves, but not uninteresting.

All of Berlin's essays display his encyclopedic knowledge and shrewd judgment. It is said that he was one of the fastest talkers on record; he writes with equal volubility, packing into each sentence a book's worth of history and theory. These essays are not for the neophyte or the casual reader -- the forthcoming _Power of Ideas_ (March 2000) promises to be more accessible -- nevertheless, they are virtuoso examples of the much praised but little practiced art of sympathetic critical interpretation.

The late Isaiah Berlin was one of the foremost liberal thinkers of the 20th century, a man and scholar who developed and promoted some of the most powerful arguments for individual liberty and liberal societies while, at the same time, wrote some of the most powerful essays in the history of ideas, particularly with respect to Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment thinkers, political philosophers, and ideologues of various persuasions. Some of his essays have become legendary: the essays on liberty, on Karl Marx and Disraeli, on Tolstoy. He left behind a significant body of work, most of which has been edited by Henry Hardy (if you read all of his essays, you will find they overlap quite a bit, but that is the product of an engaging thinker who preferred conversation to writing). "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is among his finest collection of essays.

If there is any theme to this anthology, it is that human societies are like "crooked timbers"; trying to bend them is unnatural and only results in disastrous consequences. The attempts to bend them--essentially experiments in social engineering--marked the 20th century, from Lenin's Russia to Hitler's Germany to Pol Pot's Cambodia. These experiments had deep roots in modern political thinking, extending back into the nineteenth century. They manifested themselves in illiberal, totalitarian regimes in the 20th century and took an untold number of lives.

But "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is not a study in history, although it comes from the mind of a man who lived across the span of the century he was writing about. It is a history of ideas and, in particular, of the belief that the interests, motivations, and goals of people can be, and are, the same at all times and in all places. This type of philosophical monism holds to a single vision of how societies ought to be arranged; is characterized by an idealism and utopianism that are to be attained at all costs; and is found in a number of modern ideologies such as fascism and nationalism. Berlin's essays cover idealism, utopianism, Vico, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the views of de Maistre, all of which held to some form of singular, monistic political thinking.

Berlin's answer is reasonable and humane, a pluralstic point of view that holds that human desires and ends are varied, that utopianism in its many forms (Communism and fascism, to cite two) is conceptually incoherenet and unnatural to the experience of being human, and that human experience is multi-dimensional and constantly changing.

This collection of essays exhibit Berlin's pronounced clarity of thought (one of his wonderful trademarks) and illustrative prose (with all those rolling sentences). Berlin once said in an interview that, given his experience of the 20th century, all we should and can expect is a "minimally decent society," one that is free and liberal and open enough to allow human beings to realize their own ends, whatever imperfections such a society might have. The world since the Enlightenment, and in particular the world of the 20th century, has taught that anything else tends to lead to forceful and violent attempts to fashion society according to a specific ideal; as Berlin puts it in this book, to make such an omelette, many eggs have to be broken. He promotes a political philosophy at odds with this type of thinking and, in so doing, has become one of the great voices of liberty.

Of course, as incisive as Berlin was, he was not without controversy; his essay on de Maistre was not well received when it was first written, and, since his death, he has been lauded with every praise that can be heaped on a thinker. Whether or not he deserves all of that praise is a completely separate issue. "The Crooked Timber of Humanity" is a fine collection of essays on political philosophy and a fine sampling of Berlin's way of thinking.

A reviewer before me said Turgenev came in the footsteps of the other great Russians. He might have been after Gogol, whom was the first master of fiction to turn to realism, but he was basically a frontrunner of both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (and Chekhov). At Gogol's death in 1852 Turgenev wrote an eulogy on Gogol and published the short-story cycle "A Sportsman's Sketches", and was banished to his estate. After this he went abroad and spent most of his time in Paris, where he more than anybody made Russian literature known to the outside world. His greatest novels were "A Nest of Gentlefolk", "On the Eve" and of course "Fathers and Sons". "A Month in the Country" is a pleasant and amusing play of the day, and his very best. One that later also highly inspired Chekhov. Further reading recommended: "The Essential Turgenev".

In the footsteps of other such amazing Russian authors comes Turgenev, and his wonderfully written play 'A Month in the Country.' If you love Russian literature of this time period, and you like Love triangles, and plays, then this story can not go wrong.

Isaiah Berlin, in his work "Karl Marx," concentrates on the philosophical development of one of the most influential social thinkers in modern history. Through an examination on Marx's critical analyses of the ideas of his intellectual contemporaries (including Feurbach, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Proudhon), Berlin explores the many influences that helped shape Marxian thought. Although Marx's immediate successors minimized the impact of Hegel upon Marx's ideas, Berlin maintains that Hegel's influence was essential for the formation of Marx's socio-economic philosophy.

I read this book for a college course and found it very challenging. Often I would have to read over passages several times to even begin to understand the gist of it (and maybe not even then). Of course, the subject matter is very complex. One just beginning to study Marx may want to seek out a more simplified overview of Marxian thought first before tackling this one.

Let me say that if you are looking for a biography of Marx's life you had better look elsewhere. There are no long chapters about his school days, his relations with his Sisters, Mother or Father. You will not find detailed references to every argument Marx had or every aspect of his squallid and, at times, extremely personally irresponsible lifestyle. You must look elsewhere for those details.

This book is about ideas and the struggle between ideas. It is about Marx emersed in the ideas of his time and how those ideas shaped his thinking, whether changing his ideas, borrowing or regjecting them outright Berlin has a wonderful, at times unique grasp of the issues and the ideas of the times that Marx lived.

Starting with a broad description of the Rational-Empiricist debate and the Hegelian reaction to empiricism, Berlin describes Marx as a unique German Hybrid of British Empiricism married to a searching German Hegelian spirit, dissatisified with the traditional historical interpertations offered by Hegel and his German offshoots, the Young Hegelians.

Along the way Marx comes across a uniques set of millenarian and social theorists of his time; Proudhom, Bakunin, Engels, Lasalle, Feuerbach and others, whom all, even though perhaps disliking Marx personally, respected his argument style, his learning, and his deep insight into the problems of the time.

I would not classify this as a beginning book on Marx. There is a lot of ground covered here and if one does not have at least a thumbnail sketch understanding of the times, the social and political issues, then there will be a chance that the author will loose some of his readership. Berlin's prose has been described variously as dense and hard to understand. It may be for some readers. But Berlin is not excessively wordy (it is a slender volume), but he does have the ability to cover a lot of ideas and currents in a single sentence. It is this juggling and keeping in mind of a lot of ideas and concepts in a single sentence that may necessitate one to reread certain sentences, or at least know the concepts to which he is referring.

If you do have general outline of the ideas of the age then you will love this book. I sat down thinking that this was my "serious reading." I fully expected it to be a labourious process to get through this book. Instead I was profoundly surprised by the breath and depth Berlin covers in his lucid prose.

I found it hard to put the book down.

There is no analysis of whether Marx was right or wrong. Of how his ideas become to become the bible of the oppressed on the earth or how it eventually was transmogrified in some cases to justify the mass killing of those who stood in the way of historical materialism. This is a book of ideas, and as such the ideas discussed of Marx, his contemporaries, and his intellectual primogeniteurs are a ripping good read.

The philosophical side of this book might be a strong support for the idea that philosophy was in bad shape when Nietzsche found it. The political side of the book ought to establish that it was no wonder. Before I bought this book, I had a copy of THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY by Karl Marx, which was written when Nietzsche was quite young. It was an attack on the thoroughly political view of economics which had been adopted by Proudhon. According to Berlin, "Marx was convinced that Proudhon was constitutionally incapable of grasping the truth; that, despite an undoubted gift for telling phrases, he was a fundamentally stupid man; the fact that he was brave and fanatically honest, and attracted a growing body of devoted followers, only made him and his fantasies more dangerous;" (Berlin, p. 87). In a move that is sure to remind historians of how often Communists turned against others who thought that they were on the same side, Marx's book attacked the roots of Proudhon's system in Chapter 2, The Metaphysics of Political Economy, with his usual summary of Hegel. "As to those who are not acquainted with Hegelian language, we would say to them in the sacramental formula, affirmation, negation, and negation of the negation. . . . Instead of the ordinary individual, with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking, we have nothing but this ordinary manner, pure and simple, minus the individual." (Marx, p. 115).

Berlin is capable of providing summaries of the issues, even admitting that "Marx took immense trouble to demonstrate that Proudhon was totally incapable of abstract thought, a fact which he vainly attempted to conceal by a use of pseudo-Hegelian terminology. Marx accused Proudhon of radically misunderstanding the Hegelian categories by naively interpreting the dialectical conflict as a simple struggle between good and evil, which leads to the fallacy that all that is needed is to remove the evil, and the good will remain. This is the very height of superficiality: to call this or that side of the dialectical conflict good or bad is a sign of unhistorical subjectivism out of place in serious social analysis." (Berlin, pp. 85-86).

The current clash of civilizations might be considered as stupid as anything that Marx analyzed in Proudhon's system, by those who are sure that philosophy is a style adopted by the good side, while anyone who has adopted the politics of mounting destructiveness has all the faults which the free world has always attributed to communism. Plenty of poisons have entered this contest in the last 155 years, since Karl Marx tried to side with the rising class while arguing against their unexamined notions of good and evil, but philosophies have been as powerless on this kind of question as Nietzsche might be considered absurd for attempting to encompass powerful ideas. People who can't relate to this book must lack an appreciation for something that philosophers always wanted, even in the days of the pre-Platonics. It might be considered tough to read, having been revised little since it was Isaiah Berlin's first great book in 1939. I thought it was better than a lot of what I have tried to read about Hegel, and I wasn't trying very hard.

Isaiah Berlin is a good scholar and a colorful writer. However, his book The Roots of Romanticism, I did not find helpful. I suppose maybe if one approached this book with no prior knowledge of romanticism, maybe than it might provide some useful information. But if one is looking for further insight this is not the book.
My main critique with this book is its lack of conciseness. Beginning with the first two sentences the author makes this quite clear: "I might be expected to begin, or attempts to begin, with some kind of definition of romanticism, or at least some generalisation, in order to make clear what it is that I mean by it. I do not propose to walk into that particular trap." (p. 1)
No, instead Mr. Berlin walks into the trap of ambiguity. I understand that this book was originally a series of lectures, however, to say that one will not commit himself to particular meaning is absurd because, if 'truly' practiced this is a nonsense word. Maybe Mr. Berlin is purporting ambiguity as the 'definition' and in that case the introduction becomes ironical. In either case this book is filled with many more cases of such ambiguity. For example, in the rest of the chapter Mr. Berlin gives out a hodgepodge of 'everybody' else's definition and then commits himself to none.(This might have been a great lecturing device, but it is burdensome to the reader.) However, in practice Mr. Berlin attaches himself to the meaning of Romanticism as a historical movement: "I shall do my best to explain what in my view the romantic movement fundamentally came to. The only an sane and sensible way of approaching it, at least the only way that I have ever found to be at all helpful, is by slow and patients historical method." (p. 20)
The one thing that I did find interesting in this book was the comments on Hamaan the critic of Kant. As a historical figure Hamaan is virtually forgotten in most discussions on philosophy or romanticism.
These comments on Hamaan are better discussed in Mr. Berlin's book Three Critics of the Enlightenment. (I would recommend this to the reader). Also, for more recent scholarship on the interaction of Kant and Hamaan see Kuen's biography on Kant. For a better picture of Romanticism I would recommend Kierkegaard's book Either/Or.

Amazing, powerful detective work of the roots, the meaning and the aftereffects of Romanticism. Berlin uses a very nice plain "writing" style which can be easily comprehended, and yet it is beautiful enough and complex enough to give you great insights into one of the most tremendous movements in man's history. A great introductory work for the novice. This is how philosophical equiry should be like.

This is a brilliant series of lectures by one of the most outstanding humanist scholars of the twentieth century. His style is simple yet elegant, his expositions of even the most obscure thinkers are lucid and crisp. This really is a wonderful and important book.

Berlin sees Romanticism as a reaction to the universalism and exaggerated rationalism of the Enlightenment. He sees Montesquieu's relativism and Hume's skepticism as early assaults on this dominant frame of mind, but for the most part Romanticism is the creation of German thinkers. The link to German resentment against French pomp and superficiality is well known. The connection with the spirituality of German pietism, on the other hand, is largely ignored in other works on the subject, but convincingly argued in this book. Berlin gives clear and comprehensible accounts of the sources of Romanticism in the writings of Hamann, Herder, Schiller, Kant(!), Fichte, and Schelling. Especially the thought of the unknown Hamann and the aesthetics of Schiller struck me as fascinating, partly because of Berlin's gracious, flowing style which is both description, quotation and explanation at the same time. The author is also able to mix epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics in a holistic fashion, an accomplishment the Romantics would surely laud.

If I have to make one complaint, and it is perhaps not even that relevant, it might be that Berlin ignores Fichte's 'principle of right', which determines the limit of my individual freedom by the effects my free actions have on the freedom of other people. This is interesting because Berlin in his concluding remarks describes the "surprising" result that Romanticism, because of its insistence on both free will and the incompatibility of values, becomes a forceful defense for liberal pluralism and tolerance. In my opinion, this is not such a great surprise: if we scrutinize the ethics of the early Fichte, we will see that this connection is present even in the gestation of the Romantic movement.

John Stuart Mill, author of On Liberty, defines the nature of civil liberty, and most importantly, the harm principl. He aims to give readers a better understanding of the nature and limits of power that can be exercised by society over individuals. The purpose of this book is to inform interested individuals about the rights of individuals and the limitations of the government. This book of philosophy was written almost 150 years ago. By reading the book, the reader is able to apply Mill's message and examples to our lives in America today. The ahead-of-the-times ideas that are in On Liberty can be related to our world because it discusses controversies that are still seen in our courtrooms today. Mill is able to accomplish his purpose because he uses many examples, thoughts, and theories about individual and social rights. He works through each of his ideas, looking at both sides of the issue to enable the reader to make their own informed decision about each matter. This book has a practical meaning because it allows the reader to develop and reason ideas about government power and when that power should be exercised over the people. Unfortunately, this book does have one draw back. Mill was a very educated man and wrote very well for his time. Yet today, our style and writing techniques are not the same as they were in the nineteenth century. This makes On Liberty a difficult book to read. His book is very decriptive, yet his wording is not easily understadable and some paragraphs have to be read two or three times to fully understand what he is writing about. Aside from his writing style, John Stuart Mill has put together an essay full of educated ideas about society and individuals. John Stuart Mill wrote an informative book geared towards an educated audience. He has achieved his purpose for the essay through the use of situations and examples that can be applied to real life cases still today. He managed to keep the readers interested and I look forward to reading other books he has written.

It was not Socialism itself that is an evil, but the way it was implemented in some countries, in response to white-anglo-whatever's totally value-less review. Mill's book about liberty was of vast importance in freeing the individual from the tyranny of communal opinion. Someone may dislike homosexuals, but has no right to harass them or pass ethical judgements on them for what is their choice, of no harm to anyone else. Those are opinions of an indeterminate validity. Socal intervention may only be used to protect someone from restriction of their liberties. What Mill lacks in rigour, he makes up for in persuasiveness. He has some great lines in defense of liberty, a pre-dominant value of human life. Although, it is to be noted that the book can be somewhat tedious in areas which it is repetitive. This book also illustrates what can be seen as a fault in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism takes no notice of other values, or of a conflict of values, such as liberty of existence over the majorities happiness, in which ethics slides into absurdity.

J.S. Mill has written the best promulgation of classical liberalism in his book "On Liberty" (OL). Although a socialist himself, many of the ideas in OL are actually tenets of modern libertarianism (also called classical liberalism). Mill states that the only reason that force can be used on any man is to prevent harm to others. I consider "focre" to be either social or economic. Mill saw it as only social, which explains his socialism.

Not to detract from Mill or OL, the book is a resounding defense of civil-liberties. OL completes modern democratic theory as promulgated by John Locke in his "Two Treatises of Government." While Locke argues for some kind of democracy reminiscent of Athens, Mill qualifies Locke's point by protecting the minority from the majority. This book should be read by Americans who want to know more about freedom, and by our elected officials.

Sadly, it's our elected oficials who probably won't get it.

"One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great ideas....This is the belief, that somewhere in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker...there is a final solution."

Isaiah Berlin has been somewhat wrongly looked at simply as a historian of ideas. While he is that, this book is fertile with ideas, old, new, original and daring. What start out as four essays on liberty, turn out to reveal an astute world view. The one quoted above is taken from the third essay, his famous "Two Concepts of Liberty." In it he argues that the division between 'freedom from' and 'freedom to' is a subtle intertwine, more delicate than we often suppose. In the end, we must err on the side of 'freedom from' for one important reason; while the abscence of coercion might leave loose ends, by trying to tighten all loose ends, the rope loses all slack. Without the metaphor, by coercing others, we assume that our viewpoint is the only correct one and force others to live uniform to our ideas.

This is the theme that runs through all four essays. The first, "Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century" examines the failure of all the isms then en vogue; communism, fascism, socialism. Same idea. They preached of a graspable absolute truth that in the end, proved not so handleable. The second essay, "Historical Inevitability" tackles the problem at the root; the belief that our actions are determined and that free will is an illusion. Berlin, while not trying to disprove it (try, you can't do it!), exposes it as untenable. Every thought, action, word and concept we evoke is dependant upon belief in human autonomy. This essay is quite long and began to repeat itself a bit. Fight off the urge to skip through it. Very meaty!!

The last essay, "John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life" is something of a recap of the ideas presented in the book. It is Berlins tribute and critique (Mill would've approved) of Mill, his philosophy and his life which unlike most philosophers, was lived in complete accordance with his views.

Great book. The only problems I had were the length of the second essay and Berlin's annoying habit of turning every sentence into a twenty-one lined, 12 comma, infinitive after split infinitive beast. Although his language is beautiful (a la Barzun), this was hard to get used to. HIs thoughts, though, are classic.

I won't review the four essays, except to state the obvious: They concern liberty, and what liberty entails. But that much one could ascertain from the title.

What the title does not reveal is how penetrating Berlin's analyses of the myriad subjects he comments on. His prose is exemplary, and his style endearing. Many learned people think Lionel Trilling, Erich Auerbach, Jacques Barzun, etc., are the men of letters for the 20th century reader. As enjoyable as many of these and other authors of the 20th century have been, I am amazed at how infrequently Berlin is listed among them. Yet, his mind is keener, his prose more mellifluous, and his ideas more interesting than almost anyone else of his Age.

Berlin is not a difficult read, but he is a challenging one. His weave of ideas and his elaborate critiques will require attention, but give him your attention, and he'll reward you plenteously. He is a genuine philosopher who deals with issues of the common man, not the nuances of linguistics; he is concerned with freedom, the life well-lived, and ideas that are important (not just fasionable). This collection of four essays is as good a place as any to introduce yourself to one of the 20th century's true giants of belle letters.

Agreed. Berlin's book is not the easiest in the world to read. But, then again, neither is Plato, or John Locke, or even Mill for that matter. He writes in a 19th century style, but one which, I think is beautiful and elegant. This is not a book to be devoured, but to be savored. Each word is carefully crafted. To me, Berlin is like diving into a pool of the english language, and just floating in ideas and language. And the ideas are wonderful. More than any other political philosopher, Berlin has diagnosed the problems, and the dangers, of modern social and political thinking. When he argues that those who advocate limits on liberty, in the name of justice, or equality, or another ideal, are in fact diminishing the amount of liberty in society as a whole it is hard not to agree with him. His analysis of the problems of modern philosophy and political thought is as acute. These are the ideas that I now find most compelling in this book. The essay of the two types of liberty is wonderful, as is the one on Historical Inevitability. But it is the essay on Political Ideas in the 20th Century that has become my favorite over the year, for the simple reason that he was incredibly prophetic. In the 19th century, Berlin argues, conservatives and liberal, even socialists, despite their differences agreed on the fundamental questions of politics; who should rule? What is the basis of authority? Why should I obey? What are the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship? In the 20th century, we no longer even consider the questions to be important, or relevant. All political problems have been reduced to either technical matters, of social or economic engineering, or are treated as psychological disorders, that need theraputic treatment. We accept the lost of liberty because we no longer think of it as important, as a question that needs solving. Problems like poverty, or equality, or a cleaner environment, which are suseptible of technical solutions. Anyone who worried about liberty in the face of all of these problems was, ipso facto, crazy, and a refusal to face reality. Hence, prozac or lithium is the prescribed course of treatment, to remove the source, or at least the feeling, of discontent. It is time to take another look at Berlin, not merely as a defender of liberty, but as an analyst of modern political and social thinking, and the dead ends to which it is leading us.

"The First and the Last" contains Isaiah Berlin's earliest surving extended piece of writing ("First"), his final essay ("Last") summarizing his intellectual path and development, and brief tributes by Noel Annan, Stuart Hampshire, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Williams, and Aileen Kelly.

The tributes give us a faint glimmer of the man: his humanity and generosity, his passion for music, especially opera, and his extraordinary devotion to friends and students. "You have beautiful black eyes," Greta Garbo once said to Berlin. In Oxford circles Berlin was as renowned for his vivid talk and character as for his ideas. However, these recollections only hint at Berlin's expressiveness and luminous personality. In this regard, Michael Ignatieff's illumnating biography provides a more rounded treatment and measure of the man.

"First" is a prize winning story entered in a children's magazine competition when the Berlin was twelve years of age. The short story concerns a murderous bolshevik commisar named Uritsky, whose motto is "the purpose justifies the ways". Aside from revealing his precocity, the story is meant to illustrate Berlin's lifelong thematic struggle with absolutism in all its forms.

Berlin's last essay "My Intellectual Journey" is the principal and only substantive essay in this volume. It traces the the main themes of Berlin's intellectual journey, from his early interest in verificationism and phenomenalism, his discovery of Vico and Herder, his treatment of Romanticism, his famous formulation of two senses of "Liberty", and his contrast of monism with political pluralism. The writing is lucid and serves as a good synopsis of Berlin's political pluralism, which he summarizes as "a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots of Romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far for human toleration".

Noel Annan once compared Berlin's writings to a Seurat, "a pointilliste who peppers his canvas with a fusillade of adjectives, epithets, phrases, analogies, examples, elucidations and explanations so that at least a particular idea, a principle of action, a vision of life, emerges before our eyes in all its complexity." The force and brilliance of Berlin's writings is found elsewhere. Nevertheless, "The First and the Last" is worth reading. For it is the one and only place where we find Berlin's own summation of his intellectual development alongside a modest tribute by his friends and admirers.

I was more familiar with German philosophy, as an intellectual reaction to the French revolution, than with the French and Italian thinkers who are also discussed in the radio lectures which are included in this book. I also have the book, KARL MARX by Isaiah Berlin, and noticed some of the same themes, though this book is mainly concerned with a half century prior to the writings of Karl Marx. I try to see the humor in history, so when Isaiah Berlin says that Helvetius's principal work, published in 1758, "was found to be so atheistical, so heretical, that it was condemned both by Church and by State, and was burnt by the public hangman," (p. 11) I'm not surprised that this might be "the first clear formulation of the principle of utilitarianism." (p. 13).

Rousseau is the philosopher that Berlin blames most frequently for stating opposition to those who are overly refined. This includes "All those nineteenth century thinkers who are violently anti-intellectual, and in a sense anti-cultural, indeed . . . including Nietzsche himself, are the natural descendants of Rousseau." (p. 41). The Germans were not particularly well off, politically or materially at the time, so some tried to advance themselves by studying Kant. "Therefore, Kant says, the most sacred object in the universe, the only thing which is entirely good, is the good will, that is to say the free, moral, spiritual self within the body." (p. 57). Fichte's biggest contribution to 20th century political thought in Germany has been on leadership as a solution for a crisis, and Berlin considers the hero: "The favored image is that of Luther: there he stands, he cannot move, because he serves his inner ideal." (p. 65) But Fichte went in a philosophical direction. "Fichte gradually adopts the idea that the individual himself is nothing, that man is nothing without society, that man is nothing without the group, that the human being hardly exists at all." (p. 67). The first three pages of notes are mainly citations. The notes on Fichte cover seven pages and include additional phrases from Fichte's work not mentioned in Berlin's lectures but noted on the manuscript. This provides the opportunity to read bits like, "the natural institution of the State ends this independence provisionally and melts the separate parts into one whole, until finally morality recreates the whole species into one." (p. 166).

The notes on Hegel provide a citation for `slaughter-bench.' Hegel gets credit for a new way of looking at the history of everything which is so inspired by greatness that "To see a vast human upheaval and then to condemn it because it is cruel or because it is unjust to the innocent is for Hegel profoundly foolish and contemptible." (p. 92). Also, "Hegel's most original achievement was to invent the very idea of the history of thought." (p. 99). From there, it figures that Saint-Simon would expect the French to produce rationally a society. "For him, history is a story of living men trying to develop their faculties as richly and many-sidedly as possible." (p. 112).

On the other hand, I also have Isaiah Berlin's book, RUSSIAN THINKERS, and Joseph de Maistre, the last lecture topic for this book, was a source for Tolstoy. "Maistre is fascinated by the spectacle of war." (p. 139). "Tolstoy read Maistre because Maistre lived in Petersburg during the period in which he was interested, and he echoes his description of what a real battle is like, describing the experience of people present at the battle rather than giving the orderly, tidied-up account constructed later by eye-witnesses or historians." (p. 140). After that, the phrase, "says Maistre in a mocking manner," (p. 141) applied to the ideas in the preceding lectures, establishes that "No metaphysical magic eye will detect abstract entities called rights, not derived from either human or divine authority." (pp. 143-4). I think the last lecture is far easier to understand than the others.

In 1946 the Russian born British philosoper Isaiah Berlin, then a diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow, learned that Anna Akhmatova, one of the great poets of the 20th century, was still alive and living in Leningrad. He went to see her, spending a night talking about art, poetry, philosophy, and history. The night ended when the newspaper correspondent (and Winston's son) Randolph Churchill came to Akhmatova's house and, not knowing where to find Berlin, began bellowing Berlin's name at the top of his lungs in the building's courtyard. This may not seem like a terribly important incident; in the course of a normal life such days are usually forgotten within a few weeks of their happening...but in Stalin's Soviet Union there were no normal lives. The consequences of that night are the subject of this book, a harsh unblinking look into the workings of a paranoid society and one artist's reaction to it. For Akhmatova that night was one of the greatest of her life; unlike many other pre-Revolution writers and artists she refused to leave Russia. For her contact with someone from outside the four prison walls of Soviet society was like oxygen to someone suffocating; Berlin became "the guest from the future," the unnamed character in her great work 'Poem without a hero,' the reader she would have had if she lived in a normal society. But she did not. Dalos shows how all the forces of Stalinist repression swung into action against her; how she was publicly humiliated by the Central Committee, how her son was arrested and sent to the gulag, how Mikhail Zoshchenko, the satirist and popular writer who was condemned with her, was slowly driven mad by the government's denunciation of him and his work. If anyone is interested on the effect of totalitarianism on the lives of people this is the book to read. A great tribute to a great poet.

Following that dictum, I might point out that, especially in two areas of contemporary concern, Hamann's thought is highly relevant: Oswald Bayer has shown in Autoritaet und Kritik (1991) that Hamann's hermeneutics -- antedating by two centuries Derrida's reflections on intertextuality -- provides the basis for a devastating critique of deconstruction by subverting the French thinker's concept of the "center," and demonstrating where the true center ("Mitte") is to be located. Further, there is presently a lively discussion among scholars of Hamann's critique of Kant's famous essay: "What is Enlightenment"? Berlin's present study would have done more justice to Hamann's thought by discussing such developments as these and others, which were available during his lifetime.

My review is limited to the study of Johann Georg Hamann in the present volume, and the three star rating applies to it alone. Combining Isaiah Berlin's books on Vico, Hamann and Herder under one cover was a felicitous idea of Berlin's editor and literary executor Henry Hardy. The position which these thinkers share: their anti-Cartesianism, their emphasis on history, tradition, language and mythology may now be seen through the considerably different lenses they employ. I feel compelled, however, to register a caveat. When the present Hamann study appeared in book form in 1993, I expressed my reservations about it in a letter to the "New York Review of Books," to which Berlin replied. I lamented the fact that he had ignored modern Hamann scholarship, and had clung to the interpretation of Hamann as an irrationalist, especially that espoused by Rudolf Unger in his 1911 book,"Hamann und die Aufklaerung,"ignoring modern discussions of the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Specialists in the field now consider Unger's interpretation outdated, and see Hamann as a champion of one side of the Enlightenment, albeit a severe critic of its other, extremely rationalistic, side.

The question of Hamann's relation to the Enlightenment turns on the conception of reason. I have maintained that Hamann employed a mode of reason distinct from that of the rationalistic Enlighteners as well as from that of his friendly adversary,Kant. In order to designate that mode, I adopted a term once used by Kant in referring to Hamann's thought,i.e., "intuitive reason," or, in the original German, "anschauende Vernunft." I accepted the term as an apt one for Hamann's mode of thought, however Kant felt about it. Further, I have demonstrated how it can be linguistically distinguished from the traditional logico-mathematical mode of thought in my book "The Quarrel of Reason with Itself"(1988),and elsewhere. It is one which Berlin rightly sees as akin to Dilthey's "verstehen," which Berlin also rejects. He lists a group of philosophers whose conception of reason matches his own: Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, Franz von Brentano, William James, Bertrand Russell and the "Vienna Circle." Most of these thinkers are about as far removed from any kind of "verstehen" as possible. Who then, besides Hamann, may be said to have employed what I have called "intuitive reason"? The prime examples are the great epistemological heirs of Hamann: Goethe and Nietzsche. Goethe belongs here because of his refusal to analyze the "Urphaenomen." Hence, his anti-Newtonian stance. Nietzsche, especially in "Zarathustra," which I have analyzed closely from the standpoint of intuitive reason in "Nietzsche and the Judaeo-Christian Tradition"(1985).

Having stated my reservations concerning Berlin's interpretation of Hamann, I must say, however, that we can be grateful that he has helped mightily to rescue that German philosopher from the obscurity to which he has been unjustly relegated by those who remain under the spell of the strictly rationalistic wing of the Enlightenment. Berlin, in spite of his basic lack of empathy with Hamann, not only recognized his importance, but was always fascinated by him. He was an early and enthusiastic subscriber to "The Hamann News-Letter," which I edited and published in the early 195O's and 196O's. Further, his correspondence with me regarding Hamann over a period of three and a half decades shows an unflagging interest in the man who both attracted and repelled him. In a letter to me of June 25,1972, he wrote: "My passion for Hamann is undiminished." Not too surprisingly, there are certain passages in the present book in which Berlin seems, unwittingly, to move toward a certain degree of empathy,hence to a kind of "verstehen." But such passages are few, and many others are unjustly harsh. Nevertheless, for all its shortcomings, Berlin's study of Hamann is valuable for introducing the reader, especially the anglophone reader, to the historically important pre-Romantic figure, known as "The Magus of the North," without whom the development of German Romanticism would be unthinkable, and whose insights increasingly bear fruit today, especially in theology and philosophy. As Berlin has said: "Hamann repays study."