The Story
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.Immanuel KantIsaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth centuryan activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the Platonic belief in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenthcentury reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentiethcentury Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militantand sometimes genocidalnationalism that convulses the modern world.This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which awardwinning novelist John Banville discusses Berlins life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russells A History of Western Philosophy.
Description
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.Immanuel KantIsaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth centuryan activist of the intellect who marshaled vast erudition and eloquence in defense of the endangered values of individual liberty and moral and political plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: between the Platonic belief in absolute truth and the lure of authoritarianism; between the eighteenthcentury reactionary ideologue Joseph de Maistre and twentiethcentury Fascism; between the romanticism of Schiller and Byron and the militantand sometimes genocidalnationalism that convulses the modern world.This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which awardwinning novelist John Banville discusses Berlins life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russells A History of Western Philosophy.
