The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin

The Crooked Timber of Humanity by Isaiah Berlin

"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.

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 As a historian of ideas, [Berlin] has no equal; and what he has to say is expressed in prose of exceptional lucidity and grace. -- Anthony Storr Independent on Sunday

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 He has edited several other volumes by Berlin, and is currently preparing Berlin's letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691058382
ISBN 10	0691058385
Title	The Crooked Timber of Humanity
Author	Isaiah Berlin
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	1998-02-22
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable