The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Couverture rigide

Berlin, Isaiah

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 071954789X ISBN 13 : 9780719547898

Editeur : John Murray Publishers Ltd, 1990

Synopsis

Isaiah Berlin is renowned for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. He has a deep commitment to liberty and pluralism, and has devoted the half-century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions which allow these ideals to flourish, and those which threaten them. Utopianism, cultural history, relativism, Fascism, romanticism, nationalism - the range of the eight essays collected here have as their common theme varieties of anti-rationalism. The longest essay, on Joseph de Maistre, is published here for the first time. The title is drawn from a remark by Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made".

A propos du livre

Biographie de l'auteur

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia, and in Petrograd in 1917 Berlin witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents emigrated to England, where he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York, Washington, Moscow and Leningrad, he remained at Oxford thereafter - as a Fellow of All Souls, then of New College, as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, and as founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy.

His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Revue de presse

"Berlin has restored the history of ideas to its true place as a key to unlock the past and explain the present. His is a notable achievement, and this book sustains it" (Raymond Carr Spectator)

"The truest and the most moving of all interpretations of life that my own generation made" (Noel Annan)

"To read Isaiah Berlin is above all to listening to a voice, effervescent, quizzical, often self-mocking, but always full of gaiety and amusement" (John Dunn Times Literary Supplement)

"As a historian of ideas, he has no equal; and what he has to say is expressed in prose of exceptional lucidity and grace" (Anthony Storr Independent)

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: John Murray Publishers Ltd
• Date d'édition: 1990
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 071954789X
• ISBN 13: 9780719547898
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 288
• Éditeur: Hardy Henry
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible