Against the Current

Essays in the History of Ideas - Second Edition

Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400843237
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance of dissenters in the history of ideas--among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times--and still challenge conventional wisdom.

In a new foreword to this corrected edition, which also includes a new appendix of letters in which Berlin discusses and further illuminates some of its topics, noted essayist Mark Lilla argues that Berlin's decision to give up a philosophy fellowship and become a historian of ideas represented not an abandonment of philosophy but a decision to do philosophy by other, perhaps better, means. "His instinct told him," Lilla writes, "that you learn more about an idea as an idea when you know something about its genesis and understand why certain people found it compelling and were spurred to action by it." This collection of fascinating intellectual portraits is a rich demonstration of that belief.

INDEX

Douglas Matthews

absolutism, 136

Action française, 375

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron, 138

Addison, Joseph, 160

Adler, Max, 397

Aeschylus, 162, 362–3

Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse, 65, 93

Agesilaus, 54, 65

Agis, King of Sparta, 158

Agrippa, Cornelius, 2, 107

Alberoni, Cardinal Giulio, 319

Alberti, Leon Battista, 93

Alciati, Andrea, 109

Alderisio, Felice, 36, 95n

Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 4, 126, 171

Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, 239, 262

Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, 253

Alexander the Great, 75, 412n

Alfieri, Vittorio, il conte, 37

Algarotti, Francesco, il conte, 37

Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 309

Alliance israélite universelle, 304, 309

Allon, Yigal, 331n

Alsop, Joseph Wright: letter to, 455–7

Ancients and Moderns, quarrel of, 131

Annenkov, Pavel Vasil’evich, 243

anthropology: Montesquieu and, 166, 171, 182

Antiphon, 2

Aquinas, St Thomas, 43, 81, 130

Archives israélites, 309

Argyll, George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of, 337, 342

Ariosto, Lodovico, 362

Aristotle: dialogues, xviii; and variety of institutions, 2; and natural law, 6, 85; and wicked, 34; on ‘making’, 43; on moral values, 66–7, 80n, 183, 451–2; on polis, 66; and Machiavelli, 70, 76; and Plato, 87; and reality, 93; empiricism, 102; as authority, 105; and imagination, 144; and organisation of society, 177; Montesquieu and, 183, 203; and group identity, 426; Politics, 35, 62, 93

Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 346, 351, 435, 437

Aron, Raymond Claude Ferdinand, 446

art: Enlightenment view of, 4; romantic view of, 23; sociological analysis of, 392; Sorel and creativity in, 392, 395

Athens: Machiavelli on, 53–4, 56, 58, 78, 80, 96; occultism, 104; and Roman law, 135; Sorel idealises, 383, 416; decline, 384

Auber, Daniel François...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Forward
• Author’s Note
• Editor’s Preface
• Note on References
• Introduction
• The Counter-Enlightenment
• The Originality of Machiavelli
• The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities
• Vico’s Concept of Knowledge
• Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment
• Montesquieu
• Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism
• Herzen and His Memoirs
• The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess
• Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity
• The ‘Naivety’ of Verdi
• Georges Sorel
• Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power
• Appendix to the Second Edition
• Index