Research Catalog

Title

The crooked timber of humanity : chapters in the history of ideas / Isaiah Berlin ; edited by Henry Hardy.

Author

Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997

Publication

New York : Vintage Books, 1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

Hardy, Henry.

Description

viii, 278 p.; 21 cm.

Summary

"Sir Isaiah Berlin may be our most important living philosopher, an activist of the intellect who marshals 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 idea 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"--Unedited summary from book cover.

Subject

• Civilization, Modern
• Philosophy

Note

• Originally published: 1st American ed. New York : Knopf, 1991.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

The pursuit of the ideal -- The decline of utopian ideas in the west -- Giambattista Vico and cultural history -- Alleged relativism in eighteenth-century European thought -- Joseph de Maistre and the origins of fascism -- European unity and its vicissitudes -- The apotheosis of the romantic will : the revolt against the myth of an ideal world -- The bent twig : on the rise of nationalism.

ISBN

0679735763 (pbk.) :

LCCN

^^^91050490^

OCLC

23941140

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library