Political Ideas In The Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought

Isaiah Berlin

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Published by Vintage Digital, part of Vintage Publishing

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EAN: 9781446496428
Published: 5 Apr 2009

About the book

Synopsis

'I was exhausted at the end, & yet I am sure that if ever I saw & heard anyone in a true state of inspiration it was then.'

So wrote a listener to her friend after attending one of the lectures based on the book. Political Ideas in the Romantic Age is the text Berlin wrote for four of the lectures, delivered in 1952. He revised what he had written extensively afterwards but never published it. It is his longest work and also the only connected account he gave of his key insights into the history of the ideas that dominate the political arguments of our own time.

As he put it in his Prologue, 'The age of which we speak was singularly rich in original conceptions; they transformed our world, and the words in which they were formulated speak to us still'.

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What the critics say

An event of major importance... Hitherto, students of Berlin have been like explorers searching for the source of the Nile, but with only a network of streams to go by, not a single river; now they can stand on the shores of their very own Lake Victoria, gazing at the mighty reservoir itself
- Sunday Telegraph

A dense, demanding, but often exciting book
- Daily Telegraph

Indispensable for anyone interested in the history of ideas and the development of liberal thought
- New York Review of Books

A fine introduction to Berlin's thought, and a major addition to the corpus of his work
- Literary Review

By this author

About the Author

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 his family came to England, and he was educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory and 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 Crooked Timber of Humanity, 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, and Liberty and The Soviet Mind. 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.

Isaiah Berlin