The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas

Berlin ferrets out the roots of the prejudice, intolerance, fanaticism and lust for domination that blight the modern world. He is leery of disruptive nationalisms that presume a nation's unique mission and intrinsic superiority--and that often foster racial and ethnic hatreds. He persuasively interprets 18th-century French reactionary thinker Joseph de Maistre as a harbinger of fascism. The Romantic movement's dismissal of the very notion of objective truth, its glorification of defiance and martyrdom, are, to Berlin, a disturbing legacy. While nodding to cultural pluralism, he insists that "we inhabit one common moral world." In tracing the pedigree of such novel ideals as tolerance, liberty and social equality from the Enlightenment show more onward, these erudite, engaging essays throw our century of massive violence into sharp perspective. show less

I'm currently reading Alan Ryan's _On Politics_, a new survey of political theory from the Greeks to the present. In the introduction, Ryan states that Isaiah Berlin's essays provide one model or ideal for his project, in terms of their extraordinary vividness and an almost uncanny ability to engage with the temperament of the thinkers he wrote about. That's a better blurb than I could write, and it rings true.

During the fight against fascism and the Cold War, Berlin was an important thinker. I don't think that his essays are quite as relevant today, but they do provide extremely readable access to the history of ideas.

Perry Anderson's review of Berlin's Crooked Timber of Humanity (1990) when it first appeared. Anderson's reasonably sympathetic comments dismissed the hypothesis out of hand with the thought that, amongst other evidence from the classical and medieval periods for which Berlin had not accounted, he had "mislaid Mount Olympus." Worth noting as well is Anderson's effort to state the hypothesis clearly in the claim that it told us that all traditions of the past had affirmed the existence of a single normative standard "however much they disagreed over what it was" (Perry Anderson, "England's Isaiah," London Review of Books 12/24, 20 December 1990, 6).

On another level Berlin often quoted Kant, 'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no show more straight thing was ever made'. Most attempts to create utopias lead to hellish suffering, through oppression and persecution. As Berlin said, 'To force people into the neat uniforms demanded by dogmatically believed-in schemes is almost always the road to inhumanity'. show less

No one writes about the history of ideas like Isaiah Berlin. His prose is clear and his essays invite the reader to explore his subjects further. What more could you ask for?

No one writes about the history of ideas like Isaiah Berlin. His prose is clear and his essays invite the reader to explore his subjects further. What more could you ask for?

Not the easiest read but a great background on the history of philosophical thought in western Europe and the extremes to where it lead.I fast read through some parts but most was a review of a number of philosophers through history.

" European Unity and it's Vicissitudes " is simply amazing ( written in 1959 ! )