The Cambridge Companion to Isaiah Berlin

Description

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was a central figure in twentieth-century political thought. This volume highlights Berlin's significance for contemporary readers, covering not only his writings on liberty and liberalism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Russian thinkers and pluralism, but also the implications of his thought for political theory, history, and the social sciences, as well as the ethical challenges confronting political actors, and the nature and importance of practical judgment for politics and scholarship. His name and work are inseparable from the revival of political philosophy and the analysis of political extremism and defense of democratic liberalism following World War II. Berlin was primarily an essayist who spoke through commentary on other authors and, while his own commitments and allegiances are clear enough, much in his thought remains controversial. Berlin's work constitutes an unsystematic and incomplete, but nevertheless sweeping and profound, defense of political, ethical, and intellectual humanism in an anti-humanistic age.

Joshua L. Cherniss is the author of A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin's Political Thought (2013), and of journal articles and book chapters on Berlin, Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Weber, and other twentieth-century political thinkers. He has been a Laurence S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University, and a Graduate Fellow at the Center for European Studies and the Safra Center for Ethics, both at Harvard University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University, Washington DC. Steven B. Smith is Alfred Cowles Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He has served as the Master of Branford College at Yale and is the Co-Director of the Yale Center for the Study of Representative Institutions. His book Spinoza, Liberalism, and the Question of Jewish Identity (1997) won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from Phi Beta Kappa. His most recent book, Modernity and its Discontents (2016), has been widely reviewed and the subject of book conference and panel discussions. He is currently working on a new book called In Defense of Patriotism.

'... the two opening pieces on Berlin the man, one by Amos Oz, who died in December, and the other by Hardy and Joshua Cherniss, are superb, two of the best essays ever written about him. ... The book captures the range of Berlin's work, from his early writings as an analytic philosopher and on Karl Marx in the 1930s to his essays on Russian thinkers, the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism, from nationalism to pluralism and liberalism.' David Herman, New Statesman