The Crooked Timber of Humanity
豆瓣
Chapters in the History of Ideas
Isaiah Berlin
简介
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." - Immanuel Kant. Isaiah Berlin was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century - an activist of the intellect who marshaled 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 ideas 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.
contents
Editor's Preface
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
Index
