The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition - Paperback

$24.95
$24.95
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The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition
  • The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition - Paperback

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition - Paperback

by Isaiah Berlin
$24.95
$24.95

Book Overview

"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 plurality. In The Crooked Timber of Humanity he exposes the links between the ideas of the past and the social and political cataclysms of our own time: 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.

This new edition features a revised text that supplants all previous versions, a new foreword in which award-winning novelist John Banville discusses Berlin's life and ideas, particularly his defense of pluralism, and a substantial new appendix that provides rich context, including letters by Berlin and previously uncollected writings, most notably his virtuoso review of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy.
ISBN9780691155937
Author Isaiah Berlin
PublisherPrinceton University Press
GenreHistory and Philosophy
FormatPaperback
PublishedJune 2013
Edition2
LanguageENG- English
Pages384
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

History Nonfiction Philosophy

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More by Isaiah Berlin

Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty - Updated Edition

Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty - Updated Edition - Paperback

Freedom and Its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty - Updated Edition - Paperback

By Isaiah Berlin

About Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. A Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, he was renowned as an essayist and as the author of many books, among them Karl Marx, Four Essays on Liberty, Russian Thinkers, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, and from Princeton, Concepts and Categories, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, and Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin's literary trustees. He has edited several other volumes by Berlin, and is currently preparing Berlin's letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

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