Product Description

In this outstanding collection of essays, Isaiah Berlin, one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century, discusses the importance in the history of thought of dissenters whose ideas still challenge conventional wisdom--among them Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Herzen, and Sorel. With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #310288 in Books
• Published on: 2001-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 300 pages

Review
A most remarkable intellectual achievement. There are few books published in our time which more dazzlingly illuminate some of the most crucial problems of western culture and civilisation. -- Review

Review
Isaiah Berlin was the most esteemed intellectual figure in the English-speaking world. Against the Current may be the most representative of [his] books.
(Mark Feeney Boston Globe )

A historian of ideas, [Berlin] has no equal; and what he has to say is expressed in prose of exceptional lucidity and grace.
(Anthony Storr Independent on Sunday )

Berlin expounds the ideas of half-forgotten thinkers with luminous clarity and imaginative empathy. . . . exhilarating to read.
(Keith Thomas Observer )

A most remarkable intellectual achievement. There are few books published in our time which more dazzlingly illuminate some of the most crucial problems of western culture and civilisation.
(Goronwy Rees Encounter )

Review
'This is an exceptional volume by a remarkable intellectual. Berlin's essays are wide-ranging, rich, deeply learned, and elegant.
(Mitchell Cohen, City University of New York )

Customer Reviews

Some publisher: Please reprint this wonderful book!
"Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas" has long been out of print and is hard to find in the used market. I wish some publisher would reprint it--I'm sure it would sell well. It was my introduction to this wonderful, careful, rational thinker and his ideas on pluralism, among many other topics. I'm not smart enough to summarize his thought for public consumption; you must read him for yourself. If you are a warm, loving, human being who is interested in how we got to our present intellectual condition, after reading him you will be a convert. Libraries often have "Against the Current," but you can also find great riches in his other books, some of which Amazon.com will be happy to send to you. Put his name in Keyword Search and check out the numerous titles they carry. (No, I'm not a salesman, just a fan.) I can recommend "Crooked Timber of Humanity" as a good start. For a (still) fresh reading of the life of Karl Marx read Berlin's biography of him. Enrich your life; READ ISAIAH BERLIN!!!

Brilliant!
Sir Isaiah Berlin was the greatest exponent of Liberal Pluralism
in the 20th Century. "Against The Current" is probably his best collection of essays. The essays on Verdi and George Sorel are worth the price of the book alone. Do yourself a favor and read this book. You will not regret it.

A core text of modern liberal pluralism
One of the great, and certainly at least in some quarters most influential, books of historical/ philosophical/ social thinking of the century. An argument for liberal pluralism, not as an abstract theory, but as a pragmatic necessity in the absence of the possibility of theoretical justification. Berlin almost obsessively (except that obsessive is the last word you could imagine applying to Isaiah Berlin) reiterates implicitly, in a collection of, originally independently published, essays on European intellectual history, his ironically simple thesis that the world is complex and contradictory, and not reducible to the terms of simple moral, social or policial ideas. Further, his prose, which - like his thinking - is in the tradition of Hume and Diderot, makes him an unalloyed pleasure to read.