The Crooked Timber of Humanity

Chapters in the History of Ideas - Second Edition

Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780691058382
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400847815
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

"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.

INDEX

Douglas Matthews

Action française, 160

Aenesidemus, 74

Agis, King of Sparta, 69

Agnew, Spiro Theodore, 332n

Akhmatova, Anna Andreevna, xiii

Alembert, Jean Le Rond d’, 231

Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, 96, 146, 153–4, 159, 160n, 323

Alexander II, Tsar of Russia, 155

Alexander the Great, 90, 331

Anaxagoras, 4

Ancients and Moderns, battle of the, 69, 84

Angell, (Ralph) Norman, 270

Annunzio, Gabriele d’, 129

anti-Semitism, 269

anthropology, 73, 89, 194

Antigone (Sophoclean character), 13

antinomianism, 276

Aquinas, St Thomas, 105, 114, 129, 147, 202, 292

argument: use of, 164

Ariosto, Lodovico, 39

Aristonicus, 24

Aristophanes, 23

Aristotle: on virtue as knowledge, 29; on variety and differences, 32, 59, 220; Herder on, 45; on Homer, 69; on thought, 74; on man as slave, 128; on slaves, 187; metaphysics, 227; Russell on, 285, 288–90; on innate knowledge, 319; Ethics, 289; Nichomachean Ethics, 289

Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 263–4

Arnim, Achim von, 245, 248

artist: image of, 245

arts: and invention, 60; and culture, 68; Vico on, 70; and progress, 84; as creation, 199–201, 206, 241–2; European, 226

Athens (ancient), 54, 59, 70, 125

Atlantis, 22

Augustine, St, 114, 230

Austin, John Langshaw, xiii

authority: in Rome, 56; Maistre on, 125, 127–8, 132, 148–52, 167, 169, 173–5; religious, 167–8

Ayer, Alfred Jules, xiii

Aztecs, 198n

Bach, Johann Sebastian, 9

Bacon, Francis, 30, 130, 148, 224–5, 227

Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 547

Balzac, Honoré de, 251

Barrès, Maurice, 114, 264

Basque nationalism, 267

Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 248, 251

Bayle, Pierre, 138

beauty: ideal, 60

Becker, Carl Louis, 76

Beckett, Samuel Barc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Editor’s Preface
• Note on References
• 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
• Appendix: Violence and Terror
• 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
• Appendix to the Second Edition
• Index