Henry Hardy Ordine dei libri (cronologico)

Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century – a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation. His ideas – especially his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty and political despotism – have become even more prescient and vital today. But who was the man behind such influential views? In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling story of a decades-long collaboration between Berlin and his editor, Henry Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work into print. Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained largely out of view.

Isaiah Berlin's The Sense of Reality at last makes available an important body of previously unknown work by one of our leading historians of ideas and one of the finest essayists writing in English. Eight of the nine pieces included here are published for the first time, and their range is characteristically wide. The subjects explored include realism in history, judgment in politics, the history of socialism, the nature and impact of Marxism, the radical cultural revolution instigated by the Romantics, Russian notions of artistic commitment, and the origins and practice of nationalism. The title essay, starting from the impossibility of historians being able to re-create a bygone epoch, is a superb centerpiece.