"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 . "A beautifully patterned tapestry of philosophical thought . . . A history of ideas that possesses all the drama of a novel, all the immediacy of headline news." ― New York Times "The perfect guide through the complex radical changes that have swept Western societies . . . A brilliant, convincing work . . . humane, compassionate, important." ― San Francisco Chronicle "Overwhelming intelligence . . . [Berlin's] mind is captivating . . . His reflections . . . strike at the heart of our most parroted beliefs." ― Washington Post Book World "As 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 Isaiah Berlin was 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 Hedgehog and the Fox , 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. THE CROOKED TIMBER OF HUMANITY CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS By ISAIAH BERLIN, Henry Hardy PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2013 Isaiah Berlin All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-691-15593-7 Contents Foreword by John Banville..................................................xiEditor's Preface...........................................................xixNote on References.........................................................xxviThe Pursuit of the Ideal...................................................1The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West...................................21Giambattista Vico and Cultural History.....................................51Alleged Relativism in Eighteenth-Century European Thought..................73Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism...............................95Appendix: Violence and Terror..............................................178European Unity and Its Vicissitudes........................................186The Apotheosis of the Romantic Will: The Revolt against the Myth of an Ideal World................................................................219The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism..................................253Appendix to the Second Edition.............................................279Index......................................................................335 Excerpt CHAPTER 1 The Pursuit of the Ideal I There are, in my view, two factors that, above all others,have shaped human history in the twentieth century. One is thedevelopment of the natural sciences and technology, certainlythe greatest success story of our time – to this, great and mountingattention has been paid from all quarters. The other, withoutdoubt, consists in the great ideological storms that have alteredthe lives of virtually all mankind: the Russian Revolution and itsaftermath – totalitarian tyrannies of both right and left and theexplosions of nationalism, racism and, in places, religious bigotrywhich, interestingly enough, not one among the most perceptivesocial thinkers of the nineteenth century had ever predicted. When our descendants, in two or three centuries' time (ifmankind survives until then), come to look at our age, it is thesetwo phenomena that will, I think, be held to be the outstandingcharacteristics