Review by Choice Review
Berlin's 1952 radio lectures for the BBC are collected in this volume. In these talks, Berlin discusses six thinkers he regards as enemies of human liberty: Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre. These persons have four things in common, according to Berlin. First, they were intellectually active near the time of the French Revolution. Second, although they wrote in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, their analyses are especially relevant to conditions in the 20th century. Third, they did not so much provide novel answers as introduce new questions and issues. Finally, they rejected the claim that individuals have the right to live as they wish, provided that their actions do not interfere with others doing the same. Because they repudiated that claim, Berlin considers these six thinkers as enemies of liberty. The scholarship on which Berlin's lectures are based has been superseded, in many instances, and so they will interest primarily scholars wanting to understand Berlin's own views. Nevertheless, his lectures are clear, and undergraduates will find them useful introductions to the six thinkers Berlin discusses. Also recommended for general readers through faculty. J. M. Fritzman Lewis and Clark College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
In 1952, the BBC broadcast six lectures by Berlin on philosophers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who profoundly affected subsequent European history and, balefully, traditional understandings of personal freedom. The talks captivated an enormous listenership and established Berlin as the premier popular authority on philosophy in Britain and America. This book publishes those lectures for the first time. Their subjects are Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Maistre; that is, five progressives who favored the proposition that a person should be able to choose what he wants to do and acquire, provided he harms no others, and one conservative who distrusted such liberty. As each progressive developed his political thought, he saw the need for negating that kind of liberty. Helvetius' utilitarianism, Rousseau's concept of the general will, Fichte's triumphalist nationalism, Hegel's historical dialectic, and Saint-Simon's elitism all militate against personal freedom of choice because all assume that what is good for every human is ascertainable by reason and, because it is good, enforceable upon all. Practical politics informed by those progressive ideas produced those twentieth-century plagues, fascism and communism. Well before then, Maistre denounced reason, asserted that humans were basically self-destructive, and that only such irrational institutions as the church and hereditary monarchy, enforcing such irrational social arrangements as marriage and the loyalty of soldiers, kept societies intact. Of course, the tenor of Maistre's conservatism helped rather than hindered the revolutionaries he loathed after they seized power. Berlin's first great public successes remain utterly, indeed inspirationally, absorbing. --Ray Olson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
