A berlin for historians

History and Theory

Volumn 41, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 277-300

  Cracraft, James ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3042707357     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-2303.00207     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Peter Stansky, "Isaiah Berlin," in Stansky, From William Morris to Sergeant Pepper: Studies in the Radical Domestic (Palo Alto, CA: Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999), 211.
2. Cf Berlin's full-page obituary in the New York Times (Nov. 7, 1997), Al, A14
3. Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Avishai Margalit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
4. In fact, most philosophy of history is the work of philosophers, not historians: cf. Aviezer Tucker, "The Future of the Philosophy of Historiography," History and Theory 40 (2001), 37-56
5. R. Kocis, A Critical Appraisal of Sir Isaiah Berlin's Political Philosophy (Lewiston, N.Y.: E. Mellen Press, 1989)
6. Sidney Morgenbesser, "Isaiah Berlin," in Ullmann-Margalit and Margalit, eds. , Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration. 38
7. Galipeau, Isaiah Berlin's Liberalism, 5, n. 21.
8. Berlin, "Corsi e Ricorsi," Journal of Modern History 50 (1978), 480-489, at 481, reviewing recent works on Vico.
9. Well portrayed in Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life (New York: H. Holt, 1998)
10. Michael H. Lessnoff, "Isaiah Berlin: Monism and Pluralism," in Lessnoff, Political Philosophers of the Twentieth Century (Oxford and Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999), 222
11. "[T] he most dazzling talker of his generation": Noel Annan, "The Don as Magus-Isaiah Berlin," in Annan, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 210.
12. See Morton White. "Isaiah Berlin: A Bridge Between Philosophy and the History of Ideas," in White, A Philosopher's Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 221-252
13. recording that some such joint undertaking with Berlin was discussed between them for "many years." White eventually proceeded on his own: see White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), a work "primarily concerned with the logic of history [rather than its method-ology], anxious to elucidate terms that are commonly employed by historians and historically minded thinkers, and eager to advance toward a clearer understanding of the chief intellectual activities of the historian" (2). In a letter to White of September 1963 Berlin said he thought the title "Foundations of Historical Knowledge?" was acceptable "particularly if you include the question mark" (White, Philosopher's Story, 245)
14. The "crisis" is depicted, with abundant citation of history's "postmodernist" critics, in Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), especially 3-12 and 198ff., with extended bibliographical survey (260-272)
15. Perry Anderson, "The Pluralism of Isaiah Berlin," in Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (London and New York: Verso, 1992), 234, 232.
16. Galipeau, Berlin's Liberalism, 5.
17. Cf Patrick Gardiner, Introduction to Isaiah Berlin, The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997): "Berlin has often denied that he is or ever has been a historian, and it may be that there is some accepted if restrictive sense of the term in which this is so. The fact remains, however, that he has made a unique and celebrated contribution to the history of ideas" (xiv)
18. Isaiah Berlin, Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), Author's Preface, viii
19. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, 71, 62.
20. Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin [19921 (London: Phoenix, 2000), 11
21. G. A. Cohen, "Isaiah's Marx, and Mine," in Ullmann- Margalit and Margalit, eds., Berlin Celebration, 115, 119
22. Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 17-21
23. Article republished in Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 252-286
24. Jahanbegloo, Conversations, 85-86, 21.
25. Yael Tamir, "Whose History? What Ideas?" in Ullmann-Margalit and Margalit, eds. , Berlin Celebration, 146
26. and Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ix-x and passim.
27. Stansky, "Isaiah Berlin," 214.
28. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (New York: Viking, 1978)
29. Isaiah Berlin, "The Pursuit of the Ideal," in Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Knopf, 1991), 3
30. Williams refers particularly to three essays dating to 1937, 1939, and 1950 included in Berlin, Concepts and Categories, there titled "Verification," "Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements," and "Logical Translation." The first of these was published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 39 (1939), 225-248
31. Bernard Williams, "Introduction," Berlin, Concepts and Categories, xi-xvii.
32. Morgenbesser, "Isaiah Berlin," 34, 37
33. Stuart Hampshire, eulogy of Berlin given at Oxford March 21, 1998, in Berlin, The First and the Last, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: New York Review of Books, 1999), 99
34. Gray, Isaiah Berlin, 4.
35. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, 88, 93.
36. Berlin, Karl Marx, x.
37. Cohen, "Isaiah's Marx, and Mine," 117.
38. Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life, chaps. 8-12, 17
39. In addition to the tributes contained in the collections cited above, n. 2, see Annan, "Don as Magus"; Galipeau, Berlin's Liberalism, 3 and n. 14 (3-4); and Berlin, First and Last, 81-141
40. Quoting from Berlin's 1988 lecture, later published essay, "Pursuit of the Ideal," 1
41. Isaiah Berlin, Historical Inevitability (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), 79 (for the passages quoted, see 5-7, 11, 20, 25)
42. essay reprinted, with revisions, in Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer (London: Pimlico, 1997), 1191-90
43. Berlin, Historical Inevitability, 33, 34, 36 for passages quoted.
44. See again Evans (n. 12 above)
45. Michael Walzer, "Introduction," Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 19S6), [4].
46. Berlin, "The Sense of Reality," in Berlin, Sense of Reality, 1-39
47. Protagoras, 5th century B.C.E.: "There can be little doubt that this [dictum] was generally understood in antiquity as being a doctrine of the relativity of all knowledge or opinion to each particular person, and that it involved a complete scepticism about the claims of any science to universal validity. He [Protagoras] also adopted an agnostic attitude towards belief in the gods. He does not, however, seem to have extended this scepticism to the claims of morality. Here he apparently adopted conventional moral ideas without much question, and advocated respect by each man for the moral code of his particular community" (G. C. Field, in The Oxford Classical Dictionary [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970J, 890)
48. Isaiah Berlin, "The Concept of Scientific History," History and Theory 1 (1960), 1-31 (1, 16, 9, for the phrases quoted)
49. Berlin, "Concept of History," in Berlin, Concepts and Categories, 115-116, 128
50. For Namier, that most scrupulously empirical of modern British historians, see Linda Colley, Lewis Namier (New York: Viking Press, 1989).
51. Berlin's essays in the history of ideas, apart from Karl Marx, The Magus of the North; J. G, Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994)
52. and Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), are collected in Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (New York: Viking Press, 1976)
53. and in the volumes cited above: Berlin, Russian Thinkers: Berlin, Against the Current: Berlin, Crooked Timber, Berlin, Sense of Reality; Berlin, Proper Study. Various of the essays continue to be published in new editions, sometimes revised or expanded with reference to Berlin's surviving papers; information available at the website maintained by Henry Hardy, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford: 〈http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/〉 accessed June 6, 2002
54. Tributes by Aileen Kelly and Stuart Hampshire, in Berlin, First and Last, 131, 98, 103
55. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1989), 7, 9.
56. Alan Ryan, reviewing Gray, Isaiah Berlin, in the New York Times Book Review (July 7, 1996), 8.