The power of ideas Book

Reading Isaiah Berlin is the intellectual equivalent of a Finnish sauna: when finished, one feels refreshed, cleansed and bursting with euphoric enthusiasm. Regardless of what subject Berlin chooses, his writings elevate timeless ideas, or contemplation of, to use one of Berlin's favorite phrases, "concepts and categories", and always have implications for a myriad of contemporary issues. I have never encountered a clearer thinker or writer of so many and diverse, seemingly complex, topics. As his champion and editor Henry Hardy observes in his preface, Berlin "was constitutionally incapable of writing with the opacity of a specialist."

The Power of Ideas may be the best starting point for those new to Berlin's writing. Each essay, relatively short and concise by Berlin's standards, offers a lucid gem from which the reader can easily find other works to delve deeper into specific topics. The last essay Berlin wrote in his life, "My Intellectual Path," prepared for a Chinese text about American and British philosophers, begins the book and is a valedictory summation of his most lasting contributions to the history of ideas, the field he created. Ideas, to be overly trite, have consequences. Berlin's contributions delve into the sources of those ideas, which are usually very obscure in hindsight, and how they shaped or were perverted by subsequent history.

Throughout his life, Berlin warned against monism'the notion that one fundamental, mechanistic, or scientific "truth" could be applied to explain and predict social and political experience. He is most often identified as the champion of pluralism, which is very distinct from cultural relativism, the polar opposite of monism. Pluralism demands respect of cultures, general agreement of objective facts, and respect for differing values. As Berlin writes, "My political pluralism is a product of reading Vico and Herder, and of understanding the roots of romanticism, which in its violent, pathological form went too far for human toleration." In this volume, one also gets a sense of how thinkers like Belinsky, Herzen, Meinecke, and Weizmann all contributed to his intellectual outlook.

In the final essay of this volume, "General Education," written in 1969, Berlin sums up the value of power of ideas, "But if men are to be enabled to control their lives in the light of knowledge of what it is that they are dealing with, and not simply to regard disturbing changes of this kind with mere bewilderment, or fatalistic resignation, or fanaticism, or the disdain of the elect, or a self-destructive desire to surrender to the irresistible, it is desirable that the young, in particular, should be furnished with weapons against such helplessness." Berlin's ideas are as relevant today as they were when he wrote this and will continue to be for generations to come. Ideas never die. Especially good ones.