Against the Current Essays in the History of Ideas. By Isaiah Berlin. Edited by Henry Hardy. (New York: Viking Press, 1980. Pp. liii + 394. $16.95.)

1981 ◽  
Vol 75 (2) ◽  
pp. 472-473
Author(s):  
Isaac Kramnick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
History Of

Louis Menand: The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. 2001. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 546 pp.

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-204
Author(s):  
Lance Kenney
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cold War ◽  
William James ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Cultural Impact ◽  
Oliver Wendell Holmes ◽  
History Of ◽  
Charles Peirce ◽  
The Cold War

Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club, daunting in its choice of subject matter, closely aligns itself with the ancient sense of the word ‘history’ as a fluid, almost epic narrative. The Metaphysical Club of the title was a conversation group that met in Cambridge for a few months in 1872. Its membership roster listed some of the greatest intellectuals of the day: Charles Peirce, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Chauncey Wright, amongst others. There is no record of the Club’s discussions or debates—in fact, the only direct reference to the Club is made by Peirce in a letter written thirty-five years later. Menand utilizes the Club as a jumping-off point for a sweeping analysis of the beliefs of the day. The subtitle of the book belies its true mission: ‘a story of ideas in America.’ Menand discusses the intellectual and social conditions that helped shape these men by the time they were members of the Club. He then shows the philosophical, political, and cultural impact that these men went on to have. In doing so, Menand traces a history of ideas in the United States from immediately prior to the Civil War to the beginning of the Cold War.

Isaiah Berlin and the Animal Instinct

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-144
Author(s):  
Paul Delany
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Sexual Abstinence ◽  
Abstract Thinking ◽  
World War ◽  
Analytical Philosophy ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Abstract Logic ◽  
Positive Liberty ◽  
History Of

Between Aristotle and Hegel, none of the major Western philosophers were married. Is abstract thinking, at its highest, incompatible with the messiness of everyday life? At the age of nineteen, Isaiah Berlin said he was ‘vowed to eternal celibacy’. Was there a connection between his sexual abstinence and his choice of analytical philosophy as a career? During World War II he fell in love with the gentile Patricia de Bendern; this frustrating affair coincided with Berlin’s shift from abstract logic to the history of ideas. In 1956 he took a Jewish bride, Aline Halban. His personal history reflects difficulties in choosing between endogamy and exogamy, Zionism and the diaspora, negative and positive liberty.

Inventing “Little Italy”

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna R. Gabaccia
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Dime Novels ◽  
Police Reporting ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Methodologies ◽  
The Moment ◽  
New Yorkers ◽  
Little Italy

Digitized texts open new methodologies for explorations of the history of ideas. This paper locates the invention of the term “Little Italy” in New York in the 1880s and explores its rapid spread through print and popular culture from police reporting to fictional portraits of slumming and then into adolescent dime novels and early film representations. New Yorkers invented “Little Italy” but they long disagreed with urban tourists about its exact location. Still, from the moment of its origin, both visitors and natives of New York associated Little Italy with entertainment, spectacle, and the search for “safe danger.” While the location of Little Italy changed over time, such associations with pleasure and crime have persisted, even as the neighborhood emptied of its immigrant residents.

Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
The Core ◽  
Negative Liberty ◽  
History Of ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Sacrifice

This chapter on Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty centers on the most famous piece in it, “Two Concepts of Liberty.” As a matter of genre, it is an essay in conceptual analysis. Because liberty is a historically inflected concept, it is also an essay in the history of ideas. The chapter argues that Berlin was a “Cold War liberal” only in the limited sense that he campaigned against all doctrines that licensed the sacrifice of real individuals on the altar of impersonal entities such as the proletariat or the nation, and Soviet Communism was a salient case both because of the Cold War and Berlin’s own Russian origins. Individuals have an inviolability that governments of any stripe must not infringe. That is the core of negative liberty. Positively, Berlin’s faith was that unimpeded, individuals with adequate resources would spontaneously lead varied and vivid existences.

scholarly journals Reviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-144
Author(s):  
Annabel Brett ◽  
Fabian Steininger ◽  
Tobias Adler-Bartels ◽  
Juan Pablo Scarfi ◽  
Jan Surman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
International Relations ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
The Political ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
University Of Michigan ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
Ann Arbor ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

Searching for the Political History, Archaeology, and the History of Ideas. Elías José Palti, An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), xx + 235 pp.Translation in International Relations and Ottoman-Turkish History. Einar Wigen, State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 276 + xvii pp.The Invention of Conservatism as a Modern Ideology. Amerigo Caruso, Nationalstaat als Telos? Der konservative Diskurs in Preußen und Sardinien-Piemont, 1840–1870 [Nation-State as Telos? Conservative discourse in Prussia and Sardinia-Piedmont, 1840–1870] Elitenwandel in der Moderne, Bd. 20 (Berlin: de Gruyter Ouldenberg, 2017), 516 pp.Reconsidering Friendship in the Face of Anarchy in International Society: Refreshing Insights from Conceptual History. Evgeny Roshchin, Friendship among Nations: History of a Concept (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 264 pp.On the Use of Foreign Words. Falko Schmieder and Georg Toepfer, eds., Wörter aus der Fremde: Begriffsgeschichte als Übersetzungsgeschichte [On the Use of Foreign Words: Conceptual History as History of Translation] (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2017), 328 pp.

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