Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal

by A. Dubnov

Overview

This study offers an intellectual biography of the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin. It aims to provide the first historically contextualized monographic study of Berlin's formative years and identify different stages in his intellectual development, allowing a reappraisal of his theory of liberalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780230110700
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	04/03/2012
Series:	Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History
Edition description:	2012
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

ARIE DUBNOV Lecturer in the History Department at Stanford, USA.

Table of Contents

Explaining the Liberal Predicament PART I: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING WITTY A Young Boy from Riga Becoming a Russian-Jew The Realist Appeal PART II: THE PINK LIBERAL Mr. Jericho's Piercing Eyes 'I Never Don't Moralize' Karl Marx PART III: THE ANTI-COSMOPOLITAN PLURALIST Collisions On Moses and Joshua Shifting Horizons 'This mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away'

Editorial Reviews

'Dubnov's book deserves to be read...Helps us to recall the extraordinary relevance of a great thinker of liberal pluralism.' - Il Sole 24 Ore

From the Publisher

Dubnov (History/Stanford Univ.) debuts with a biography of Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), the world-renowned Jewish historian and philosopher. The author provides insight into both Berlin and the English culture and society to which his family fled to escape anti-Semitic pogroms and revolution. Dubnov claims that the mature Berlin's ideas of freedom and "value pluralism" were rooted in his experiences defining and maintaining a Jewish identity during the 1920s and '30s, while also assimilating into Oxford academic culture. Berlin's participation in the philosophical disputes of the day took place against the background of the British elite's appeasement of Hitler and Nazism and the Peel Commission's adoption of partition for Palestine. Such conflicts were foreshadowed in encounters with the anti-Semitic Christian "Englishness" of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, and later with the views of retired imperial officials at All Souls College, Oxford. They were echoed during the time of Berlin's service in the United States during World War II, when it became increasingly obvious that Churchill's government was not going to support the establishment of Israel, and America's Zionists began to follow their own path. This was also the time when Berlin first made the acquaintance of Chaim Weizmann and became a Zionist, and the author compares what he calls Berlin's postwar "diaspora Zionism" with his becoming a political thinker of freedom. An inspiring account of the relationship between the struggle to defend pragmatic liberalism and the dilemmas and conflicts of politics.

Kirkus Reviews