Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder - Second Edition

by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy (Editor), Jonathan Israel (Foreword by)

Overview

Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin's essays on these celebrated and captivating intellectual portraits: Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin's most important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences—both positive and (often) tragic.


Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism.


Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers—in appreciation and dissent—is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements.


The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Both are out of print.


This new edition includes a number of previously uncollected pieces on Vico and Herder, two interesting passages excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful responses to two reviewers of that same edition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691157658
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	11/10/2013
Edition description:	Second edition with a New Foreword
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) was one of the leading intellectual historians of the twentieth century and the founding president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. His many books include The Hedgehog and the Fox, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Roots of Romanticism, and Against the Current (all Princeton). Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin's literary trustees. He has edited several other volumes by Berlin, and is currently preparing Berlin's letters and remaining unpublished writings for publication.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jonathan Israel ix

Editor's Preface xix

Note on References xxv

VICO AND HERDER 1

Author's Preface 5

Introduction 7

The Philosophical Ideas of Giambattista Vico 26

Vico's Theory of Knowledge and Its Sources 151

Herder and the Enlightenment 208

THE MAGUS OF THE NORTH 301

Editor's Preface 305

Foreword to the German Edition 312

Author's Preface 317

1. Introduction 320

2. Life 324

3. The Central Core 341

4. The Enlightenment 345

5. Knowledge 350

6. Language 390

7. Creative Genius 410

8. Politics 423

9. Conclusion 428

Excursus to Chapter 6 444

Bibliographical Note 449

Appendix to the Second Edition 453

Giambattista Vico: Man of Genius 455

The Reputation of Vico 479

The Workings of Providence 484

Hamann's Origins 486

Letters 489

Index 517

What People are Saying About This

Jerry Z. Muller

"Isaiah Berlin is among the finest intellectual historians of recent decades. Yet his position is somewhat peculiar: for while he is clearly a scholar of enormous erudition, the characteristic style of his work is closer to that of brilliant conversation than of conventional historical scholarship. His works on Vico, Herder, and Hamann deal with thinkers who were at odds with main currents of the Enlightenment. For anyone with a historical sense, the recrudescence of so many of the characteristic notions of the 'Counter-Enlightenment' under the rubric of 'postmodernism' is striking. The recovery of these ideas is all the more effective for being a critical one: Berlin reminds his readers of some of the unfortunate historical consequences of the ideas in question."

Mark Lilla

Isaiah Berlin's main preoccupation throughout his productive life was understand the nature of the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann belong with his other profound and influential studies of the leading figures of what he called the Counter-Enlightenment. But they are also crucial for anyone hoping to understand Berlin's own analysis of modern life and politics, which has received increasing attention in recent years. Anyone interested in Berlin or those he studied will find this an essential volume.
— Mark Lilla, University of Chicago

From the Publisher

"Isaiah Berlin's main preoccupation was to understand the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Counter-Enlightenment thinkers are classics and also illuminate his own ideas about the place of reason in politics. An essential volume."—Mark Lilla, Columbia University

"Isaiah Berlin is among the finest intellectual historians of recent decades. Yet his position is somewhat peculiar: for while he is clearly a scholar of enormous erudition, the characteristic style of his work is closer to that of brilliant conversation than of conventional historical scholarship. His works on Vico, Herder, and Hamann deal with thinkers who were at odds with main currents of the Enlightenment. For anyone with a historical sense, the recrudescence of so many of the characteristic notions of the 'Counter-Enlightenment' under the rubric of 'postmodernism' is striking. The recovery of these ideas is all the more effective for being a critical one: Berlin reminds his readers of some of the unfortunate historical consequences of the ideas in question."—Jerry Z. Muller, Catholic University of America

"Isaiah Berlin's main preoccupation throughout his productive life was understand the nature of the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann belong with his other profound and influential studies of the leading figures of what he called the Counter-Enlightenment. But they are also crucial for anyone hoping to understand Berlin's own analysis of modern life and politics, which has received increasing attention in recent years. Anyone interested in Berlin or those he studied will find this an essential volume."—Mark Lilla, University of Chicago

Muller

Isaiah Berlin is among the finest intellectual historians of recent decades. Yet his position is somewhat peculiar: for while he is clearly a scholar of enormous erudition, the characteristic style of his work is closer to that of brilliant conversation than of conventional historical scholarship. His works on Vico, Herder, and Hamann deal with thinkers who were at odds with main currents of the Enlightenment. For anyone with a historical sense, the recrudescence of so many of the characteristic notions of the 'Counter-Enlightenment' under the rubric of 'postmodernism' is striking. The recovery of these ideas is all the more effective for being a critical one: Berlin reminds his readers of some of the unfortunate historical consequences of the ideas in question.
— Jerry Z. Muller, Catholic University of America

Editorial Reviews

"Isaiah Berlin's main preoccupation was to understand the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Counter-Enlightenment thinkers are classics and also illuminate his own ideas about the place of reason in politics. An essential volume."—Mark Lilla, Columbia University


"Isaiah Berlin is among the finest intellectual historians of recent decades. Yet his position is somewhat peculiar: for while he is clearly a scholar of enormous erudition, the characteristic style of his work is closer to that of brilliant conversation than of conventional historical scholarship. His works on Vico, Herder, and Hamann deal with thinkers who were at odds with main currents of the Enlightenment. For anyone with a historical sense, the recrudescence of so many of the characteristic notions of the 'Counter-Enlightenment' under the rubric of 'postmodernism' is striking. The recovery of these ideas is all the more effective for being a critical one: Berlin reminds his readers of some of the unfortunate historical consequences of the ideas in question."—Jerry Z. Muller, Catholic University of America


"Isaiah Berlin's main preoccupation throughout his productive life was understand the nature of the modern reaction against the Enlightenment. These essays on Vico, Herder, and Hamann belong with his other profound and influential studies of the leading figures of what he called the Counter-Enlightenment. But they are also crucial for anyone hoping to understand Berlin's own analysis of modern life and politics, which has received increasing attention in recent years. Anyone interested in Berlin or those he studied will find this an essential volume."—Mark Lilla, University of Chicago

From the Publisher

All three essays in this collection have appeared elsewhere at other times in the past 40 years; Berlin himself proposed publishing a trilogy of essays on Herder, Vico, and de Maistre in 1960, though that book never appeared. This is the first time that these three particular essays have been published together. Hardy, one of Berlin's literary trustees, has made editorial revisions on the Vico essay for its appearance here; the Herder essay is essentially the same as it appeared in The Proper Study of Mankind. The Hamann study has an additional foreword written by Berlin in 1994 for the German edition. Berlin saw Vico, Herder, and Hamann as antipathetic to the underlying ideas of the French Enlightenment, and in these three essays, he delineates the reasons for that antipathy. In them, and particularly in Hamann, Berlin sees the first cogent criticisms of the movement. He also clarifies what he feels is misdirected in each writer's thinking and what effect their ideas had on the thought of the centuries that followed. Hardy has performed a sterling service here by reviving these three essays and collecting them in one volume. Not only does it provide some access to the thought of the three writers, but it helps to place them more properly within the intellectual movements of their own times. Recommended for academic libraries with programs in philosophy, the history of ideas, and Western intellectual development.--Terry C. Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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