The Roots of Romanticism - Softcover

Berlin, Isaiah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712665447 ISBN 13: 9780712665445

Publisher: Random House, 2000

Synopsis

The Roots of Romanticism at last makes available in printed form Isaiah Berlin's most famous lecture series, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965, recorded by the BBC, and broadcast several times. A published version has been keenly awaited ever since the lectures were given, and indeed Berlin had always hoped to complete a book based upon them. But, despite extensive further work, this hope was not fulfilled, and this book is an edited transcript of his spoken words. For Berlin, the Romantics set in train a vast unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notions of objective truth and validity in ethics, with incalculable, all-pervasive results. As he said of them elsewhere: 'the world has never been the same since, and our politics and our morals have been deeply transformed by them. Certainly this has been the most radical, and indeed terrifying...change in men's outlook in modern times.' In these brilliant lectures Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define Romanticism, distils its essence, traces its development from its first stirrings to its unbridled apotheosis, and shows how its lasting legacy permeates our contemporary outlook.

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Review

In these lectures, originally delivered at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art in 1965, acclaimed historian of philosophy Isaiah Berlin addresses the origins of what he deems "the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred." His focus, apart from some digressions into Montesquieu, Hume, and Rousseau, is on the German philosophers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and he runs through the contributions of Herder, Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, and others in turn. He also shows how romanticism would later influence both the existentialists and the fascists, but paradoxically have its greatest influence upon the emergence of a liberalism that seems at complete odds with the romantic sensibility. Berlin's tone is informed but rarely obtuse, making The Roots of Romanticism as fun to read as it must have been to hear him deliver spoken. --Ron Hogan

From the Back Cover

"These are not only wonderfully engaging lectures, but by now also a historical document of considerable importance.... What was so good about the way Berlin tackled Romanticism was that he allowed for the variety of ideas and attitudes that so marked the movement, but found a common theme in the antitheses with which so much of his work was concerned--Romanticism as anti-rationalism, anti-monism, anti-utilitarianism, and so on. That enabled him to do something that few other writers have brought off, which was to set each strand of romanticism in its own cultural setting."--Alan Ryan, New College, University of Oxford

"This book provides an excellent account of the topics that were to preoccupy Berlin throughout his life. . . . It is a history of ideas, wonderfully under control, always with the sense of how those ideas have impacted on other ideas and eventually on the contemporary period."--Tracy B. Strong, University of California, San Diego

"In a dark century, he showed what a life of the mind should be: skeptical, ironical, dispassionate and free."--Michael Ignatieff

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0712665447
• ISBN 13: 9780712665445
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 171