Product Description

Isaiah Berlin's celebrated radio lectures on six formative anti-liberal thinkers were delivered on the BBC's Third Programme in 1952. They are published here for the first time, fifty years on. Freedom and its Betrayal is one of Isaiah Berlin's earliest and most convincing expositions of his views on human freedom and the history of ideas, views which later found expression in such famous works as 'Two Concepts of Liberty', and were at the heart of his lifelong work on the Enlightenment and its critics. In his lucid examinations of sometimes difficult ideas Berlin demonstrates that a balanced understanding and a resilient defence of human liberty depend on learning both from the errors of freedom's alleged defenders and from the dark insights of its avowed antagonists. This book throws light on the early development of Berlin's ideas, and supplements his already published writings with fuller treatments of Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel and Saint-Simon, with the ultra-conservative traditionalist Maistre bringing up the rear. Freedom and its Betrayal shows Berlin at his liveliest and most torrentially spontaneous, testifying to his talents as a teacher of rare brilliance and impact. Listeners tuned in expectantly each week to the broadcasts and found themselves mesmerised by Berlin's astonishingly fluent extempore style. A leading historian of ideas, who was then a schoolboy, records that the lectures 'excited me so much that I sat, for every talk, on the floor beside the wireless, taking notes'. This excitement is at last recreated here for all to share.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #79655 in Books
• Published on: 2003-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Review
This is a collection of six lectures originally given by Isaiah Berlin on BBC Radio in 1952, transcriptions edited by Henry Hardy. The lectures give quick brush-paintings of the philosophies of six major thinkers - Helvetius, Rousseau, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Simon and Maistre - and their attempts to construct a moral and political science; or, as Berlin puts it, to answer the question: 'Why should anyone obey anyone else?' They were the first ever to be broadcast without the aid of a prepared script, and caused something of a sensation when they were aired; Berlin's torrential style and extempore illustrations caught the imagination of his listeners to such an extent that The Times headed their leader column with a comment on the series. Isaiah Berlin famously spoke with a rapidity and intensity that was at once captivating and extremely hard to understand. Hardy as a result is faced with a Herculean editorial task - and a task in which he acquits himself superbly, bringing to life not only the sense of Berlin's lectures, but something of the style in which he delivered them. The resulting transcript shows Berlin to be possessed of an extraordinary gift for explaining complex ideas in clear and simple language, without appearing to dumb down, back off or gloss needlessly. He speaks swiftly, succinctly and conversationally - he can almost be heard, so natural is the flow of the editing - completely enunciating in a few pages ideas which took their originators whole books to expound. Each lecture reads independently as an incisive encapsulation of the thought of a major figure in Western philosophy, capped by a brief section showing why that thought is antithetic to human liberty. Berlin creates in flowing language a historical reader and, ultimately, a warning. Masterful. (Kirkus UK)

From the Publisher
'Never before had someone addressed such abstract topics with such fluency and intensity-these lectures, while presupposing no specialist expertise, introduce-some of the key issues in modern political theory in an enthusiastic and quite unpatronising way.' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph

From the Back Cover
"[Berlin's] lecturing style . . . proved enormously successful as broadcasting. . . . [H]undreds of thousands of people tuned in . . . to listen to fiendishly difficult hour-long talks, delivered in clipped, rapid-fire Oxford accent. These were the lectures that led Eliot, in his barbed way, to congratulate Isaiah for his 'torrential eloquence'; and the conservative Michael Oakeshotte to praise him, in equally barbed fashion, as 'the Paganini of the platform'. . . . The conventional signs of public attention poured in: anonymous ladies knitted him red socks; cranks sent him manuscripts. . . . The head of [the BBC's] Radio 3 hailed the talks as a landmark in British broadcasting, and they were certainly a landmark in Berlin's life. The search to find his own intellectual vocation had been a central preoccupation since his return from the war. With the broadcast of 'Freedom and Its Betrayal,' that struggle resolved itself. . . . He had become a public intellectual--in the Russian mould, but in an English idiom." (Michael Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin: A Life)

"This is one of the most important books on the history of ideas in Berlin's oeuvre. The lectures are clearer than many of his later writings and are extremely compelling. Berlin was convinced that, for all its praise of liberty, the Enlightenment was in fact hostile to it, and that the Counter-Enlightenment offered sounder intellectual grounds for defending and extending liberty. Even those who disagree with this diagnosis of modern thought will have to confront it." (Mark Lilla, University of Chicago)

Customer Reviews

What's The Big Idea?
Berlin call himself an historian of ideas, rather than a philosopher. Nevertheless, his way of reporting history throws its own light on these ideas, drawing out the ironies and ambiguities of their evolution.

In Six Enemies of Liberty, he examines in loving detail, the peculiarities of the times and the thinking of six key personalities who decisively influenced our ideas of freedom and repression, duty and justice, of our rights and our obligations.

Berlin has the wonderful art of making general trends in thought explicit, where these attitudes often were, or often are, the implicit assumptions of those who owned them. He then contrasts them with conflicting attitudes which seemed equally obvious to other people in other circumstances. This draws out the full novelty of the concepts in discussion.

Some of the thinkers (Rouseau, Kant..) are familiar to most students of philosophy or history, but we tend to think of them only as bit part players who lent key aspects of our current sense of liberty. Their inclusion in a list of 'traitors' is enough to raise an eybrow, but the book argues carefully and convincingly, that however well intended these men were, their attitudes to freedom then were finaly the opposite of what the West in the 21st century would usually regard as valuable.

As an historian, Berlin always frames their ideas in the context of the going debate of their time, bringing out the full passion of their declarations and protests. He also always manages to produce a couple of names that lie off the beaten track - De Maistre was particularly new and interesting for me - to make the whole experience richer and more entertaining.

A peculiar magic that Berlin invokes, is to show either how easily men could justify attitudes to freedom which nowadays would be found cruel and outrageous, or on the other side of the coin, how ideas which sound very credible at first, led men to conclusions which seem the very opposite of what their creators declared themselves to be fighting for.

As ever, Berlin's immense scholarship, and persuasive eloquence serve to warn us precisely against too much scholarship and eloquence. The big idea is that the almost the last thing the world needs is any more big ideas.

Effortless Insight
The book contains six essays orignally given as radio lectures, and the direct and straightforward way difficult ideas on philosophy are communicated shines through the beautifully flowing prose. The writing is elegant, immediate and almost casually deep. An excellent introduction to philosophy around the Enlightenment, and a wonderful display of a lively mind at work.