Henry Hardy

The compelling story of a decades-long collaboration between social and political theorist Isaiah Berlin and his editor, Henry Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work into print.Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century – a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation. His ideas – especially his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty and political despotism – have become even more prescient and vital today.But who was the man behind such influential views? Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the self-deprecating philosopher emerges.This is a unique portrait of a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained largely out of view.

"With a revised foreword by Brookings President Strobe Talbott and a new introduction by Berlin’s editor, Henry Hardy.George Kennan, the architect of US policy toward the Soviet Union, called Isaiah Berlin “the patron saint among the commentators of the Russian scene.” In The Soviet Mind, Berlin proves himself fully worthy of that accolade. Although the essays in this book were originally written to explore the tensions between Soviet communism and Russian culture, the thinking about the Russian mind that emerges is as relevant today under Putin’s post-communist Russia as it was when this book first appeared more than a decade ago.This Brookings Classic brings together Berlin’s writings about the Soviet Union. Among the highlights are accounts of Berlin’s meetings with the Russian writers in the aftermath of the war; a celebrated memorandum he wrote for the British Foreign Office in 1945 about the state of the arts under Stalin; Berlin’s account of Stalin’s manipulative “artificial dialectic”; portraits of Pasternak and poet Osip Mandel'shtam; Berlin’s survey of Russian culture based on a visit in 1956; and a postscript reflecting on the fall of the Berlin Wall and other events in 1989.Henry Hardy prepared the essays for publication; his introductory discussions describe their history. In his foreword, revised for this new edition, Brookings’s Strobe Talbott, a long-time expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, relates the essays to Berlin’s other work.The essays and other pieces in The Soviet Mind—which includes a new essay, “Marxist versus Non-Marxist Ideas in Soviet Policy”, and a summary of a talk on communism—represent Berlin at his most brilliant, and are invaluable for policy-makers, students and anyone interested in Russian politics and thought—past, present and future."

Now in one volume--"Berlin's most influential essays". Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of our time and one of its finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing: here the reader will find Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"; his penetrating portraits of contemporaries from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevelt; his essays on liberty and his exposition of pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to scientific method; and his brilliant studies of such intellectual originals as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder.