BOOKS
ISAIAH BERLIN'S ESSAYS
AGAINST THE CURRENT: ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS. By
Isaiah Berlin.
Viking Press. $16.95.
"What do you teach? "
"History. "
"What kind of history?"
"Intellectual history."
"Oh, I see. ... Eh, what's that?"
If
writing intellectual history is, as someone once quipped,
like nailing jelly to a wall, trying to define the discipline is even mOte
difficult when the wall itself can no longer be taken for granted as
objective reality. No doubt the chaotic ferment in the discipline today
is due to the precarious status of both intellect and idea, the former no
longer regarded as a rational faculty capable of apprehending truth,
the latter no longer a form or symbol capable of representing it. Sir
Isaiah Berlin is too mature a thinker to suffer from the epistemological
nightmares that afflict the theorists of history and literature in our
time. Indeed it is to his credit that he can write so confidently about the
great thinkers of the past in full knowledge of the impasse at which
modern thought finds itself. While philosophers may persist in asking
questions about their own questions, Berlin long ago gave up the study
of philosophy to explore the history of ideas. One gathers that he finds
some consolation in the fact that "reality" had been a central problem
in Machiavelli's Florence and Vico's Naples centuries before it became
a fashionable "problematic" in Wittgenstein's Vienna or Sartre's Paris.
Against the Current,
the third of a projected four volume collection of
Berlin's essays, presents old-fashioned intellectual history in the very
best sense of the term: rethinking the thoughts of other thinkers . Its
reception in America may reflect the disarray of the discipline in this
country more than the luminous quality and genius of the work itself.
Intellectual history developed relatively late in the United States.
Although practiced much earlier, the discipline did not become
professionally recognized until the appearance of
The Journal of the
History of Ideas
in 1940. The main spirit behind that distinguished
journal was Arthur O. Lovejoy, pioneer of the "history of ideas"
