Isaiah Berlin

The four essays are `Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century'; `Historical Inevitability', which the Economist described as `a magnificent assertion of the reality of human freedom, of the role of free choice in history'; `Two Concepts of Liberty', a ringing manifesto for pluralism and individual freedom; and `John Stuart Mill and the Ends of Life'. There is also a long a...

Isaiah Berlin witnessed the excesses of the Russian Revolution as a child. In becoming one of the key liberal intellects of the last century he made some of his most important contributions on Russian thought and the idea of freedom. In the ten essays gathered here, Berlin addresses the great Russian minds of the nineteenth century - Herzen, Bakunin, Belinsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev - as well as exp...

'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.' This fragment of Archilochus, which gives this book its title, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Tolstoy. There have been various interpretations of Archilochus' fragment; Isaiah Berlin has simply used it, without implying anything about the true meaning of the words, to outline a...