POLITICAL IDEAS IN THE ROMANTIC AGE

ISAIAH BERLIN WAS BORN IN RIGA, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia; there in 1917, in Petrograd, he witnessed both Revolutions – Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents came to England, and he was educated at St Paul’s School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

At Oxford he was a Fellow of All Souls, a Fellow of New College, Professor of Social and Political Theory, and founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy. In addition to Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, his main published works are Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty and The Soviet Mind. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

Henry Hardy, a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, is one of Isaiah Berlin’s Literary Trustees. He has edited (or co-edited) many other books by Berlin, including the first three of four volumes of his letters, and is currently working on the remaining volume with Mark Pottle.

Joshua L. Cherniss is a graduate of Yale, holds a doctorate in history from Oxford, and is completing a Ph.D. in political theory at Harvard. He has taught political theory at Yale, Harvard and Smith College, and is the author of A Mind and Its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought (2013).

William A. Galston is a Senior Fellow and Ezra Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. His many books on political theory include Liberal Pluralism (2002) and The Practice of Liberal Pluralism (2005).

For further information about Isaiah Berlin visit
<http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/>