Sense of Reality

Berlin is a philosopher of history as well as a historian of ideas, and these nine engaging, previously unpublished essays, broadcasts, talks and lectures written or delivered between 1950 and 1972 confirm the noted Oxford scholar's breadth of vision, humanistic outlook and enormous erudition worn lightly. Deeply skeptical of system-builders of all types, whether Marxists, metaphysicians, Darwinians, positivists or scientists, he regards ""-isms"" as traps that all ages invent. ""Political Judgment,"" an inquiry into what makes a politician wise or gifted, bristles with practical intelligence. In his boldest essay, ""The Romantic Revolution,"" he argues that 18th-century romanticism, with its emphasis on subjectivity and the inner life, had a transforming effect on ethics, politics and aesthetics: Beethoven's music finds its counterpart in the worship of political individualism exemplified by Napoleon. Berlin finds much to admire in Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore's double-edged critique of colonialism, on the one hand, and in Indians' chauvinist nationalism, on the other. Overall, these essays brilliantly subject to the microscope the ever-lurking forces of irrationalism, doctrinaire ideology, prejudice and amoralism, forces that Berlin dubs the Counter-Enlightenment. (May)