Books like Against the Current by Isaiah Berlin

"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 work, which has appeared in various books (many of them out of print) over the past half century. Here the reader will find Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"; his penetrating portraits of important contemporaries - from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevelt; his seminal essays on liberty and his exposition of his most distinctive doctrine - pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to science; and his brilliant studies of intellectual originals such as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder."--BOOK JACKET.

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 and masterly introduction written specially for this collection, in which the author replies to his critics

Explains why revolution often leads to war, using case studies of the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions.

"John Hobson claims that throughout its history most international theory has been embedded within various forms of Eurocentrism. Rather than producing value-free and universalist theories of inter-state relations, international theory instead provides provincial analyses that celebrate and defend Western civilization as the subject of, and ideal normative referent in, world politics. Hobson also provides a sympathetic critique of Edward Said's conceptions of Eurocentrism and Orientalism, revealing how Eurocentrism takes different forms, which can be imperialist or anti-imperialist, and showing how these have played out in international theory since 1760. The book thus speaks to scholars of international relations and also to all those interested in understanding Eurocentrism in the disciplines of political science/political theory, political economy/international political economy, geography, cultural and literary studies, sociology and, not least, anthropology"--

Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and political circumstances that produced such men as Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky, and others of the Russian intelligentsia, who made up, as Berlin describes, 'the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world.' (Source: [Penguin Books](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/13561/russian-thinkers-by-isaiah-berlin-ed-henry-hardy-intro-aileen-kelly-other--jason-ferrell/9780141442204))