Books like Personal impressions by Isaiah Berlin

A comparative study of the American, French, and Russian revolutions.

In this book Rorty argues that thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein have enabled societies to see themselves as historical contingencies, rather than as expressions of underlying, ahistorical human nature or as realizations of suprahistorical goals. This ironic perspective on the human condition is valuable on a private level, although it cannot advance the social or political goals of liberalism. In fact Rorty believes that it is literature not philosophy that can do this, by promoting a genuine sense of human solidarity. A truly liberal culture, acutely aware of its own historical contingency, would fuse the private, individual freedom of the ironic, philosophical perspective with the public project of human solidarity as it is engendered through the insights and sensibilities of great writers. The book has a characteristically wide range of reference from philosophy through social theory to literary criticism. It confirms Rorty's status as a uniquely subtle theorist, whose writing will prove absorbing to academic and nonacademic readers alike.

«Dos conceptos de libertad» es una defensa del pluralismo y de la libertad individual. La obra del filósofo Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) es una de las más firmes defensas del pluralismo occidental. Su famoso ensayo 'Dos conceptos de libertad' ofrece una introducción accesible a su pensamiento. El incisivo análisis de Berlin sobre el concepto de libertad sigue determinando nuestro pensamiento sociopolítico actual.

A series of lectures about the purpose of Universities in society.

The definitive biography of the Bundy brothers, who advised presidents on peace and war during the Cold War and became key architects of America's Vietnam War strategy, despite their doubts about sending American troops to Southeast Asia.

Isaiah Berlin's The Sense of Reality at last makes available an important body of previously unknown work by one of our leading historians of ideas and one of the finest essayists writing in English. Eight of the nine pieces included here are published for the first time, and their range is characteristically wide. The subjects explored include realism in history, judgment in politics, the history of socialism, the nature and impact of Marxism, the radical cultural revolution instigated by the Romantics, Russian notions of artistic commitment, and the origins and practice of nationalism. The title essay, starting from the impossibility of historians being able to re-create a bygone epoch, is a superb centerpiece.