The Roots of Romanticism is the long-awaited text of Isaiah Berlin's most celebrated set of lectures, the Mellon Lectures, delivered in Washington in 1965 and heard since by a much wider audience on BBC radio. For Berli, the Romantics set in train a vast, unparalleled revolution in humanity's view of itself. They destroyed the traditional notion of objective truth in ethicsm with incalculable, all-pervasive results. In his unscripted tour de force Berlin surveys the myriad attempts to define romanticism, distils its essence, traces its development, and shows how its legacy permeates our outlook today.

"Sir Isaiah Berlin here explores the world and the ideas of a man he calls the Enlightenment's "most passionate, consistent, extreme, and implacable enemy," a philosopher whom he considers perhaps the only "wholly original critic of modern times." J.G. Hamann was an eccentric Prussian thinker of the eighteenth century whose peculiar and difficult work was cherished by Kant, Goethe, and other luminaries, yet to the twentieth century this self-styled Magus of the North is all but unknown." "With his customary eloquence and insight, Berlin penetrates to the heart of Hamann's concerns and shows how important they are to modern life - ideas about creativity, the nature of language and thought, human knowledge, secular and spiritual authority. Though Hamann opposed the values we think of as modern - rationalist, secular individualism - and he lived his life in poverty and neglect, his visionary pietism and skeptical empiricism, Berlin argues - his genius - deserve attention and respect."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In the period covered here Isaiah Berlin creates Wolfson College, Oxford; John F. Kennedy becomes U.S. President (and is assassinated); Berlin dines with JFK on the day he is told of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba; the Six-Day Arab-Israeli war of 1967 creates problems that remain with us today; Richard M. Nixon succeeds Johnson as President and resigns over Watergate; and the long agony of the Vietnam War grinds on in the background. At the same time Berlin publishes some of his most important work, including Four Essays on Liberty--the key texts of his liberal pluralism--and the essays later included in Vico and Herder . He appears on the radio, on television, and in documentary films, and gives numerous lectures, especially his celebrated Mellon Lectures, later published as The Roots of Romanticism . Behind these public events is a constant stream of gossip and commentary, acerbic humor, and warm personal feeling. This new volume leaves no doubt that Berlin is one of the very best letter-writers of the 20th century.