Isaiah Berlin; The Journey of a Jewish Liberal

New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2012. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. xiv, 316, [2] pages. Includes Acknowledgments, and Abbreviations and Archives. Also includes Introduction: Explaining the Liberal Predicament. Includes Part I: The Importance of Being Witty; Part II: The Pink Liberal; and Part III: The Anticosmopolitan Pluralist. Also includes Notes, Bibliography, and an Index, as well as 9 black and white illustrations. This is one of the Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. This study offers an intellectual biography of the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas Sir Isaiah Berlin. It aims to provide the first historically contextualized monographic study of Berlin's formative years and identify different stages in his intellectual development, allowing a reappraisal of his theory of liberalism. This groundbreaking intellectual biography offers a fresh reappraisal of the philosopher, political thinker, and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin, from his childhood to the apex of his career as a scholar and public figure. Applying a "double perspective" that examines Berlin both as an East European Jewish Emigre as well as a British Liberal Intellectual, Arie M. Dubnov illuminates the powerful tensions that defined Berlin's work, stressing the very ambivalent relation between his liberal philosophy and his Zionism. Powerfully relevant to the intellectual and political crises of today, this is a long overdue reassessment of one of the seminal figures of twentieth-century thought. Arie M. Dubnov is the Max Ticktin Chair of Israel Studies. Trained in Israel and the U.S., he is a historian of twentieth century Jewish and Israeli history, with emphasis on the history of political thought, the study of nationalism, decolonization and partition politics, and with a subsidiary interest in the history of Israeli popular culture. Prior to his arrival at GW, Dubnov taught at Stanford University and the University of Haifa. His publications include the intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin: The Journey of a Jewish Liberal (2012), and two edited volumes, Zionism - A View from the Outside (2010), seeking to put Zionist history in a larger comparative trajectory, and Partitions: A Transnational History of Twentieth-century Territorial Separatism (2019, co-edited with Laura Robson), tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition in the British interwar Imperial context and reconstructing the cross-border links connecting partition plans in Ireland, Palestine/Israel and India/Pakistan. Additionally, he has published numerous articles in leading journals in the field, including Nations & Nationalism, Modern Intellectual History, The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Rethinking History, Jewish Social Studies, The Journal of Israeli History and more. Sir Isaiah Berlin OM CBE FBA (6 June 1909 - 5 November 1997) was a Latvian-born British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy. Born in Riga (now the capital of Latvia, then a part of the Russian empire) in 1909, he moved to Petrograd, Russia, at the age of six, where he witnessed the revolutions of 1917. In 1921 his family moved to the UK, and he was educated at St. Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1932, at the age of twenty-three, Berlin was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to his own prolific output, he translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during World War II, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. From 1957 to 1967 he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. In 1966, he played a critical role in creating Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its founding President. Berlin was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties, and on 25 November 1994 he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at the University of Toronto, for which occasion he prepared a "short credo" (as he called it in a letter to a friend), now known as "A Message to the Twenty-First Century", to be read on his behalf at the ceremony.