Isaiah Berlin Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Times Literary Supplement

Critical Essay by Times Literary Supplement

SOURCE: “History and Morals,” in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 2759, December 17, 1954, p. 821.

In the following essay, the reviewer discusses Berlin's ideas regarding historical determinism and human responsibility in Historical Inevitability.

For the past 200 years or more, historians and philosophers of history have been busily engaged in an attempt to organize the past experience of mankind, to marshal the facts of history into an orderly sequence of cause and effect, and to enlarge our understanding of the past, in the spoken or unspoken belief that such understanding would contribute to the more effective management of the present and the future. Vico and Condorcet, Kant and Hegel, Marx and Comte, Buckle and the addicts of geopolitics, the political adapters of Darwinism and the racial theorists, have all paid their tribute to this belief. Some were idealists, others materialists; some, according to later canons of judgment, were reputable,...
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