The Deepest Strand. Isiah Berlin and the Intellectual History of Russia

Abstract

Abstract Isaiah Berlin’s essays on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia throw light not only on their subject – the role of that group in preparing the ideational ground for the coming revolutions – but more broadly on Berlin’s central philosophical preoccupations and historiographical and hermeneutical assumptions and method. I try to show this – the centrality to his overall project of Berlin’s work on the Russians – by contextualising that work within the broader framework of his philosophical and historical thought.