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  • Published: 11 March 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141442204
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $22.99

Russian Thinkers




This revised edition has been completely re-set with an updated index and a new preface

Isaiah Berlin witnessed the excesses of the Russian Revolution as a child, and in becoming one of the key liberal intellects of the last century some of his most important contributions were on the subject of Russia and the concept of freedom. In the ten essays gathered here, Berlin addresses the great Russian minds of the nineteenth century: Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev, Belinsky and Tolstoy, as well as exploring the political and social revolutions they inspired and responded to. Berlin himself describes this extraordinary outpouring as ‘the largest single Russian contribution to social change in the world’.

  • Published: 11 March 2008
  • ISBN: 9780141442204
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $22.99

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About the author

Isaiah Berlin

Isaiah Berlin was born in Riga, now capital of Latvia, in 1909. When he was six, his family moved to Russia, and in Petrograd in 1917 Berlin witnessed both Revolutions - Social Democratic and Bolshevik. In 1921 he and his parents emigrated to England, where he was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Apart from his war service in New York, Washington, Moscow and Leningrad, he remained at Oxford thereafter - as a Fellow of All Souls, then of New College, as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory, and as founding President of Wolfson College. He also held the Presidency of the British Academy.

His published work includes Karl Marx, Russian Thinkers, Concepts and Categories, Against the Current, Personal Impressions, The Sense of Reality, The Proper Study of Mankind, The Roots of Romanticism, The Power of Ideas, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Freedom and Its Betrayal, Liberty, The Soviet Mind and Political Ideas in the Romantic Age. As an exponent of the history of ideas he was awarded the Erasmus, Lippincott and Agnelli Prizes; he also received the Jerusalem Prize for his lifelong defence of civil liberties. He died in 1997.

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Praise for Russian Thinkers

The enduring vitality of Berlin's characterisation of Russian thought is demonstrated by the publication [...] of a new edition of Russian Thinkers, painstakingly revised and augmented by Henry Hardy ... a series of sparkling and sympathetic essays

Times Literary Supplement