Volume 53, Number 12 · July 13, 2006
The Case for Decency
By John Gray
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, with an introduction by Joshua L. Cherniss
Princeton University Press,292 pp., $29.95
Unfinished Dialogue
by Isaiah Berlin and Beata Polanowska-Sygulska, with a foreword by Henry Hardy
Prometheus, 317 pp., $28.00
Russia, Poland and Marxism: Isaiah Berlin to Andrzej Walicki, 1962–1996
in Dialogue and Universalism, Vol. 15, No. 9–10, 2005.Warsaw University Press, 196 pp., $5.00
Western political thinking between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of communism was shaped by the experience of totalitarianism. The rise of National Socialism and Stalinism produced a sense of the fragility of liberal civilization that persisted after the Nazi regime had been destroyed and Soviet power contained. The question that troubled many was how liberal values could have collapsed so precipitately and completely in much of Europe, while Communist regimes that claimed to embody Enlightenment values repressed freedom on an unprecedented scale. It was clear that if the disasters of the twentieth century were not to be repeated, the intellectual roots of totalitarianism had to be uncovered and destroyed, even if this meant relinquishing some cherished Western beliefs.
Review, 4550 words
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