Volume 45, Number 20 · December 17, 1998
Wise Man
By Alan Ryan
Isaiah Berlin: A Life
by Michael Ignatieff
Metropolitan Books, 356 pp., $30.00
The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays
by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy, by Roger Hausheer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 667 pp., $35.00
When Isaiah Berlin died on November 5th last year, an astonishing number of people felt it as a personal loss. Berlin was eighty-eight years old, and had been unwell for some months, so his death was not exactly a surprise; nonetheless, it came as a shock, and it left a large gap in the lives of those who knew him even slightly. It sounds mildly insulting to say of anyone that he has become an institution; but it is certainly true that Berlin had become something larger than any of the roles he had occupied with such distinction—among them, philosopher, author, diplomat, and college president. Perhaps, to borrow W.H. Auden's description of Freud, he had become a 'climate of opinion.' It was a climate that owed much, if not quite everything, to the personality of its creator.
Review, 8026 words
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