Isaiah Berlin

This book provides a sustained, critical and theological engagement with arguably the most crucial aspect of contemporary society - its diversity.The author finds in the social theory of Isaiah Berlin a number of fruitful ways to reframe the debate over these questions, and to contribute to a more positive conversation regarding our fundamental differences.The book focuses particularly on Berlin's critique of monism and idealistic utopianism, arguing that pluralism does not represent a failure in the nature of human society, but a superabundance of possibilities in a created world grounded in the character of God. Bringing Berlin's thought into conversation with other social theorists, philosophers and Christian theologians, the book provides leaders and members of faith communities with a viable model to move beyond tolerance as mere forbearance to a grace which consists of respect and radical acceptance of others.

Since its founding in 1922, Foreign Affairs has been the world's leading journal of international relations, a distinction earned by providing the most insightful and far-reaching commentary on global politics and economic policy available anywhere. America has increasingly played a pivotal role in world events, whether military, political, economic, or ideological, and Foreign Affairs and its contributors have been at the center of each debate.

It was in Foreign Affairs that George Kennan first proposed the policy of containment that became the touchstone of U.S. strategy during the Cold War; that statesmen-scholars like Henry Kissinger and Arthur Schlesinger have debated the contentious issues of nuclear weapons and human rights; that journalists like Walter Lippmann and James Reston have offered prescient analyses of American foreign policy; and that thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Samuel Huntington have explained the changing nature of the world. In The American Encounter, readers will find these landmark essays and many more in a unique intellectual history of this century and of the extraordinary role that America has played in it.

There is no other book like this, because there is no other publication like Foreign Affairs. The American Encounter is a powerful link to the giants of history, those visionaries whose warnings and advice still speak to us today, offering wisdom, insight, and a greater understanding of America's place in the world.

"Although a great many memoirs are being published these days, this autobiography by Morton White has special significance because professional philosophers seldom write their memoirs and, when they do, they rarely produce books as engaging as this one. As historian of ideas and a philosopher, White is able to situate his life in the deeper and broader intellectual currents of his time, and therefore the story of his experiences at Columbia, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study is a brilliantly conceived contribution to the history of American philosophy in the twentieth century. Readers concerned with the development of higher education will be fascinated by White's description of the struggles over religion at Harvard in the 1950s, while historians of urban life will be much interested in his vivid account of his boyhood on the Lower East Side of New York. And students of pragmatism will learn much about the twentieth-century attack on the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements from a letter written to White by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski, and from the three-way correspondence of Nelson Goodman, W. V. Quine, and White reproduced in an appendix.

From Kosovo to Québec, Ireland to East Timor, nationalism has been a recurrent topic of intense debate. It has been condemned as a source of hatred and war, yet embraced for stimulating community feeling and collective freedom. Joan Cocks explores the power, danger, and allure of nationalism by examining its place in the thought of eight politically engaged intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the antagonist of capital, Karl Marx; the critics of imperialism Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon; the liberal pluralist Isaiah Berlin; the neonationalist Tom Nairn, and the post-colonial writers, V. S. Naipaul and Edward Said. Cocks not only sheds new light on the complexities of nationalism but also reveals the tensions that have inspired and troubled intellectuals who have sought to lead lives between detached criticism and political passion.In lively, conversational prose, Cocks assesses their treatment of questions such as the mythology of national identity, the right to national self-determination, and the morality of nationalist violence. While ultimately critical of nationalism, she engages sympathetically even with its defenders. By illuminating the links that distinguished minds have drawn between thought and action on nationalism in politics, this stimulating work provides a rich foundation from which we ourselves might think or act more wisely when confronting a phenomenon that, in fundamental and perplexing ways, has shaped our world.