Below are the five parts to an essay by Isaiah Berling on 19thC the Russian publisher Alexander Herzen. I highly recommend them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOj3V21g4ng http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lJn38b12_o http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_woYq9se20&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNjhFHERcos&feature=relmfu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKylH3S5iI4&feature=relmfu First of all Berlin really knew how to read literature. Then also there was his voice, upper class Englsh snobby voice, but in his case, perhaps deserved. What makes this essay or lecture particularly interesting is that Berlin so completely identifies with Herzen, that he might as well have talked about his own liberal political philosophy. I've been through one collection of Berlin's essays, called Against the Current which develops much the same material in the form of intellectual biographies. They almost all turn out to be brillant and annoying. Berlin was famous for coining the term the counter-enlightenment and proceeds to outline the romantic movements in the wake of the French Revolution, and the reciation of various earlier figures such as Vico. On the other hand he manages in my opinion to get it slightly wrong in way that made it very difficult to use such a term against Strauss---who richly deserved the label. This annoyed me to no end because I could use the term or footnote Berlin's essay. At the heart of all this was my own youth when academic liberal professors and academia more generally so completely obscured Marx and the whole socialist traditions in the US and elsewhere, that those of us who cared about such things, had to reconstruct them after we got out school. That there were such traditions was only hinted at mostly in student culture of the period. And well, the eminent liberals like Berlin were the very foundation of such smoke and mirrors before us. Still it is worth listening to. In another of these lectures on Turgenev, Berlin explains the great wound that Turgenev suffered as a total coward aboard a ship that catches fire at sea. Near his death he wrote a very short story called Fire at Sea. I had read this story and knew the rumor and other details of Turgenev's life and had read Fathers and Sons, and his Sketchbooks. The latter is highly recommended. It is a descriptive series of sketchs of the life and times of rural Russia told by an aristocratic hunter who wonders on country roads and forays into the nearby forest for game. Really good stuff. So, what does this have to do with us. Well look at Egypt or us for that matter trapped in tyrannies that are crushing whatever used to be our way of life. Even the ambiguous liberal solutions that Berlin might advocate, if they were to succeed might give us relief and some hope. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
