April 1999

This is a placeholder post linking to this month's entries in the pre-Blogger format.


1999-04-01

READING NOTEBOOK

[Isaiah] Berlin was insistent that the most monstrous crimes of the twentieth century have been committed on behalf of ideas that, in the abstract, sound most attractive. Marx and Freud, he argued, were both too eager to champion a version of what Rousseau had once said was "forcing" people to be "free." Berlin stood for
calling a spade a spade; he distinguished liberty from other possible values, such as justice or equality. Intellectuals who recklessly play around with ideas could end up, like Heidegger, as proponents of Hitler.

--Paul Roazen, "An Effervescent Thinker," review of Isaiah Berlin: A Life, by Michael Ignatieff, in The American Scholar, Spring 1999, p. 154

1999-04-01

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