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"I was never a first-rate philosopher," wrote Berlin in 1991 to the Harvard philosopher Morton White. "I was a perfectly competent teacher at New College but I do not think much more than that [ … ] Writing Karl Marx excites me far more than writing papers for the Aristotelian Society." Nonetheless, he added, "the other half of our lives, the purely philosophical one, was indispensable."¹ This book, chronicling Berlin's intellectual formation from early childhood up to the mid-fifties, takes Berlin up to the beginning of the "mature" stage of his intellectual career, which started after he left the Realist philosophy of his youth and reinvented himself as a political thinker and historian of ideas. It follows Berlin's career up to the point when he finally sat to write the "big book" everyone expected him to write, Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (hereafter PIRA), which he found unsatisfactory and left unpublished for the rest of his life. ² This study concludes with PIRA, and leaves Berlin at the threshold of his worldly reputation, before he was knighted by the Queen, appointed Chichele Professor, and produced "Two Concepts of Liberty," which was immediately recognized as a landmark of political theory.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137015723_11

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