Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Hitchens on Isaiah Berlin

Berlin congratulated himself on remaining on good terms with friends who could barely stand to be in the same room.

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...he was simultaneously pompous and dishonest in the face of a long moral crisis where his views and his connections could have made a difference.

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He may also have felt that luck played too large a part in his success – a rare but human concession to superstition.

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Ernest Gellner, however, always said he [Berlin] was a fraud.

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It wasn’t the anti-semites or Christians, after all, who persecuted Spinoza.


-- Moderation of Death

this is a review of Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin: A Life. more on Berlin himself than on the book though. written for a competent reader. эссе довольно язвительное, в частности про Lewis Namier и его слова касательно the future of the white race. много внимания уделено отношению Берлина к палестинской тематике, что, впрочем, неудивительно в эссе Хитченса.

see also Two Spirits of Liberty: The world could use more of Christopher Hitchens’s courage and Isaiah Berlin’s tolerance

also The Dishonesties of Isaiah Berlin

at the end Hitchens says with commendable directness:

If it is fair to say, as Ignatieff does, that Berlin never coined an epigram or aphorism, it is also fair to add that he never broke any really original ground in the field of ideas.
вообще он многословен

see my review

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