Russian Thinkers which is a compilation of essays on the Russian luminaries that includes Alexander Herzen, Tolstoy, Belinsky, Bakunin, and populists like Chernyshevsky is very helpful to introduce one to Russian history during the19th century and was written in Russia. These essays are used by Berlin so that he can clearly bring his points about the political ideologies. The main purpose of the book is a critical analysis of the political and social ideologies existing in Russia whereby Berlin crystal clear knew his materials. The book is not thematically arranged and appears very confusing since the themes are not chronologically arranged.
The main theme in this book is to show that he knew many things and was also interested in knowing many things and this is properly demonstrated in the fox and hedgehog metaphor whereby the hedgehog is known to know one major thing while the fox knows several issues. He thereby categorizes the human beings as hedgehogs and their lives are the personification of a particular and central image of realism which makes them think, feel, and breath as the system addicts and examples include Dante, Plato, Nietzsche, and Proust, or as foxes whose lives centrifugal instead of being centripetal, chase numerous different ends, mostly have a logic of realism that stops them against formulating a specific system of everything simply because they know life is very complex to be compressed in a form of a Procrustean unitary system, Montaigne, Shakespeare Balzac, and Goethe are in one way or the other the foxes.
Berlin was aware of the instability of liberalism and termed it as “non -belief belief” which obviously does not satisfy the deeper human needs and managed to stay away from the totalitarian power’s planned genocides and the siren songs. But Berlin has not succeeded, assuming due to the history of ideas environment while compilation his essays, to respond to additional essential queries plaguing in the liberals’ minds such as whether it could tackle 20th/21st-century pressing issues Or whether it mutated into a dark distortion of its self, therefore, making a deal with postmodern regal power as being symbolized by the X Filesque financial and military Free World gluttonous elites who batten onto the unenviable situation of the bigger part of the globe such as Africa, Latin America, East Europe and part of Asia.
Berlin essays on his hero, Herzen, fathers, and children controversy, Turgenev and juxtaposed to Herzen, Bakunin are not dated, fresh and more so universal. Tolstoy is unsurpassable covered, and I doubt it can be done better. But essays like those covering Russia, the 1848 revolutions, German Romanticism, and Russian populism, although brightly weaven, they are of historical interest than relevant to the contemporary metastable angst condition. But eventually, Berlin made his point about his ideas of liberalism.
References
Isaiah Berlin (1994) Russian Thinkers, Penguin Publishers, UK.