Isaiah Berlin Against the Current

Mark Lilla discusses the work of Isaiah Berlin at The New York Review of Books.

'as the Enlightenment gained adherents over subsequent centuries and the wider public saw the benefits of free inquiry, pressure on the new philosophers and scientists to address the wider implications of their work eased, leaving those who challenged them looking like irrational, anti-philosophical reactionaries. By making the question What can we know? paramount, they suppressed the more unsettling one, Why and what should we want to know?

'Berlin’s achievement was to have used the history of ideas to recover this latter question and make it urgent once again.'