Offers a new interpretation of Johann Gottfried Herder's political thought, situating his ideas in pan-European Enlightenment debates.

Isaiah Berlin was deeply admired during his life, but his full contribution was perhaps underestimated because of his preference for the long essay form. The efforts of Henry Hardy to edit Berlin's work and reintroduce it to a broad, eager readership have gone far to remedy this. Now, Princeton is pleased to return to print, under one cover, Berlin's essays on these celebrated and captivating intellectual portraits: Vico, Hamann, and Herder. These essays on three relatively uncelebrated thinkers are not marginal ruminations, but rather among Berlin's most important studies in the history of ideas. They are integral to his central project: the critical recovery of the ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment and the explanation of its appeal and consequences--both positive and (often) tragic. Giambattista Vico was the anachronistic and impoverished Neapolitan philosopher sometimes credited with founding the human sciences. He opposed Enlightenment methods as cold and fallacious. J. G. Hamann was a pious, cranky dilettante in a peripheral German city. But he was brilliant enough to gain the audience of Kant, Goethe, and Moses Mendelssohn. In Hamann's chaotic and long-ignored writings, Berlin finds the first strong attack on Enlightenment rationalism and a wholly original source of the coming swell of romanticism. Johann Gottfried Herder, the progenitor of populism and European nationalism, rejected universalism and rationalism but championed cultural pluralism. Individually, these fascinating intellectual biographies reveal Berlin's own great intelligence, learning, and generosity, as well as the passionate genius of his subjects. Together, they constitute an arresting interpretation of romanticism's precursors. In Hamann's railings and the more considered writings of Vico and Herder, Berlin finds critics of the Enlightenment worthy of our careful attention. But he identifies much that is misguided in their rejection of universal values, rationalism, and science. With his customary emphasis on the frightening power of ideas, Berlin traces much of the next centuries' irrationalism and suffering to the historicism and particularism they advocated. What Berlin has to say about these long-dead thinkers--in appreciation and dissent--is remarkably timely in a day when Enlightenment beliefs are being challenged not just by academics but by politicians and by powerful nationalist and fundamentalist movements. The study of J. G. Hamann was originally published under the title The Magus of the North: J. G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism. The essays on Vico and Herder were originally published as Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas. Both are out of print. This new edition includes a number of previously uncollected pieces on Vico and Herder, two interesting passages excluded from the first edition of the essay on Hamann, and Berlin's thoughtful responses to two reviewers of that same edition.

Johann Gottfried Herder was a philosopher and important intellectual presence in eighteenth-century Germany. Herder's Political Thought examines the work of this significant figure in the context of both historical and contemporary developments in political philosophy. Vicki A. Spencer reveals Herder as one of the first Western philosophers to grapple seriously with cultural diversity without abandoning a commitment to universal values and the first to make language and culture an issue of justice. As Spencer argues, both have made Herder a source of inspiration for the pluralist turn of contemporary political philosophy. Contending that in an era of globalization, it is no longer possible to ignore Herder's crucial insights on the relationship between cultural membership and individual identity, Spencer demonstrates how these ideas can help us understand, and perhaps resolve, the linguistic and cultural-political struggles of our times.

The texts collected in this volume contain Herder's most original and stimulating ideas on politics, history and language.

Herder is often criticized for having embraced cultural relativism, but there has been little philosophical discussion of what he actually wrote about the nature of the human species and its differentiation through culture. This book focuses on Herder's idea of culture, seeking to situate his social and political theses within the context of his anthropology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, theory of language and philosophy of history. It argues for a view of Herder as a qualified relativist, who combined the conception of a common human nature with a belief in the importance of culture in developing and shaping that nature. Especially highlighted are Herder's understanding of the relativity of virtue and happiness, and his belief in the impossibility of constructing a single best society. The book will appeal to a wide range of readers interested both in Herder and in Enlightenment culture more generally.

In this masterful work of historical scholarship, Zeev Sternhell, an internationally renowned Israeli political scientist and historian, presents a controversial new view of the fall of democracy and the rise of radical nationalism in the twentieth century. Sternhell locates their origins in the eighteenth century with the advent of the Anti-Enlightenment, far earlier than most historians. The thinkers belonging to the Anti-Enlightenment (a movement originally identified by Friederich Nietzsche) represent a perspective that is antirational and that rejects the principles of natural law and the rights of man. Sternhell asserts that the Anti-Enlightenment was a development separate from the Enlightenment and sees the two traditions as evolving parallel to one another over time. He contends that J. G. Herder and Edmund Burke are among the real founders of the Anti-Enlightenment and shows how that school undermined the very foundations of modern liberalism, finally contributing to the development of fascism that culminated in the European catastrophes of the twentieth century.

Among his generation of intellectuals, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is recognized both for his innovative philosophy of language and history and for his passionate criticism of racism, colonialism, and imperialism. A student of Immanuel Kant, Herder challenged the idea that anyone – even the philosophers of the Enlightenment – could have a monopoly on truth. In Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism, John K. Noyes plumbs the connections between Herder’s anti-imperialism, often acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, and his epistemological investigations. Noyes argues that Herder’s anti-rationalist epistemology, his rejection of universal conceptions of truth, knowledge, and justice, constitutes the first attempt to establish not just a moral but an epistemological foundation for anti-imperialism. Engaging with the work of postcolonial theorists such Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak, this book is a valuable reassessment of Enlightenment anti-imperialism that demonstrates Herder’s continuing relevance to postcolonial studies today.