Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty

Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty

Liberty is a revised and expanded edition of the book that Isaiah Berlin regarded as his most important--Four Essays on Liberty, a standard text of liberalism, constantly in demand and constantly discussed since it was first published in 1969. Writing in Harpers, Irving Howe described it asan exhilarating performance--this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be. Berlins editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlins principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in anextended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlins unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of...