SOURCE: “Isaiah Berlin's Enlightenment,” in Commentary, Vol. 69, No. 5, May, 1980, pp. 61-4.

In the following essay, Hook reflects on Berlin's observations on Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment thought.

Isaiah Berlin's third volume of collected essays, Against the Current, falls within the area of historical sociology This is the last of the twelve divisions in which Arthur O. Lovejoy, the father of the academic discipline known as the history of ideas, charted the interests and themes customarily explored under that rubric. The field is concerned, among other things, with the ruling ideas, the climates of opinion, the underlying intellectual currents and tendencies that affect historical and social development.

As these and other writings attest, Isaiah Berlin has emerged since Lovejoy's death as the most distinguished explorer of a vast area of thought in the humanities and social studies. The intellectual styles of Lovejoy and Berlin, however, are quite different and achieve their...