The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library

Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

Corrections in grey cells have been made in the paperback edition published by Pimlico in 2007. Those in pink cells remain to be made.
I am grateful to Neil Foxlee and Roger Hausheer for bringing some of these errors to my attention.

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jacket
[add picture credit:]
 Jacket: details from The Tennis-Court Oath, 20 June 1789, after Jacques-
Louis David. © Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris/Bridgeman
Art Library.
vii
 2–1 up
 [insert this new line between these lines:]
Postscript to editor’s preface 284
x
 note 4, 2
 A. C. L.
 A. L. C.
xviii
 10–9 up
 thinkers (1960 and 1965 respectively), represented [...] them
 thinkers, represented [...] them (1960 and 1965 respectively)
xx
 6 up
 tel quel
 telles quelles


[add after end of preface:]
PS  A postscript to the above preface is printed on p. 284.
xxx
 15
 in this
 in this [way]

note 4
 L 339–40.
 L 339.
xlix
 16
[insert note cue 2 after ‘rich variety’]


[insert new note 2:]
 19.
liii
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 reaction [...] in PIRA attests
 reaction in PIRA [...] attests
lv
 9
 works given
 works
lvi
 4–5 [insert new line between these lines:]
 1956: ‘The Philosophers of the Enlightenment’, POI 36–52
lix
 8 up
 National
 Natural
7
 12 up
 infallible
 ineffable
9
 11
 the species
 other species
12
 4 up
 conclusions
 confusions
14
 11
 partisan favour partisan fervour
28
 19 up
 proof and not
 demonstrative proof and must
31
 18 up
 news
 view
38
 13 up
 Leuwenhoek
 Leeuwenhoek
97
 2 up
 mythical
 mystical
103
 note 3, 5 [on p. 104]
 xii.
 p. xii.
135
 4 up
 does
 does not
152
 15–14 up
 to a man coming to murder my friend about my friend’s whereabouts
 about my friend’s whereabouts to a man coming to murder my friend
161
 14 up
 jejeune
 jejune
221
 3–4 criteria of [...] establishing truth
 criteria of, [...] establishing, truth
234
 4 up
 music
 the music
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 consequence
 consequent
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 8
 progressive
 a progressive
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 soldiers
 soldier
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 19
 sense which
 sense in which
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 3
 Rechtstaat
 Rechtsstaat

4 up
 premisses are
 premisses is
262
 1
 is true or not.
 is true.
266
 2
 innaccurate
 inaccurate
284
[add the following:]
Postscript to editor’s preface

 Since this volume went to press I have come across more references in his correspondence to the work Berlin did on the book after he had given the Mary Flexner Lectures. In a letter to the Warden of All Souls (John Sparrow) dated 17 February 1955 he writes that he has ‘concluded the second draft of a book on Political Ideas in the Romantic Age, arising out of lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College and later broadcast by the BBC’. This may put a slightly optimistic gloss on what he had achieved, but it does add to the evidence that all six chapters were originally drafted, and that the text published here represents a comparatively late stage in Berlin’s preparation of the work. Nevertheless, he clearly realised that there was a good deal more to be done, since on 28 July 1956 he writes from Oxford to his friend Morton White: ‘in Sept (abroad) & Oct. (here) I shall try to work like a black to finish my Bryn Mawr politics book. Then to fresh pastures.’
    As late as 1959 Berlin is still promising eventual delivery. Miss McBride wrote to him on 11 February 1959, with immense tact, suggesting he send the manuscript as it then stood. In his mildly disingenuous reply of 16 February 1959 he writes: ‘I am covered with shame. If the lectures which I delivered at Bryn Mawr had been written down I should, after all these years, have let you have them, closing my eyes and ears to the consequences. But I fear they do not exist, only a hideous collection of fragments and notes to remind me of what I should have done and what I did. But I am still determined to produce a book and send you a manuscript. Despite everything that has been said about good resolutions, provided we are both alive – and I feel beautifully optimistic on that score despite everything – you should have my lectures within two years or so. Please forgive me for my dreadful, but all too characteristic, dalliance.’
    Three years later, however, his beautiful optimism has disappeared. As a postscript to a card written on 6 August 1962 to Alfred A. Knopf, who had enquired, in a postscript of his own, whether he might publish the lectures, Berlin writes: ‘The Bryn Mawr lectures I have mercifully consigned to the dust bin.’ Not true, at any rate literally, but plainly Berlin had by this point finally accepted that he would never deliver the book to which the present volume is the closest approximation now possible. In a letter of the Ides of March 1963 to Chester Kerr of Yale University Press, he puts this down to ‘diffidence on my part, of which [Oxford University Press] were somewhat critical’, and says that ‘no manuscript was ever delivered to them, nor, now, is ever likely to be’.
H.H.

14 up
 shoud
 should
288
[insert new entry above that for Victor Hugo:]
 Hugo, Gustav, 233

Hugo, Victor
 129, 233
 129
291
 Schopenhauer 207
 168n, 207