Corrections to Political Ideas in the Romantic Age

Corrections to 2nd edition

The second edition (2014) was completely revised throughout, and translations should be made from this edition, with the additional corrections listed below.

Page Line For Read
i 11 Marx, Marx, The Age of Enlightenment, [roman commas]
3–1 up the first three […] Pottle. all those listed above, and a four-volume edition of his letters. He is co-editor of The One and the Many: Reading Isaiah Berlin (2007), editor of The Book of Isaiah: Personal Impressions of Isaiah Berlin (2009), and author of In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure (2018).
ii 2 up [insert below:] <https://isaiah-berlin.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/>
iii [add at end:] Affirming: Letters 1975–1997
vi 10 The Isaiah The Trustees of the Isaiah
xxv 2nd epigraph Quel Quelle
xxxiii 4 Quel Quelle
note 2, last line [add at end:] [But see Postscript, xli below.]
xli [add at end:]
Postscript 2017
Since the above was written, a letter from IB to the Warden of All Souls dated 4 May 1954 has come to light. In this IB writes: ‘I have in MS about three-quarters of a book dealing with the origins of modern political ideas in the romantic age.’ This may be seen as weighing in the balance against the earlier evidence, cited at xxxiii/2 above, that the missing chapters were drafted.
8 note 1, last 1981– 1981–2015
18 note 1, 1 viiii viii
227 note 1, 1 naturans naturans –
266 10 up bees or beavers beavers or bees
359 1 both in the East and West in both the East and the West
362 3 freedom, freedom
363 8 up forth, and forth – and
366 78/119 8/1
369 16 nd and
371 16 Ignorance Prejudices
372 3 up of physics or physics
380 14 let lets
382 9 by either either by
4 up authorise authorises
383 note 1, 1 tereated treated
387 4 up the a

Corrections to 1st edition

The superseded list below may be of use to owners/readers of the first edition (1997). It includes (but is not exhausted by) corrections made in later impressions of that edition.

Page Line For Read
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.
xxxiii note 2, last [add in translations:] [Since this was written, a letter from IB to the Warden of All Souls dated 4 May 1954 has come to light. In this IB writes: ‘I have in MS about three-quarters of a book dealing with the origins of modern political ideas in the romantic age.’ This may be seen as weighing in the balance against the earlier evidence, cited at xxxiii/2 above, that the missing chapters were drafted.]
[add in the Princeton edition:] [But see Postscript, xli below.]
xli [add at end of text in the Princeton edition:]
Postcript 2016

Since the above was written, a letter from IB to the Warden of All Souls dated 4 May 1954 has come to light. In this IB writes: ‘I have in MS about three-quarters of a book dealing with the origins of modern political ideas in the romantic age.’ This may be seen as weighing in the balance against the earlier evidence, cited at xxxiii/2 above, that the missing chapters were drafted.
xlix 16 [insert note cue 2 after ‘rich variety’]
[insert new note 2:] 19.
liii 6–5 up 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
95 note 1, 2 1887–1919 1887–1919, 1990
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
238 3 up consequence consequent
241 8 progressive a progressive
251 7 soldiers soldier
253 19 sense which sense in which
257 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

Last updated 14 June 2021