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READING: Alan Ryan on Isaiah Berlin on Karl Marx

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Alan Ryan: Forward to: Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: ’Karl Marx was Isaiah Berlin’s first book. He was just thirty years old when it appeared. In Oxford and London he was already known as a dazzling conversationalist and a strikingly gifted young philosopher; but it was in Karl Marx that he first revealed his special talent as a historian of ideas—the discipline in which he enthralled his readers for the rest of his writing life. That talent is, as such gifts often are, a talent that is easier to admire and enjoy than it is to describe; but it emerges as an astonishing ability to do justice both to the thinker and the thought—to paint a picture of the personalities of the men and women he writes about, without for a moment forgetting that we want to know about them because of their ideas rather than their marital adventures or their tastes in dress, and to make the picture vivid just because, although ideas have a life of their own, they are also stamped with the

Alan Ryan’s 1995 “Foreword” to Isaiah Berlin’s: Karl Marx: His Life & Environment. Very much worth reading as a take on Karl Marx, even more so as a take on Isaiah Berlin, and perhaps as a take on Alan Ryan… Alan Ryan: Forward to: Isaiah Berlin: Karl Marx: His Life and Environment: ’Karl Marx was Isaiah Berlin’s first book. He was just thirty years old when it appeared. In Oxford and London he was already known as a dazzling conversationalist and a strikingly gifted young philosopher; but it was in Karl Marx that he first revealed his special talent as a historian of ideas—the discipline in…

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