Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas

Berlin argues that Machiavelli's originality lies not in his political advice but in his discovery of a genuine moral antinomy. Machiavelli juxtaposed two incompatible ethical systems—Christian virtue and pagan civic virtue—without suggesting one could be rationally chosen over the other. Berlin claims Machiavelli thus saw 'that there might exist ends—ends in themselves in terms of which alone everything else was justified—which were equally ultimate, but incompatible with one another, that there might exist no single universal overarching standard that would enable a man to choose rationally between them' [citation:3]. This is the seed of Berlin's value pluralism.

The Counter-Enlightenment is Berlin's term for the intellectual movement that resisted the Enlightenment's faith in universal reason, natural law, and a single rational answer to how we should live. Its central figures include Vico, Hamann, Herder, and others who emphasized the particularity of cultures, the incommensurability of values, and the limits of rationalist analysis. Berlin argues in this collection that these thinkers, though often illiberal, identified genuine problems that mainstream Enlightenment rationalism failed to see—especially the reality of cultural difference and the irreducibility of moral conflict [citation:3].

Berlin's approach is philosophical rather than purely historical. As Mark Lilla notes in the foreword to the second edition, Berlin's decision to become a historian of ideas was 'not an abandonment of philosophy but a decision to do philosophy by other, perhaps better, means' [citation:6]. His instinct was that you understand an idea better when you know its genesis and grasp why it compelled people to action. Berlin also brings an unusual 'imaginative re-creation' to his subjects, suspending disbelief in ideas he personally rejects in order to present them fairly [citation:3].

The most common misconception is that Berlin endorses or sympathizes with all the 'against the current' thinkers he profiles. In fact, Berlin often disagrees profoundly with his subjects—Machiavelli, Sorel, and the Counter-Enlightenment figures were not liberals. The moral purpose of these essays, as one scholar has noted, is to engage with illiberal ideas seriously without adopting them, to show what rationalists and liberals can learn from them while still defending liberal values [citation:3]. Berlin's technique of 'empathetic insight' is a method, not an endorsement.

Against the Current is widely regarded as one of the most representative collections of Berlin's work [citation:15]. It was first published in 1979 and has remained in print through multiple editions, including a corrected second edition in 2013 with a new foreword by Mark Lilla [citation:10][citation:1]. The essays have been praised for 'luminous clarity and imaginative empathy' and for illuminating 'some of the most crucial problems of western culture and civilisation' [citation:15]. Its central themes—value pluralism and the importance of dissenters—remain foundational to liberal political theory.

The collection includes 'The Counter-Enlightenment,' 'The Originality of Machiavelli,' 'The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,' 'Vico's Concept of Knowledge,' 'Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment,' 'Montesquieu,' 'Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,' 'Herzen and His Memoirs,' 'The Life and Opinions of Moses Hess,' 'Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx, and the Search for Identity,' 'The Naivety of Verdi,' 'Georges Sorel,' and 'Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power' [citation:4][citation:1]. The second edition adds an appendix of letters in which Berlin discusses these essays [citation:6].