Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas

Berlin's criterion is not temperament but intellectual position: each figure mounted a serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of their time, and each was marginalised or dismissed for it. Machiavelli exposed the incompatibility of Christian virtue and political necessity; Vico rejected the application of natural-scientific method to human society; Montesquieu treated laws as relative to climate and custom rather than universal reason; Herzen resisted the abstraction of radical ideology; Sorel attacked the rationalism of socialist orthodoxy. Kirkus Reviews noted that this third volume of Berlin's collected essays contains 'the essence of Berlin's scholarly contribution' because his entire body of work is absorbed with the history of ideas . The collection's coherence lies in Berlin's conviction that these dissenters together reveal what mainstream thought suppresses: the plurality of human goods and the limits of rationalist politics.

Against the Current is not a book Berlin assembled as a unified statement. Henry Hardy edited the collection and compiled the bibliography; Roger Hausheer contributed an introduction that frames the essays' common concern with dissent and intellectual marginality . The volume was the third in a projected four-volume series of Berlin's collected writings, and its contents were partly determined by what had already appeared in the earlier volumes—Russian Thinkers and Concepts and Categories—which is why essays on Russian thinkers are largely absent here . Readers should approach the book as a curated selection shaped by editorial decisions about what belonged where, not as a monograph Berlin designed. Hausheer's introduction is a useful guide to the volume's underlying unity, but it is an editor's construction of that unity.

Graeme Garrard has argued, against Berlin, that Rousseau should be seen as the father of Counter-Enlightenment thought, and that there was no single movement deserving the name—rather, multiple Counter-Enlightenments spanning from the mid-eighteenth century through critical theory and postmodernism . James Schmidt has gone further, questioning whether 'the Enlightenment' itself is a later construction, which would render the idea of a coherent opposition to it equally problematic . These challenges do not invalidate Berlin's essays as interpretations of specific thinkers, but they complicate the overarching narrative. Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment is a useful heuristic for grouping critics of rationalism and universalism, but readers should not treat it as a settled historical taxonomy. The essay of that name, first published in 1973, remains influential precisely because it framed a debate that later historians have redefined.

Machiavelli is Berlin's earliest witness to the dissolution of a unified moral order. In Berlin's reading, Machiavelli was not merely advising princes on effective rule; he was recognising that Christian virtue and political success rest on incompatible values. There is no single standard that can reconcile them. This makes Machiavelli a precursor of Berlin's value pluralism: if two genuine goods can conflict irreconcilably, then the Enlightenment dream of a harmonious moral science is untenable. The essay on Machiavelli thus sets the pattern for the volume: a dissenting thinker exposes a truth that the dominant tradition cannot accommodate, and the historian's task is to recover that insight from the margins. A reviewer in Papers Past described Berlin's Machiavelli as one of the first to see that Western man must live in a world of diversity and endemic conflict, without a divinely decreed pattern of life .

The essays on Moses Hess, Disraeli, and Marx address a different kind of marginality: the position of Jews in European society and the search for identity under conditions of emancipation and assimilation. Moses Hess, a nineteenth-century socialist and early Zionist, is presented as a figure whose ideas ran against both orthodox socialism and assimilationist liberalism. Berlin's interest is not merely biographical; he treats these thinkers as case studies in the costs of belonging and not belonging. The Disraeli–Marx comparison, in particular, examines two responses to Jewish identity that diverge radically—one through aristocratic self-invention, the other through revolutionary universalism—while sharing a common origin in exclusion. Kirkus Reviews identified these essays as centring on 'problems of Jewish identity' and noted their relevance to the volume's concern with cultural and historical relatedness .

The book has had a complex publication history. It was first published by Hogarth Press in London in 1979, with an American edition from Viking Press in 1980 . Oxford University Press issued an edition in 1981, and Pimlico brought out a paperback in 1997 . Princeton University Press published a new edition in 2000 or 2001, which remains the standard scholarly version available today . The Princeton edition retains Hardy's editorial apparatus and Hausheer's introduction, and it is the version most likely to be found in libraries and bookshops. Readers should note that pagination differs across editions, so citations to specific essays should specify the edition used. The volume has never been substantially revised or expanded in the manner of Hardy's later editions of Liberty or The Roots of Romanticism.