Isaiah Berlin. The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. Edited by Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer. New York.Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000.

The Proper Study of Mankind brings together some of the most celebrated works by one of the leading thinkers of our time. Here the reader will find Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, The Hedgehog and the Fox; his penetrating portraits of contemporaries, from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevelt; his essays on liberty and the disposition of political life; his defenses of philosophy and history against scientism or culturalism; and his brilliant studies of such intellectual originals as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder. Having these extraordinary works in one book allows readers who are new to Berlin, as well as those already familiar with him, to see the depth and breadth of this philosopher's immense contribution.

"This engrossingly readable book of essays . . . contains ideas that suggest a devastating critique of the conservative utopian mentality that has shaped our lives over the past two decades . . . For anyone wanting to understand the misuses and turns of the history of ideas, this book is indispensable." - John Gray, The New York Times Book Review