Political Philosophy

This is the fourth video in a series on the political thought of Sir Isaiah Berlin, whose work attempted to bridge the divide between varieties of universalism, which tend to lead to totalitarianism, and the particularism that emerged from the backlash against universalism from sources in Counter-Enlightenment, Romantic and reactionary thought. In this video, I discuss Berlin’s views of the Counter-Enlightenment thinker Joseph de Maistre, who in Berlin’s view anticipated much of modern fascism.