"The Proper Study of Mankind" brings together Berlin's most celebrated writing. Here readers will find his penetrating portraits of contemporaries; his essays on liberty and his exposition of pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to scientific method; and his studies of intellectual originals.

Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of our time and one of its finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing: here the reader will find 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 his exposition of pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to scientific method; and his brilliant studies of such intellectual originals as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder.