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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Revered by Kierkegaard as a genius, German thinker Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), a Lutheran pietist, counterposed God's will and direct revelation to the shortcomings of science and secular liberalism. In this absorbing if unconvincing study, Berlin portrays Hamann as "the first out-and-out opponent of the French Enlightenment," a forerunner of Nietzsche and the existentialists in his defense of the intuitive and the concrete against the hyperrational, generalizing, scientific West. In his opposition to reason, his anti-intellectual identification with the masses and his attacks on Jews, Hamann fueled the irrational currents that culminated in Nazi hysteria, charges Berlin. Nevertheless, the author, a distinguished historian of ideas, believes that Hamann's original views on creativity, language as a system of symbols and the hazards of abstract thought command the attention of readers willing to tackle Hamann's digressive, dense and flowery prose style.

Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hamann was the son of a bathhouse keeper who himself became a warehouse manager. His is an outsider's philosophy, but he caught the eye of Goethe and Hegel. He came from the strain of German pietism that produced Kant yet struck out against the whole enlightenment preoccupation with reason and rational morality. In this book, revived from forgotten Columbia lectures, Berlin concentrates on Hamann's skepticism, not his Bible-based fideism. Berlin sees Hamann's arguments against the pretensions of human reason as the first major assault on the enlightenment's use of reason to bring heaven to earth. But in this portrait by the debonair apostle of a cool Oxonian common sense that rejects rationalism and skepticism alike, Hamann seems to froth at the mouth. Berlin's one positive interest is developed in his appendix on Hamann's belief that language is the result of the knitting together of the human faculties to make an intelligible unity and is neither a miraculous intervention of God nor something we invented. Any Berlin book is essential for academic libraries and public libraries serving informed readers.

- Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa

Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.