After quoting a passage during which Fichte summons Germany to its transcendental future, he unearths his most sensible resolution in one other prophet, Heinrich Heine, who, in his well-known visions of Germany’s destiny, writes that ‘Armed Fichteans will come, whose fanatical will neither worry nor self- curiosity can contact. [. . . ] A drama could be played in Germany by contrast with which the French Revolution will look an insignificant peaceable idyll’. three Understandably, in his different 5 profiles Berlin’s feedback doesn't achieve the extent of depth present in his piece on Fichte. In every one case, he follows a similar approach to exposition: he describes the logical and biographical improvement of a selected thinker’s principles, which regularly results in a last synthesis within which the person thinker is judged to be against human freedom. In Berlin’s research of Rousseau, for instance, the concept that of radical liberty results in the ‘general will’, that social ‘we’ which isn't the sum of person ‘I’s yet a better harmony that integrates them and whose collective authority, in a last ‘mystical’ bounce, Rousseau ultimately assigns to the country. four Berlin’s seventy three under (subsequent undeniable numbers check with the pages of the current volume). 2  three  four  113. seventy eight. forty eight. 1  Foreword  • xxi revelatory portrait of Rousseau (whom he considers ‘the such a lot sinister and so much bold enemy of liberty’)1 isn't really with no sympathy. Berlin supplies him a few credits for the genesis of participatory democracy and praises his spontaneous mistrust of the Enlightenment elite whom Helvétius esteems. He additionally sees useful contributions within the philosophy of Hegel, akin to the incorporation of the humanities and sciences into his crucial imaginative and prescient of heritage. His account of Hegel is schematic yet transparent: from the metaphysical spark of the concept that of the dialectic to Hegel’s proposal of ‘transhistorical heroes’ because the protagonists of the inevitable march of background towards its ultimate synthesis in common cause as represented through the nation. on the subject of Hegel, Berlin’s prophetic impetus isn't really a lot revelatory as hugely severe: he considers Hegel the author of the main influential and oppressive ‘theodicy’2 in background. it truly is noteworthy, a minimum of from our distance in time, that Berlin comprises ‘enemies’ of person freedom whose rules – within the area of heritage – don't appear against liberalism, no less than of their perspectives on economics: Helvétius and his utilitarianism and Saint-Simon’s productivism. Be that because it may possibly, his portrait of Saint- Simon is one of the most sensible within the booklet. past his prestige as a prototypical secular ‘Messiah’, Berlin regards him as ‘the maximum of all of the prophets of the 20th century’3 for having been the 1st to parent the commercial and technological forces of historical past. The essay on Maistre (on whom Berlin could later post a lot wider investigations) exhibits a just a little unusual appeal to a personage very faraway from Berlin, to a guy who was once a company apologist for monarchy, the Church, the earlier and the dictatorship of the sabre.