"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 work, which has appeared in various books (many of them out of print) over the past half century.

Here the reader will find Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"; his penetrating portraits of important contemporaries - from Pasternak and Akhmatova to Churchill and Roosevelt; his seminal essays on liberty and his exposition of his most distinctive doctrine - pluralism; his defense of philosophy and history against assimilation to science; and his brilliant studies of intellectual originals such as Machiavelli, Vico, and Herder."--BOOK JACKET.