Description
Book SynopsisHistorians of ideas, and students of nationalism in particular, have traced the origins of much of our current vocabulary and ways of thinking about the nation back to Johann Gottfried Herder. This volume provides a clear, readable, and reliable translation of Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, supplemented by some of Herder''s other important writings on politics and history. The editors'' insightful Introduction traces the role of Herder''s thought in the evolution of nationalism and highlights its influence on fields such as history, anthropology, and politics. The volume is designed to give English-speaking readers more ready access to the thinker whom Isaiah Berlin called the father of the related notions of nationalism, historicism, and Volksgeist.
Evrigenis and Pellerin should be congratulated for editing this volume, which publishes Herder's smaller and early work, Another Philosophy of History, including six smaller essays on the same topic. This volume offers the opportunity to introduce Herder to students in a survey of the history of political thought, along with his better-known contemporaries such as Rousseau, Kant, Burke, and Hegel, as well as their predecessors Machiavelli, Locke, and Hobbes. Evrigenis and Pellerin's edition gives the reader a fine introduction to Herder and his thought. The selections of the smaller essays are very helpful in allowing someone unfamiliar with Herder to see how his important thoughts could be responsible in shaping how thinkers in the later half of the 19th Century thought about the nation and the role of politics in general. Rating: * * * * * --Clifford Angell Bates, Jr., Political Studies Review
The translation . . . is beautiful, precise, and eminently readable. . . . I found the notes extremely helpful. --Frederick Neuhouser, Barnard College, Columbia University
