Books

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Pushkin Press
May 25, 2023

Isaiah Berlin was one of the great public intellectuals of his time. A magnetic speaker and beacon of liberal philosophy, he gained first-hand experience of some of the pivotal events of the twentieth century and crossed paths with luminaries from Virginia Woolf to Sigmund Freud. Declining to write an autobiography, Berlin instead agreed to give extensive interviews to acclaimed writer Michael Ignatieff in the final decade of his life. The result is a magisterial biography that penetrates deeply into Berlin’s life and thought while capturing his vivid style of conversation. Reissued in this updated edition, it traces Berlin’s journey to become one of his era’s most vigorous defenders of liberty and individuality in the face of tyranny and dogma.

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I just finished reading “Isaiah Berlin” and must say that it is one of the finest books I have ever read. The story of Mr. Berlin’s life if fascinating, from his childhoon in Russia and England, to his education, his service in the Foreign Office during WWII, his meetings with Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova, his career as an Oxford don, etc. Mr. Ignatieff tells the story, interspersed with the substance of his developing philosophical views, with warmth and insight. Even if you care not for philosophy (and I generally do not), this book deserves attention simply because it is a wonderful life and well told.
— ★★★★★ — Richard F. Jackson (Amazon Germany review)

New book out / November 9, 2021

On Consolation

When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes—war, famine, pandemic—we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.

How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of portraits of writers, artists and musicians searching for consolation—from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi—writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of the twenty-first century.

Fire and Ashes:
Success and Failure in Politics

Harvard University Press
November 19, 2013

In 2005 Michael Ignatieff left his life as a writer and professor at Harvard University to enter the combative world of politics back home in Canada. By 2008, he was leader of the country’s Liberal Party and poised–should the governing Conservatives falter–to become Canada’s next Prime Minister. It never happened. Today, after a bruising electoral defeat, Ignatieff is back where he started, writing and teaching what he learned.

What did he take away from this crash course in political success and failure? Did a life of thinking about politics prepare him for the real thing? How did he handle it when his own history as a longtime expatriate became a major political issue? Are cynics right to despair about democratic politics? Are idealists right to hope? Ignatieff blends reflection and analysis to portray today’s democratic politics as ruthless, unpredictable, unforgiving, and hyper-adversarial.

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“A distinguished intellectual, writer, journalist, and academic gives up his library and his chair at Harvard to pursue a political career at the highest level and for six years he experiences the passion and the fever, the enthusiasm and the intrigue, the failure and the success of party politics in the vast Canadian scene. Six years after that immersion in political life, he goes back to his library, he does some thinking, and he offers us an exceptionally insightful and honest account of that adventure. This book is a compass that will help the reader find his or her way in the dizzying maze that politics has become in the great modern democracies.”
— Mario Vargas Llosa

Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry

Princeton University Press
February 16, 2003

Michael Ignatieff draws on his extensive experience as a writer and commentator on world affairs to present a penetrating account of the successes, failures, and prospects of the human rights revolution. Since the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, this revolution has brought the world moral progress and broken the nation-state’s monopoly on the conduct of international affairs. But it has also faced challenges. Ignatieff argues that human rights activists have rightly drawn criticism from Asia, the Islamic world, and within the West itself for being overambitious and unwilling to accept limits. It is now time, he writes, for activists to embrace a more modest agenda and to reestablish the balance between the rights of states and the rights of citizens.

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“One of the most pleasing aspects of Michael Ignatieff’s frequent contributions to the human rights debate is the clarity with which he writes about a subject beset as never before by uncertainty and disagreement. Not least of the achievements of Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry […] is the simplicity and common sense Ignatieff introduces. And at a time when it has become fashionable to deride the gains made by the human rights movement over the years, his cautious optimism is refreshing.”
— Caroline Moorehead (The Spectator)

Isaiah Berlin: A Life

Metropolitan Books
September 1, 2000

Isaiah Berlin was witness to a century. Born in Riga in the twilight of the Czarist empire, he lived long enough to see the Soviet state collapse. The son of a Jewish timber merchant, he became a presiding judge of Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic: historian of the Russian intelligentsia, biographer of Marx, scholar of the Romantic movement, and defender of the liberal idea of freedom against Soviet tyranny. When he died in 1997, he was hailed as the most important liberal philosopher of his time.

But Berlin’s life was not only a life of the mind. Present at the crucial events of our age, he was in Washington during World War II, in Moscow at the dawn of the Cold War, and dining with President John F. Kennedy on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis. From Albert Einstein to Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill to Anna Akhmatova, his circle of friends constitutes a veritable who’s who of twentieth century art, politics, and philosophy.

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Ideas are “what human beings live for and by” — “Ignatieff combines presentation of Berlin’s personal life with his public life. He connects the internal struggle with his Jewish, Russian and English worlds, to his writing and speaking. Well done. […] Even though Berlin is now recognized as a public intellectual, Ignatieff presents his life the way Berlin lived it. His Jewish family in pre Soviet Russia, learning German from the merchants, running away from Lenin and the Bolsheviks, all play a key role in the man to come. His connection to the serious Russian writers, Tolstoy, Turgenev, etc., never leave him. His Jewish tradition colors his connection to the gentile world, always preventing him from a feeling of acceptance. His English environment, which he loved, never completely smothered the Russian and Jewish influence. Produced a complex man and a facinating book. […] Written with a light touch, easy to absorb and enjoyable to learn.”
— ★★★★★ — Clay Garner (Amazon US review)

Scar Tissue

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 1, 1994

Chronicles one woman’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease and her sons’ painful witness to the tragedy, which is enhanced by their careers in philosophy and neurology and by strengthened family bonds.

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The Way of All Minds — “Although Michael Ignatieff is primarily known as a writer of intelligent books of accessible political theory, his short novel, “Scar Tissue” is a beautifully observed, emotionally precise account of the fraying of minds, flesh, and relationships. It’s one the earliest of several good books about the loss of a parent through Alzheimer’s disease — Ignatieff’s novel is comparable to John Bayley’s memoir of his wife, Iris Murdoch — but it’s more than that. […] Again and again, I was struck, and moved by, the psychological accuracy of the book, and the writer’s courage in facing up to not only a lot of the “big questions,” but to the cost of one’s own self-deceptions.”
— ★★★★★ — Stan Persky (Amazon US review)

A Just Measure of Pain

Pantheon Books
January 1, 1978

Subtitled “The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850”, A Just Measure of Pain describes the moment in 18th century England when the modern penitentiary and its ambiguous legacy were born. In depicting how the whip, the brand and the gallows – public punishments once meant to cow the unruly poor into passivity – came to be replaced by the “moral management” of the prison and the notion that the criminal poor should be involved in their own rehabilitation. Michael Ignatieff documents the rise of a new conception of class relations and with it a new philosophy of punishment, one directed not at the body but at the mind. A Just Measure of Pain is a highly atmospheric and compellingly written work of social history, which has already become a classic study of its subject. For the Penguin edition the author will provide an afterword concerning the polemics which followed the book’s first publication in 1978.

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