Return of the Volksgeist

Sir Isaiah Berlin, who died in 1997, was a fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. One of the West's foremost political philosophers, he authored several seminal works, including Karl Marx, The Age of Enlightenment, Four Essays on Liberty, Vico and Herder and The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas.We sat down for several rambling hours of conversation at a cafe in the small harbor in Portofino, Italy, at the end of the summer in 1991.