Isaiah Berlin, the Enlightenment, and What the Jews Can Teach the World

The British-Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin made it his life’s work to understand and write about the European critics of the 18th-century Enlightenment—not because he, too, opposed the Enlightenment, but because he thought Western civilization would benefit from recognizing its own faults and limitations. Yoram Hazony argues that the substance of this critique of Enlightenment ideas has roots in Jewish thought going back to the Hebrew Bible. (Video, about 50 minutes.)