"Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the —power' or —mental activity' assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev's view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as —heroes', —historic forces', —moral forces', —nationalism', —reason' and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias."
Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-born British philosopher and historian of ideas known for his defense of liberalism and value pluralism. Born in Riga on 1909-06-06, he became influential through essays such as Two Concepts of Liberty and through his work on intellectual history. He died in Oxford on 1997-11-05.