A short review

Abstract

“History,” Tolstoy supposedly said, “would be an excellent thing if only it were true.” According to Sir Isaiah Berlin, Tolstoy was referring to the kind of history written by “professors” and “peddlars of ideas” who tend to describe only the “flowers” of the past, the colorful and obvious, and to ignore the “roots” of history, the deeper, more substantial, enduring but less accessible taproots of life. The vast majority of historians, Berlin said of Tolstoy's views, avoid the kind of hard digging necessary in order to relate “the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual, three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment.”