Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity. By Kei Hiruta. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. 288p. $35.00 cloth.

Methodology, comparison and humanity: a reply to Otobe, Futai and Yamaoka

“…For example, Otobe suggests that my book would have been stronger had I paid more attention to Arendt's and Berlin's work on intellectual history, while Yamaoka expresses his reservations about my interpretation of Berlin's negative liberty. Similarly, it has been argued elsewhere that I overstate the contrast between Arendt's anti-nationalism and Berlin's liberal nationalism (Ashcroft, 2022(Ashcroft, : 1095, that I sometimes present the difference between the two thinkers in an overly stylised manner (Waldron, 2022: 4), and that I should have considered their 'characters' more carefully (Shorten, 2023: 277). Notwithstanding these and other criticisms of specific issues, readers of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin generally agree that comparing the two thinkers is overall beneficial to the study of Arendt, Berlin and twentieth century political thought more broadly.…”