THE BRITISH ACADEMY,
established by Royal Charter in 1902, champions and supports the humanities and social sciences. It is an independent, self-governing fellowship of scholars elected for their distinction and achievement.
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The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions
This lecture took place on 11 October 2006
Professor Bernard Bailyn, FBA, Adams University Professor emeritus, Harvard University
One of Isaiah Berlin's abiding concerns was the disastrous effects of the search for perfection: the horrors that perfectionists had wrought in their determination to force some portion of mankind, for their own good, into ideal moulds. In this lecture I consider this 'recipe for bloodshed' in terms not of the formal discourses Berlin discussed but of popular derivatives of those doctrines; and I sketch the fate of perfectionist aspirations not in the dense, tightly meshed environment of Europe but in the open amplitudes of the Western Hemisphere. Reviewing several perfectionist projects of Atlantic dimensions Spanish Catholic, British Puritan, Dutch, and German I conclude that the horrors Berlin deplored derived not from the search for perfection, which had creative consequences, but from the uses and misuses of power.
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