Romanticism made a greater difference to us than anything else since the Renaissance. It was a precursor to a whole new reference for thinking and the structuring of society. Berlin traces the evolution of romanticism with its many levels of comprehension and implications in modern thought. He leads us through historical vicissitudes engendered by this new authenticity of ideas. He brings light to the suppositions and eventualities (conditional) that the romantics sermonized. The Romantics said the same question can have more than one answer and were the first to say the answer was not something built into the universe. Berlin gives due relevance to the fact that romanticism was responsible for bringing pluralism to the fore from the predominantly monistic views held by society. He writes in My Intellectual Path, "a society in which many opinions are held, and those holding different opinions are tolerant of each other, and is better than a monolithic society in which one opinion is binding on everyone" (Berlin 58).
             The history of Western Civilization contains a long and frequently bloody and always intellectually and imaginatively very stimulating record of collisions between different versions of the world's order. But we need to recognize that fundamental to them all was a belief that there was an order to be discovered, at least in part. Berlin had noted three important conceptual changes in western culture which altogether replaced classical notions of the existence of monastic order in reality. One of the first changes was seen during the rise of stoicism where the concept of the public was replaced by the inner convictions of the individual. The second was the irreconcilability between natural and moral values that politics was in fact in conflict, as Machiavelli suggested, with Christian ethics. Suddenly there was an interest in two different points of view, that of the individual and the church. Thirdly and the most revolu...