Berlin’s essay on ‘The Counter-Enlightenment’ was strikingly pivotal in renewing and extending his twentieth-century reputation as a towering contemporary intellectual giant: for the concept of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ became a central feature of his continuing relevance to intellectual debate in the 1970s and through the last quarter of the twentieth century. Among its strengths, it figured as a partially successful effort to draw attention in Anglophone lands to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy as a vital aspect of the early nineteenth century’s cultural shift to Romanticism and reaction to the Enlightenment. But its importance extends much further than that. For while it profoundly dismayed some, it proved profoundly thought-provoking for many with its eloquent promotion of intellectual history to centrality and front-rank status viewed as an aspect of the humanities and of philosophy itself. Its distinctive combining of philosophical study and insight, and delving into history, impressed many with burning secular, pluralist and ethical zeal.