A learned study of the concept of decline since the Enlightenment, sure to generate widespread discussion and debate. A recent spate of books has proclaimed the ``end'' of just about everything from education to science to history itself. Historian Herman, coordinator of the Smithsonian's Western Civilization Program, has provided us with an invaluable historical context from which to re-examine this persistent belief that everything is in an inevitable process of decline. Herman has an admirable command of his sources. Part I, ``The Languages of Decline,'' reveals how a particular tradition of rhetoric combined with historical analysis and science (and sometimes pseudoscience) to produce a sense of doom. Part II, ``Predicting the Decline of the West,'' shows how popular the idea of decline was in the West in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But valuable as the book is in tracing the evolution of these ideas through an impressive array of sources, it's not without faults. Herman rather startlingly moves (without any seeming self-consciousness about the gesture) from a masterful analysis of the concept of decline in the recent past to what seems to be a personal and heartfelt attack on modern systems of thought. In Part III, ``The Triumph of Cultural Pessimism,'' readers who have read Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind may feel a sense of dÇjÖ vu: Herman attacks the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, as well as modern French philosophers from Sartre to Foucault. The book degenerates into a diatribe against multiculturalism and environmentalism, even making an implicit connection between the latter and Nazism. Hovering over the entire project, although never invoked, is the controversial 1989 essay ``The End of History,'' by Francis Fukuyama. A fascinating—and disturbing—study, and one that surely demands a response from those who firmly believe in the idea of progress.
Pub Date: March 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82791-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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