Histories of ideas can be a snooze, but this is a surprisingly lucid examination of a dramatic revolution in human thought.
Many authors write about Enlightenment science and Enlightenment politics, but there was also Enlightenment ethics, the focus of this book.
Through the writings of great thinkers, Wootton (History/Univ. of York; The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, 2015, etc.) describes the birth of a new concept of human nature during the years 1500 to 1800. This is heavy stuff, but readers expecting a turgid, scholarly tome need not worry. According to the author, for most of history, what mattered most was not whether you succeeded but what sort of person you were. Great men suppressed their passions and exercised reason. Then, beginning in the Renaissance, philosophers made a U-turn, replacing Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with a new type of decision-making that resembles cost-benefit analysis. Machiavelli became a symbol of deceit when he merely described the new rules of the game. His ideal prince served his interests (keeping his job) by making it impossible for subjects to challenge him or by benefiting them so generously that they opposed any change. Thinkers from Hobbes to Locke to Voltaire assumed that humans act from purely selfish motives. We feel pity when an innocent person suffers because that could happen to us; we don’t pity a criminal being punished because we don’t feel threatened. That humans are selfish is not necessarily a terrible thing. Adam Smith taught that humans working solely for their own profit benefit everyone. The Founding Fathers followed David Hume, who wrote, “in contriving any System of Government, and fixing the several Checks and Controuls of the Constitution, every Man ought to be suppos’d a Knave, and to have no other End, in all his Actions, than private interest.” Throughout the narrative, Wootton demonstrates a consistent ability to make complex intellectual ideas approachable.
Histories of ideas can be a snooze, but this is a surprisingly lucid examination of a dramatic revolution in human thought.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-97667-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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