Dense with provocative ideas—a solid choice for budding political philosophers.
In a challenging book, an esteemed philosopher examines how liberalism yielded to a totalitarianism impulse.
Gray is emeritus professor of European thought at the London School of Economics and a prolific author. In his latest, he gathers a number of the themes he has pursued throughout his life and work. He uses Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan as a starting point, explaining how Hobbes believed that a powerful government was necessary to protect people from one another and from external enemies—and nothing more. In the past century, however, we have seen the rise of the “New Leviathans,” who want to go much further, to “become engineers of souls.” Gray looks at the attempts of the Soviet leaders to mold people and at how that pattern was adopted by Putin. It justifies a totalitarian level of control, all in the name of the greater good. There is a similar pattern in China, with leaders who see themselves as fulfilling a quasi-divine purpose. A related strain of thinking Gray labels as “hyper-liberalism,” which “vulgarizes post-modern philosophy.” Though “enclaves of freedom persist…a liberal civilization based on the practice of tolerance has passed into history,” writes the author. “In schools and universities, education inculcates conformity with the ruling progressive ideology. The arts are judged by whether they serve approved political goals.” Gray questions the obsession with race and slavery, noting that slavery and racism have had many faces throughout history, and he views as arrogant the idea that the American experience represents a universal experience. Gray does not provide an easy solution, but he sees an obligation to fight totalitarianism in whatever way we can. He concludes: “If we go on, it is because we cannot do otherwise. It is life that pulls us on, against the tide, life that steers us into the storm.”
Dense with provocative ideas—a solid choice for budding political philosophers.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374609733
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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