A highly provocative work of popular science.
Can human nature be reduced to a set of laws that can then be used to organize society? By this intriguing account, many a physicist is now exploring such a question.
Apply a law to individual humans, and you’ll likely end up with more exceptions than rules. But perhaps, suggests British science writer Ball (The Ingredients, 2003, etc.), the terms haven’t been correctly expressed: human nature is more a collective than an individual matter, so the task is to describe the workings of the crowd, such that “we can make predictions about society even in the face of individual free will.” Opening his inquiry with Thomas Hobbes, who proposed a mechanistic model of humankind in his much-despised Leviathan, Ball touches on some unsettling questions: Are we merely drones in a big hive? Is there such a thing as free will? (Probably: Ball points to “many examples of social behavior in which a kind of regularity and order comes not from any predestination in the fates of the participants but from the very limited range of their viable choices.”) Writing with his customary light hand, and drawing on very recent developments in things like chaos and network theory, Ball looks at some of those examples to see what scientists think about why we do the things we do. Why, for instance, are there traffic jams? (Because the universe is rife with anomalies and random perturbations.) Why do economic systems—the stock market, say—resist behaving in always predictable ways? (Ditto, and “the fluctuations are unavoidable.”) Why do wars erupt, and why do some wars stay small and manageable while others kill millions? (Ditto, and therefore “there can be no telling how big a conflict might be sparked by the smallest disturbance.”) Ball’s survey raises more questions than it answers, but one fascinating constant emerges: “Regardless of what we believe about the motivations for individual behavior, once we become part of a group we cannot be sure what to expect.”
A highly provocative work of popular science.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-28125-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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