HUMANLY POSSIBLE

A history of humanist thought told through the lives of its major thinkers.

In this fascinating, well-organized journey through the evolution of humanism, Bakewell, award-winning author of At the Existential Café and How To Live, introduces us to the men and women who have resisted religious dogma and fixed ideologies to carve out a way of thinking in which individuals occupy center stage. Humanists are freethinkers, following no predetermined path. They are committed to inquiry and formal education and believe that “the meaning of our lives is to be found in our connections and bonds with others.” Bakewell begins in the 14th century in southern Italy with Petrarch and Boccaccio, both of whom strove to cultivate “the joy in writing” and worked to enlarge and salvage the “wrecked or sunken knowledge” embodied in classical manuscripts. The author then introduces us to such northern humanists as Erasmus and Montaigne, whose famous essays embraced “both [the] philosophical and personal,” along with the Enlightenment thinkers Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, “the most intellectually merciless thinker of his time.” During the 16th century, Bakewell writes, humanists became “less naively adoring of the past, and ever more interested” in human complexity, fallibility, and uncertainty. Also making an appearance are Harriet Taylor Mill, Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, Frederick Douglass, Bertrand Russell, Matthew Arnold, E.M. Forster, and Vasily Grossman, among many others. Bakewell acknowledges anti-humanism as well—fascists in Italy, blasphemy laws, the contemporary zealots of artificial intelligence—and reflects on the challenges that a turbulent 20th century posed to overcoming injustice through independent thought, moral inquiry, and mutual respect. Throughout, Bakewell frequently reminds us that humanism is always a “work in progress.” Ultimately, “history and the human world are neither stable and good on the one hand, nor hopelessly tragic on the other. They are our own work, so if we want it to proceed well, we have to exert ourselves to make it happen.”

A wonderfully learned, gracefully written, and simply enjoyable intellectual history of humanism.