Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison By David Wootton
Book Power, Pleasure, and profiteroles
MA PhD Cantab FRHistSDavid Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History He works on the intellectual and cultural history of the English speaking countries Italy and France 1500 1800 He is currently writing a book entitled Power Pleasure and Profit based on his Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford in 2014 His most recent book is The Invention of Science published by Allen Lane. EPub Power, Pleasure, and profit book He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge and has held positions in history and politics at four British and four Canadian universities and visiting postions in the US before coming to York. Book Power, Pleasure, and profitable Lovely Stuff English I m a huge fan of The Invention of Science and was very interested in the premise of this book However here the author is much interested here in showing that he has the right interpretation of what Machiavelli Hobbes and A Smith actually meant I just care very little about what this great men thought I would have much prefer an angle similar to The Invention where the focus was on how entire societies thought at different points in time and how that thought evolved English A tough book to get through Wootton seems motivated by economy and determined to condense very deep points about the Enlightenment paradigm into 9 short chapters yet liberal in his digressions and segues Deserves a second re read if and when I have the time English This engaging work looks at the transition that occurred in the Western world in the early modern period Wootton shows how the values of the Enlightenment against which we are constantly carping were put in place both in theory and practice The result free markets and political liberty he argues now serve to keep the values we have been complaining about for ages because there are real complaints to be lodged to fill the gap between waiting for my library holds Why I finished it This was not the book that I was expecting to read Wootton traced the formation and history of the ideas of political power individual pleasure versus society s gain and economic profit Probably familiar territory to philosophy majors but it was new ground for me English A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents We pursue power pleasure and profit We want as much as we can get and we deploy instrumental reasoning cost benefit analysis to get it We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed It is a way of life and thought that seems natural inevitable and inescapable As David Wootton shows it is anything but In Power Pleasure and Profit he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought from Machiavelli to Madison to show how new ideas about politics ethics and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded theories about the rational pursuit of power pleasure and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes Locke and Adam Smith The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality But it also helped to create a world in which virtue honor shame and guilt count for almost nothing and what matters is success Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning To answer that question Wootton writes we must first recognize that we live in its grip Power Pleasure and Profit Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison.
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