From prolific historian Smith (Killing the Spirit, 1990; Redeeming the Time, 1986, etc.): a genealogy of democracy that rejects Max Weber's ``Protestant ethic''—which equates democracy, Christianity, and capitalism—and instead places the democratic impulse squarely in the Christian communalist tradition. Christian doctrine, says Smith, is the basis of our American belief in the equality and unity of all men and women before the law, and in the eyes of God. These ideas first erupted into human consciousness in the Hebrew Bible, and found their clearest expression in the teachings of Jesus. For a thousand years, Smith says, the Catholic Church nurtured the dignity of human life and elevated the status of women to heights unknown in non-Christian cultures. With the Reformation, Protestantism—and American Puritanism in particular—took the lead in the cause of human rights, promoting ``convenanted communities,'' quasi-socialist societies with no room for such capitalist practices as unbridled competition and monopolization. The Reformation left its stamp on many pivotal American events (``radical Protestants freed the slaves''), and the New Deal, Smith argues, was a ``Christian socialist revolution'' led by devout churchgoers, including FDR and Henry Wallace. Today, America's moral leadership lies with black Protestantism and a revitalized Catholicism, which may restore Christianity to ``its classic role as the critic of capitalism.'' Smith's attempt to divorce Christianity and capitalism is only half-successful (see Michael Novak's The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1992, for a pro-capitalist Christian argument); still, a forceful and elegant demonstration of the close alliance between Christianity and democracy on American soil.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10531-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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