Vico, the great philosopher and legal theorist of the Enlightenment who lived and died in obscurity, was among the first to sound the prevailing modern theme. In The New Science, he marvels "that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows: and that they should have neglected the study of the nations or civil world, which since men had made it, men could come to know." Attacking Cartesian rationalism as well as questioning the Platonic tradition; developing the comparative studies of mythology, anthropology, archaeology, philology, linguistics; historical in one sense (man's cultural adventures constitute "the ideal eternal history") and ahistorical in another ("progress" is only the rising and falling of cyclical patterns); deciphering the origins of civilization through its primitive riddles, "crude beginnings," "frightful superstitions"—these are some of the recognitions which made no sense to the savants of Vico's day but which are brilliantly annotated in his works. Sir Isaiah Berlin, an articulate expositor and fervent Viconian, has written a dazzling monograph celebrating his hero's immensely protean mind. Like Vico himself, however, he now and then gives the effect of chasing both the hounds and the hares, so that the reader not previously acquainted with the Italian's often contradictory, bizarre, darkly poetic genius may find the journey a bit rough. The complementary study of Herder—whose belief that "we live in a world we ourselves create" became a shibboleth of nationalism, populism, and romanticism—is far easier to grasp. The essays do not overlap, but are presented in stimulating contrast to and concert with one another.
Pub Date: May 20, 1976
ISBN: 0670745855
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1976
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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