An impassioned, big-picture primer ideal for college students.
The great ideas and personalities of the Enlightenment condensed and compressed for accessible consumption.
The unleashing of the human mind from orthodoxy ushered in one of the most exciting periods in history, and consummate historian Burns (Emeritus, Government/Williams Coll.; Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court, 2009, etc.) proves a lively guide to the great currents of Enlightenment thought, from the justification of civil society by the gloomy theorist Thomas Hobbes to the clash over slavery and abolition in America’s Civil War. As announced by Martin Luther’s nailing of his Theses to the Wittenberg church door in 1517, the mind of man was the measure of all things, and only through rigorous empirical tests could ideas be tried and accepted. The received teachings of the medieval church were discarded in favor of “natural philosophy,” and men, although brutish, according to Hobbes, were governed by reason and “motivated to join together in a social compact by fear and the desire for self-preservation.” From Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, among numerous others, ideas of liberty, free thought and speech, religious toleration, and the ability of each individual to transform himself through environment, education and experience shook the “fixity and fatalism” of the Old World, unloosening the bedrock of absolutism and playing out successively in the English civil war, the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Burns maneuvers gracefully through these cataclysmic events, weaving in minibiographies of the notables and significant currents like the Scottish national school system, which gave rise to the stunning contributions of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith. Happiness, property, reform, universal suffrage: The author traces these key concepts to our own era, still worthy of fighting for, as evidenced by the recent events of the Arab Spring.
An impassioned, big-picture primer ideal for college students.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02489-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
In 1989, The National Interest published "The End of History?" by Fukuyama, then a senior official at the State Department. In that comparatively short but extremely controversial article, Fukuyama speculated that liberal democracy may constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and hence the "final form of human government." Now Fukuyama has produced a brilliant book that, its title notwithstanding, takes an almost entirely new tack. To begin with, he examines the problem of whether it makes sense to posit a coherent and directional history that would lead the greater part of humanity to liberal democracy. Having answered in the affirmative, he assesses the regulatory effect of modern natural science, a societal activity consensually deemed cumulative as well as directional in its impact. Turning next to a "second, parallel account of the historical process," Fukuyama considers humanity's struggle for recognition, a concept articulated and borrowed (from Plato) by Hegel. In this context, he goes on to reinterpret culture, ethical codes, labor, nationalism, religion, war, and allied phenomena from the past, projecting ways in which the desire for acknowledgement could become manifest in the future. Eventually, the author addresses history's presumptive end and the so-called "last man," an unheroic construct (drawn from Tocqueville and Nietzsche) who has traded prideful belief in individual worth for the civilized comforts of self-preservation. Assuming the prosperity promised by contemporary liberal democracy indeed come to pass, Fukuyama wonders whether or how the side of human personality that thrives on competition, danger, and risk can be fulfilled in the sterile ambiance of a brave new world. At the end, the author leaves tantalizingly open the matter of whether mankind's historical journey is approaching a close or another beginning; he even alludes to the likelihood that time travelers may well strike out in directions yet undreamt. An important work that affords significant returns on the investments of time and attention required to get the most from its elegantly structured theme.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-910975-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.
A manual for soldiers or anyone interested in what can happen to mind, body and spirit in the extreme circumstances of war.
Decorated Vietnam veteran Marlantes is also the author of a bestselling novel (Matterhorn, 2010), a Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar. His latest book reflects both his erudition and his battle-hardness, taking readers from the Temple of Mars and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey into the hell of combat and its grisly aftermath. That Marlantes has undertaken such a project implies his acceptance of war as a permanent fact of human life. We go to war, he says, “reluctantly and sadly” to eliminate an evil, just as one must kill a mad dog, “because it is a loathsome task that a conscious person sometimes has to do.” He believes volunteers rather than conscripts make the best soldiers, and he accepts that the young, who thrill at adventure and thrive on adrenaline, should be war’s heavy lifters. But apologizing for war is certainly not one of the strengths, or even aims, of the book. Rather, Marlantes seeks to prepare warriors for the psychic wounds they may endure in the name of causes they may not fully comprehend. In doing that, he also seeks to explain to nonsoldiers (particularly policymakers who would send soldiers to war) the violence that war enacts on the whole being. Marlantes believes our modern states fail where “primitive” societies succeeded in preparing warriors for battle and healing their psychic wounds when they return. He proposes the development of rituals to practice during wartime, to solemnly pay tribute to the terrible costs of war as they are exacted, rather than expecting our soldiers to deal with them privately when they leave the service. He believes these rituals, in absolving warriors of the guilt they will and probably should feel for being expected to violate all of the sacred rules of civilization, could help slow the epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans.
A valiant effort to explain and make peace with war’s awesome consequences for human beings.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1992-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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