Power, Pleasure, and Profit Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

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  • Engels
  • Hardcover
  • 9780674976672
  • 08 oktober 2018
  • 400 pagina's
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David Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought 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.



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.

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Taal
en
Bindwijze
Hardcover
Oorspronkelijke releasedatum
08 oktober 2018
Aantal pagina's
400
Illustraties
Nee

Betrokkenen

Hoofdauteur
David Wootton
Tweede Auteur
David Wootton
Hoofduitgeverij
Harvard University Press

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Extra groot lettertype
Nee
Product breedte
156 mm
Product lengte
235 mm
Studieboek
Ja
Verpakking breedte
156 mm
Verpakking hoogte
235 mm
Verpakking lengte
235 mm
Verpakkingsgewicht
352 g

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9780674976672
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