The Shape of the New
Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
April 27, 2015
University of Washington professors Montgomery (international studies) and Chirot (Russian and Eurasian studies) look at three thinkers and ideas that represent “Enlightenment liberalism”: Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”; Karl Marx’s “dialectical materialism”; and Charles Darwin’s “natural selection.” The fourth idea is presented as an ongoing debate, which originated with Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, on the virtues of centralized versus decentralized government. After a clear presentation of these ideas, their evolution, and distortions, the authors turn to “secular and religious reactions against the Enlightenment.” The prominent movements of anti-modernism include Christian and Islamic fundamentalism as well as fascism, with its “admiration of violence and direct action,” focus on “the mythic origins of the nation,” and “worship of a heroic national leader.” The strongest chapter addresses Christian fundamentalism in relation to contemporary American politics. The authors also offer a clear exposition of the Islamic fundamentalist thinker Sayyid Qutb, which is particularly helpful in understanding the intellectual roots of al-Qaeda and ISIS. The book sometimes covers too much too quickly, but it is a solid, idea-rich examination of how formative 18th- and 19th-century ideas germinated into the belief systems that have governed the 20th and 21st centuries.
April 15, 2015
A broad survey of the ideas that have driven modern history since the 19th century-and on account of which millions of lives have been changed for good or ill. According to Montgomery (Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research, 2013, etc.) and Chirot (Contentious Identities: Ethnic, Religious and National Conflicts in Today's World, 2011, etc.), both professors at the University of Washington, these ideas are fourfold, resting in the single persons of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin, and then in the struggle between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton over the nature of the new republic that would grow from certain parallel and antecedent ideas. The first two are economic in nature, the third biological, and the fourth political. But all are political, of course, and the authors nicely move to depersonified history by examining deeper values: the idea embodied by Smith, for instance, that "individuals should have the freedom to make all essential decisions affecting their material and moral lives." The authors' argument is fluent and mainly unobjectionable; as intellectual historians, it is their bread and butter to maintain that ideas matter, and the ideas they enumerate have inarguably "structured the modern world." Their later elaborations sometimes seem a stretch, if by modern world one means modern ideas, which would discount some of their cases. The book is academic in outlook and attitude and sometimes in execution. The prose is accessible, though, and the narrative is well-written, made more interesting by the authors' willingness to tangle with tough constituencies and mount tough arguments-against, say, the narrowness of religious fundamentalists or the aridity of "postmodern pedagogy and scholarship," with their lamentable habit of reducing the love of and insistence on reason as a species of evil. A pleasure for students of modern history, especially useful for those seeking an introduction to the broad field of intellectual history. Barzun, Berlin, and Needham would likely argue at points, but this fits squarely in their tradition.
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