The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World - Softcover

Montgomery, Scott L.; Chirot, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691173192 ISBN 13: 9780691173191

Verlag: PRINCETON UNIV PR, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A testament to the enduring power of ideas, The Shape of the New offers unforgettable portraits of Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx - heirs of the Enlightenment who embodied its highest ideals about progress - and shows how their thoughts, over time and in the hands of their followers and opponents, transformed the very nature of our beliefs, institutions, economies, and politics. Yet these ideas also hold contradictions. They have been used in the service of brutal systems such as slavery and colonialism, been appropriated and twisted by monsters like Stalin and Hitler, and provoked reactions against the Enlightenments legacy by Islamic Salafists and the Christian Religious Right.

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Scott L. Montgomery is an affiliate faculty member in the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His books includeDoes Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research. Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the University of Washington. His books includeWhy Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder (Princeton). They both live in Seattle.

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"This is a wonderful book. Montgomery and Chirot combine double-barreled scholarship, lucid prose, and considerable wisdom to offer us a fascinating excursion into the history of ideas. For anyone who wants to understand today's emerging conflicts--and what it will take for Enlightenment liberalism again to prevail--The Shape of the New is essential reading."--Jeffrey Gedmin, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University

"The Shape of the New is an ambitious book and a joy to read. The scholarship is brilliant. In contextualizing the great ideas of modern history, Montgomery and Chirot provide a holistic framework with which to understand the processes of social change and ideological conflict."--Paul Froese, coauthor of America's Four Gods: What We Say about God--and What That Says about Us

"This fantastic book offers an impressively learned and evenhanded treatment of the Enlightenment's key ideas and the reactions to them over the past two centuries. I guarantee that anyone who reads it will be a lot smarter, more cultured, and a far more intellectually interesting dinner companion."--Zoltan Barany, author of The Soldier and the Changing State: Building Democratic Armies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas

"This important book demonstrates the power of Enlightenment ideas, how they have shaped the world we live in, and how they have created systems of both action and reaction through time. It should be widely read by students, educators, and others who think that there is no need to teach classical thinkers or that their era is over."--Karen Barkey, author of Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective

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The Shape of the New

Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World

By Scott L. Montgomery, Daniel Chirot

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17319-1

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition, ix, 
Preface, xi, 
Acknowledgments, xiii, 
INTRODUCTION: Ideas as Historical Forces, 1, 
PART I: INVENTORS OF MODERNITY AND WHAT BECAME OF THEIR IDEAS, 17, 
1 Adam Smith: The Science of Man, Morality, and Money, 19, 
2 Karl Marx: The Tragic Consequences of a Brilliant Theory, 81, 
3 Charles Darwin: Struggle and Selection in the Realm of Ideas, 148, 
4 Making Democracy: The Jefferson-Hamilton Debates, 215, 
PART II: SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS REACTIONS AGAINST ENLIGHTENMENT, 279, 
5 Counter-Enlightenment: From Antimodernism to Fascism, 281, 
6 Christian Fundamentalism: The Politics of God in America, 336, 
7 Purifying Islam: The Muslim Reaction against the Western Enlightenment, 379, 
CONCLUSION: The Power of Ideas and the Importance of the Humanities, 418, 
Bibliography, 439, 
Index, 473, 

CHAPTER 1

Adam Smith

The Science of Man, Morality, and Money

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people. ... Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs.

ADAM SMITH, AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

Man does not live by GNP alone.

PAUL SAMUELSON, ECONOMICS

Adam Smith is known worldwide as the founder of modern economics. However, though he knew French well, he seems never to have uttered or written the phrase "laissez-faire." Like "free enterprise," "entrepreneur," and even "capitalism," it is a term that does not appear in any of his writings, which amount to over a million words. Born in 1723, Smith died in July 1790, four years before the firm of Boulton and Watt produced the first advanced steam engine. Smith thought, lectured, and wrote, that is, before the full advent of the Industrial Revolution, a development of which he knew neither the reality nor the name. Important as this may be, it has never counted against his reputation. Erudite, eccentric, generous but intensely private, living at a time when wood and animals still powered the globe, this eighteenth-century Scotsman nonetheless composed a book destined to explain a modern world of machines, corporations, and global markets running on oil and electricity, powering unimaginable industrial, military, and financial might that would alter the human prospect forever.

Smith himself was not wealthy and was no apologist for the rich. The man who lived quietly in the small town of Kirkcaldy, where Wealth of Nations was composed, who breathed the wet sea air from the Firth of Forth and often absentmindedly strolled its mist-laden shores, became a key and in some part radical figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, arguing as much on behalf of working-class laborers as manufacturers and free trade. To be sure it was Adam Smith who wrote that the object of every country's economy is to increase the riches and power of that country. No less did he claim that in a law-abiding state, those who seek to maximize their own gain serve the benefit of all, being "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention" (Smith 1776 in Cohen and Fermon 1996, 326). Here is the true Adam Smith, economists have often said. But "invisible hand" appears only once in a book of over eight hundred pages, and only three times in all of his writing, leading at least one scholar to suggest it may have been nothing more than a sarcastic phrase (Rothschild 2001, 117). This does create a problem for economists who have made it the center of his thought. It was this same Adam Smith, after all, not his presumed opposite, Karl Marx, who wrote that when "regulation is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable" (Smith 1776, 143). It was Smith, too, whom Thomas Malthus charged with confusing the wealth of a state with the happiness of its lower classes.

This complex thinker is not the Adam Smith so many have come to believe in. Indeed, anyone with knowledge of Smith's reputation who reads An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations today with a clear eye will be struck by the subtlety of his thought and by the gap between what has been most often said about Smith and what he actually said. They may also find it surprising that he has a sense of humor, dry as gin. "By nature, a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound," he tells us (1776, 18). The literature dealing with his thought would by now fill a well-endowed public library, and this includes much excellent historiography that takes this literature as subject of inquiry, critique, and correction (Winch 1978; Jones and Skinner 1992; Rothschild 2001; Milgate and Stimson 2009).

It is the real Smith that deserves our interest. As economists who have studied him carefully know, the varied strands of his thinking remain even today the basis of most schools in the field, even those that seem to oppose each other.

He wrote only two books, but the range of his mind revealed in these works was vast, his interests spacious, his thought many-layered. This helps explain the complexities of Wealth of Nations in particular. Like all great works, it has many levels and is more wide-ranging, diverse, and bewildering than any one group of ideas. In addition to the division of labor and trade, it takes up matters of education, colonialism, the nature of sovereignty, civil society, natural resources, and a great deal more. It endorses certain trade restrictions and taxes on transportation, it favors universal schooling for the poor, and it expresses a healthy distrust of merchants at all times. But it is also a plea for the right of individuals to make their own decisions about how to conduct their lives, and it is in favor of eliminating the many restrictions on trade that were then current in Britain and even more on the European continent. Allowing markets to operate freely was part of this, if not the only part. In other words, the Adam Smith of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment can be interpreted by the fervid apostles of total free market thinking that some economists have favored only if they look at one side of his writing, ignoring much else that he stood for. One thing, perhaps, we can say for certain: as a man in some anxiety about his future legacy, who on his deathbed had close friends burn his remaining manuscripts, Smith would have been pained to see what some have made of him but perhaps pleased that he remains so important and the source of study.

There are other ironies to contemplate. Smith's real goal was to map out human nature, yet his own life remains largely an outline. To biographers, he "lacks visibility"; he left no journal, autobiography, or other record of his detailed existence (Phillipson 2010). We are fairly sure that he visited many workplaces and markets, discussed the things he saw, and wrote down what he learned. But there is no documentation of this. To those who would ask for more, Smith offers only negative advice: "The character of a man is never very striking ... [but] a dull and lifeless thing, taken merely by itself" (Smith 1976–87, vol. 4, 132). Though he lectured about trade and wage...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PRINCETON UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691173192
• ISBN 13: 9780691173191
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 512
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar