Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
JMC fellow David Wootton’s new book, Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison (Harvard University Press, 2018), comes out in October. He unpacks the West’s intellectual and cultural paradigm shift from virtue-based morality to an ethic of calculative self-interest.
About the book
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.
Learn more about the book here >>
David Wootton is Anniversary Professor of History at the University of York. He works on the intellectual and cultural history of the English speaking countries, Italy, and France, 1500-1800. He is the author of The Invention of Science, published by Allen Lane. In 2016 he gave the annual Besterman Lecture at the University of Oxford. He was educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and has held positions in history and politics at four British and four Canadian universities, and visiting postions in the US, before coming to York.
Learn more about David Wootton >>
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