The Worldly Philosphers

This book, Robert Heilbroner's classic overview of major thinkers in the history of economics, is truly excellent. I've been using it to base a series of informal discussions on, for a student society I help run that aims to push for critical analysis and pluralism in the university economics curriculum - we were doing a three-part talk on how economics has grown and evolved as a subject, and this book was a good place to start in terms of giving a general outline.

   I've already spent a good twenty hours or so over the past month condensing this book into three thirty-minute-long chunks of digestible information, and there's so much depth of explanation I could now go to in terms of the book's content that it'd end up being far too long of a post for me to be able to be bothered to write, so I'll only give a very brief (well, as brief as it'll go without being dull or vacuous) overview.
   Heilbroner gives us the story of what economics is, told from those who thrust it forwards into intellectual frontiers as-then unexplored: from the recesses of pre-modern history where, despite millennia of scarcity, trade and debt, it had yet to develop as a field of study; through its gradual coalescence into a vision of society as capitalism took hold of 18th century Europe, until Adam Smith first undertook to draw from the ideas of many thinkers of his day a complete theory of how nations' wealth worked, grew, fell, failed, expanded. Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo and their not-so-cheerful theories of inevitable poverty-based automatic population controls and viciously competitive profit-erosion followed, and the classical school of economic thought began to take shape. This entire system of thinking was recorded in a comprehensive survey by J.S. Mill, around the time where mid-to-late-19th century Europe was growing restless from the continual misery inflicted upon the working masses by processes of industrialisation, urbanisation and generally just capitalism[isation]. In moral response to the broadening inequalities and exploitations, utopians sprang up, most as eccentric in character as bizarre in theory (Saint-Simon and Fourier sound like great fun); but on the serious side a pair of bitingly-logical analytic socialists named Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels here developed ideas that would expose the fundamental internal inconsistencies of capitalism; ideas that would start revolutions and shape the next 130 years. However great the social impact of the radical leftist thinkers however, academic economics had taken a very different turn - economists like Léon Walras, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth and Stanley Jevons had begun reforming the subject into mathematical-based abstractions and models, and inevitable detachment from the more basic questions of underlying assumptions and political implications. This was the beginning of the birth of the neoclassical school of thought (which now dominates all economics studies, hence the recent national push for pluralism). Other than Thorstein Veblen (whose bottomless cynicism exposed the brutally-selfish heart of all society, primarily economics, which he also emphasised the post-industrial-revolution dependence of on technological development) and Joseph Schumpeter (who showed the limits of economics against an object of study that is, frankly, unpredictable), the book nears its end on John Maynard Keynes; the giant of 20th century thinking who, with impeccable clarity and rationality, showed governments the best way of breaking out of a slump - by compensating for depressed investment and stimulating consumption with a kick-starting burst of public-sector spending. His ideas declined in fashionability throughout the 20th century though, and while a few of the less-debatable aspects have been incorporated into post-Keynesian neoclassical economics, his grand vision of society is no longer prevalent within the academic ring of those professing to be economists. The book ends on a provocative note about the conflict between where the subject has gone now (well into thinking of itself, thoroughly problematically, as a science) and where these key figures in its evolution saw it as going; if economics continues to be dominated by maths and models instead of insightful observation of actual economies, then "worldly philosophy" is dead. Again, hence that whole campaign thing.
   I'd recommend anyone read this book; especially if you're interested in economics or politics or history or philosophy or sociology or whatever, and compulsory if you're a student of economics. Heilbroner's done an amazing job of conveying the core theories of the big thinkers simply without diluting them, and the grand narrative of how the "dismal science" has grown up is interspersed with delightfully colourful mini-biographies of those who helped push it forwards (these are extremely enjoyable; Robert Owen and J.M. Keynes in particular just had awesome lives), and a topic that has the potential of considerable stultification becomes lively, fascinating, and a joy to read about.

The Human Animal

This book, from zoologist Desmond Morris, was recommended to me in August of last year in some frankly bizarre circumstances. Long story short, I was talked to by an insanely sane stranger on a bus, he told me I should read this book, and in stumbling across it in a bookshop's bargain bin last week and reading the whole of it in three days I have kept my promise; and I am thoroughly glad that I did.

   It's an immensely eye-opening book, trying as it does to compose a rough examination of humanity from the perspective of zoology - and by dissecting human behaviour and lifestyle into animal explanations, some extraordinary insights into the nature, history, character, behaviour and needs of man are revealed.

   The book was written alongside Desmond Morris's 6-part BBC documentary series on the same topic (yeh, they had TV in 1994) and so the book's 6 chapters focus on the central themes of each episode of that. There are far too many fascinating observations and "oh wow so that's why X is X"-provocations in each section for me to be able to give any sort of overview that does justice to the sheer interestingness of the vast panorama of humanity that is exposed, but here's a vague guide as to the chapters' themes:

1. Body language - how basic gestures and movements are rooted in tribal-social origins of humans, and despite enormous various in ethnic culture and spoken language, these communicative foundations are generally much the same across the world.
2. Evolutionary origins - how humans grew distinct from other apes, and through the winning combination of bipedal stance, dexterous hands, and advanced intelligence, we were able to dominate the hunting-grounds and flourish.
3. Urbanisation - how as thriving human communities grew, we became more distanced from the wilderness that had birthed our species, and as societies coalesced into larger organisations such as towns and cities, while allowing for progress to accelerate this also forced territorial aspects of our animal nature into conflict.
4. Reproduction - how (left free from constraints of social convention) human sexual pairings all follow a remarkably similar pattern, and how physical and psychological developments in intimate relationships have given human sex a higher and less brutish place in our species' way of life (a certain degree of detachment advised if reading this chapter - the biological descriptions are as fundamental to understanding the topic as they are graphic).
5. Childcare - how human births and babies differ developmentally to other animals, being far more vulnerable and thus dependent on parental affection, which are ensured by strong emotional bonding; essential for proper mental and physical wellbeing in our life cycle.
6. Recreation - how the cognitive surplus of humans leaves us with a glut of spare time; being able to satisfy our basic survival needs easily, we can divert our vast intellect into other pursuits that benefit or entertain the community - from this springs science, art, literature, music, technology, philosophy and basically all culture: the root of which is our ability to think in abstraction, to see something as something else and create meaning from it, fueled by our insatiable curiosity to understand life.

   This book is a veritable treasure-trove of glimpses into why humans are as they are, with many uncoverings of evolutionary psychology and biology that throw up radical prompts to rethink much of the philosophical-as-religious way we perceive humanity today. One of my main itches reading it was how we should respond to the news that we are animals, or how we should act knowing that our evolution has already determined particularities into our bodies and minds. Part of me wants to carefully draw out all the links between what Morris's explanations of human development implies is good alongside similar implications from liberal christian ethics and anthropology and sociology and in doing so weave a consistent impenetrable scientific-philosophical picture of how humanity should be. But part of me knows that this would have feeble legs to stand on - what has evolved is simply what survives best. Having ascended by evolutionary means to a plateau from which we can rationally assess the world we're in, the arguments we rely upon to justify aspects of our lives are seldom grounded only in our animal natures, and I'm not sure whether they should be either. It's a headscratcher, to be sure.

   Nonetheless, this is a fascinating read, and for anyone interested in the origins of human biology, psychology, sociology and anthropology, plus all the philosophical quandaries unearthed by this exposition, I would (as that eccentric guy on the 52 did to me) wholeheartedly recommend you read this book.