Power Pleasure and Profit

<p><b>A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents.</b> <p/>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 <i>Power Pleasure and Profit</i> 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. <p/>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. <p/>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.</p>