The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature
- ISBN13: 9780060781507
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
In his most important book to date, award-winning author Timothy Ferris—”the best popular science writer in the English language today” (Christian Science Monitor)—makes a passionate case for science as the inspiration behind the rise of liberalism and democracy. Ferris argues that just as the scientific revolution rescued billions from poverty, fear, hunger, and disease, the Enlight-enment values it inspired has swelled the number of persons living in free and democratic societies from less than 1 percent of the world population four centuries ago to more than a third today.
Ferris deftly investigates the evolution of these scientific and political revolutions, demonstrating that they are inextricably bound. He shows how science was integral to the American Revolution but misinterpreted in the French Revolution; reflects on the history of liberalism, stressing its widely underestimated and mutually beneficial relationship with science; and surveys the forces that have opposed science and liberalism—from communism and fascism to postmodernism and Islamic fundamentalism.
A sweeping intellectual history, The Science of Liberty is a stunningly original work that transcends the antiquated concepts of left and right.
The Science of Liberty: Democracy, Reason, and the Laws of Nature
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In an otherwise very interesting book, the author, Timothy Ferris, makes no significant use of a wealth of work on the co-production of social order across the spheres of science, economics, and politics (such as Alder’s The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World or Jasanoff’s States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order (International Library of Sociology)), and has failed to move past widely repeated but mistaken readings of several supposedly “postmodern” authors to more thoughtfully considered positions. Latour, Heidegger, and Derrida offer much more in the way of positive potentials than could be guessed from what Ferris says. For instance, in direct opposition to Ferris’ characterization of “logocentric” as “a fascist epithet aimed at those who employ logic” (page 238), Derrida in fact uses it (on page 34 of his 1981 book, Positions, University of Chicago Press) to characterize those who resist logic and mathematics.
Similarly, Latour’s work is widely recognized for describing and documenting the ways that the scientific values exported from the laboratory in technology carry with them moral and social values that have precisely the unintended broader effects Ferris is interested in.
Far from ignoring science as a source of knowledge, reducing it to arbitrary social constructs, or turning their back on learning, as Ferris claims (page 259), Latour (Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society), Heidegger (What Is a Thing?), and Derrida all engage substantively and repeatedly with mathematics and measurement; see Mathematics and the Roots of Postmodern Thought for an in depth treatment of postmodern themes in mathematics. Further, Latour and Derrida explicitly took up the issues raised by Ferris and replied to critics in works Ferris is apparently unaware of.
Thomas Kuhn (The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change) once recounted how his perplexity at absurdities in Aristotle eventually taught him to ask himself how a reasonable person could have arrived at such a position, with the result that not only did he learn how to resolve the apparent illogic, he also found that other things he thought he’d understood had changed their meaning. Ferris shows that he has multiple opportunities for applying this lesson. For a full treatment of these issues, see my blog at [...]
Rating: 2 / 5
Timothy Ferris’ THE SCIENCE OF LIBERTY: DEMOCRACY, REASON, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE is best understood in connection with Walter J. Ong’s relationist thesis that probably all major cultural developments are related to developments in the verbal media of communication.
According to Ong’s relationist way of thinking about cultural developments in Western culture and elsewhere, modern capitalism, modern science, and modern democracy in Western culture are connected with the historic emergence of the Gutenberg movable printing press in the 1450s. Ferris has connected modern democracy with modern science in Western culture, both of which emerged historically in print culture in Western culture.
Ong’s classic account of the emergence of print culture in Western culture is contained in his massively researched book RAMUS, METHOD, AND THE DECAY OF DIALOGUE: FROM THE ART OF DISCOURSE TO THE ART OF REASON (1958; 3rd ed. 2004). (In COMMONPLACE LEARNING: RAMISM AND ITS GERMAN RAMIFICATIONS, 1543-1630 [2007], Howard Hotson corrects certain technical details in Ong’s understanding of Ramus’ thought.)
Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (The Hampton Press Communication Series (Media Ecology).)
Rating: 5 / 5
Despite its breezy style and superficial charm, this book, whether from ignorance or unspoken design, ventures into a quagmire of its own making, a point visible in the title itself. What a pity, since the book has a lot of potentially interesting material. But it seems to be a devious or sneaky book in the way it proceeds in a curious conspiracy of silence of its own making. What sort of tactic, naivete or deliberate terminological aggression, would drive a scientific author to use, without a single reference to the discourse of Kant et al., a phrase so provocative, the ’science of liberty’? The idea of a ’science of freedom’ was one of the deepest strains of the philosophy of history (and an idea with its own share of confusions, and rockets blowing up on the launchpad)and the whole basis was a critique of the rising tide of Newtonian scientism and reductionism. Granted Hegel on the ’science of freedom’ is an extravagant metaphysical archaeology lost to us, but still, to steal the idea to subsitute reductionist scientism, and bad sociology, is not much progress.
To write a book with this title on modernity ignoring a central choral thematic entirely is spooky, and drives one to query the author’s intentions, or competence. His competence is adequate, thus it must be propaganda in action to fool the science peanut gallery, who will agree to anything, as long as ’science can explain it’ is on the label.
To coopt this phrase in the way that Ferris does leaves one nettled and unnerved by the arrogance of science propaganda in action, that will mislead readers by simply deleting reference to the history of the discourse in question. I do not wish to be unfair or get into one-star mode here, since it is probable the author is himself the victim of the overdose of science enthusiasm in the cult of scientism that declares science to the solution to all mysteries, including here, preposterously, the origin of liberalism.
To propose that science is the cause of liberalism is surely a false and superficial analysis of the case. If science is the cause of liberalism, what, pray tell, is the cause of the Romantic movement? Oops, again science is the answer: the Romantics were the first to produce the critique of universalist reductionism in the name of science, that is to say, fake explanations like this one. So science must have caused it (haha!).
The question of the rise of liberalism is extremely complex, and while it is obviously worth a try to look at the influence of science in the emergence of open societies it is not helpful to smear over the complexity of the development of liberal societies with this kind of groupie science club type of explanation. Freedom and causality are complements, as Kant saw, and require a model of their independent and reciprocal development, therefore something beyond causal science. Now we have it. Liberalism analyzed would require a new kind of science.
Let me note again that this book seems precisely pegged to displace the tradition here, e.g. the immense discourse of Kant and others on the idea of freedom, at the dawn of the age of liberalism. To write such a book and not discuss Kant with the title the author chooses takes one’s breath away, and the harm done to the unsuspecting is disgraceful scholarship.
In general the rise of liberalism is a tough thing to explain. We need to stand back and look at world history as whole and not indulge in line item explanations. In the totality of world history in its evolutionary complexity the rise of science, and the emergence of liberalism have independent histories going back to Sumer, at least. And the question of the Axial Age, and the mysterious resemblance of the modern transition to such ‘axial’ periods in its explosive discontinuity, almost like a punctuated equilibrium, looms in the background making most sociological thinking inadequate to the task.
Modern science has been unable to produce a science of history for the simple reason that its own attempt to produce a science of freedom has been a reductionist effort to eliminate freedom from discussion. The way toward such a science was indicated by Kant. It is unbelievable he doesn’t appear in such an account.
We have gone to the dogs already. No other conclusion is possible.
Lead this author off to remedial Kantstudien forthwith.
Rating: 4 / 5
While I have not yet finished this book, I have already established that, while it has a great premise and many interesting factoids and quotables, it is definitely a night time sleeper rather than a “can’t put it downer”. Too bad, since Timothy Ferris is a highly regarded scholar. I’d recommend the book for its content, not for its style. Where’s Carl Sagan when you need him? At least we still have Thomas Friedman.
Rating: 3 / 5
ferris is at his best in this well paced, thoroughly engaging book. i strongly recommend it for anyone interested in science and politics. it especially relevant today considering the massive political/scientific issues we facce: climate change, energy, stem cells, etc. great read that left me feeling encouraged and hopeful!
Rating: 5 / 5