Power, Pleasure, and Profit
Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison
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Narrated by:
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Charles Constant
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By:
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David Wootton
About this listen
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 reveals, 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 instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought to reveal 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. 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 states, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.
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Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
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Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
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Nature's God
- The Heretical Origins of the American Republic
- By: Matthew Stewart
- Narrated by: Michael Quinlan
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? Not only the erudite Thomas Jefferson, the wily and elusive Ben Franklin, and the underappreciated Thomas Paine, but also Ethan Allen, the hero of the Green Mountain Boys, and Thomas Young, the forgotten Founder who kicked off the Boston Tea Party. These radicals who founded America set their sights on a revolution of the mind. Derided as "infidels" and "atheists" in their own time, they wanted to liberate us not just from one king but from the tyranny of supernatural religion.
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Excellent exploration of this subject
- By Caroline on 01-13-15
By: Matthew Stewart
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The Voice of Reason
- Essays in Objectivist Thought
- By: Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In the years between her first public lecture in 1961 and her last in 1981, Ayn Rand spoke and wrote about topics as different as education, medicine, Vietnam, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. In The Voice of Reason, these pieces are gathered together in book form for the first time. Written in the last decades of Rand's life, they reflect a life lived on principle, a probing mind, and a passionate intensity. With them are five essays by Leonard Peikoff, Rand's longtime associate and literary executor.
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Explains Everything Of Today
- By L. Nicholson on 11-20-15
By: Ayn Rand, and others
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Fools, Frauds and Firebrands
- Thinkers of the New Left
- By: Roger Scruton
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of the leading critics of leftist orientations comes a study of the thinkers who have most influenced the attitudes of the New Left. Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. Scruton delivers a critique of modern left-wing thinking.
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Deconstructing the New Left
- By Wayne on 01-17-20
By: Roger Scruton
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America's Revolutionary Mind
- A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It
- By: C. Bradley Thompson
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the 15 years before 1776.
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Excellent study of Revolutionary Thinking
- By Amazon Customer on 03-24-21
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The Constitution of Liberty
- The Definitive Edition
- By: Ronald Hamowy - Edited by, F. A. Hayek
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Constitution of Liberty is considered Hayek's classic statement on the ideals of freedom and liberty, ideals that he believes have guided - and must continue to guide - the growth of Western civilization. Here, Hayek defends the principles of a free society, casting a skeptical eye on the growth of the welfare state and examining the challenges to freedom posed by an ever-expanding government.
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very detailed and important
- By Big Kyle 570 on 06-17-20
By: Ronald Hamowy - Edited by, and others
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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- By: Max Weber
- Narrated by: Monroe Clark McBride
- Length: 5 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Max Weber's best-known and most controversial work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904, remains to this day powerful and fascinating. Weber's highly accessible style is just one of many reasons for his continuing popularity. The book contends that the Protestant ethic made possible and encouraged the development of capitalism in the West.
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Very good unprejudiced scholar
- By Viktor V. Choban on 07-11-19
By: Max Weber
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On Revolution
- By: Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Hannah Arendt's penetrating observations on the modern world, based on a profound knowledge of the past, have been fundamental to our understanding of our political landscape. On Revolution is her classic exploration of a phenomenon that has reshaped the globe. From the 18th-century rebellions in America and France to the explosive changes of the 20th century, Arendt traces the changing face of revolution and its relationship to war while underscoring the crucial role such events will play in the future.
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Insightful Analysis of Differing Revolutions
- By Roger on 01-10-18
By: Hannah Arendt