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More copies of this ISBN:This title in other formats:Cunningby Don Herzog
Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:Want to be cunning? You might wish you were more clever, more flexible, able to cut a few corners without getting caught, to dive now and again into iniquity and surface clutching a prize. You might want to roll your eyes at those slaves of duty who play by the rules. Or you might think there's something sleazy about that stance, even if it does seem to pay off. Does that make you a chump? With pointedly mischievous prose, Don Herzog explores what's alluring and what's revolting in cunning. He draws on a colorful range of sources: tales of Odysseus; texts from Machiavelli; pamphlets from early modern England; salesmen's newsletters; Christian apologetics; plays; sermons; philosophical treatises; detective novels; famous, infamous, and obscure historical cases; and more. The book is in three parts, bookended by two murderous churchmen. Dilemmas explores some canonical moments of cunning and introduces the distinction between knaves and fools as a time-honored but radically deficient scheme. Appearances assails conventional approaches to unmasking. Surveying ignorance and self-deception, Despair? deepens the case that we ought to be cunning--and then sees what we might say in response. Throughout this beguiling book, Herzog refines our sense of what's troubling in this terrain. He shows that rationality, social roles, and morality are tangled together--and trickier than we thought. Review:"What is cunning, and how did it develop a pejorative connotation? Herzog, a professor of law and political philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of, most recently, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, applies his erudite style and barbed humor to this examination of the idea of 'cunning' and how it connects to our concepts of rationality and morality, gleefully gamboling across the literature and pop culture of a few millennia and invoking Hume as convincingly as Tammy Faye Bakker. Herzog writes engaging prose without sacrificing the intellectual rigor of his exploration (the book winds down, for example, with a vexing question about Greek mythology: 'They don't cast cunning as wisdom's bitch daughter. They cast wisdom as cunning's bitch daughter. What then?') and contextualizes his ideas by 'going local' to provide real-world examples (Internet and telemarketing scams, plastic surgery) rather than relying on 'off-the-shelf abstractions.' The book is organized into three parts-Dilemmas, Appearances, and Despair-but Herzog jumps from topic to topic and century to century, referencing and cross-referencing so quickly that structure is moot. Some readers may find his approach disorienting, but those ready for a scholarly escapade will find it innovative and invigorating." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review:?Erudition, knavery, & Tupperware ... After all, it's sinful, some might say, but it's also necessary?. Robert Fulford, National Post Review:?It is a classic tale of trial and error, and of creative destruction?. Virginia Postrel, The New York Times Synopsis:"This book evinces on every page its author's extraordinary erudition and range. Captivating and pleasurable, it is a repository of example after example, story after story, anecdote after anecdote of 'cunning' behavior. Herzog is familiar with ancient literature, seldom-read eighteenth-century playwrights and novelists, Tammy Faye Bakker, nineteenth-century advertisements, seventeenth-century astrology, the letters of Dashiell Hammett, student answers to nineteenth-century school examinations, detective fiction, research about Tupperware--and that's mainly from the second chapter alone."--Patrick Deneen, Georgetown University, author of "Democratic Faith"<P>"An impressive piece of work. Herzog nails his target of instrumental rationality head-on. In form the book is innovative, even daring. It is one of those rare works in political theory with a clear claim to originality of conception as well as purpose. It also breaks through the field's conventional boundaries by engaging modes of reasoning, questions of affect, and problems of ethics and judgment that, for the past decade or so, have found considerable uptake in philosophy, law, literary studies, and history."--Kirstie McClure, University of California, Los Angeles, author of "Judging Rights" Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 Dilemmas 13 Appearances 69 Despair? 123 Afterword 185 Index 193 What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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