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Cunning
by Don Herzog
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780691124155 |
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher 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 Contents
Introduction 1
Dilemmas 13
Appearances 69
Despair? 123
Afterword 185
Index 193
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rkevinhill, August 15, 2008 (view all comments by rkevinhill)
On the surface, this book seems to be in the genre of cultural history, the history of an idea (Machiavellian maneuvering). But wait a minute! Isn't Machiavellian maneuvering a timeless fact of life for us humans? Isn't the idea of a history of cunning as odd as the idea of a history of sexuality? There's the rub. It turns out that how we think about cheats and scoundrels has a history, and one can't quite view it in the same way again once this comes to light. More: not only do our assumptions about scoundrelhood reflect a history, but they don't stand up to critical scrutiny (the author's beautiful final story of the gulled murderer at the end illustrates this, but I don't want to spoil it for you by explaining it here). More: dubious assumptions about scoundrelhood are lurking in the deep background of how slews of people today think about rational choice, philosophy of social science, and the nature of morality, and though the author does not lean heavily on this point, if the reader is aware of what, say, economists think rational self-interest is, the implications of the critical history of scoundrelhood for all kinds of projects is quietly devastating. This agenda, if it is his agenda, sneaks up on you in the course of what you might think is just a really fun sequence of anecdota, revealing him as a stealth philosopher. The stealth philosopher seems also revealed in the very quiet undercurrent of insistence that we rethink our assumptions about morality, selfishness and deceit, and acknowledge them, and human life more generally, as the cussedly complex, theory-defying things that they are. Yet this touches the reader on a more intimate level--are you sure you *are* a good person? How do we draw the boundaries between dupe and knave? Can we? The author provides no answers, only lots of really uncomfortable questions. Last but not least, all of this is presented in one of the most delightfully wicked, jazzy, clever, fun prose styles I have ever encountered. There is a kind of brilliantly improvisational quality to the book which makes it a joy to read. The better to sneak up on you with its deeper concerns, sowing seeds of doubt that we know what rationality and irrationality, honesty and deceit, good and evil, really are. How very cunning.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780691124155
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- Location:
- Princeton
- Subject:
- Ethics & Moral Philosophy
- Subject:
- Deception
- Subject:
- Political Science and International Relations
- Subject:
- Law
- Subject:
- Philosophy
- Copyright:
- 2006
- Edition Description:
- Trade paper
- Publication Date:
- February 2006
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Grade Level:
- College/higher education:
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- 2 halftones.
- Pages:
- 208
- Dimensions:
- 9.50x6.48x.73 in. .96 lbs.
