Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

"This is by far the most challenging book on my list. David Wootton is one of the best intellectual historians we’ve got. He began as a historian of atheism, writing a brilliant short book about Paolo Sarpi , who was a Venetian humanist. Rather like England, Venice had an ambivalent relationship with the Pope. It was excommunicated in a papal interdict at the beginning of the seventeenth century and Sarpi became an apologist for the Venetian state. David’s real breakthrough book, in terms of reaching a wider audience, was called The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution , which is full of bravura writing and interesting detours that he’s particularly good at. There is an entire chapter on ‘the fact.’ This book, Power, Pleasure and Profit , is incredibly ambitious because it tries to address a change in humanity during the Enlightenment, when the secular is emboldened. People in the West turned their backs on Aristotle and Christ—who had underpinned rationality and morality up until then—and started to think in a Benthamite, utilitarian way about cost and benefit. So you have people like Hobbes, Locke, and Voltaire who are interested in the selfish motives of human beings and the way in which you can build an infrastructure around those selfish motives that makes them beneficial. It’s an interesting book because the Enlightenment has become fashionable again—I’m thinking of Steven Pinker, and even Jordan Peterson. But, in a sense, it’s life reduced. Pleasure is good and pain is bad. The old morality, where something was worthwhile in itself, is replaced by, ‘Does this hurt? Then it’s bad. Does this feel good? Then it’s good.’ It’s a very reductionist mentality. There’s one passage where he writes, “The real transformation was not in the world of ideas; it was in the lives and behaviour of people who had come to accept that virtue, honour, shame and guilt counted for almost nothing; all that mattered was success.” That has a very modern aspect, but in this profit and loss calculation it also seems like we’ve lost something. I think about this in terms of Brexit where, for many people, if you tell them they’ll lose something economically, they still think it’s worth it. It goes back to what we were saying about Iran, that a culture that’s very, very strong and deep is incredibly resistant, it can endure, it can overcome. Whereas I think Wootton is arguing that this culture of profits and losses is very, very fragile because it’s not really built on anything. It’s not built on the idea that some things are worth doing just because they’re worth doing or someone is good because they’re good. There’s always got to be a reason. The book is very much concerned with Britain and the Scottish Enlightenment. People like Adam Smith in particular are important to it. I don’t think David has looked at the Continental tradition , which tends to be more metaphysical. If you think of people like Kant or Marx , their writing tends to have, for want of a better word, a more religious, deeper meaning. Even Voltaire, who Wootton does refer to, is an Anglophile really. He’s one of the citizens of nowhere. David talks about that quite a lot—the citizens of somewhere. Why would people vote for Brexit ? Why would people vote for Trump? They must be irrational, they must be bad—whereas there may be deeper reasons that are almost, I wouldn’t say spiritual, but just not simply a profit-and-loss calculation. That’s what—I think— David is exploring in this book. Of course, he goes on endless digressions, as David always does. In themselves, they’re fantastically entertaining. There’s an interesting character called Kenelm Digby who links a lot of things together because he’s there in the mid-seventeenth-century. He’s a Catholic acquaintance of Oliver Cromwell, a key member of the Royal Society, and the inventor of the modern wine bottle. So he’s quite an eclectic figure. But the main people are Hobbes, Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, those Enlightenment philosophers . David always takes you on a ride. You read it once and you’ve probably understood 5-10 per cent of it, but you reread it and go back to certain passages. The book is based on a series of lectures he gave at Oxford. There’s things where you think, ‘Oh yes, that’s absolutely right’—real epiphanies—and then you’ll see something and go, ‘Hang on, that can’t be true. That’s mad.’ It’s just so full of ideas. It’s always stimulating and it’s always well worth persisting with David. I think his diagnosis is convincing, with the caveat that he’s largely writing about an Anglophile tradition. The cure, I don’t know. There does seem to be a reaction against that simple economic rationalism we’ve had for about 30 years or so, whereby money is everything and as long as GDP keeps going up and people’s wages keep going up, that will be enough. It doesn’t feel that way at the moment, as though that is enough. He’s examining a profound shift then in the light of a profound shift now , and so the book feels very, very timely. The problem is we know where they went, but we don’t know where we’re going. So it’s difficult, but it might be useful for navigating the present. Not that history ever repeats itself."