Review
'No one who wishes to understand the great modern transformation of the industrialized world - the immense rise in human wealth even with an increase in population - can do so without studying the remarkable scholarship of the great British historian and anthropologist Alan Macfarlane. In The Riddle of the Modern World Alan Macfarlane looks at three thinkers - Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville - who were alive when the great change took place to see if they, from direct observation, could explain what happened. - James Q. Wilson, Wall Street Journal
Product Description
What conditions the chances of liberty, wealth and equality at the start of the third Christian millennium? Why did human civilizations develop so slowly for thousands of years, and then transform themselves during the last three hundred? This study of four great thinkers who lived between 1689 and 1995, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, De Tocqueville, and Ernest Gellner, weaves their lives and works together and through their own words shows how they approached the question of the nature of man, his past and his future.
About the Author
ALAN MACFARLANE is Professor of Anthropological Science at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1986. His previous books include Marriage and Love in England 1300-1840 (1986), The Culture of Capitalism (1987), The Savage Wars of Peace (1997).
