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| BOOKS |
| Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another |
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Tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes
decided in the seventeenth century that he would work out how society should
be governed. But his approach was not to be based on the wishful thinking
of Plato's 'Republic' or Bacon's 'New Atlantis'; Hobbes used Galileo's mechanics
to construct a theory of government from physical first principles. His
answer looks unappealing today: a dictatorial monarchy that ruled with an
iron fist. But Hobbes had begun a new adventure: to look for 'scientific'
rules that governed society. This programme was pursued, from many different
political perspectives, by Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, John
Stuart Mill and others; but social and political philosophy gradually abandonded
such a scientific approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the
social, economic and political sciences, as we find that large numbers of
people can display behaviour eerily reminiscent of so many mindless particles,
all interacting with one another. This new physics of society has a different
philosophy, however - not to determine how to govern or organize, but to
examine the consequences of particular choices and to understand how our
laws, institutions and customs arise from the effect each individual has
on the others. This book is the first to bring these new ideas together
and to weave them into the historical context of a scientific search for
better ways to live.
Reviews of this
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(Heinemann/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004) Winner of the Aventis Prize
for Science Books 2005! |
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