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Rating: 
Summary: Love it!
Review: Fantastic book! MacFarlane examines the riddle of why mankind has done so well over the last 300 years, and what prevented these advancements from occuring earlier in our history. He uses the work of four "philosophers"; Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Ernest Geller to throw light on the role that liberty, wealth, and democracy have played. The book is broken down into four sections. Each section starts with the life and times of the philosopher in question. Then their ideas and discoveries about the world around them are examined in detail. Each one contributes to the "solution" to the "riddle". I have been reading a lot of Hayek lately, and many of the ideas he refers to in passing in his work are laid out much more throughly here. If you enjoy history, and are particularly interested in the development of liberty and understanding how individual liberty leads to wealth and better conditions for all, you should buy this book. Also, if you are interested in anyone of the four philosophers mentioned above, you'll be treated to a clear overview of their life and work in the context of the book's subject. It's expensive, but worth it. Buy it before it goes out of print again!
Rating:
Summary: Love it!
Review: Fantastic book! MacFarlane examines the riddle of why mankind has done so well over the last 300 years, and what prevented these advancements from occuring earlier in our history. He uses the work of four "philosophers"; Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Ernest Geller to throw light on the role that liberty, wealth, and democracy have played. The book is broken down into four sections. Each section starts with the life and times of the philosopher in question. Then their ideas and discoveries about the world around them are examined in detail. Each one contributes to the "solution" to the "riddle". I have been reading a lot of Hayek lately, and many of the ideas he refers to in passing in his work are laid out much more throughly here. If you enjoy history, and are particularly interested in the development of liberty and understanding how individual liberty leads to wealth and better conditions for all, you should buy this book. Also, if you are interested in anyone of the four philosophers mentioned above, you'll be treated to a clear overview of their life and work in the context of the book's subject. It's expensive, but worth it. Buy it before it goes out of print again!
Rating: 
Summary: Rather too much an ambitious work for so scarce results.
Review: If you wish to have a good summary of certain aspects (i.e., the interactions and relations between liberty, wealth and equality) of three great thinkers (Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Tocqueville; Ernst Gellner is also treated but not to much in depth, really), this book is interesting. But not at all enough to cope with its ambitious aims: i) to explain the obstacles which had halted the growth of all great agrarian civilizations up to the18th century ; and ii) to try and explain what has happened since the 18th century. By the end of the book, the author recognizes that "there is still a large gap in the explanation of how the transition to the modern world has occurred" and that there is still pending an explanation of the technological and scientific growth in western Europe between the 12th-19th centuries and why, during the same period, it slowed down, ceased and even partially regressed in other civilizations which had previously been far more advanced than Europe. As of today, nobody has a definitive answer to this, but I would suggest to read the following books: "The Rise of the West" by William H. McNeill, "World History. A new perspective" by Clive Ponting, "Reorient" by Andre Gunder Frank, "The Great Divergence", by Kenneth Pomeranz, "The Dynamics of Global Dominance. European Overseas Empires 1415-1980", by David Abernethy and "The Cash Nexus" by Niall Ferguson.
Rating:
Summary: Convinving Look Into Sources of English Exceptionalism
Review: In "The Riddle of the Modern World," Alan Macfarlane "seeks to find the sources of English exceptionalism that ushered in the modern world, looking through the eyes of a number of witnesses from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries who have thought about these sources in a comparative framework. The first of these authors is Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), who lived around the time England was breaking away from the European herd and establishing the institutions that would bring about the Industrial Revolution. The next is Adam Smith (1723-90), who lived just at the cusp of the changeover from an agrarian economy to an industrial mineral-energy-using economy. The third is Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), who lived when modernity had become manifest both in England and in its offshoot, the United States of America. The fourth is the contemporary sociologist and anthropologist Ernest Gellner (1920-95).""This strategy is an interesting one, and Macfarlane's thumbnail sketches of the lives and though of these thinkers are cogent and concise. I learned a great deal from his discussion of Montesquieu, and I am sure that readers who do not know the writings of the other thinkers discussed in the book will likewise find much of interest in it." -From "The Independent Review," Fall 2002
Rating:
Summary: A collection of conspectuses.
Review: This book is, above all, a collection of conspectuses about various classical authors' views on the factors(most related to the development of a distinctly Western mindframe) that triggered the commercial and technological dominance of the West from the XVIIIth Century on. By doing so, the author misses the opportunity to investigate more closely the actual political and economic factors at work ("Imperialism", for instance, and not only in the Leninist sense). Also, his remarks on the authrors selected are sadly banal and add nothing new. To be used at most as an undergraduate textbook. Too bad that Macfarlane didn't write nothing that could compare to his works on English individualism and and the role of marriage in pre-modern England.
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