The God of the Machine

Rating:
Summary: A work of genius!
Review: For anyone interested in history of political thought this is a must read. A true work of genius. One of my top twenty books.

Rating:
Summary: One of the most important books of the 20th Century!
Review: God of the Machine was my first clue that history could be more than a boring recitation of names and dates.

Paterson looks at the whole sweep of history, from ancient to contemporary, and relates it to the ideas and principles of freedom. Her central concern is to discover the political forms which freedom and civilization require. Her central unifying concept of "the long circuit of energy that makes civilization work" is both exhilarating and true: if economic thinking has not yet caught up to Isabel Paterson, so much the worse for it!

Written by a friend of Ayn Rand, and a lover of freedom, God of the Machine is a gem!

God of the Machine is well up in the top 10 of Random House's poll of most important non-fiction of the 20th Century.

Rating:
Summary: Folded Corners
Review: I tend to fold the corners of pages that I consider having important premises or conclusions in any book I read. One day I was encouraging my sister to read "The God Of The Machine". She picked up my tattered book and replied "Why are all the pages folded"? I laughed outloud in recognition on how important the whole of the book is and no page is unimportant.

Rating:
Summary: A good book that deserves a re-write
Review: The topics covered in this book are extremely important and Ms. Paterson has for the most part taken the correct position on them. However, her writing style reflects her lack of formal education and varies considerably from paragraph to paragraph. Her organization of thought is haphazard at best, yet she was able to convey her points and make astute observations throughout. The common-sense approach should keep many readers interested through material that could be boring at the hands of other authors.

The most unfortunate aspect of the book is her continued attempt to force an analogy of the principals of electricy with human effort. At no time did I find this analogy appropriate or helpful. At other places in the book she tried to force an analogy of dimensional geometry that also failed to convey any additional meaning. I continually skipped these sentences and found that I lost no comprehension of the material.

Rating:
Summary: a classic of American political thought
Review: This book is a vigorous and idiosyncratic defense of old-school liberalism. It is similar to, but better than, Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, which was published in the same year. It will probably be regarded as a classic someday by those who study American thought under FDR and during WWII.