Subtitled “A Hopeful History”
(2019 Dutch; 2020 Little, Brown, xviii+461pp, including 64pp acknowledgements, notes, and index)
Still catching up posting about big books I’ve read in recent years. This book came out in 2020 (in the US) and I blogged about it briefly here. His first book, UTOPIA FOR REALISTS, came three years before this one, and I blogged about that one here. His third book, MORAL AMBITION, was released last year, and I picked it up last week to read next, before realizing I should catch up on the second book here, first.
Bregman is an historian and thinker and all-around optimist about things that many people are pessimistic about. This he aligned with Pinker and Rosling and Norberg and others. The title of this book is a play on words; Humankind doesn’t mean just humanity, it stands for the author’s conviction that people are more often kind rather than innately bad. In the big picture, he’s aligning himself with Rousseau rather than Hobbes, and so on that level he’s challenging the ideas of people like Pinker, who in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE documented the decline of violence over human history in the context of Hobbes’ Leviathan and the ideas of the Enlightenment that reigned in earlier violent tendencies. Bregman is claiming those early violent tendencies didn’t exist, or have been misinterpreted through bad history or bad storytelling. And he makes a good case, even though he seems to rely on anecdotal evidenced a bit too often…
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