Review by Choice Review
Aristotle understands happiness as the exercise of the distinctively human virtues, not as a mood or a feeling. The small polis, where fellow-citizens knew one another, might be conducive to the cultivation of character. The large, modern state, with its impersonality and the mass-life that lends itself to fleeting satisfactions and their conjuring by entrepreneurs public and private, makes Abbinnett (Univ. of Birmingham, UK) long for a less atomized, more "collective pursuit of the good life." Abbibbett sensibly rejects the ideologies that promise happiness wrongly understood. Staying entirely within the philosophic tradition that substituted history for Aristotelian natural right and the biblical God as its moral standards, Abbinnett interrogates not only Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida but Arthur Schopenhauer, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, (especially) Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Emmanuel Levinas. He takes a position close to Theodor Adorno--rejecting the Absolute Spirit while also rejecting dialectical materialism, settling instead on an ever-evolving "spirit" (with a lower-case 's'). Connoisseurs of postmodernism--especially those of leftish leanings--will enjoy and profit from this book, which eschews the grander promises of utopianism while remaining hopeful for some other, more modest socialist proposals. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections. W. Morrisey Hillsdale College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
