On Equilibrium - Softcover

Saul, John Ralston

3.85

293 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140288031 ISBN 13: 9780140288032

Publisher: Penguin Canada, 2005

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What does John Ralston Saul's influential philosophical trilogy Voltaire's Bastards, The Doubter's Companion and The Unconscious Civilization mean for the real lives of individuals? Is it possible to apply his groundbreaking theories to everyday life?

On Equilibrium presents us with a virtual "how to"of the ways that ideas can translate into action. Saul explains how our different qualities give us the intelligence, self-confidence and ability to think and act as responsible individuals.

Saul argues that when human qualities are worshipped in isolation they become weaknesses, even forces of destruction or self-destruction. In short, they become ideologies. But as he explores the qualities he has identified as being necessary to integrated human behaviour, he shows us that the key is to use these qualities in combination. How can we use these qualities as positive forces in our own lives and in society? How can we use them to reinforce us as humans?

On Equilibrium is an intelligent, persuasive and controversial exploration of the essential qualities of humanity and how to use them to achieve equilibrium for the self and for an ethical society. It is a logical, compelling and humane successor to his bestselling trilogy.

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About the Author:

John Ralston Saul is Canada’s leading public intellectual. Declared a “prophet” by Time magazine, Saul has received many awards and prizes, including Chile’s Pablo Neruda Medal. He is president of PEN International, an organization dedicated to freedom of expression. He has published fourteen works, which have been translated into twenty-five languages in thirty-six countries, the most recent of which is The Comeback, an examination of the remarkable return to power of Aboriginal people in Canada. Saul lives in Toronto.

From Publishers Weekly:

This intriguing but often murky treatise on political philosophy extols balance and moderation in an incongruously vehement tone. Saul, an economist and philosopher and author of Voltaire's Bastards, sees humanism as a "dynamic equilibrium" between the six "qualities" of common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory and reason; trouble starts when balance is disrupted and one quality overshadows the others. In particular, reason-which modernity elevates into a false god, he says-must be tempered by other qualities. Otherwise, we develop a simplistic, "linear" mindset fixated on illusory "certainties," and eventually succumb to "ideology"-especially to the rationalist (but ultimately irrational) orthodoxies of free-market economics and technological determinism. Saul's "six qualities" schema links considerations of individual character to a larger social polemic on the need to subordinate markets and technology to the demands of conscience, tradition and democracy. His ambitious and far-ranging argument is studded with thought-provoking riffs-on the similarities between fascist and modern-day democratic politics, for example, or libertarian conceits about the withering away of the state. But Saul is also prone to psychologizing and his insights can get lost amidst abstract pronouncements ("Ideology, being in the possession of truth, has no need for compassion..."). His ideas are not systematically developed (perhaps because systematic development smacks of rationalist ideology), and the book can feel, at times, like bits of a manifesto for the author's left-liberal views on, say, factory fishing. Saul's is a serious, politicized, if laborious restatement of classic humanist values-broadmindedness, empathy, civic responsibility, distrust of technocracy, attunement to complexity and compromise, opposition to fanatics and absolutists-but it doesn't quite live up to its intellectual pretensions.
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