On Equilibrium

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 5, 2004

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.