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Cunning, by Don Herzog
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Want to be cunning? You might wish you were more clever, more flexible, able to cut a few corners without getting caught, to dive now and again into iniquity and surface clutching a prize. You might want to roll your eyes at those slaves of duty who play by the rules. Or you might think there's something sleazy about that stance, even if it does seem to pay off. Does that make you a chump?
With pointedly mischievous prose, Don Herzog explores what's alluring and what's revolting in cunning. He draws on a colorful range of sources: tales of Odysseus; texts from Machiavelli; pamphlets from early modern England; salesmen's newsletters; Christian apologetics; plays; sermons; philosophical treatises; detective novels; famous, infamous, and obscure historical cases; and more.
The book is in three parts, bookended by two murderous churchmen. "Dilemmas" explores some canonical moments of cunning and introduces the distinction between knaves and fools as a "time-honored but radically deficient scheme." "Appearances" assails conventional approaches to unmasking. Surveying ignorance and self-deception, "Despair?" deepens the case that we ought to be cunning--and then sees what we might say in response.
Throughout this beguiling book, Herzog refines our sense of what's troubling in this terrain. He shows that rationality, social roles, and morality are tangled together--and trickier than we thought.
- Sales Rank: #3423925 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Princeton University Press
- Published on: 2006-01-22
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .73" h x 6.48" w x 9.50" l, .96 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
What is cunning, and how did it develop a pejorative connotation? Herzog, a professor of law and political philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of, most recently, Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, applies his erudite style and barbed humor to this examination of the idea of "cunning" and how it connects to our concepts of rationality and morality, gleefully gamboling across the literature and pop culture of a few millennia and invoking Hume as convincingly as Tammy Faye Bakker. Herzog writes engaging prose without sacrificing the intellectual rigor of his exploration (the book winds down, for example, with a vexing question about Greek mythology: "They don't cast cunning as wisdom's bitch daughter. They cast wisdom as cunning's bitch daughter. What then?") and contextualizes his ideas by "going local" to provide real-world examples (Internet and telemarketing scams, plastic surgery) rather than relying on "off-the-shelf abstractions." The book is organized into three parts-Dilemmas, Appearances, and Despair-but Herzog jumps from topic to topic and century to century, referencing and cross-referencing so quickly that structure is moot. Some readers may find his approach disorienting, but those ready for a scholarly escapade will find it innovative and invigorating.
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Review
One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2006
"[In] his sparkling new book . . . Don Herzog doesn't say his subject changed the world, though it would be hard to imagine the world without it. He lets cunning lead us toward a broadened idea of human behavior."--Robert Fulford, National Post
"In Cunning, Mr. Herzog's playful and wide-ranging new book, he meditates on the tricks played by Henry Tufts, Odysseus, and used-car salesmen, among many others. Acts of cunning, Mr. Herzog says, can teach us about social roles, the limits of rationality, and the contradictions the lie within utilitarian and Kantian moral arguments."--David Glenn, Chronicle of Higher Education
This pleasingly original little volume is bookended by two tales of murderous priests. . . . In prose that conveys a deliciously convivial murmur (the author is a law professor who hates most academic writing), Herzog proceeds to discuss Odysseus, Machiavelli, car salesmen and confidence tricksters, believers in angels, astrology and demons, jazz musicians and pirates, both eliciting out sympathy for the variety of human moral life and refusing the paranoiac conclusion that all around us are knaves. Very cunning indeed."--Steven Poole, The Guardian
"At the start of this extraordinary book we are invited to view cunning as a nobody, and nobody as cunning. By its conclusion, we are left to struggle with the thought that cunning is everybody, and that everybody is cunning. Like Odysseus himself, the reader who undertakes this labyrinthine journey will have many tales to tell, and will be very much the wiser for it."--John C. P. Goldberg, Michigan Law Review
"This study is highly original, deeply researched, and lucidly written, providing pioneering work on the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Germany and challenging and reshaping the extensive scholarship on memory and the Holocaust. . . . By focusing on a subject seemingly far removed from Nazism, Herzog shows how pervasive debates about the Nazi past were and how complex and contradictory the attitudes of even committed antifascists were."--Mary Nolan, The Historian
"Cunning is a remarkable book. . . . It is both a pleasure and difficult to read. It is a pleasure because it is so clever and erudite, so provocative and original, and because I have learned much from it and agree with much of it. It is difficult to read because the book's 'message' is so deflationary, because the playfulness edges toward self-display, and because it is hard to trust it. Of course, this is Herzog's point, which means that my attitude and reservations are precisely what Cunning aimed to cultivate."--J. Peter Euben, Duke University, Durham, NC
From the Back Cover
"This book evinces on every page its author's extraordinary erudition and range. Captivating and pleasurable, it is a repository of example after example, story after story, anecdote after anecdote of 'cunning' behavior. Herzog is familiar with ancient literature, seldom-read eighteenth-century playwrights and novelists, Tammy Faye Bakker, nineteenth-century advertisements, seventeenth-century astrology, the letters of Dashiell Hammett, student answers to nineteenth-century school examinations, detective fiction, research about Tupperware--and that's mainly from the second chapter alone."--Patrick Deneen, Georgetown University, author of Democratic Faith
"An impressive piece of work. Herzog nails his target of instrumental rationality head-on. In form the book is innovative, even daring. It is one of those rare works in political theory with a clear claim to originality of conception as well as purpose. It also breaks through the field's conventional boundaries by engaging modes of reasoning, questions of affect, and problems of ethics and judgment that, for the past decade or so, have found considerable uptake in philosophy, law, literary studies, and history."--Kirstie McClure, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Judging Rights
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
a cunning piece of work
By R. Kevin Hill
On the surface, this book seems to be in the genre of cultural history, the history of an idea (Machiavellian maneuvering). But wait a minute! Isn't Machiavellian maneuvering a timeless fact of life for us humans? Isn't the idea of a history of cunning as odd as the idea of a history of sexuality? There's the rub. It turns out that how we think about cheats and scoundrels has a history, and one can't quite view it in the same way again once this comes to light. More: not only do our assumptions about scoundrelhood reflect a history, but they don't stand up to critical scrutiny (the author's beautiful final story of the gulled murderer at the end illustrates this, but I don't want to spoil it for you by explaining it here). More: dubious assumptions about scoundrelhood are lurking in the deep background of how slews of people today think about rational choice, philosophy of social science, and the nature of morality, and though the author does not lean heavily on this point, if the reader is aware of what, say, economists think rational self-interest is, the implications of the critical history of scoundrelhood for all kinds of projects is quietly devastating. This agenda, if it is his agenda, sneaks up on you in the course of what you might think is just a really fun sequence of anecdota, revealing him as a stealth philosopher. The stealth philosopher seems also revealed in the very quiet undercurrent of insistence that we rethink our assumptions about morality, selfishness and deceit, and acknowledge them, and human life more generally, as the cussedly complex, theory-defying things that they are. Yet this touches the reader on a more intimate level--are you sure you *are* a good person? How do we draw the boundaries between dupe and knave? Can we? The author provides no answers, only lots of really uncomfortable questions. Last but not least, all of this is presented in one of the most delightfully wicked, jazzy, clever, fun prose styles I have ever encountered. There is a kind of brilliantly improvisational quality to the book which makes it a joy to read. The better to sneak up on you with its deeper concerns, sowing seeds of doubt that we know what rationality and irrationality, honesty and deceit, good and evil, really are. How very cunning.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Chump or Cad?
By Alexander Herzen
Here is the dilemma addressed by Herzog: We do not want to be chumps, and we do not want to be cads (or, in his terms, fools or knaves). But is there a third option? As Herzog demonstrates, the question is harder to answer than one might unreflectively think. Offering a dazzling and difficult rumination on cunning in low and high culture, Herzog shows that making the case against cunning requires one to question numerous modern dogmas, including welfare economics and instrumental rationality. The discussion includes an analysis of Homer's and Sophocles' arch-trickster, Odyesseus, and the more prominent "high culture" defenders or chroniclers of cunning -- Machiavelli, Hobbes, David Hume, Tacitus. But Herzog also seamlessly knits in discussions of Nigerian e-mail scams; the 17th century astrologer William Lilly; Master James, a murderous and adulterous 17th century curate; Albanian ponzi schemes; and Tupperware parties. Want to know what those last five items (among others) have to do with Machiavelli's Mandragola? Read the book.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Cunning - the silent artificer
By Shalom Freedman
There is a concept which describes a certain kind of character- type in Israel. The concept is ' fryerr' .A 'fryerr' is something like a sucker , a person who on every occasion simply gets the short end of the stick. As I am sort of pretty much of kind of a 'fryerr' I take great interest in what can be thought of as the opposite type of character, the 'cunning ' person, the one who knows how to cleverly get what they want.
Now in order to satisfy my interest, and perhaps teach me a few tricks which I will of course never learn Don Herzog has cunningly written a book on the subject of 'Cunning'. And this as I am suddenly reminded of one of my favorite literary characters, 'Gimpel the Fool' who is always being deceived by others, and who no matter how many times he is disappointed, continues to believe and hope in them. The saintly fool, which I suppose the sympathy of many of us is really with.
'Cunning' people we might admire, but we do not really like very much. That is unless we happen to be trapped in an elevator with them and they figure out the way out.
But 'cunning' as Herzog explains is a lot more than being smart. In an outstanding review of the book which appeared first in CanadaCom. Robert Fulford describes the history of the concept of cunning as elaborated by Herzog as follows:
The "evolution of the word "cunning" suggests that a history could be written through changing word-meanings. In the 14th century, "cunning" meant erudition, and in the 16th Sir Thomas More described virtues such as "chastity, liberality, temperance, cunning." But perhaps English speakers noticed that wisdom could be put to corrupt ends. They shifted the adjective from the Positive column to the Negative.
By the 18th century it clearly meant knavery. The sentimental 19th century added a new meaning -- appealing, sweet. Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit tells us of tea served with "cunning teacakes." By 1887 it described a child who was "piquantly interesting." Today, a more blatant use emerges: A British ad agency called Cunning promises "guerrilla marketing," boasting British Airways and Levi's as clients.
Cunning is essential to some. A poker player lacking it would be comically inept. A politician who presented the same face to all his followers would be unique in history as well as unsuccessful. And then there's law, an industry grounded in cunning. This worried James Boswell, a lawyer, so he asked his idol, Samuel Johnson, about legal ethics. Boswell feared that simulating strong feelings or stating something you don't believe might distort the moral sense, making a lawyer immoral in his private life. Johnson replied: "Why no, Sir. Everybody knows you are paid for affecting warmth for your client; and it is, therefore, properly no dissimulation."
Cunning is connected with secrecy, with duplicity, with the ability to mimic and deceive. Cunning people often play at being simple- minded .The con-man is of course one great popular American figure of cunning.
When I think however of the supreme cunning( Herzog also analyzes novels and shows how skillful they can be in providing false clues as to what their characters really are- i.e. deceiving by appearances.) I think of one great literary master, Joyce.
It was by 'silence, exile and cunning' that he would win his way to literary greatness, forge in the smithy of his soul ' the uncreated conscience of his race'. How cunning, and perhaps how duplicitous, but the fact is that of all the hundreds of thousands of writers of the twentieth century Joyce was cunning enough ( and of course great enough in literary terms) to have his work read and reread all the years of the nights.
My sense is many of us would do well to study Herzog's work to acquire a bit of cunning of our own. But then my guess is, most of us, would out of our absurd need to come out with it all at the beginning, to be completely honest and straightforward, forget to be cunning, and not achieve what we want.
Some of us seems will be compelled to admire and perhaps resent the 'cunning' without ever being able to truly join their ranks.
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