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Product Identifiers
PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
ISBN-101400062284
ISBN-139781400062287
eBay Product ID (ePID)46454755
Product Key Features
Book TitleVictory of Reason : How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success
Number of Pages304 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2005
TopicEconomics / General, Christianity / General, World, Sociology of Religion
IllustratorYes
GenreReligion, Social Science, Business & Economics, History
AuthorRodney Stark
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.1 in
Item Weight18.5 Oz
Item Length9.5 in
Item Width6.5 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2005-046559
TitleLeadingThe
Dewey Edition22
Dewey Decimal270
SynopsisMany books have been written about the success of the West, analyzing why Europe was able to pull ahead of the rest of the world by the end of the Middle Ages. The most common explanations cite the West's superior geography, commerce, and technology. Completely overlooked is the fact that faith in reason, rooted in Christianity's commitment to rational theology, made all these developments possible. Simply put, the conventional wisdom that Western success depended upon overcoming religious barriers to progress is utter nonsense. InThe Victory of Reason,Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark's view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and nonsecular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason: While the world's other great belief systems emphasized mystery, obedience, or introspection, Christianity alone embraced logic and reason as the path toward enlightenment, freedom, and progress. That is what made all the difference. In explaining the West's dominance, Stark convincingly debunks long-accepted "truths." For instance, by contending that capitalism thrived centuries before there was a Protestant work ethicor even Protestantshe counters the notion that the Protestant work ethic was responsible for kicking capitalism into overdrive. In the fifth century, Stark notes, Saint Augustine celebrated theological and material progress and the institution of "exuberant invention." By contrast, long before Augustine, Aristotle had condemned commercial trade as "inconsistent with human virtue"which helps further underscore that Augustine's times were not the Dark Ages but the incubator for the West's future glories. This is a sweeping, multifaceted survey that takes readers from the Old World to the New, from the past to the present, overturning along the way not only centuries of prejudiced scholarship but the antireligious bias of our own time.The Victory of Reasonproves that what we most admire about our worldscientific progress, democratic rule, free commerceis largely due to Christianity, through which we are all inheritors of this grand tradition. From the Hardcover edition.
LC Classification NumberBR115.C5S63 2005
Bewertungen und Rezensionen
Relevanteste Rezensionen
- 26. Mai. 2022
Accessible but thought provoking
Rodney Stark has a knack for writing history that is simultaneously accessible to the general reader and thought provoking to the history buff. In The Victory of Reason he makes the case that the West gave birth to capitalism and science and eliminated slavery precisely because it embraced the foundational and unique axioms of Christianity. In the process, he exposes the errors of Enlightenment thinkers, who were so pleased with themselves and so contemptuous of what preceded them that they dubbed themselves "enlightened" and previous centuries "dark," even though, in the West, those previous centuries were marked by steady progress and innovation, not regression. In this slim volume, Stark knocks down notion of the Middle Ages as an interruption of the progress from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (which is where Enlightenment thinkers came up with the notion of "Middle Ages" or the "Dark Ages" in the first place - to them, the ancients were "classical," they were "enlightened," and the many centuries in between were just "in the middle" where nothing worthwhile happened because it was held back the Catholic Church's superstition, backwardness and terror). Stark makes the case that the world prior to Rome's fall in the West was basically in a state of arrested development, and that the smaller and less powerful political structures of subsequent centuries fostered greater creativity and led to greater individual freedom and prosperity than had ever been seen to that point anywhere in human history. Making this development even possible was Christianity, which in Western Europe was the Catholic Church, serving as both the cultural glue and the intellectual engine of the age. Many will instinctively recoil at the thought, so commonly derided has been the Catholic Church for centuries. But such reactions are emotional, not rational. And Stark shows why.Bestätigter Kauf: JaArtikelzustand: Gebraucht
- 05. Mai. 2021
Good Read
Get it! Read it! Think about the country you want to have and push for it.Bestätigter Kauf: JaArtikelzustand: Gebraucht
