Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on.

These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win.

We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Those foundations rest heavily on a much-admired model, the writings of Immanuel Kant, who believed that “necessity of the categorical imperative was easily visible to any reasoning creature.” Blackburn’s glosses lend a down-to-earth, commonsensical quality to Kant’s rarified arguments, which he augments with other theories of right and wrong.ĭemanding but highly accessible, and highly rewarding. His lively narrative examines what he considers to be the principal threats to ethical behavior, key ideas such as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” and “freedom from the bad,” and the foundations for a modern theory of ethics.

Without falling into tongue-clucking, and careful to distinguish ethics from morals, the author points the way to doing more than merely living “benevolent, admired lives” in benighted times he urges readers to give close thought to matters of the public and private good and mull over terms such as “freedom” and “responsibility.” Here, he offers us a handy guide to doing just that. Blackburn suggests that our tolerance befits the modern zeitgeist, a climate in which “we care more about our rights than about our ‘good’,” the logical culmination of the “me decade” and the culture’s insistence on relativism, political correctness, false consciousness, and other enemies of any system of shared ethical behavior. A slender but rich meditation on why humans should choose to behave well when the possibilities for doing evil are so abundant.Ī follow-up to Blackburn’s surprisingly popular Think (1999), this takes a closer look at the thorny subject of ethics, a timely matter in an age of scandal and gossip-even if most of us tend to be forgiving of, say, extramarital assignations and the white lies of daily life.

Think simon blackburn chapter summary