Cover of Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West

Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the Westis a sweeping and provocative exploration of nothing less than the political, economic, social, and cultural origins of Western society. With great daring and originality, John Ralston Saul dissects the contradictions, delusions, and illusions that have brought the world to the brink of confusion and crisis, and shatters the myths surrounding the icons and institutions that we have been taught to revere and cherish.

Audience
adult
Length
epic · 640 pages

Click a tag to see books like this one that share it. Point at it (on a phone, tap it) for less of it instead.

Read it? Sign in to help tag it.

Liked Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West? Here’s where I’d start.

These suit anyone who liked Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. Sign in and mark a few books for picks shaped around your own taste.

  1. Has Man a Future? Shares philosophy, nonfiction, politics
  2. Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault Shares philosophy, nonfiction, politics
  3. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy Shares politics, nonfiction, economics
  4. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism Shares philosophy, politics, nonfiction

“People who read Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West tend to reach for these next.”

  1. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief
  2. How to Change the World: Marx and Marxism 1840-2011
  3. Juno Beach: Canada's D-Day Victory, June 6, 1944
  4. The Poverty of Theory

“If you want more of the same (philosophy about religion), start with these.”

  1. Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights
  2. The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out
  3. Natural Right and History
  4. Enlightenment's Wake

“If it was the politics that hooked you, try one of these.”

  1. Behemoth, or The Long Parliament
  2. The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato
  3. The Open Society and Its Enemies
  4. Why Men Fight

“These start from a similar idea, even if they go somewhere else with it.”

  1. Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture
  2. American Titan: Searching for John Wayne
  3. Latin America: From Colonization to Globalization
  4. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution