Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison by David Wootton (Harvard, £25.95)
In England between 1658 and 1832 the theory about what motivated people changed. Was this a good thing? The intellectual historian David Wootton shows that the theory did change. But he very much doubts it was a good thing.
Historically speaking, “Pleasure and profit were often coupled together,” Wootton notes in his astonishingly learned book, but never until 1658 and the publication of William Percey’s The Compleat Swimmer “were they claimed to be the only motivations, to the exclusion of all others, such as honour, virtue, and piety. [It was] a new account of what it is to be a human being.”