Humankind – One for the bookshelf?
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Humankind: A Hopeful History by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman
Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed primarily by self-interest. Providing a new historical perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history, Humankind makes a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good.
https://www.ft.com/content/63803e14-95d9-11ea-af4b-499244625ac4
His other earlier book is Utopia for Realists
“a world without borders to a world without poverty – it’s time to return to utopian thinking.”
We’re ahead of you ! We had already asked for a review copy and two members had bought their own. One of them will review it for August or September Socialist Standard.
His previous book wasn’t that bad. His “utopia” is a civilisation based on UBI, not envisaged as some reform to the poor law system but as a way freeing people from drudgery and money-hunting. The sort of UBIer we can talk to. He should be a socialist.
He was interviewed on BBC 5 Live in the last week or so. Some interesting ideas, not quite there yet, but at least he countered some of the human nature arguments.
Quick, make him aware of our existence!
I read this book the other day. It’s well written and very good. Obviously a few, minor and not central to his argument, things that could be argued with but definitely worth a read.
There’s an interesting discussion between him and Steven Pinker here: https://thepanpsycast.com/panpsycast
He will have been sent our review of his previous book as are all authors of books we review. It will be interesting to see if has taken on board any of our comments:
Book Reviews: ‘Utopia for Realists’, & ‘A Place of Refuge – An Experiment in Communal Living’
😀
I think one of the past popular features in the Standard is when we do an interview. Way back in the 70s with Tony Benn, more recently with Kliman and Paul Mattick Jnr, also our exchanges with Michael Albert. Perhaps, we could approach Bregman for an interview for the Standard.
Or even more ambitiously to give an online talk and Q and A now that we are getting accustomed to the technology of Zoom and Discord.
There was an earlier one than Tony Benn:
A Forecast of the Coming Revolution: Interview with Paul Lafargue
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