TY - BOOK AU - Wotton, David. TI - Power, pleasure, and profit: insatiable appetites from Machiavelli to Madison SN - 9780674976672 U1 - 170.903woo PY - 2018/// CY - Cambridge PB - The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press KW - Conduct of life -- History; Power (Social sciences) -- History; Values -- History; Enlightenment; Ambition -- History; Pleasure; Profit N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index N2 - We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning―cost-benefit analysis―to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives ER -