Extracurricular reading.

The college curriculum has been a matter of great controversy for the past several years. But much undergraduate learning takes place outside of class and beyond the confines of formal reading lists. Taking advantage of this phenomenon, REASON asked a number of scholars, mostly university professors, to recommend works that students are not likely to encounter on the typical college syllabi but that they would suggest to a curious undergraduate. We limited each contributor to a single book but, as you'll see, some managed to cheat.

Gregory Benford

Most important, a book should hold your interest. Uplifting tomes left unread help no one. For pure intellectual fun, I salute Michael Hart's The One Hundred: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. Like peanuts, it's hard to nibble on just one entry in this 570-page book.

Most undergraduates emerge from universities agreeing with Henry Ford, that history is bunk. This book can correct that, ladling in fascinating detail that makes the past seem real and relevant.

Hart plays around the usual dates-and-wars approach, avoids the social-movement models, and for his underlying drivers stresses two great currents in human endeavor: science/technology and religion. These, he argues in case after case, propelled humanity from hunter-gatherers to lords of the planet, for better and for worse.

When I bought the first hardcover edition in 1978 (a second, updated edition is now in trade paperback), I thought that in his list of those who have most moved humanity, surely I would know the top 10. I missed one, and no one I know has recognized his entry number 7: Ts'ai Lun, the inventor of paper. Yet Hart's case is compelling. This obscure Chinese eunuch devised paper in 105 A.D., and the Han dynasty kept the technique secret until 751, when Arabs tortured the trick out of Chinese craftsmen.

Paper was never separately invented, even though its existence was known for centuries. Hart argues cogently that China's rise to cultural superiority over the West for a thousand years in large measure arose from the organizing utility of readily available paper. Only when Johann Gutenberg (entry number 8) devised the printing press did the West redress the balance and draw ahead of China.

Hart's Top Ten balances science/technology with religion, beginning with Muhammad (because he both rounded and spread a major religion), then in order, Newton, Christ, Buddha, Confucius, St. Paul, Ts'ai Lun, Gutenberg, Columbus, and Einstein. My only major difference with Hart's choices is that I believe Euclid, the sole figure who put mathematical thinking on an orderly basis, has been more influential than Einstein.

Necessarily, Hart has to guess at the long-range influence of those born in the last few centuries, but still, engaging patterns emerge. An unusually large number of major figures flourished between the sixth and third centuries B.C. From the 15th century on, each century supplies more names.

Natives of the British Isles turn up often, with Scots the true standouts. Hart argues cogently that scientists and inventors (37 entries) exercise more sway over later lives than politicians and generals (30 entries). Nineteen of the hundred never married, and 26 had no known children, with both these groups concentrated near the top of the list. Maybe family life gets in the way of greatness? Hart estimates that about half of the list have no living descendants. Seven were illiterate, principally military leaders. Oddly, at least 10 suffered from gout, a fact of interest in medical research.

The book abounds in insights, points worth arguing, quirks of history. It makes the past a living landscape, and as Hart hopes, does indeed "open, as it did for me, a new perspective on history."

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine and the author of Timescape.

Stephen Cox

Students who are trying to make sense out of history will probably not derive much help from the versions of historical theory that they encounter in the classroom. They will be especially disappointed if they want to understand the wonderful coincidence embodied in the progress of capitalist societies--the simultaneous expansion of personal liberty and material prosperity.

The historical theories that are normally embalmed in college syllabi won't come close to explaining how this happened. Some of them deny that there is such a thing as "progress" in the first place. Others view material progress as an effect of purely material forces, a kind of self-generating machine that periodically emits, as a byproduct, certain sentimental notions about the importance of individuals and individual liberty.

The conclusive refutation of all this nonsense can be found in Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine (Transaction Publishers). Paterson demonstrates the dependence of economic forces on ideas, which are the products of individual minds; and she shows that the key to material progress is the discovery of social and political mechanisms that allow individuals to think and act freely. If modern civilization can be likened to a machine, then the creative mind is its dynamo; its circuits of energy are maintained by capitalist institutions; and its improvement results from a gradually increasing understanding of the "engineering principles" of a free society. "These are not sentimental considerations," Paterson says. "They constitute the mechanism of production and therefore of power."

Paterson traces the history of the engineering principles from Greek science and Roman law to the system of limited government created by the founders of the American republic. She then describes the subversion of that system by collectivist ideas and practices. She presents a withering analysis of the managed economy, public education, state-sponsored "security" schemes, and the supposedly humanitarian impulses that lead people to favor the welfare state.

When The God of the Machine was published in 1943, it was shockingly unfashionable. "Fit audience, though few": The general public was not attracted, but Paterson was admired by such fellow iconoclasts as Ayn Rand, Albert Jay Nock, and Russell Kirk. The God of the Machine remains a classic of individualist thought. But it is not a pale historical artifact, locked in its time of origin. It is focused on the great continuing issues of civilization, which it confronts with the authority of Paterson's special character and experience.

Brought up in poverty on the Western frontier, educated by herself and educated superbly, Paterson became an important novelist and literary critic. She did not merely preach individualism; she lived life as an individualist. And she was not merely a theorist; she had the creative imagination that brings theory to life and challenges the imaginations of others. There was nobody quite like Isabel Paterson, and there is nothing quite like The God of the Machine.

Stephen Cox is professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego.

William C. Dennis

Among the intellectual openings to the further expansion of socialism that will plague the early 21st century, three appear to me to be particularly troubling: the question of race, the yearning for equality, and the worry over environmental degradation. Thus the friend of liberty will need to do some reading in all three of these areas if he is to be an able advocate of human freedom. On equality, one might first turn to the writings of the late Aaron Wildavsky, particularly his The Rise of Radical Egalitarianism, (1991); the Heartland Institute's recent Ecosanity (1994) would be one good place to start thinking about the environment for liberty.

But on the question of race, the premier scholar of good sense is Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. To his Race and Economics (1975), Markets and Minorities (1981), and Ethnic America (1981), among others, Professor Sowell has added this year Race and Culture: A World View (Basic Books). In these books. Sowell deals with how culture and background influence the statistical outcome of group behavior. He does this not to denigrate the role of individual effort in life achievements but to show how different starting points, values, customs, attitudes, and beliefs are bound to make a difference in how persons in a particular ethnic or religious group turn out.

Starting points matter. They do not determine, but they do influence. How could things be any other way? Nor would we want them to be, for otherwise the wonderful variety of humanity would be reduced to some colorless norm. Therefore, Sowell argues, if one bases governmental policies on statistical "disparities" of group outcomes, he will, perforce, ignore culture, history, choice, and preference as he tries to wrench the lives of real people into patterns more closely aligned to his theories of how things ideally should be.

Yet this is not a book where Sowell imposes some end state view of his own to substitute for those of the coercive utopians. Rather this is a work that might be subtitled, "On How to Begin Thinking About Race." Full of interesting examples of group differences throughout history and around the globe, Sowell's book has thoughtful discussions of paternalism, slavery, migration and conquest, discrimination and segregation, the counterintuitive and unintended consequences of government planning, the question of racial reparations, and the idea of social justice, among other topics.

Sowell's chapter on race and intelligence is one of his best--undogmatic and sensible throughout. Even to discuss such questions as these frankly would keep this book off...

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