"The Worldly Philosophers", Robert L. Heilbroner

There are times when I feel wholly inadequate to the task of considering any issue of import. Instead of a bedrock of historical lessons from Livy or a paragon from Cicero, I find myself forced to draw on less carefully considered narratives from the genre of popular fiction.

Such was the nourishment of my tepid liberal arts education. My high school years were spent studying such important works as McGraw Hill - Physics, or McGraw Hill - English Reader, or substitute any other poorly organized and uninspiring text. When we weren't being bored to death by the Reader's Digest versions of science or literature we were reading novels.

Now, in my thirties I find myself wanting to know so much more about history as understood by Machiavelli or economics as considered by Smith, Marx, and Keynes. I wish we had been required to read Darwin instead of listening to a teacher read a biology text. We should have been reading Hitler and dissecting his flawed vision for Germany under the tutelage of Marcus Aurelius, Plato, and Augustine, not only looking at pictures and learning how awful it is to attempt genocide.

If like me you long for a firmer grasp on the "classics" or worse, if you feel like there is no reason to study history for anything more than entertainment, that the lessons have all been learned, then I encourage you to read, "The Worldly Philosophers" by Heilbroner. It will assault your notion that humanity has found lasting solutions to the problems of government and production. You will find yourself in the company of careful thinkers who dared to look beyond the paradigms programmed into their beings by common consensus. You will most likely be exposed and stand naked in front of human history bereft of the comfortable armor of self-satisfied ignorance. I am.

It is a rare treat to be challenged by a book, to renew our intellectual curiosity and question those convictions we hold so deeply that we don't realize they actually possess us. I hope this book offers you such an opportunity.