Critical mass : how one thing leads to another
Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves' In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society. Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs. Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live
eBook, English, 2006
First American pbk. edition View all formats and editions
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2006
1 online resource (520 pages) : illustrations
9781466806832, 9780374530419, 1466806834, 0374530416
868665290
Introduction : political arithmetick
Raising Leviathan : the brutish world of Thomas Hobbes
Lesser forces : the mechanical philosophy of matter
The law of large numbers : regularities from randomness
The grand ah-whoom : why some things happen all at once
On growth and form : the emergence of shape and organization
The march of reason : chance and necessity in collective motion
On the road : the inexorable dynamics of traffic
Rhythms of the marketplace : the shaky hidden hand of economics
Agents of fortune : why interaction matters to the economy
Uncommon proportions : critical states and the power of the straight line
The work of many hands : the growth of firms
Join the club : alliances in business and politics
Multitudes in the valley of decision : collective influence and social change
The colonization of culture : globalization, diversity, and synthetic societies
Small worlds : networks that bring us together
Weaving the web : the shape of cyberspace
Order in Eden : learning to cooperate
Pavlov's victory : is reciprocity good for us?
Toward Utopia? : heaven, hell, and social planning
Epilogue: Curtain call