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The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World
Daniel J. Boorstin

0679434453 Retail Price: $25.95
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Format: Hardcover, 298pp.
ISBN: 0679434453
Publisher: Random House
Pub. Date: September 1998

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Description

From The Publisher:

Throughout history, from the time of Socrates to our own modern age, the human race has sought the answers to fundamental questions of life: Who are we? Why are we here?

In his previous national bestsellers, The Discoverers and The Creators , Daniel J. Boorstin first told brilliantly how we discovered the reality of our world, and then he celebrated man's achievements in the arts. He now turns to the great figures in history who sought meaning and purpose in our existence.

Boorstin says our Western culture has seen three grand epics of Seeking. First there was the heroic way of prophets and philosophers--men like Moses or Job or Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, as well as those in the communities of the early church universities and the Protestant Reformation--seeking salvation or truth from the god above or the reason within each of us.

Then came an age of communal seeking, with people like Thucydides and Thomas More and Machiavelli and Voltaire pursuing civilization and the liberal spirit.

Finally, there was an age of the social sciences, when man seemed ruled by the forces of history. Here are the absorbing stories of exceptional men such as Marx, Spengler, and Toynbee, Carlyle and Emerson, and Malraux, Bergson, and Einstein.

These great thinkers still have the power to speak to us, not always so much for their answers as for their way of asking the questions that never cease either to intrigue or to obsess us.

In this impressive climax to a monumental trilogy, Daniel J. Boorstin once again shows that his ability to present challenging ideas, coupled with sharp portraits of great writers and thinkers, remains unparalleled.


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Reviews

"Daniel J. Boorstin's unexcelled intellectual career began at an extraordinary high level fifty years ago and has steadily ascended ever since. It is too soon to say that it has reached its apogee with The Seekers. However, this completion of a trilogy on humanity's quest for understanding confirms Boorstin's rank as one of the giants of twentieth-century American scholarship."
—George F. Will


"Boorstin reminds us what intellectual history on the grand scale looks like....The Seekers is an impressive conclusion to a grand trilogy .... The three books together bring to mind a monumental library whose facade is decorated by statues of Moses, Socrates and Newton and whose reading room is framed by murals depicting the Progress of Technology and Law. In an age of Alexandrian pedantry and narrow specialization in the academy, Boorstin has slowly and carefully built a Library of Alexandria open to the public, a library, that is, without walls."
—The New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind

 

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About the Author

Daniel J. Boorstin is also the author of The Americans, a trilogy that won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989, he received the National Book Award for lifetime contribution to literature. He was the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and for twelve years served as the Librarian of Congress. He lives with his wife and editor, Ruth F. Boorstin, in Washington, D.C.

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Table of Contents

A Personal Note to the Reader

BOOK ONE: AN ANCIENT HERITAGE
PART I. THE WAY OF PROPHETS: A HIGHER AUTHORITY
1. From Seer to Prophet: Moses' Test of Obedience
2. A Covenanting God: Isaiah's Test of Faith
3. Struggles of the Believer: Job
4. A World Self-Explained: Evil in the East
PART II. THE WAY OF PHILOSOPHERS: A WONDROUS INSTRUMENT WITHIN
5. Socrates' Discovery of Ignorance
6. The Life in the Spoken Word
7. Plato's Other-World of Ideas
8. Paths to Utopia: Virtues Writ Large
9. Aristotle: An Outsider in Athens
10. On Paths of Common Sense
11. Aristotle's God for a Changeful World
PART III. THE CHRISTIAN WAY: EXPERIMENTS IN COMMUNITY
12. Fellowship of the Faithful: The Church
13. Islands of Faith: Monasteries
14. The Way of Disputation: Universities
15. Varieties of the Protestant Way: Erasmus, Luther, Calvin

BOOK TWO: COMMUNAL SEARCH
PART IV. WAYS OF DISCOVERY: IN SEARCH OF EXPERIENCE
16. The Legacy of Homer: Myth and the Heroic Past
17. Herodotus and the Birth of History
18. Thucydides Creates a Political Science
19. From Myth to Literature: Virgil
20. Thomas More's New Paths to Utopia
21. Francis Bacon's Vision of Old Idols and New Dominions
22. From the Soul to the Self: Descartes's Island Within
PART V. THE LIBERAL WAY
23. Machiavelli's Reach for a Nation
24. John Locke Defines the Limits of Knowledge and of Government
25. Voltaire's Summons to Civilization
26. Rousseau Seeks Escape
27. Jefferson's American Quest
28. Hegel's Turn to "The Divine Idea on Earth"

BOOK THREE: PATHS TO THE FUTURE
PART VI. THE MOMENTUM OF HISTORY: WAYS OF SOCIAL SCIENCE
29. A Gospel and a Science of Progress: Condorcet to Comte
30. Karl Marx's Pursuit of Destiny
31. From Nations to Cultures: Spengler and Toynbee
32. A World in Revolution?
PART VII. SANCTUARIES OF DOUBT
33. "All History Is Biography": Carlyle and Emerson
34. Kierkegaard Turns from History to Existence
35. From Truth to Streams of Consciousness with William James
36. The Solace and Wonder of Diversity
37. The Literature of Bewilderment
PART VIII. A WORLD IN PROCESS: THE MEANING IN THE SEEKING
38. Action's "Madonna of the Future"
39. Malraux's Charms of Anti-Destiny
40. Rediscovering Time: Bergson's Creative Evolution
41. Defining the Mystery: Einstein's Search for Unity

Some Reference Notes
Acknowledgments
Index


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