You have to filter through the dense, rambling, pompous at times dirt for the insightful gems. There is a payload here but it's a lot of effort to get to. It's hard to pin down a concise thesis because he goes off into so many tangents and covers so much ground. That ground is the entire scope of western civilization going back to ancient Greece including political hierarchies, military strategy, economics, academia, law, art, literature and so much more. Essentially the point is that over time elites have used bureacracy, specialization and obfuscation to cover their incompetence and corruption, and to shut citizens out of decisions which are in the public interest. He is at his best when critiqing the political and economic system. His cultural critiques ranging from painting to comic books to sitcoms, are reaching and tangential to the main point.

A somewhat tedious read, as it often diverged into lengthy tangents, but it did contain many excellent nuggets of insight and historical analysis, as well as a strong condemnation of our overly bureaucratic society. Unfortunately I felt the overall thesis of the work was not well defined or structured, and his opinions were often simplifications stated without enough support or examples. Perhaps it's unfair of me to expect that an attack on structuralism would be well structured?
I'd recommend his book "The Unconscious Civilization" for a more concise and focused piece.

This one took a long, long time to finish.
Largely because it's a book full of dense and varied ideas. A real 7 course meal of a book. Those ideas are also a bit scattered and loosely supported, so it couldn't hold my sustained interest.

TL;DR - He made some great points about how we have systems instead of results, confusing the system with result. We have an enormous, elaborate justice system. Do we have justice? We have a labyrinth of tax law. Are our taxes fair? We have a Byzantine system of gov't, is our gov't representative?

The thoughts and philosophy were interesting enough that I took notes, long review follows:

Cherry picking data, examples. This occurs throughout the book, at every turn he holds one exceptional example up to demonstrate his point, baldly ignoring that the trends and statistics show the opposite to be true. Over and over he picks his examples to support his point.
Does JRS know anything about the military? From his bio and works it seems like he does. But his military systems and warfare analysis is right out the window. The value of secrecy and technology are being demonstrated right now (as of this writing) in Ukraine.
Prognosticates a lot. Everyone who took a gamble that worked was a military genius, gambled and failed? A fool.
He also talks about govt secrets like he knows anything but doesn’t actually. Military secrets are of minimal importance *eyeroll* I'm sorry, but currently the invading Russians aren't using encryption, and it's having catastrophic results. I agree with his idea that the majority of secrets kept are just empire building here at home. But tactical secrecy and technological superiority are key to military success.
Great bit about inflation. He points out that Visa prints more money than the mint. CREDIT is the driver of inflation, not the gov't.
Loosely gooses stuff about Christian mythology magical thinking and paganism and how they apply to the modern world and the search for meaning in images.
Really a reach about art and the perfect picture. I had to skip some of this, just a lot of logical fallacies about the nature of images and man’s need to make sense of the universe. Though I agree about the veneration of painting as “art” instead of a utilitarian image. Why is a painting somehow revered more than a picture?
TV as ritual makes some good points but also throws out some real jumps and assumptions , all over the place babble in this section.
Some pure, grade A bullshit about terrorists being iconoclastic individuals and having deeply considered moral stances. Empathy and envy for middle class sophists who decide to assassinate.

Novels and mass communication opinions from the pre internet age are quaint.
Ok, waaay out there opinions about novels and their power. And the lack of good western novelists. He throws a lot of shade, but he is a philosopher with real political world experience.

In the end, some diamonds in that rough. It’s hard to make a well reasoned critique of reason and logic. We have systems of justice, systems of economics, of the military. And they don’t provide better outcomes than individual decision makers.

I really liked this book. It took me a long time to read, but it was well worth it. He discusses how the world of reason has become the world of managers who no longer are connected to reality and have perverted the reason why the enlightenment first began. He disses the world of experts who dismiss the common persons insights and experience because it does not fit into his logical frame of mind. He basically declares that divorce of reason and logic from the real world is a major source of our problems today.

The quote on the back of the book, from the Washington Post, describes it as "a hand grenade diguised as a book." 'Nuff said.

Very Relevant to current day Political State and the problems with our Administrative Layer in Government

I first heard of this book on the EconTalk podcast. I find the premise intriguing, but the book wasn't quite what I expected. It's not the book's fault that it was written before the internet came into common use and before 9/11/01, of course.

This is a very lengthy (600+ pages), dense, extensively researched, comprehensive approach to the topic. It is well-reasoned (pun intended; appropriate to the topic) discourse that attempts to draw out the logical outcomes and results from what has already transpired in the areas of philosophy, politics, art, literature, economics. It gives much to ponder. If you buy into his whole thesis, the resulting explanations are plausible and probably spot-on in most cases. While the book is twenty years old, the author notes in the introduction that very little has changed and that the conclusions that he drew in the early 1990s are as valid if not more so today. It reminds me of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

(If you haven't read and understood this book, don't pretend to be an activist.)

.... In 1989, Jules Verne’s great-grandson discovered the manuscript of an unknown novel by his famous ancestor. Paris in the Twentieth Century was published in French in 1994. Shortly after it was published in 1996, I bought Richard Howard’s English version, read it as a curiosity, and set it aside, largely forgotten save for its title.

That title, however, has stuck in my mind for almost two decades as the kernel of an art project I have finally started concrete work on. As I began preliminary sketches, I realized I should probably reread the novel whose title had been rolling around in my mind so long.

Two years before Verne’s lost novel was published, John Ralston Saul published the sweeping yet remarkably readable study of modern Western society and it’s history, Voltaire’s Bastards. Somehow, it took me two decades to get to it. And, somehow, I found myself reading Voltaire’s Bastards with Paris in the Twentieth Century as its tag-team partner.

So, 19th century French science fiction writer and 20th century Canadian philosopher. Two hundred page dystopian novel and six hundred page carefully researched (I’ll ignore the little Frankenstein error) philosophical study of western social history since the Renaissance.

What’s the connection?

Just this: Verne and Saul describe virtually identically structured societies, although the details are, inevitably, different.

As I remember, the marketing of Verne’s novel in North America concentrated on the Gosh! Wow! factor of his predictions. This emphasis is evident in the blurb’s on the back of the paperback. People Magazine is quoted about the “overcrowded metropolis”, the homeless, and automobiles. And elevators and fax machines. Of course, when we really think about it, none of these predictions were that unpredictable. Indeed, Paris in Verne’s time was far from sparsely populated or free from the homeless. In fact, Verne’s technological predictions are minor details of the novel. Ray Bradbury, as quoted on the paperback, is perfectly correct that Paris in the Twentieth Century is “an absolute necessity” for those interested in the history of Speculative Fiction. But Verne’s novel, hidden until just twenty years ago, has not been at all an influence — it was unknown. Its science fiction interest is purely antiquarian and its technological prophecy is modest.

Of another kind of interest — again antiquarian — is Verne’s predictions about the shape of Western society in the second half of the Twentieth century. It is here that Verne is startlingly on the money, and on the money to a degree made clear by a reading of Voltaire’s Bastards.

Voltaire’s Bastards is a challenging book, not because of its size — it is stunningly artful and, as I mentioned, readable — and not because its arguments are complicated — Saul is conversational, straight-forward, and eminently sensible. I took thirty-seven pages of notes while reading Voltaire’s Bastards — not as a chore, but because Saul’s points are so darn well taken and so worth remembering. What is challenging about Voltaire’s Bastards is that it challenges almost everything you think you know about Western Society and its historical underpinnings. If you read Voltaire’s Bastards well, you will be changed, the scales may just fall off your eyes, you may just have taken Morpheus’ Red Pill. But it probably won’t make you feel too happy. . . .

Read the rest of my discussion of Voltaire's Bastards and Jules Verne's Paris in the Twentieth Century at:

http://behindthehedge.wordpress.com/2...

I must really be getting desperate to find something worth reading in my library now if I'm going back to 1992. I think I first considered reading this like 5 or 6 years ago when I heard Chris Hedges recommend it, and even then it seemed too outdated for me. I also didn't really know what to expect from it. It sounded kind of like it might be religious propaganda or something. Usually it's fundamentalists who feel threatened by "reason" after all. I also saw that his most recent book (2005) was predicting the "end of globalism", which didn't really sound right to me. International trade certainly wasn't slowing down and economies are still getting more and more interconnected, although if it sounded like he was saying that trend SHOULD end rather than just predicting that it was then I'd have been a little more interested in it. Based on what I know about him now, the "end of globalism" probably has more to do with the rise of nationalism than with trade policies, which means that his other book probably isn't as irrelevant today as I had originally guessed. Most reviews of his books that I looked at, including recent reviews of this one, said not to worry about how long ago it was written. According to them this is still an important book that everyone should read. Because of that I decided I might as well give it a go.

I wasn't as thrilled with this book as those other reviewers were. I didn't hate it at least. He was definitely ahead of his time when he wrote this. In a lot of ways, he's still ahead of the mainstream. There's pretty good discussions about the dangers of specialization, technological progress and endless growth, as well as the need for debt forgiveness and the fact that there are problems with both sides of the political spectrum. These are things that are still being ignored today. Unfortunately, this isn't the best writing style for reaching the average Joe, which is who he seemed to be trying to write for. A lot of what he says will just sound pedantic and snobbish to most people. He talks about the need to clarify the arguments, to translate the jargon so we can all develop a more general understanding of the big picture. Rather than translate all the different languages of the specialized fields though he sort of just gives us one more new language to learn. It took me a while to figure out what he even meant by "reason." Obviously, reason/rationality isn't bad by definition. For the most part, "reason" in this book means using a rational method to accomplish irrational goals. Maybe he thinks that emotion is needed to decide what our goals should be in the first place or something? I'm still not really sure I totally get what he's saying, to be honest. It's just an annoying, overly confusing way of describing things, in my opinion.

These arguments have come a long way in the last 25 years, being explained much more clearly and in way less than 600 pages. I usually prefer to think about it as "the scientific method vs. the scientific crusade." Basically, we've developed a good approach to solving problems but that doesn't mean that we have to figure out every secret of the universe. A lot of our accomplishments aren't leading to easier lives or enlightenment of the masses. They're often just giving more power to the small minority who already have way too much of it. So to reject the scientific crusade isn't the same as totally rejecting everything about "science." People love to overcompensate when they hate something. Since Christianity is annoying, a lot of atheists renounce every moral it teaches rather than just the corruption, stupid superstitions and misogynist ideas. Since Nazis suck people refuse to criticize anything a Jew does, even when they treat Palestinians the same way the Nazis treated them. When kids are disgusted by their parents' generation they wear really uncomfortable clothes and listen to music that their parents hate, even when they hate it too. Since Soviet communism didn't work out too well people reject universal healthcare and every other "socialist" form of welfare.... it's really amazing. This book's message, as far as I can tell, is a call for a more nuanced approach, what Saul simply calls common sense. That is still an important message today but I wouldn't recommend that anyone waste their time with this book just for that. It's not the outdated statistics and lack of current events that really bother me about it. He tries way too hard to come up with clever theories for things that don't need them. A lot of this stuff just crosses the line into bullshit territory. If this was half the length then maybe I could say it's worth a read but 600 pages is really pushing it.

Brilliant

"It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self-deception or illusion, that the light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized" (I Ching).

This books is that courage about the nature of us and our society. For anyone wanting to understand society, this is the book.