Critical Mass : How One Thing Leads to Another

by Philip Ball

• ISBN13: 9780374281250
• ISBN10: 0374281254
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2004-06-01
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Philip Ball is the author of, most recently, Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color (FSG, 2002), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in London with his wife.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Political Arithmetick	p. 3
Raising Leviathan: The brutish world of Thomas Hobbes	p. 9
Lesser Forces: The mechanical philosophy of matter	p. 33
The Law of Large Numbers: Regularities from randomness	p. 48
The Grand AH-Whoom: Why some things happen all at once	p. 80
On Growth and Form: The emergence of shape and organization	p. 98
The March of Reason: Chance and necessity in collective motion	p. 118
On the Road: The inexorable dynamics of traffic	p. 156
Rhythms of the Marketplace: The shaky hidden hand of economics	p. 178
Agents of Fortune: Why interaction matters to the economy	p. 204
Uncommon Proportions: Critical states and the power of the straight line	p. 226
The Work of Many Hands: The growth of firms	p. 250
Join the Club: Alliances in business and politics	p. 270
Multitudes in the Valley of Decision: Collective influence and social change	p. 295
The Colonization of Culture: Globalization, diversity, and synthetic societies	p. 337
Small Worlds: Networks that bring us together	p. 352
Weaving the Web: The shape of cyberspace	p. 372
Order in Eden: Learning to cooperate	p. 402
Pavlov's Victory: Is reciprocity good for us?	p. 429
Toward Utopia?: Heaven, hell, and social planning	p. 449
Epilogue: Curtain Call	p. 467
Notes	p. 471
Bibliography	p. 489
Acknowledgments	p. 503
Index	p. 505
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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