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What's Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment
Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases it appears to be so. But when it comes to the “enlarged benevolence” of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no. In this insightful, provocative essay, Stove builds a case for the claim that when benevolence is universal, disinterested and external, it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty.
As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn’t be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one’s endeavors. Utopian schemes to reorganize the world have regularly ended in failure.
Easily the most important example of this phenomenon is twentieth-century communism. As Stove reminds us, the attractiveness of communism—the “emotional fuel” of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years—has always been “exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery.” Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences.
In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age.
As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn’t be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one’s endeavors. Utopian schemes to reorganize the world have regularly ended in failure.
Easily the most important example of this phenomenon is twentieth-century communism. As Stove reminds us, the attractiveness of communism—the “emotional fuel” of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years—has always been “exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery.” Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences.
In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age.
221 pages, Hardcover
First published June 30, 2011
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About the author
David Stove
12 books22 followersDavid Charles Stove was Australian philosopher and a widely published polemical journalist. His work in philosophy of science included criticisms of David Hume's inductive skepticism, as well as what he regarded as the irrationalism of Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend. Stove was also a critic of Idealism and sociobiology, describing the latter as a new religion in which genes play the role of gods.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 24, 2015
Published posthumously, with a supplied title (invented by the editor-publisher), the original title of this screed is: That Monstrous Steep, Niagara: or, Happiness, Benevolence and Private Property. There was no mention of "Limits of Enlightenment" in the original author-supplied title. Unpolished and possibly never intended for publication, it's not clear that publication of this ivory-tower tract hasn't harmed Stove's reputation (legacy?). No point here in listing the non sequiturs, imaginary threats, and inaccuracies in the book. How dated it feels, in 2015, reading this.
December 25, 2020
An angry conservative exegesis by a man who took his own life after seeing the world go to sh*t.
It's worth reading if you want an insight into why conservatives think the way they do. Some of the viewpoints are VERY problematic-especially on women's suffrage-but it's a counterpoint to the liberal discourse that has become almost universal today; and a good companion to contractualist ethical theories.
It's worth reading if you want an insight into why conservatives think the way they do. Some of the viewpoints are VERY problematic-especially on women's suffrage-but it's a counterpoint to the liberal discourse that has become almost universal today; and a good companion to contractualist ethical theories.
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July 9, 2013'What’s Wrong With Benevolence is an extended essay—107 pages—that Stove wrote between February and October 1989, as the Soviet Union’s grip on its European satrapies was being broken. Francis Fukuyama was writing the first iteration of his essay “The End of History?”—which still had the question mark in its title—at precisely the same time. Neither essay shows any awareness of the other, and they could hardly be more different in tone or approach.
While Fukuyama saw Marxist-Leninist despotism as a detour in an upward evolutionary development of human society, for Stove it was the political expression of a fundamental human weakness that came to light as the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment became dominant. At the heart of that weakness, says Stove, is a dream of universal benevolence.'
Read the full review, "Killing With Kindness," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
While Fukuyama saw Marxist-Leninist despotism as a detour in an upward evolutionary development of human society, for Stove it was the political expression of a fundamental human weakness that came to light as the ideals of the 18th-century Enlightenment became dominant. At the heart of that weakness, says Stove, is a dream of universal benevolence.'
Read the full review, "Killing With Kindness," on our website:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews