Abhyuday’s Reviews > The Social Contract > Status Update
Abhyuday
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Actually 0% but I wanted to say a few things before I delved into it. One that this series of "Great Ideas" books by Penguin is equal parts based and messed up, from Seneca to Schopenhauer - I think I'll peruse the entire series many of the 20 books in it accompanied this one on the shelf I plucked it from anyways
— Sep 26, 2022 04:02AM
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Nia
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Sep 26, 2022 07:14AM
In what ways is the series based and/ or messed up?
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Nia wrote: "In what ways is the series based and/ or messed up?"Hi Ms Jeffrey :)
Well, the based-ness comes about due to the fact that some of the books in the collection are ones I really like and/or to some degree agree with. The weirdness/messed up-ness comes into play in how despite the publisher writing that the books are connected by how "[t]hey have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution [...], enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted" - there doesn't seem to be something really unifying them other than their controversy or popularity. In some sense then it seems like the series is made to sell, and the serialised order doesn't really make sense either - the last five books move from Darwin to Nietzsche to Woolf to Freud to Orwell, and as far as I can tell doesn't come with notes, annotations or accompanying introduction aside from whatever the author inserted. While I find it nice, it isn't really the best for everyone, especially someone seeking to understand it and new to it. So there's the "and" part of based + messed up in addition the "or" part.
It'll be fun to read through it but probably not in the prescribed order at the back of the book.
Yeah I guess. Like the "top hits" of ideas. There *is* some value to finding out more about what has been influential. I generally read the Philosophy ones. 😹
