Cunning

by Don Herzog

Book Overview

Want to be cunning? You might wish you were more clever, more flexible, able to cut a few corners without getting caught, to dive now and again into iniquity and surface clutching a prize. You might want to roll your eyes at those slaves of duty who play by the rules. Or you might think there's something sleazy about that stance, even if it does seem to pay off. Does that make you a chump?

With pointedly mischievous prose, Don Herzog explores...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691136343
• ISBN13: 9780691136349
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Chump or Cad?

Here is the dilemma addressed by Herzog: We do not want to be chumps, and we do not want to be cads (or, in his terms, fools or knaves). But is there a third option? As Herzog demonstrates, the question is harder to answer than one might unreflectively think. Offering a dazzling and difficult rumination on cunning in low and high culture, Herzog shows that making the case against cunning requires one to question numerous modern dogmas, including welfare economics and instrumental rationality. The discussion includes an analysis of Homer's and Sophocles' arch-trickster, Odyesseus, and the more prominent "high culture" defenders or chroniclers of cunning -- Machiavelli, Hobbes, David Hume, Tacitus. But Herzog also seamlessly knits in discussions of Nigerian e-mail scams; the 17th century astrologer William Lilly; Master James, a murderous and adulterous 17th century curate; Albanian ponzi schemes; and Tupperware parties. Want to know what those last five items (among others) have to do with Machiavelli's Mandragola? Read the book.

a cunning piece of work

On the surface, this book seems to be in the genre of cultural history, the history of an idea (Machiavellian maneuvering). But wait a minute! Isn't Machiavellian maneuvering a timeless fact of life for us humans? Isn't the idea of a history of cunning as odd as the idea of a history of sexuality? There's the rub. It turns out that how we think about cheats and scoundrels has a history, and one can't quite view it in the same way again once this comes to light. More: not only do our assumptions about scoundrelhood reflect a history, but they don't stand up to critical scrutiny (the author's beautiful final story of the gulled murderer at the end illustrates this, but I don't want to spoil it for you by explaining it here). More: dubious assumptions about scoundrelhood are lurking in the deep background of how slews of people today think about rational choice, philosophy of social science, and the nature of morality, and though the author does not lean heavily on this point, if the reader is aware of what, say, economists think rational self-interest is, the implications of the critical history of scoundrelhood for all kinds of projects is quietly devastating. This agenda, if it is his agenda, sneaks up on you in the course of what you might think is just a really fun sequence of anecdota, revealing him as a stealth philosopher. The stealth philosopher seems also revealed in the very quiet undercurrent of insistence that we rethink our assumptions about morality, selfishness and deceit, and acknowledge them, and human life more generally, as the cussedly complex, theory-defying things that they are. Yet this touches the reader on a more intimate level--are you sure you *are* a good person? How do we draw the boundaries between dupe and knave? Can we? The author provides no answers, only lots of really uncomfortable questions. Last but not least, all of this is presented in one of the most delightfully wicked, jazzy, clever, fun prose styles I have ever encountered. There is a kind of brilliantly improvisational quality to the book which makes it a joy to read. The better to sneak up on you with its deeper concerns, sowing seeds of doubt that we know what rationality and irrationality, honesty and deceit, good and evil, really are. How very cunning.

Cunning - the silent artificer

There is a concept which describes a certain kind of character- type in Israel. The concept is ' fryerr' .A 'fryerr' is something like a sucker , a person who on every occasion simply gets the short end of the stick. As I am sort of pretty much of kind of a 'fryerr' I take great interest in what can be thought of as the opposite type of character, the 'cunning ' person, the one who knows how to cleverly get what they want. Now in order to satisfy my interest, and perhaps teach me a few tricks which I will of course never learn Don Herzog has cunningly written a book on the subject of 'Cunning'. And this as I am suddenly reminded of one of my favorite literary characters, 'Gimpel the Fool' who is always being deceived by others, and who no matter how many times he is disappointed, continues to believe and hope in them. The saintly fool, which I suppose the sympathy of many of us is really with. 'Cunning' people we might admire, but we do not really like very much. That is unless we happen to be trapped in an elevator with them and they figure out the way out. But 'cunning' as Herzog explains is a lot more than being smart. In an outstanding review of the book which appeared first in CanadaCom. Robert Fulford describes the history of the concept of cunning as elaborated by Herzog as follows: The "evolution of the word "cunning" suggests that a history could be written through changing word-meanings. In the 14th century, "cunning" meant erudition, and in the 16th Sir Thomas More described virtues such as "chastity, liberality, temperance, cunning." But perhaps English speakers noticed that wisdom could be put to corrupt ends. They shifted the adjective from the Positive column to the Negative. By the 18th century it clearly meant knavery. The sentimental 19th century added a new meaning -- appealing, sweet. Dickens in Martin Chuzzlewit tells us of tea served with "cunning teacakes." By 1887 it described a child who was "piquantly interesting." Today, a more blatant use emerges: A British ad agency called Cunning promises "guerrilla marketing," boasting British Airways and Levi's as clients. Cunning is essential to some. A poker player lacking it would be comically inept. A politician who presented the same face to all his followers would be unique in history as well as unsuccessful. And then there's law, an industry grounded in cunning. This worried James Boswell, a lawyer, so he asked his idol, Samuel Johnson, about legal ethics. Boswell feared that simulating strong feelings or stating something you don't believe might distort the moral sense, making a lawyer immoral in his private life. Johnson replied: "Why no, Sir. Everybody knows you are paid for affecting warmth for your client; and it is, therefore, properly no dissimulation." Cunning is connected with secrecy, with duplicity, with the ability to mimic and deceive. Cunning people often play at being simple- minded .The con-man is of course one great popular American figure of cunning.