Subtitled “Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain”
(Viking, June 2008, 292pp, including 20pp of acknowledgements, notes, and index.)
Note that the paperback edition from 2009 changed the subtitle to “A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics”
This is a fascinating book on two opposite counts. Lakoff is a professor at UC Berkeley, and I became aware of him through newspaper columns and Facebook posts and mentions of him by David Brin. I bought this 2008 book belatedly in 2019 from a 3rd-party dealer, via Amazon, for $10(!), and have now gotten around to reading it.
Briefly, the two opposite counts: his take is about politics, from the perspective of what we’ve learned about the brain [mind] since the 18th century, and his understandings are precisely those gathered from studies of the mind, principally that humans don’t think rationally, as everyone but especially the economists used to think. This is not a new discovery, but what’s new here is how Lakoff applies this to modern politics. Continue reading
