Harari’s World History

 

Readers of this blog may be interested in a review article of 3500 words I published in Technology and Culture 62, no. 4 (2021) Here I reprint only the opening paragraph, out of respect for the journal.

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Evolution toward Intelligence without Consciousness? Harari’s World History 

Yuval Noah Harari’s three books, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, have sold more than 12 million copies. This review will not summarize their 1,400 pages so much as characterize their overarching argument. Harari has a Ph.D. from Oxford and teaches world history at Hebrew University, but his writing is more popular than academic in tone. There are few footnotes. A chapter in Sapiens on “The Marriage of Science and Empire” has just ten notes, and a chapter on capitalism has only four. Harari usually ignores rather than disputes alternative theories. In Sapiens, he treats Karl Marx as a religious thinker and asserts that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations is “probably the most important economics manifesto of all time.”  He displays no awareness of how business historians have reconceived the corporation during the last half century, preferring to invoke the tired trope of the “invisible hand” that was decisively undermined in 1977 by Alfred Chandler’s The Visible Hand with more decisive critique in later works such as Philip Scranton’s Endless Novelty.  Smith’s “invisible hand” theory was adequate to comprehend the economy of 1800 but became increasingly inadequate after c. 1840.

    As in this case, Harari’s bibliography is often haphazard, and his knowledge of some subjects is inadequate to formulate good questions, much less answer them.

As these opening lines suggests. I find many problems with Harari's arguments.