The Invention of Good and Evil: A World History of Morality

Hanno Sauer's book explores humanity's moral transformations from our earliest ancestors to the present day, challenging the idea that morality is joyless and claustrophobic.

Format: Hardback
Length: 416 pages
Publication date: 12 September 2024
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd

This fat, complex, good-natured, and intriguing book is full of such memorable material... startling and often thrilling. Spectator A heroic effort... rich with complex narrative, full of unexpected twists like the inquisitor's tale. Economist For almost five million years, humans have been locked in a relationship with morality, inventing and reinventing the concepts of "Good" and "Evil" and weaving them into our cities, laws, and customs. Morality is a concept that can feel joyless and claustrophobic, associated with restraint and coercion, restriction and sacrifice, inquisition, confession, and a guilty conscience. For many, it is a device used to shame us into compliance. This impression is not necessarily incorrect, but it is most certainly incomplete. Hanno Sauer traces humanity's fundamental moral transformations from our earliest ancestors through to the present day, when it can often seem that we have never disagreed more over what it means to be good, and what it means to be right. But we can use our past as a basis for a new understanding of our future. Our current political disagreements may feel like the end of the world, but where will the evolution of morality take us next?

Weight: 634g
Dimension: 165 x 243 x 38 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800818293
Edition number: Main