Restoring our faith in humanity

Review by Elaine Davie.

If you’ve lost all faith in the milk of human kindness; if you’re overwhelmed by the level of violence, dishonesty, selfishness and greed around every corner, this book may be the antidote you need.

Dutch historian and journalist, Rutger Bregman, author of award-winning Utopia for Realists sets out in this entertaining and well-researched book to disprove Machiavelli when he comments ‘it can be said about men in general that they are ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy.’ If someone does you a good turn, Machiavelli adds, don’t be fooled, for ‘men never do anything good except out of necessity.’

Given man’s track record through the ages, it was never going to be easy to disprove these sentiments, and Bregman is realistic when he says that anyone attempting to make a strong case for human goodness is likely to be roundly ridiculed. The book is broadly structured around two opposing viewpoints, one articulated by English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the pessimist who argued in favour of the wickedness of human nature, and the other by his French counterpart Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who implicitly believed that within our heart of hearts we’re all good.

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