About this item
"Mark Lilla is always a challenging, fascinating mind - alert to all the power, paradox, and dangers of ignorance." -- Rory Stewart, author of Politics On the Edge and co-host of The Rest Is PoliticsA dazzling exploration of our wish to remain innocent and ignorant -- and its consequences. Aristotle claimed that "all human beings want to know." Our own experience proves that all human beings also want not to know. Today, centuries after the Enlightenment, mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. Why is this? Where does this will to ignorance come from, and how does it continue to shape our lives?. In Ignorance and Bliss, the acclaimed essayist and historian of ideas Mark Lilla offers an absorbing psychological diagnosis of the human will not to know.
About the Author
Mark Lilla was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1956, and was educated at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. After holding professorships at New York University and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he joined Columbia University in 2007 as Professor of the Humanities. During the 1980s he was also an editor of the public policy quarterly The Public Interest.
Lilla is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times, but is best known for his books The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics and The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. These works have been translated into over a dozen languages. He lectures widely and has delivered the Weizmann Memorial Lecture in Israel and the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University.
