Customer Reviews

Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior

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Or "How to Make Friends and Influence People"
This is a book about the nature of power, language, and behavior. Peckham starts with an interesting pragmatist premise: the meaning of a sign is the response to it. This may seem like a tautology but it's not; Peckham states that language is slippery (predicting and predating the post-structuralists and Derrida) and that language, essentially, is about regulating behavior. The book follows these premises through out the social landscape.

His statements about language resemble, to me, late Wittgenstein because he thinks that language has rules that are almost endemic to their structure and these rules are used by us to categorize and divide the quotidian corporeal world (and this leads us to inscribe these structures into the larger world). His social beliefs mirror Bourdieu and Foucault, in a way, by claiming that social roles and states have to keep their populace under control and that this means, in modern times, trying to regulate their desires.

At first it seems like a depressing book with "no way out" but at the end he goes into "social transcendence" which is a fancy way of saying that society sometimes fails and creates people who don't "fit in." Sometimes.... hell, most of the time, this is a bad thing (sociopaths, Jim Jones, Hitler, etc.) but sometimes its a great thing that leads to movements that set the larger culture in slightly new directions (which isn't necessarily good, but that's not the point).

You don't need a philosophy background to understand it and although it is dense, it's one of the most rewarding books I've read in the last two years.