The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993 [Hardcover]

Ruth Dudley Edwards (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1995

Since its founding by James Wilson in 1843 as a radical free-trade journal, The Economist has grown in worldwide weekly circulation to over 500,000 copies (200,000 of which are sold in the United States). In celebration of this influential paper's 150th anniversary, Ruth Dudley Edwards has written The Pursuit of Reason, a work that is at once a history of the major international economic, business, and political issues of the past 150 years and an account of the people who reported on them--now published for the first time in the United States.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1040 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press (March 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875846084
• ISBN-13: 978-0875846088
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 2.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,937,480 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quality magazines never die, May 14, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993 (Hardcover)

"The pursuit of reason" is a detailled and excellent written history of the Economist.It's the answer to the question:HOW CAN A BUSINESS MAGAZINE SURVIVE FOR MORE THAN 150 YEARS? The answer of this book is: quality goes never out of style.A must for every economist who loves his job.

5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars never mind the quality feel the weight, July 31, 2006

By 

Christopher Macrae "intangibles mapmaker" (Rockville, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993 (Hardcover)

This is one of those books which seeks to impress its own authority with thousands of references. As my father worked at The Economist for nearly 40 years, I have met several of its characters and yet when I read Ruth's book it's like meeting different people. With nearly 1000 pages, I soon lost interest in reading everyone serially as even the reason for economics does not come through the way I believe founder James Wilson intended.

Unless the index is itself porous, try a few tests. The one reference to Calcutta does not explain this is where James Wilson died before his time trying to bring ethics to the British Raj. There is no reference to the word entrepreneur even though this is one of the keywords that journalists from The Economist systemically embedded in economics intent on the reasoning that economics - and its compound consequences - should be used to truly and fairly represent all people, and not just the big get bigger.

It would be a pity if The Economist loses its culture and values because of a tome that does not live its founders DNA. Especially in the coming decade where economics itself needed to be transformed (according to The Economist's 1980s future history scenarios) if we are to earn future sustainability of our species. We are hurtling through a series of tipping points of the post-industrial age where it is high time for economics to help all of us unite in confronting inconvenient truths and the corrupted systems that courageous grassroots networkers at Transparency International bear witness to. You will not find such tensely vital neighbours as globalization or micro in the index. So presumably no valuetrue debate on which way round the triangle "micro to inter to macro economics" needs to be mapped if every society and global village network is to be cross-culturally sustainable in the way we all invest in markets - and their networking gatesway to freedom and happiness.

Reasoning needs, now more than ever, to be about open maps from and to diverse destinations, not a uniform managerial mindset carved in Harvardian stone and resembling the dinosaur's world view.