Can Humanism Save Us?

One of the quirks of book publishing is that a finished manuscript can sit around for nearly a year before it finally appears in hardcover. For most authors, this long liminal existence is a source of agitation, but substantively meaningless. And it would be perfectly reasonable to assume that a book exploring seven centuries of humanistic thinking wouldn’t go stale during its prepublication wait.

But between the time that Sarah Bakewell shipped her final draft of and received finished copies of the book, her subject began to stare squarely at its demise. What her book set out to defend is an intellectual tradition, admittedly ill-defined, that stands for reason, the ennobling potential of education, and the centrality of the “human dimension of life,” as opposed to systems and abstract theories. But in the intervening months, advanced chatbots