Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I was very much looking forward to this book as I have enjoyed and learned from Martha Nussbaum's writing in the past. Moreover, I strongly believe in the general thrust of this book -- that the humanities are being undervalued as our colleges and public schools become more and more career oriented. I teach humanities (English and Philosophy) myself, so I was predisposed to her thesis before I even picked it up. But I found the argument to be mediocre at best; in fact, the whole book read like it was a journal article that had been stretched, padded, and embellished to meet the minimal page count to be credibly marketed as a book. There's also something of a dashed-off quality to the prose, lots of repetition from chapter to chapter along with loose sentences, incomplete thoughts, vagueness, and other signs of haste. The book makes a decent case for critical thinking, but seems to lack that quality itself -- it unhesitatingly endorses the educational thinking of Rousseau, Dewey, and Tragore without critically engaging their thought or methods. Nussbaum argues that we need critical thinking in order to challenge traditions without seeming to be aware that she is simply making claims based on authorities that form a tradition, and, indeed, lots of educators and philosophers challenge these approaches. And she nowhere critically engages the possibility that some traditions might be valuable. I am reminded that Mark Edmundson cogently observed that what passes for critical thinking these days is using methods of thought and vocabulary that one doesn't really believe to debunk world views one would rather not be challenged by. I fear that Nussbaum's approach to critical thinking would probably lead to that kind of superficiality. Nussbaum's desire to mold students into "citizens of the world" whose perspective is global is, to me, naive idealism (and revealing of the political agenda behind her thinking). I'm all for students learning as much as they can about other cultures and political systems -- at least there we agree -- but there is no all-encompassing global perspective that can embrace, say, strict Sharia laws that force women into subservience and Western feminism (I could give a legion of other examples). Moreover, Nussbaum casually drops in the tired old trinity of "race, gender and class" enough to make me think that she would embrace crass West-bashing, such as we have seen in culture studies programs for decades now -- the kind that forgets that critical thinking is foundational to the Western tradition (indeed, she invokes Socrates at several junctures). (And please, I know that the West is not without fault, and that its faults should be exposed and corrected; but the West is not without virtue, and all too often those virtues are ignored or denigrated.) I agree entirely that our students (and future workers, managers, leaders) need to be skilled at critical thinking and have educated imaginations, and I wholeheartedly endorse the book's title and theme: "Not for Profit." Among the great things about the humanities is that they help us to live complete and meaningful lives and to see things from other perspectives beyond that of "how is this going to make me money." In fact, I like to joke with my students that the great benefit of a humanities degree is that I can B.S. myself into believing I am happier with my pittance of a salary than I would be as a millionaire tycoon. I simply don't think this book is worthy of Martha Nussbaum's powers as a thinker and a writer. She's better than this, and I expect she'll prove that on her next outing.