I hadn’t been reading books for a while so to get back into it started taking them for the bus journey to work and back. Unfortunately this was probably a poor choice for reading early on the day.

It’s a book analysing late 18th century political theory and is written in a style to match. Really dense, black hole academic dense. I quite enjoy books with loads of endnotes and footnotes.

The bibliography is almost 30 pages.

30.

pages.

That tells you how many endnotes etc. there were.

The book was enjoyable, interesting and informative. It just achieved these attributes in spite of its style. And it was a bargain too, normally £20+ I got it for £3 from the SSP‘s Wee Red Bookshop.

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It was a really interesting and engrossing read.

The book is split into a number of chapters, each dealing with a type of logical fallacies. These include “The right to my opinion” and “morality fever”. It is well written and funny, dissecting statements from the great and the good, showing their flawed reasoning. As well as contrasting hypothetical positions of liberals, socialists, conservatives and libertarians.

One timely chapters deals with stock brokers. After discussing whether their high salaries are rewarded for luck or for skill, and discussing statistics of results and how some of the traders will have good runs he concludes:

Investment banks should employ former winners of Lotto tickets for them. No salary could be too high for these wizards of ticket selection.

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