A Guide for the Perplexed - (Harper Perennial Modern Thought) by E F Schumacher (Paperback)

About the Book

"Schumacher explores our relation to the world: our obligations--to other people, to the earth, to progress and technology, but most importantly to ourselves. If [people] can fulfill these obligations, then and only then can [they] enjoy a truly authentic relationship with the world--and truly know the meaning of living"--Amazon.com.

Book Synopsis

"A condensation of a vast and refreshingly unorthodox system of ideas." -- Arthur Koestler, Observer

From one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, and the author of the international bestseller Small Is Beautiful, the reissue of a timeless treatise on the meaning of living.

In A Guide for the Perplexed, bestselling author E. F. Schumacher explores our relation to the world: our obligations--to other people, to the earth, to progress and technology, but most importantly to ourselves. If man can fulfill these obligations, then and only then can he enjoy a truly authentic relationship with the world--and truly know the meaning of living.

Schumacher argues that we need maps: a "map of knowledge" and a "map of living." The concern of the mapmaker is to find for everything its proper place. For things out of place tend to get lost; they become invisible and their proper places are filled by other things that should not be there at all and therefore serve to mislead.

A Guide for the Perplexed teaches us to be our own map makers in following our destined path in life's journey.

From the Back Cover

An inspired critique of modern materialistic values and a road map for achieving one's true, higher potential from "one of the wisest minds of our time."*

"This is what my life has been leading to," said the maverick economist E. F. Schumacher upon completing A Guide for the Perplexed, his summation of a lifetime of wisdom. The author of the classic Small Is Beautiful, the "eco bible" (Time) named one of the Times Literary Supplement's 100 Most Influential Books Since World War II, Schumacher charts the failings of "materialistic scientism," the system of thought that dominates the developed world and which Schumacher charges with narrowing the horizons of human experience. Instead, he seeks to offer a new, far more expansive "map for living" that liberates our goals beyond the constraints of logic and inspires in us the faith to choose a life of higher significance. "Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns," he writes, "but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us something much better: that we can become oak trees."

Review Quotes

"A Guide for the Perplexed deserves wide reading. It deserves in fact a Place in the college curriculum, as a text for introductory courses in philosophy....It does as much for the defense of traditional civilizational values as C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man did in the last generation, and it does so on a metaphysical foundation." -- Greensboro Daily News

"Nothing less than a Manual for Survival, concerned... with the full realization of human potential." -- Newsday

"A condensation of a vast and refreshingly unorthodox system of ideas." -- Arthur Koestler, Observer

"The most exciting philosophical book for ages." -- Daily Mail (London)

"There is a rich store of wisdom and understanding, embedded in the religions of East and West, which our dangerous preoccupation with science has scanted and ignored. ... People may see the blindness of only seeing in one particular way." -- Sunday Telegraph

"A Guide for the Perplexed offers us a harvest of utterly sane, consoling, and life-affirming insight from one of the wisest minds of our time." -- Theodore Roszak, Los Angeles Times