Mary Douglas

The title puts it fairly. Sacred books don’t spring out of thin air; there was a Bible before ever its stories and laws were fixed in writing. How the Bible Became a Book starts with the history of writing and its impact on Judaism, but as it goes along, fascinating comparisons with other histories of ‘textualisation’ crop up, together with a wide range of similar disputes...

The author of The Emergence of Probability (1975) has written another formidable book on the history of probability theory. The first described the development in the 17th and 18th centuries of a new way of legitimating knowledge: a mathematical theory of predictability under uncertainty based on observed frequencies of numbers on thrown dice. From its origins in gambling, probability theory began to meet the demand for a reliable form of authority that would release the Renaissance and the Age of Reason from religious claims to control knowledge. When it had seeped from games and mathematics to marine insurance, and thence moved on to produce what Ian Hacking calls an avalanche of numbers in every kind of public concern, established theories of causality were ready to be toppled. As he said in the earlier book, the world was about to become safe for future Galileos. But the change was slow, and not in time to divert Descartes from his project to establish in reason itself an independent arbiter for truth (and, we can add, not in time to save ourselves from a Cartesian world divided radically between primary and secondary qualities).

If the crisis for the environment were a purely physical problem it could be resolved by protective legislation. Because markets are arraigned as responsible for the disastrous state of the environment, profound paradoxes arise for Western political thought. Much Green writing implies that in addition to a change of heart, the remedy would require strong political and economic controls. Herein lies the dilemma, for the idea of moving to a command economy is repugnant to a tradition committed to liberty, equality, free enterprise and consumer choice.

‘What has been happening in anthropology since Margaret Mead died?’ This book would have helped me to answer that casual question. A study of Melanesian culture, it does refer to Mead’s field reports from New Guinea and to her interest in adolescent and sexual behaviour: it also surveys the whole record of anthropological reporting in the region. The state of the art that it reveals is rather disconcerting, but the manner of revealing it is highly original.