The Saving Lie

"This book explores the distinction between selflessness and self-interestedness, between acting for one's own advantage and acting, even when disadvantageous, for reasons of duty or conscience. This apparently straightforward contrast (exemplified in the difference between rational-choice models in economics and holistic models in social anthropology) is a source of confusion. This is so, F. G. Bailey argues, because people polarize and essentialize both actors and actions and uphold one or the other side of the contrast as concrete reality, as the truth about how the social world works. The task of The Saving Lie is to show that both versions are convenient fictions, with instrumental rather than ontological significance: they are not about truth but about power. At best they are tools that enable us to make sense of our experience; at the same time, they are weapons we deploy to define situations and thus exercise control."--BOOK JACKET.

First sentence: Kenneth Burke, in A Grammar of Motives, wrote, "In any term we can posit a world, in the sense that we can treat the world in terms of it, seeing all as emanations, near or far, of its light" (1969a, 105).

Year

2003

Language

English

Publisher

University of Pennsylvania Press

Editions

3

Pages

232

ISBN

9780812237306

Data source: Wikidata