A look at every idea we ever had

As one reads this thought-provoking book, one is struck by the ironies it reveals about the discrepancy between the original intentions behind some ideas and their ultimate effects. Most early Protestants, for example, were motivated by the desire for a more authentic faith, closer to God and Absolute Truth. Yet the movement, with its many individual sects and believers, by strengthening individualism and engendering a certain skepticism (with so many different kinds of true believers, how could any claim to have a lock on Absolute Truth?) soon fostered tolerance, freedom, democracy.

Watson has something of a blind spot about one half of the human race, however, for this history almost entirely neglects feminism and the ground-breaking ideas of women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

And, although Watson pays some heed to the ideas of democracy and equality (his intelligent and appreciative discussion of the American Revolution is particularly good), he generally does not cover ideas about social justice in enough depth.

We get some inkling of Watson's own views in the Introduction: While other scholars have proposed everything from fire and agriculture to Protestantism and rationalism as the most world-changing ideas, Watson's own candidates are "the soul," "Europe," and "the humble experiment."

At the book's conclusion, he expresses his conviction that the idea of the soul, while in some respects a fine idea that fostered individualism, also had a negative effect in that it got people placing more value on unfathomable matters such as the Next World than on what might be accomplished in this one.

In his view, natural science - the study of the physical world - has proved the most fruitful line of human endeavor, and, although he has some regard for social science, he is deeply suspicious of anything subjective, from Plato to Romanticism. (Perhaps this is why he misattributes Shelley's phrase about poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world to Coleridge, and seems unaware of Shelley's strong interest in science.)

But just as we now consider some of the ideas that dominated earlier eras as regressive (the early Church Fathers' antipathy to worldly knowledge), dangerous (the racist thinking of men like Gobineau in the late 19th century), or misguidedly utopian (Marxism), it is surely possible that we in our own times labor under similar delusions.

In presenting the latest line of thought, Watson often seems (perhaps unwittingly) imbued with it. Trade is unreservedly presented as a "good thing" (what of the slave trade or the drug trade that spawned the Opium War?) Ditto, money: So much for the proverb about love of it being the root of evil!

Despite such qualms, one cannot help being impressed by so comprehensive, incisive, and stimulating a guide. Moreover, at the very modest price of $29.95, this hugely readable, information-packed tome is better than a bargain.

• Merle Rubin is a freelance book reviewer based in Pasadena, Calif.

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