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NotPhil  ·  4775 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Meme Weaver
What it was, was a polite attempt to give you a way out of this discussion without embarrassing you.

However, there's nothing intellectually dishonest about saying that, for instance, One Dimensional Man and Guns, Germs, and Steel are very different types of books. As the essay said, one is a book filled with ideas, and the other is a book about an idea. They're both good books, but there's a big difference in range, depth, nuance, scope, and insight.

One Dimensional Man takes the ideas of institutional agenda-setting, commodity fetishism, hierarchical organization, mass-media influence, the concentration of resources, the sociological need to fit in, the profit motive, industrialization, false consciousness, and social marginalization and weaves them into an insightful description of a society which appears to offer freedom, but really exercises an almost totalitarian amount of control over it members, their lives, and even their thoughts. It's generally seen as a seminal text in Critical Theory, or the Frankfurt school of philosophy, and it sparked and guided the counter-cultural movement of the 60s.

Guns, Germs, and Steel posits that material wealth is the end result of living on a continent that is oriented horizontally, giving the people who inhabited its biomes a greater number of resources to make use of. It's generally seen as an interesting essay, that attempted to revive the debunked theory of geographical determinism, which was unnecessarily expanded into a book.

Again, they're both good books, but there's nothing remotely dishonest about saying that they're different types of books. One weaves together many ideas, the other (over) explains only one idea.