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In this vivid book, the historian Steven Stoll considers the way people throughout the Atlantic world read wealth into nature during the 1830s and 1840s. Opening among the supersized products and high-stacked shelves of Costco, The Great Delusion weaves past and present together through the life of a strange and brooding German engineer and technological utopian named John Adolphus Etzler, who pursued universal wealth from the inexhaustible forces of nature: wind, water, and sunlight. He was not a major theorist. He did not invent anything we use today. But Etzler absorbed and articulated just about every major materialist idea of the time, using those theories to pursue his own program for abundance and happiness. In Etzler we see a disturbing picture of ourselves. If he seems eccentric—or just plain crazy—he was no less so than the most pragmatic thinkers of his time, and of ours. Eloquent and insightful, The Great Delusion neatly demonstrates that Etzler’s fantasy has become our reality and that we continue to live by some of the same economic assumptions that he embraced.
“Stoll’s brilliant exhumation of the life of Etzler—Frankenstein-like inventor and Hegelian con man—confronts us with the lunatic-utopian origins of our civilization’s most profound (and suicidal) desire: the infinite consumption of nature.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
“This is a hot little book, hot in moral intensity, hot in probable consequences, and hot to handle. It will dismay some, infuriate others, and invite thinking by anyone who regards ours as the responsible species. We have memory and anticipation. Stoll wants us to observe, anticipate, and act. A stirring and eloquent piece of work.” —Roger Kennedy, Director Emeritus, the National Museum of American History
“Enthrallment with growth has brought us to a perilous state environmentally. The world economy is so large that its impacts are disrupting the planetary systems that make life on earth possible, and yet economic activity is on track to double in size in less than two decades. Stoll’s insightful book on the utopian origins of our growth fetish could not be more timely. It raises difficult issues about the balance of economy and ecology that must soon be faced.”—Gus Speth, Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and Professor in the Practice of Environmental Policy, Yale University
“The lesson Stoll wants us to learn from the mad inventor’s biography is clear: Despite our optimism that we can harness all the energy necessary to increase production, we cannot fool Mother Nature.” —Paul Davidson, The New Leader
Steven Stoll is an associate professor of history at Fordham University and the author of Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2002). His writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The New Haven Review.
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