Master Passions: Emotion, Narrative, and the Development of Culture

This is an ambitious and wide-ranging attempt at delving into the motivating underpinnings of human conduct, both for good and for ill. You get some flavor of the book, when you look in the index and find the names of Michel Foucault, Rene Girard, Mikhail Bakunin, Camus, Thomas Kuhn, Heidegger, Isaiah Berlin, Arthur Koestler, Sartre, Umberto Eco, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Samuel Beckett, Hegel, Descartes, Pascal, Nietzsche, Bergson, Dostoyevsky, Emil Cioran, Kafka, Lenin, John Milton, Max Weber, Simmel, Wittgenstein. With a strong philosophical orientation, the book was nevertheless shelved under "psychology" even though it was written by two graduate business school professors (Harvard, Toronto).Some of the chapter headings are intriguing: "Anxiety: the Primeval Broth", "Ambition as Desire and the Will to Power", "Envy and Jealousy: The Master Ratchets", "Want, Will, Wish, Would: the Predicaments of Desire", "A Self Against Itself: An Aesthetic or Rage", "Soliloquies of the Candid Villain: Catharses of the Master Passions".Personally, I found the book riveting. Once immersed in the discourse of the book, I could not put it down. The writing style reminds me of European writers like Catherine Clements or Slavoj Zizek though not Lacanian in the least, even if the subject matter circles around desire.I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in books of this genre, mixing philosophy and the cultural sciences while ranging over a vast amount of territory in a short number of pages (to be exact, 231 pages without the references and index).It's actually a fun book to read, and if one does not take it too seriously, a lot of laughs. Or if one does take it seriously, then a survival manual and roadmap for achieving ultimate status and power, while ruthlessly overcoming one's rivals.