Download or read book Power, Pleasure, and Profit written by David Wootton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore.