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Why We Are Restless
We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change—even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.
Arguing that the philosophy we have inherited, despite pretending to let us live as we please, produces remarkably homogenous and unhappy lives, Why We Are Restless makes the case that finding true contentment requires rethinking our most basic assumptions about happiness.
WHY WE ARE RESTLESS
TESTIMONIALS
“Benjamin and Jenna Storey’s delightful Why We Are Restless belongs on the shelf of thoughtful, accessible books on human happiness like Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft and Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live. Through the lens of four French thinkers, the Storeys explore perennial questions about contentment and examine some of the most compelling responses put forward over the centuries. They are teachers in the best sense, inviting us to understand ourselves better than we do.”
Mark Lilla
Author of The Once and Future Liberal
"Terrific book. Hard to understand modern secular culture if you don't know anything about Montaigne."
Timothy Keller
“Today, so many of us are unable to sit still; obsessed with achievement, we are unable to think clearly about the purpose of our lives. The Storeys diagnose our ills as built into our implicit conception of happiness—we have sold ourselves short by aspiring to comfort and prosperity rather than to heroism or transcendent sources of wisdom or salvation. This challenging and provocative book provides us with substantial resources to look more closely at ourselves—all the while offering clarity, healing, and hope, wherever our reflections lead.”
Zena Hitz
Author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
“Why We Are Restless is a tour de force of philosophical genealogy. The sour disquiet of our lives, the foreboding of our political moment, the pervasive sense that we have come up against some real existential stuff—it all comes into focus here as the denouement of a conversation that began over four hundred years ago. In retracing turns taken in the history of the West, the Storeys indicate intriguing paths out of the intellectual cul-de-sac we have wandered into.”
Matthew B. Crawford
Author of Shop Class as Soulcraft
“We moderns face a paradox. The freedom and abundance our societies have brought us only serve to make us discontented. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey unearth the philosophical roots of this predicament. Their discussions of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville are unfailingly lucid, humane, accessible, and engaging. This is popularization in the best sense. It is relevant, eloquent, and never talks down to the reader.”
William Deresiewicz
Author of Excellent Sheep
“In this elegantly argued and beautifully written book, Benjamin and Jenna Storey lay bare the intellectual root of our psychic distress: a shrunken view of our humanity, ignorant of the soul’s true longings. In tracing the history of the modern ‘self,’ the Storeys show the causes of our impoverished self-understanding and liberate us to choose a richer alternative. A most important book.”
Leon R. Kass
Professor Emeritus, Committee on Social Thought and the College, University of Chicago
“Why We Are Restless refuses to settle for easy and superficial solutions. Storey and Storey set out the deep tensions within each philosopher’s thought, and why they cannot be brushed aside.”
Ann Hartle
Emory University
“Absorbing, elegant, and stimulating, Why We Are Restless possesses an easy fluency and understated wit that are as rare as they are delightful.”
Wilfred McClay
Author of The Masterless
“Written by two of America’s best teachers of political philosophy . . . [Why We Are Restless is] an education in the irony and complexity of the modern quest for contentment, and in the pre-modern sources required for any understanding of how to actually achieve meaningful contentment. It overflows with their concern for their students, and with the wisdom that is still on offer in some islands of sanity in the contemporary academy, waiting for those students determined enough to pursue it or lucky enough to come across it.
Yuval Levin
Author of A Time to Build
“Unapologetically earnest. . . brave and countercultural.”
Joe Moran
Times Higher Education