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Agency

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What to expect

'The message of this book is both highly liberating and optimistic', Rory Sutherland

Drawing on six decades of pioneering research and a sweeping reexamination of the last 2500 years-from Periclean Athens and the Hebrew Torah to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Civil Rights Movement-Martin Seligman shows how rises and falls in agency have steered the course of history.


Agency is the big idea for our times: when individuals have confidence, optimism and imagination, civilizations leap forward. In their absence, societies stagnate-no matter how rich their resources or how brilliant their citizens.


This remarkable book shows how individuals can act with agency and, with a clear-eyed view of an AI-transformed future, argues that we are entering the next great era of human flourishing.

Critics Review

This book feels both like the capstone of a brilliant career and the beginning of a new paradigm. Agency is a thrilling achievement from the person who has most changed how we think about human flourishing.
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN, author of The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
In this extraordinary book, Martin Seligman shows that one phenomena, agency, has propelled all human progress and flourishing. This will enable you to understand the past in new ways-but even more importantly, to build the future you want.
ARTHUR C. BROOKS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Meaning of Your Life
An intriguing and robustly argued worldview that puts the creative human mind at the center of history.
Publisher's Weekly
The message of this book is both highly liberating and optimistic. It also gives credit for progress to millions of ordinary people blessed with the right mindset, rather than to a few special people blessed with the right ideas. It also describes our present dilemma: we would have much to be optimistic about, if only we could learn to become more optimistic.
RORY SUTHERLAND, author of Alchemy
Martin Seligman is among the most influential psychologists in history, with seminal contributions spread over multiple decades straddling two centuries. But this may be his most important book yet. From a perspective
that he above all commands-the positive parts of human nature- Seligman explains how we have improved the human condition in the past, and therefore what we will need to do to improve it in the future.
STEVEN PINKER, professor at Harvard University and the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now, and When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .
Martin Seligman brings his unrelenting curiosity and psychological insight to bear on a topic that we desperately need to better understand: progress. Exploring the prospects and possibilities of human agency from the past to the present, his sweeping book distills the wisdom of many lifetimes and reminds us, on nearly every page, that optimism is a virtue.
DARRIN M. McMAHON, author of Equality: The History of an Elusive Idea
An exhilarating whistlestop tour through human history.
The Daily Mail
Author Martin Seligman
Narrator Jacques Roy
Duration 11 hours and 52 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781399843041
Format Audiobook
Publisher John Murray Press
Genre Cognitivism, cognitive theory, History, Philosophy, Psychological theory, systems, schools and viewpoints, Psychology
Availability AU, GB, IE

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