Play Fair
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The Flawed Genius of William Playfair
Author: David R. Bellhouse
language: en
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Release Date: 2023-07-26
A product of the Scottish Enlightenment, William Playfair (1759–1823) worked as a statistician, economist, engineer, banker, land speculator, scam artist, and political propagandist. It has been claimed – erroneously – that Playfair was a spy for the British government and ran a forging operation to print the paper money of the French Revolution. The Flawed Genius of William Playfair offers a complete account of Playfair’s life, richly contextualized in the economic, political, and cultural history of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. The book explores the many peaks and troughs of Playfair’s career, ranging from moderate prosperity to bankruptcy and imprisonment. Through careful analysis, David R. Bellhouse shows that Playfair was neither a spy nor a forger, but perhaps briefly a one-time courier for a government minister. Bellhouse pieces together as complete a picture as possible of the forging operations supported by the British government and illuminates Playfair’s lasting contributions in economics and statistics, where he is known as the father of statistical graphics. Disputing the misinformation about the man, The Flawed Genius of William Playfair highlights that the truth about Playfair’s life is often more intriguing than the fictions that surround him.
The North American Review
Vols. 227-230, no. 2 include: Stuff and nonsense, v. 5-6, no. 8, Jan. 1929-Aug. 1930.
Play in a Godless World
This text challenges the long tradition which sees human play as the fount of creativity and origin of all civilization. The book traces the history of an alternative theory of play in Shakespeare, Nietzsche and Freud, where play is an end in itself - a cultivation of aesthetic forms which do nothing to disguise their artificiality and which are loved only for the fictions which they are. Nietzsche, the arch-philosopher of play, Freud, the theorizer of slips and jokes, and Shakespeare, master of the man-made illusions of the play world, are shown to anticipate the playful philosophy which has become a hallmark of postmodern times.