My early nomination for Book of the Year was published in 1841.
If you ask me, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds captures the spirit of our times. Charles Mackay set out to survey points in history where entire countries seem to have gone mad.
His first example is the Mississippi Bubble. In 1716, a character named John Law, who might remind readers of Elon Musk, sold gullible souls in the French government on a way to leverage a great unused asset: Louisiana.
The incantation used to sell the scheme was simple: Everyone would get rich. The French word millionaire came into English with the bubble.
Law talked the French into turning over foreign trade to his company — private enterprise can do things more efficiently, you know. The company took over the tax system and other functions of government. It minted money.
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds was expanded and published in London in 1852. The American businessman and statesman Bernard Baruch urged a Boston publisher to bring out an edition in 1932. Baruch was surveying the wreckage of “The New Economics,” the nonsense that led to the stock market crash of 1929.
Baruch suggested that the only incantation against such mass bewitchment was “two and two still make four.” He conceded it didn’t work.
Financial schemes and the pillaging of governments are just a part of the book. Mackay surveys the popular sport of hunting witches and recalls the days when countless people went in debt to buy tulips. Mackay didn’t include religious delusions. There were just too many. He wrote:
Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history — a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which (Richard) Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes!
Oddly, perhaps perversely, I find those lines comforting.
• Source: Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds; London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852.
Project Gutenberg has it here:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
The edition with Baruch’s foreword is here:
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.58938/page/n9/mode/2up
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