Stupidity resists straightforward historicization because the quality appears persistent and ubiquitous across eras. Better work focuses on historicising the concept: how societies and thinkers have defined and responded to stupidity. Definitions range across ignorance, foolishness, unwillingness to learn (amathia), and failure to draw correct conclusions. Usage fluctuates between describing persons and actions and often rests on a know-it-when-you-see-it intuition. The Enlightenment shifted stupidity's framing from moral failing to cognitive failing. Philosophical distinctions clarify meanings but ordinary usage continues to blur boundaries, producing a field of overlapping senses rather than a single, firm definition.
Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here's-a-profound-thought tone of voice: I'd rather be stupid than happy. In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it's open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense.
The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there's lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You'd be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of stupidity how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason's derr-brained secret sharer.
But then there's the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned? Is it a quality of person or a quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it's all of these.
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