Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

Sarah Bakewell

Mar 2023 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Antonia Beamish

About this audiobook

The New York Times bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A New York Times Notable Book

“A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading. . . Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate.” –Wall Street Journal

“Sweeping . . . linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes.” — The New York Times

The bestselling author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists, all seeking to understand what it means to be truly human

Humanism is an expansive tradition of thought that places shared humanity, cultural vibrancy, and moral responsibility at the center of our lives. For centuries, this worldview has inspired people to make their choices by principles of freethinking, intellectual inquiry, fellow feeling, and optimism. In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong humanist, illuminates the very personal, individual, and, well, human matter of humanism and takes readers on a grand intellectual adventure.

Voyaging from the literary enthusiasts of the fourteenth century to the secular campaigners of our own time, from Voltaire to Zora Neale Hurston, Bakewell brings together extraordinary humanists across history. She explores their immense variety: some sought to promote scientific and rationalist ideas, others put more emphasis on moral living, and still others were concerned with the cultural and literary studies known as “the humanities.” Humanly Possible asks not only what unites all these meanings of humanism but why it has such enduring power, despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, and tyrants. A singular examination of this vital tradition as well as a dazzling contribution to its literature, Humanly Possible serves as a recentering, a call to care for one another, and a reminder that we are all, together, only human.

Ratings and reviews

Humanly Possible is a studied and beautiful summary of the history of Humanism.

About the author

Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the “hippie trail” through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a fulltime writer. Her books include How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2016. Bakewell was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize. She still has a tendency to wander but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.