The book is divided into two parts: “Ignorance in Society” and “Consequences of Ignorance.” Right off the bat, predictably, comes the academic question: could there, should there, be a field of study devoted to the science of ignorance? The name for the new discipline, Burke says, would be agnotology (the study of ignorance: how it is produced and maintained) or perhaps agnoiology (more like the study of what is unknowable). The book’s 15 chapters are rich with examples of “duh!” and “d’oh!” across dozens of subjects (politics, war, business) and stories of hundreds of people through about five centuries from all around the globe-plus scores of citations and a rich bibliography that may help to spare his readers from finding themselves mentioned in the next edition.

What he delivered instead was a Guinness Book of World Stupid. A friend of his suggested he present his publishers with a blank sheaf of pages as his submission for this one thank goodness he didn’t. What’s expensive is ignorance!”Īn emeritus professor of history at the University of Cambridge, Burke has written more than 30 books, including histories of the Italian Renaissance and a magisterial two-volume social history of knowledge. After the incumbent had decried the high cost to the state of government investment in education, his challenger (who lost, alas) shot back: “Education isn’t expensive. THE EPIGRAPH Peter Burke deploys to open his fascinating new history of worldwide ignorance ( Ignorance: A Global History, 2023) is ripped from a Brazilian presidential debate in 1989.

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