Michael Bess

Michael D. Bess (born 1955) is Chancellor's Professor of History, as well as Professor of the Communication of Science and Technology, and Professor of European Studies, at Vanderbilt University, where he has been teaching since 1989. He is a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first century Europe, with a particular interest in the interactions between social and cultural processes and technological change.

He earned his PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989.[1]

His fifth and most recent book is Planet in Peril: Humanity’s Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them (Cambridge University Press, October 2022). This study focuses on the existential risks posed by climate change, nuclear weapons, pandemics (natural or bioengineered), and artificial intelligence – surveying the solutions that have been tried, and why they have fallen short thus far. Bess describes a pathway for gradually modifying the United Nations over the coming century so that it becomes more effective at coordinating global solutions. The book explores how to get past ideological polarization and global political fragmentation, drawing lessons from the experience of the environmental movement and of the European unification movement.

He is also the author of four other books:

• Our Grandchildren Redesigned: Life in the Bioengineered Society of the Near Future (Beacon Press, 2015);

• Choices Under Fire: Moral Dimensions of World War II (Knopf, 2006);

• The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France, 1960-2000 (U. of Chicago Press, 2003; French Translation, 2011, Champ Vallon), which won the George Perkins Marsh prize (2004) of the American Society for Environmental History; and

• Realism, Utopia, and the Mushroom Cloud: Four Activist Intellectuals and Their Strategies for Peace, 1945–1989. Louise Weiss (France), Leo Szilard (United States), E.P. Thompson (England), Danilo Dolci (Italy) (U. of Chicago Press, 1993).

He is currently at work on three book projects:

• Overflowing Goodness: How to Improve the Lives of Two Billion People (without harming anyone else) – a study of world poverty and how it could be dramatically reduced via a Guaranteed Minimum Income system implemented at a global scale.

• Strong Seeds: Human Flourishing and the Power of Seemingly Small Acts – an exploration of what makes for a life well lived, at four levels of experience and action: personal, national, global, and spiritual.

• What Makes Us Human? From Neurons to the Sistine Chapel – a synthesis of contemporary research on human nature and personhood, probing the boundaries between animals, humans, and advanced informatic machines.