The Sovereignty of Good
Published 1970 · 222 pages · 37,823 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Nonfiction
How hard is The Sovereignty of Good to read?
The Sovereignty of Good scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Murdoch uses philosophical terms (genetic analysis, normative-descriptive words, ontological proof) and untranslated Greek and German, but writes in plain English. The register is closer to Notes from Underground than to Gravity's Rainbow.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences are long and qualified, with parenthetical asides and stacked objections, but each paragraph moves in clear steps. The prose is lucid, more demanding than Orwell and well short of James.
- Abstraction: 82 out of 100
- The argument concerns will, the self, the Good and transcendence, and it is anchored by concrete cases like M and D, the kestrel, and the concentration-camp guard. It is closer to Notes from Underground than to Atomic Habits.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Murdoch compresses Hampshire, Wittgenstein, Kant, Freud, Plato and Weil into short paragraphs, and each step carries a new move. The density is high without being encyclopedic.
How The Sovereignty of Good is regarded
The Sovereignty of Good holds a literary regard score of 82 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.