Knowledge Is the One Thing You Can't Buy: Notes on Nuccio Ordine's The Usefulness of the Useless

The title is a small trick, and it works on you before you've read a page. Usefulness and useless aren't supposed to share a sentence — that's the oxymoron, and it's clever precisely because Ordine means it literally. He's not being ironic. He's arguing that the things a market can't price are exactly the things that make us better, and that a civilization organized around exclusive economic interest is a civilization quietly destroying itself.

His clearest proof is the simplest one. Almost anything can be bought. A house, a car, a company, a vote if you're patient enough. Knowledge can't. Give someone what you know and you don't have less of it — you both end up richer than you started. That's not a metaphor. It's the one transaction in human life where the giver doesn't lose, and it's the same shape as a much older idea I've read elsewhere: the French economist Alain Lipietz traces the word common back to the Latin munus — a gift that carries a duty to give again. Ordine's version of that duty is knowledge itself. You received it from someone; you owe it forward.

Ordine builds the case out of unexpected company: Tommaso Campanella's 1602 utopia The City of the Sun imagines the Solarians, a people with no private property and a four-hour workday, where the only shame is idleness. Ordine reads something sharper into it than the utopia itself: free people answer to no clock and to no one, while servants live entirely inside someone else's schedule, ruled by both the hour and the master who set it. I love that line, and I've kept turning it over since I read it. Retirement, when I think about it honestly, isn't the end of work — it's the exact move Ordine is describing: from being a servant to a corporate master, to becoming a free person again.

He turns to Georges Bataille too, and specifically to a text Bataille called The Limit of the Useful — years of notes on ritual, war, laughter, and the logic of capitalism, left unfinished and only translated into English in 2023. And to Henri Poincaré, who spent a career insisting that science is worth doing whether or not it pays, in a book literally titled The Value of Science. There's a historian named Joel Mokyr whose work I've spent time with that makes the same case with numbers instead of philosophy: he argues that the Industrial Revolution came out of a widening epistemic base — a body of open, freely shared knowledge, built by the Republic of Letters, a loose transnational network of scholars trading discoveries with no thought of who'd profit. Ordine is making a moral argument. Mokyr is making a historical one. They arrive at the same observation: knowledge that circulates freely is knowledge that grows, and knowledge that gets fenced off for exclusive economic interest stops growing the moment the fence goes up.

The book's sharpest illustration isn't a philosopher, though. It's a pair of physicists and an engineer. Heinrich Hertz proved in 1888 that Maxwell's theoretical electromagnetic waves were real — purely to confirm the theory, nothing more. His own words on the discovery: "I do not think that the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application." He was one of the great scientific minds of his century, and he was wrong about the one thing that looks obvious in hindsight. Seven years later, Guglielmo Marconi picked up exactly where Hertz's curiosity stopped and built the thing Hertz never thought to build: a business. Hertz and Maxwell were geniuses without a thought of use. Marconi was a clever inventor with no thought but use. The second man's invention stood entirely on the first men's uselessness.

Which is exactly what Ordine says is disappearing. He watches universities turn into companies, teachers into bureaucrats, students into clients, and he names it plainly: this transition is not good, and it should be stopped. A university that only teaches what pays isn't a smaller university. It's a different kind of institution wearing the old one's name. Glenn Bostock makes a close cousin of this argument in A Human Business, aimed at running a company instead of a university — his whole case is "usefulness over profit," the belief that profit should follow from being genuinely useful to people, not the other way around. Ordine would say the university forgot that lesson first, and business is only now catching up to relearning it.

Einstein gets the last word, and it's the line I've read a dozen times since: "I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." He wrote that in a letter in 1952, decades after he'd already reshaped physics twice. Not modesty — description. Curiosity, held with no thought of use, is what made the talent look like talent from the outside. John Medina makes a version of the same claim in Brain Rules — that we're explorers by nature, and the risk of the AI age is letting that explorer instinct go quiet because something else offered to do the wondering for us. Ordine and Medina are describing the same organ. One calls it the human spirit. The other calls it the brain doing what it evolved to do.

This is a short book with one argument: usefulness has limits, and past those limits it starts consuming the things that make a life worth living — love, dignity, truth, curiosity itself. It belongs right next to the "less, but better" shelf here at the store — Essentialism and its cousins argue for doing fewer things well; Ordine argues that some things are worth doing for no reason at all, and that a life that only does what pays has already done less, not more. Read it as a case for the humanities. Read it as a case for pure research. Read it, if you're anywhere near your own retirement, as I did — as a case for finally answering to no one but yourself.

— Arun

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