Tag: things worth reading

Every year, I try to write a post about books that I’ve read in the past year. This time, I found myself writing so much about some of the books, that the post was getting unmanageably large. So I’ve split it in two. This is part one; part two will follow. 

Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850–2000. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to build on the traditions of radical politics, especially those in conversation with Marxism. If you read this blog, and you haven’t read this book, you should go read it. (You can come back here in a month or whenever when you’re done.)

This is a genuine history of movements, not of parties or political leaders or theorists. It’s striking how many of the quotes are attributed to roles (“a contemporary union leader”, “a Vienna suffragist”) rather than to named individuals. The book’s title is well chosen: The central theme is that the project of socialism is the extension of collective self-government to all of social life, including the organization of production. Socialism, in other words, is simply a continuation of the struggle for political rights. 

The term social democracy — which today suggests an anodyne reformism — meant originally a program to extend democratic principles from the demarcated political sphere to the rest of society, in particular the economy. The party, let’s not forget, that the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks were factions of, was the Russian social democratic party. This continuity between from the battle for democratic rights — and later against fascism — to socialist politics comes through very clearly here.

This is not just a history of socialist parties, and much of the book — especially in the earliest and the latest, post-1968 sections — is devoted to non-electoral formations. But party politics is central, and for good reason. In many ways it was socialists who invented modern political parties. Electoral politics was originally an arena for competition between personality- and patronage-based fractions of the elite. It was only once socialists and their labor allies invented mass organizations for contesting the ballot that centrist and conservative parties developed in response. There is an important figure-ground reversal here from the Whiggish liberal conventional wisdom in which parliamentary politics is the ground on which socialist politics occupies (usually small) part. 

One thing you will come away from this book with is a sense of how much the terrain of political struggle has shifted over time. It’s like a 500-page working-out of the William Morris line that “men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” It is tempting, today, to look back on the debates of the past as having had right side and wrong side, and to think that what we learn form them is to take correct position rather than the incorrect one. But what a history like this makes clear is that the right and wrong positions, to the extent we can identify them even in retrospect, were right and wrong with respect to conditions at the time of that debate. What was wrong at one time may very well be right at another — or simply irrelevant.

Which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn from the past, or that there isn’t a great deal to learn from it. 

One lesson that comes through clearly is how much the progress over the past 200 years has been won in a few brief windows. Advances for human freedom and equality are real and, so far, irreversible; but they have been episodic rather than incremental. Besides the period of the French Revolution (outside of the scope of the book), the two great periods of revolutionary change are the decade or so during and following each of the world wars. The basic contours of electoral democracy were only firmly established in the wake of the revolutionary transformations of the First World War; the welfare state, the recognition of women’s humanity and the end of colonial empires in the wake of the Second.  

The thing to remember here is that these changes were not inevitable. They did not just happen. They were the result of titanic struggles from below — struggles which however were often aiming at other goals, which they often failed to achieve. 

A few other throughlines. One is that working-class movements have been led by relatively privileged workers. Unskilled workers are capable of occasional convulsive uprisings, but at the the core of sustained working class institutions have been workers with some degree of autonomy and social power — skilled artisans in the 19th century, machine workers and then educated white-collar white workers in the 20th. Another sustained theme: Utopians are essential to more practical movements. A vision of a radically different world provides the energy required for even incremental improvements. 

Perhaps the most important lesson of the book is that the great left victories have come when radical, disruptive anti-systemic mass movements have worked in concert with parties of government. The same people, the same organizations can never be both; but each requires the other.  To put it another way: The content of elections comes from the possibility of riots and barricades, the value of riots comes from the possibility of state power. The existence of political democracy in any substantive sense is the flip side of the possibility of disruptive challenge from below.

All this is very broad-brush and abstract; most likely you either already agreed with it, or you don’t. If you want nuance, evidence, concrete examples — well then you have to read the book.

Han Kang, Human Acts and We Do Not Part. Thanks to Arjun for introducing me to Kang; these are two of the most powerful novels I’ve read in quite a while. 

The two books have a similar structure:  Each takes a historic atrocity by Korea’s US-backed military governments — the Gwangju uprising of 1980 in Human Acts, the lesser known but even bloodier Jeju massacres of 1948-49 in We Do Not Part — and follows the aftermath down to the present, exploring how people live with its memory. In both there is a certain supernatural aspect to the afterlife of the victims. Both ask how it is possible to live when one knows that one’s government, one’s country, the respectable people in authority, have committed indescribable crimes that have never been accounted for. 

Human Acts begins in the midst of the Gwangju uprising and then moves forward in time, looking at the events from the perspective of various participants — two young men who were killed, a blue-collar worker who was imprisoned and tortured, a journalist, a publisher struggling with military censors, a writer who resembles Han Kang. We Do Not part goes in the other direction, starting with a Kang-like writer (perhaps the same one) in a personal crisis, whose act of kindness for a friend carries her backward to the mass murder of suspected communists at the start of the Korean War. It ends with an indelible image of hope in darkness that is almost, but not quite, extinguished. 

Both are beautiful books; I cannot recommend them too highly. 

Brett Christophers, The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet. I originally picked this up with the intention of writing something about it, which I did not end up doing. It was a frustrating read to me — I like the author and am very sympathetic to his broader worldview, and there’s a lot of specific information in this book that is valuable and compelling. But I am unconvinced by the book’s central argument. 

A proper critique of the book deserves far more space, which I still hope to give it at some point. But here’s the short version.

The core of Christophers’ argument is that while the cost of renewable energy is falling rapidly, that does not mean that the private power companies will adopt it. They are motivated by profit, and renewables, despite being cheaper, are not more profitable. So a transition away from fossil-fuel based electricity generation will also require a transition to public ownership, or to a non-capitalist economy more broadly.

I believe down to my bones that moving away from the pursuit of profit as the organizing principle of social life is possible, and necessary, and matters for almost everything. But I don’t think Christophers’ argument gets you there.

There are a couple basic problems with his argument. First, profit is the difference between the sale price of a commodity and its cost of production. So to say anything about differences in profit, across technologies or industries or over time, one needs to analyze the determination of cost and price independent of each other. But Christophers doesn’t do this. He instead frames his analysis in terms of the awkward portmanteau “cost-price.” 

If you wanted to take his analysis seriously, you would focus on the fact that in a competitive market, price tends toward marginal cost. If marginal cost is constant or falls with the level of production, and if fixed costs are substantial, then producers in a competitive market will face losses; such an industry won’t be viable in the long run. This was the situation of railways, for instance, in the late 19th century, which experienced repeated episodes of vicious price wars ending in general bankruptcy.

But capitalism is, of course, capable of producing railroads; this is because capitalism, despite some of its defenders’ claims, does not in general involve competitive markets. What we can say is that an industry like renewable energy, or railroads, requires a sufficient degree of monopoly power to enable it to recover its fixed costs. This is less of a problem for fossil fuels, where costs of production are a larger part of overall costs.

This problem is exacerbated by the specific way that electricity is priced in many markets, where the price is determined by the marginal producer. This was fine in an era where high-cost facilities would come online only when demand was high, raising profits for the rest of the industry. But when the marginal producer is a solar or wind facility, the price won’t cover fixed costs and the industry will make a loss. Christophers lays this out very well, and there’s no question it’s a real problem. But we should be clear: It’s a problem with how electricity prices are currently regulated. Not with clean energy or capitalism as such.

Second, let’s suppose that price-setting is such that a lower-cost production method will definitely lead to lower profits. Does that mean that profit-seeking capitalists will not adopt that method? Well no. Because there’s a critical distinction here between the individual enterprise, where production techniques are chosen, and the industry as a whole, where prices are set. If I can produce the same commodity at a lower cost than my competitors, then my profits will definitely increase. Perhaps, once the new method is generally adopted, everyone’s profits will be lower. But so what? I’m a capitalist! My own profits, now, are what I care about.

I admit that I am a little surprised that someone writing in the Marxist tradition doesn’t seem to have considered this possibility. This sort of collective-action problem among capitalists is the whole story of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in Volume III of Capital. And it’s been a central subject of debate for Marxist economists ever since. I don’t necessarily expect Brett Christophers to have a settled view on the validity of the Okishio theorem. But I would kind of hope that he knows this conversation exists. 

This is all very critical; but, to be clear, there’s a great deal in the book that is useful and insightful. The problem is, the conclusion that the concrete material points to is that we need better rules for regulating electricity prices. If you want to get to an argument against organizing production on the basis of profit, you would need to start from somewhere else.

Cixin Liu, The Three Body Problem. There was some mix-up at Christmas last year, where two copies of this were purchased and no one was sure whether they were for me, the 13-year old, or my college-age nephew. I think I was the only one of the three of us who eventually read one.

For all the attention it’s gotten, I thought it was … ok. Or rather, the first two-thirds, which combined a slice of life from the last 50 years of Chinese history with a weird and unsettlingly out-of-focus mystery, was pretty good; and the last third, which rushed to tie up and explain everything, deflated most of what the first part had promised. At the end of the day, real human history and relationships offer much richer alien world than anything might work out about a hypothetical civilization on some other planet.

Michael Lewis, Who Is Government? I sent my post on teachers — which I was very pleased with; you should read it if you have not — to N+1 before putting it up on the blog; they didn’t go for it, but they did ask me to review this book. I read the book, but never wrote the review: I’d kind of got the larger points I wanted to make out of my system with the teachers post, and there wasn’t enough substance in the book to do much with on its own. 

The book, anyway, is edited by Michael Lewis; it’s a collection of admiring essays on federal employees, two by Lewis himself, the half-dozen others by various Atlantic–Harper’s–Washington Post type writers. Lewis’s essays are by a wide margin the best — whatever else you say about him, he really is a master of this type of storytelling. It helps that he chose interestingly offbeat subjects — a mine safety enforcer and an infectious-disease specialist — rather than the standard cop-astronaut-soldier palette of approved public occupations that the rest of the portraits are drawn from. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend buying this book; but if you see a copy in one of those little free library boxes on the street, you should take it out, read the two Lewis pieces, and then donate it to another one. 

John Kay, The Corporation in the 21st Century. As I’ve mentioned, Arjun’s and my next book is on the contradictions of the corporation. (Our working title is Relations of Production.) So I’ve been reading a bit on that, for instance this. This book has a tremendous number of fascinating stories and sharp observations — it’s a goldmine for someone else writing on the corporation — but the whole is perhaps less than the sum of its parts. Still, there are lots of good bits. Here is one passage that I appreciated:

Neither Amazon nor Apple has raised any money from shareholders since their IPO, and neither is ever likely to in the future. Past stockholder investment represents less than .01 per cent of the current value of these businesses. Modern companies are typically cash-generative before they reach a scale at which they become eligible for a listing on a public market. The purpose of the IPO is not to raise capital but to demonstrate to earlier investors and employees that there is value in their shareholdings and to enable some to realise that value. The objective of listing on a stock exchange is not to put money into the business but to make it possible to take money out of the business.

Kay has some interesting ideas about the diminishing importance of capital ownership as such to the organization of production and the generation of profits. But to me, anyway, the book is more interesting for the examples than for the larger argument they’re meant to support.

Katya Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990. This is a history of East Germany that strives for a sympathetic perspective without flinching from the facts. Unfortunately, the latter are not very cooperative with the former.

I am probably an ideal reader for this book — you will find few people more willing to dispute the idea that the good guys won the Cold War, or to defend the record of actually existing communism. And Hoyer does a good job complicating the story of East versus West. She emphasizes, for example, that Stalin had no interest in creating a separate German puppet state, and consistently directed Communist leaders there to focus on maintaining their legitimacy in an eventual united Germany; the idea of building a separate socialist state in the East was a local initiative. She notes that expropriation of private businesses in the East was not nearly as immediate or complete as Cold War mythology suggests, with many former owners willingly remaining as managers of their enterprises under state ownership. Not so different from an IPO, when you think about it.

She also makes the interesting and, to me, convincing argument that in the early years, migration to the west was the result of success as much as failure — the East combined an excellent technical education and training system with a very flat distribution of income, creating a large stratum of moderately privileged engineers and skilled workers who saw the opportunity for greater privilege in the West. 

But ultimately, despite the successes (gender equality is another important one) it’s hard to find much positive to say about the East German leadership, and Hoyer’s story ends up being a rather dismal one. Keynes was very far from a Communist, but when he looked at the Soviet Union 100 years ago, he recognized that something new and important and genuinely promising was being attempted — that “beneath the cruelty and stupidity of New Russia some speck of the ideal may lie hid.” It would be much harder to say that about the cruelty and stupidity of the Ulbricht-Honecker regime. 

Alice Munro, The Progress of Love. This is not Munro’s very best work — I would give that to Dear Life, Friend of My Youth, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and perhaps Runaway — but it’s certainly not her worst. And honestly even her worst is good. 

As I noted on last year’s list, while I am generally on the side that says you can and should judge artistic work by the author’s personal conduct, I haven’t been able to give up Munro; I’ve been rereading her work since the revelations about her daughter came out. I dipped into various collections this year but this is the one I reread in full. 

When you read her in that light, it’s striking how many stories there are about neglectful mothers who lose, or almost lose a young daughter, or who could have lost one if not for some miracle. (Very often it’s to drowning — I don’t know what that means.) The self-involved mother and (nearly) drowned child moment is one of a number of situations and characters she keeps coming back to in her stories — rereading, it’s more striking how many of them are variations on a few themes.

This repetition to me is one of the things that’s fascinating about Munro. It’s almost like she’s a scientist— she has some fundamental problem she’s working over, an experiment she keeps rerunning under slightly different conditions to see if the results change. Which points to, I think, the difference between her and Allen, Polanski, etc. — like them she failed as a human being, but unlike theirs her art is conscious of that failure and struggles with it. If Woody Allen could make a movie from the perspective of a brilliant young female writer struggling with the attention of a lecherous older mentor, I might give him another chance.

Philip Stern, Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism.  This is a comprehensive account of the role of corporations in creating the British Empire over the 16th to 19th century. This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while but don’t have any real background in, and the book really clarified and reshaped my understanding of it. And as a book, it’s exhilarating.  It’s one of those impossibly comprehensive works of history by someone who seems to have read everything, and who has the perfect quote for any topic — the sort of book that makes you think that people in history graduate programs must learn some dark magic for note keeping.

From my point of view, it’s interesting for what it says about the idea that Arjun and I have been working on, as the corporation as a sort of social membrane between the logic of money and markets on the one hand and the socially embedded relationships through which production is actually organized, on the other. From this point of view — which we are hoping to developing in our next book, though I don’t want to put a date on it — the tensions between finance and production, between shareholders and managers, are not a recent historical development. On the contrary, a site of conflict between distinct social logics is just what a corporation is. 

Like several other books on this list, this deserves a long essay (and I had started to write one) but in lieu of that here’s a brief summary of some of the most interesting things I took from it.

First, the early modern corporations we are familiar with emerge out of a much broader and more diverse universe of organizations. This is I suppose obvious, but it tends to get effaced in accounts that are focused on the historical roots of modern corporations, which naturally focus on the lineages that survived. But for every East India Company or Hudson’s Bay Company, there are a dozen other joint stock companies organized around some mix of long distance trade and colonization, which weren’t successful enough to make it into most history books. 

Maybe more interesting is the diversity of institutional forms. Corporations have always combined public authority with private profit, but the exact mix has varied. One important divide in early colonizing corporations was between what one might call a feudal or seigneurial model, which involved the creation of communities with a distinct identity and local relations; versus a mercantile model in which claims were subdivided without any horizontal connections between franchisees. 

From the very beginning, there have been debates about whether corporations should be thought of as an extension of government or a form of private property. An important aspect of this debate was the question of whether corporations were created by public charters or patents, or whether the state was simply recognizing an existing set of relationships, as with the recognition of a marriage; or whether a corporation had no existence independent of the legal act that created it. 

This was linked to a larger question of whether sovereignty — legitimate political authority — was sanitary or dispersed throughout society. Or as Stern puts it: “To someone who imagined civil society as a conglomerate of concentric and intersecting corporate bodies … corporations were alternative and natural sites where people might choose to associate and govern themselves, produced in the first instance not by the state but rather by the people that formed them.”  

A central argument for organizing trade on the basis of the corporation — a delegation of sovereignty, or a recognition of existing organic connections — was, in the early modern period, a deep-seated idea that Europeans, or Christians (the equivalence of these categories is not a recent development) could not, as individuals, make any kind of agreement with non-Europeans. As Stern writes, paraphrasing Grotius, in Europe there was an existing political order that made private contracts possible; but “outside of Christendom,” Europeans could only make contracts unless they could first “bind themselves into a social contract under the protection of corporations.”

Historically, the corporate charter is cognate with both constitutions and patents; like the former, it was the basis of a delineated form of political authority, like the latter it gave exclusive rights to commercial activity in a certain sphere. Historically, there was a great deal of overlap in the  language and legal forms used for each of them. Seeing the patent, the corporation and the constitution as variations on the theme of delegated sovereignty, is one of the more valuable things I got from this book.

Books I read in 2024:

Joe Studwell,  How Asia Works. Arjun recommended this to me some years ago; I finally read it this year because I assigned it to my economic history class. It’s one of the best things I’ve read on late industrialization in Asia — it can comfortably go on the shelf with Alice Amsden’s Asia’s Next Giant or Chalmers Johnson’s MITI and the Japanese Miracle, and in fact I’d recommend it over them, both because it’s more current, and because this is a topic that really benefits from a comparative perspective. One thing I particularly appreciated was his emphasis on the critical importance of land reform as a precondition for industrialization, both because of the greater efficiency of small farms in the labor-surplus context of early industrialization, and because of the need to close off land as an outlet for wealth to spur investment in industry.

Thomas A. Stapleford, The Cost of Living in America. A comprehensive history of the development of price-level statistics in the United States, which I read in the course of doing work on the money book. It’s an excellent work of narrative history which is equally attuned to the concrete work of producing price statistics, the theoretical questions of what they are intended to represent, the political stakes of debates over them, and the concrete purposes for which they are used. It’s a pretty specialized topic, admittedly, but if it’s one that you’re interested in, then this is the book to read.

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. I first read these many years ago in college, but reread them this year because the 13-year old still likes being read aloud to before bed and serious history is what he is into. The books are as good as I remembered; I would recommend them to anyone interested in how the modern world took shape in 19th century Europe. Hobsbawm’s communist politics aren’t overt, but they’re what make the books work: That everything builds toward the Russian Revolution gives them their propulsive force, rather than just being a catalogue of one thing after another.

Annie Ernaux, Exteriors and The Years. I read these this year, after reading her A Man’s Place last year. I didn’t find either of these quite as beautiful or as moving as that one, but they’re still great books. The Years uses a second person narration to seamlessly blend a personal narrative with the shared experience of a generation; I wonder, would this work for anyone who wasn’t born in the immediate postwar years?

Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism. This is another book I read because I assigned it for my economic history class. It worked perfectly for that purpose, both because it is a survey of the whole economic history of the United States from the 16th century to the present, and also because it has a strong central theme — the changing forms and meaning of capital as an organizing principle of economic life.

You can tell it was written by a historian rather than an economist — there are many more reproductions of painting and photos than there are charts or tables. Levy is a somewhat eccentric writer, and makes some quirky choices about how he approaches his topic — there’s a whole chapter based around a close reading of Melville’s “Confidence Man” as an illustration of the importance and difficulty of trusting strangers in a more mobile and urbanizing society, and the chapter on the civil war and reconstruction spends more time on how the war was financed than on changing labor relations in in the postwar South. But for anyone looking for a comprehensive economic history of the United States, I would very much recommend it.

Justin Torres, We the Animals. Laura recommended this one — the author is a friend of a friend. It’s a powerful, but lighthearted and poetic, book about growing up Dominican and gay in upstate New York. Like Ernaux’s The Years, it gets some its effect from the fuzziness of the protagonist, which gradually shifts from the three brothers collectively to the narrator alone.

Peter Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History. This book I also assigned to my economic history class, which was a mistake. If the book came out today, its garbled content would be a sure sign of AI slop. Did you know that enclosure in early modern England refers to a government requirement that all landowners put fences around their fields, which smaller landowners could not afford to do? (It does not). Do not read this book.

Joshua Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. This book, by the author of the magnificent Working Class New York, is one more that I read because I assigned it my economic history class. It tells the history of the factory through half a dozen iconic sites, from early 19th century Lowell, to early 20th century River Rouge, to Shenzhen today. While the broad outlines of most of the stories are broadly similar to what you would find in other histories of industrialization (the River Rouge chapter has considerable overlap with Levy’s chapter on the same topic) there’s also a lot here that was new to me, especially thanks to Freeman’s focus on the factory buildings themselves. One of the central themes of the book (which I touched on in a blog post) is how similar the experiences of factory work have been over the past two centuries, even when the broader social context is very different.

Stephen Marglin, Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First Century General Theory. I read this book partly because I recalled being very impressed years ago hearing Marglin give a talk based on the material in it, and partly in order to use parts of it in my graduate macro class. It turned out not to be helpful for that purpose, which is not a knock on the book — it’s just that with this kind of dense material you have to really focus on it if you are going to use at all.

The book presents itself as an effort to rewrite the theory of the General Theory in the language of contemporary economics. One thing I greatly appreciate about it is how attuned Marglin is to the real-world questions — both in Keynes’ time and today — that the theory must speak to. His central claim is that while the logic of Keynes’ argument does not work as he presented it, it does work when rewritten in terms of explicitly dynamic models. For this reason, much of the book is a deep dive into dynamics and various out-of-equilibrium adjustment processes, something that economists more often gloss over to focus on the ultimate equilibrium position.  It makes a big difference, for instance, if we think firms that find themselves with excess inventory respond by reducing prices or by reducing output.

I have mixed feelings about the book. I certainly share Marglin’s conviction that Keynes offers profound insights into the capitalist process, which need to be reformulated to connect with modern debates. And the book’s discussions of different adjustment dynamics is brilliant and original. But I am not sure that the latter helps much with the former — Marglin’s “rescue” of Keynes is not, to me, very satisfactory.¹ So while there is a lot of great stuff in here, the book as a whole seems a bit less than the sum of its parts.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles. Laura assigned this to a class, so it was around the house and I picked it up. What a weird and engrossing book. Even though it’s imagining a future that now lies well in the past, it doesn’t feel dated because Mars, here, is just an allegory for the American West.

Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart, The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. I’ve always been fascinated by evolutionary biology, and evo-devo in particular. Among other things, it seems to me there’s a striking parallel between orthodox economic theory and the simplistic version of Darwinian evolution we’re taught in high school (and that’s now beloved of YouTube explainers.) The development of complex new forms is fundamentally different from movement toward an optimum within a given space of phenotypes — a difference highlighted by the kind of research into development described here. Evolution is not about selection between random genetic variation, but the result of preexisting systems that allow for the creation of complex forms, into which genes are just one input, often interchangeable with inputs from the environment or the organism’s own behavior.  The best book I’ve read on this topic remains Mary West Eberhart’s Developmental Plasticity and Evolution; but I learned a lot from this one too.

David Graeber, Pirate Enlightenment. This posthumously published book explores the mixed pirate-Malagasy communities in 17th century Madagascar, drawing on a handful of contemporary sources and later anthropological work on Madagascar (including Graeber’s own). The central concern is the same as in The Dawn of Everything: the existence of politics in premodern societies, in the sense of conscious, collective choices about how society should be organized; and the priority that many of these choices seemed to give to preserving freedom from personal domination or compulsion. I freely admit to being a big Graeber fan, but I was often quite irritated by the previous book; I think the picture is more convincingly drawn on the smaller canvas here.

A. J. P. Taylor, Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman. I’ve gotten into the habit of listening to audiobooks while cooking and cleaning, and I find that narrative history and biography works very well for that format. This is a perfectly serviceable biography, covering all the important events in Bismarck’s life and career, providing the historical and political context, and engaging, sometimes critically, with the existing literature, while keeping to a reasonable length.

I have to say, the biggest impression I came away with is that Bismarck must be one of the most boring people ever to have played such a central historical role. Every major decision he made was, in Taylor’s telling, purely tactical, oriented to whatever short-term problem he was most concerned about at the moment. (The crowning of Wilhelm as Emperor of Germany, far from being the secret agenda of the war with France, was, in this telling, a last-minute improvisation to ensure that Prussia’s North German allies didn’t drop out of the war.) Once the immediate crisis was dealt with, he just kind of sat around waiting for the next one. Bismarck was, evidently, an educated and intelligent person; but you get the impression that as the avatar of the Juncker class, he aspired to stupidity as a positive virtue.

Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, translated by Tom Nairn. Another political biography I listened to as an audiobook. It’s an outstanding biography; written in the 1980s, when many of Gramsci’s contemporaries were still around, it draws on interviews by the author as well as the usual archival sources. A lot of the interest comes from the fact that Gramsci was located so precisely at one of the hinge-points of the 20th century; can you believe that he and Mussolini personally debated, on the floor of the Italian parliament, the class basis of fascism and whether it could be considered revolutionary? But Gramsci is also sort of the anti-Bismarck, not only in his personal background and the political project he helped lead, but also because he personally is a complex and fascinating individual who its delightful to spend time with, even in the mediated form of a biography. After I finished it, I had the thought: If a genie offered me an hour anywhere at any time in history, I’d like to spend it at Gramsci’s home in 1926, while he played with little Delio.

Alice Munro, Friend of My Youth. I read almost all of Munro’s books 15 or so years ago. I picked this collection up again after the story about her daughter’s abuse at the hands of her husband came out, to see if they read differently. They do, a bit. Mothers who abandon their children, or who overlook or ignore some danger to them, are a recurring theme in Munro’s work, and that hits a bit differently now. But mostly rereading them just convinced me, again, that Munro is the greatest contemporary writer of short fiction. This collection is one of her better ones, I think (there are always a few duds); it particularly highlights one of Munro’s other recurring themes, the presence but inaccessibility of the divine in the world, which we can perceive only as a kind of negative space around it, an absence or hole. (In this collection, the title story and “Pictures of the Ice” are two outstanding examples.) Anyway, I stopped watching movies by Woody Allen and Roman Polanski many years ago. And while I loved the Sandman comics, and my kids loved Fortunately the Milk (which I suppose should also be on this list), I wouldn’t bring a Neil Gaiman book into my home now. But reasons good or bad, I don’t feel that way about Alice Munro.

Eric Cline, 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. One astonishing thing you learn from books like this is how much writing survives from over three thousand years ago. It’s a like a whole other history before history, as far before ancient Rome as Rome is from us. What I like about this book in particular is how well it does the most important thing about writing about ancient civilizations — paying constant attention to how we know what we do know, and to how much we don’t and probably never will know. The book does not offer any definite answer its central mystery — why so many of the interconnected Mediterranean civilizations of the 2nd millennium BC collapsed around the same eponymous year — but to me that’s a virtue rather than a flaw.

Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea. Strassler’s blog is the best thing I know on the internet for explaining fundamental physics to a general audience in a rigorous way. (His recent series on quantum interference is a tour de force.) So I was very excited when this book came out. I’m sorry to say I was rather disappointed. Strassler has an admirable commitment to avoiding shortcuts, or what he call “phybs”, and carefully works his way up from the most fundamental concepts (what is a field? what is a force?) in the most rigorous but nontechnical way. Unfortunately, clarity and precision come at the expense of breadth and depth; I can’t say I learned much of anything new from the book. Well, again, I am a religious reader of his blog; but then, you’d think that’s who his readers would be? Anyway, I definitely recommend his blog; if you’re interested in fundamental physics but don’t know anything about physics (I’m not sure how much overlap there is between those circles?) then you might also want to read the book.

Branko Milanovic, Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War. I read this survey of economists’ shifting views on income distribution because Tim Sahay and I were going to interview Branko about it, which ended up not happening. It’s an erudite and gracefully written book, as you would expect; but there’s something a bit off about it. As he acknowledges, income inequality as we think about it today was not really a concern for most of the authors he is writing about, particularly the earlier ones. So asking how they would answer our questions can lead to a weirdly off-center perspective, focusing myopically on the few instances where they discussed inequality in something like modern terms. It’s symptomatic that the chapter on Marx includes two full pages discussing whether Marx misquoted a single sentence from Gladstone on the distribution of wealth in England.

I’m a great admirer of Branko’s work, but this is not the book of his that I would recommend to people.

Jerusalem Demsas, On the Housing Crisis. I assigned this for a class I taught last fall on “the economics of New York”. I wanted something that would make the straightforward supply argument on housing costs, and this fit the bill. If you follow housing debates, you won’t find much new here. It’s a collection of her opinion pieces, mostly for The Atlantic; if you don’t have a subscription and can’t get past the paywall, I guess that might be a reason to buy this book.

Patrick Condon, Sick Cities: Disease, Race, Inequality and Urban Land.  I assigned this for the same unit in the same class, as the other side of the argument. The housing market is extremely segmented and landlords have a great deal of market power, so housing costs have nothing to do with supply — that’s the position here. (Though this particular book also has a lot about covid, working from home and so on.) Personally, I think both sides of this debate have valid and important points, which both of them then wrongly elevate into absolute truths. But that is a topic for another time.

John Scalzi – Old Man’s War and The Collapsing Empire. The 13 year old, who enjoys science fiction as well as history, picked up one of these. Yeah, they’re not suitable for a 13 year old. I ended up reading them both. I can’t say I liked them very much. A lot of familiar sci-fi tropes recycled, without anything much new being added that I can see. But I read them to the end despite not really liking them, so they evidently work on a basic what-happens-next level.

 

ETA: I forgot, I also read Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories last year. They were good.

Previous editions:

2023 books

2020 books

2019 books

2017 Books

2016 books

2015 books

2013 books

2012 books I

2012 books II

2010 books I

2010 books II

Books I read in 2023. I’m probably forgetting some.

Geoffrey Ingham, The Nature of Money. One of the fundamental divides in thinking about money is whether we start from the commodity or the unit of account. Do we begin, logically and historically, with the idea of exchange and then bring in money, or do we start from an abstract unit of measurement which then, among other things, is used to value commodities? The latter view defines what’s known as chartalism; Ingham offers the most persuasive statement of the chartalist position that I know. The most visible (though, it seems to me, fading) contemporary version of chartalism is the one offered by Modern Mone(tar)y Theory. There’s a clear affinity between Ingham and MMT but also some important differences; taking Mitchell Innes rather than Knapp as its starting point, Ingham’s version emphasizes money as a measure of obligations in general, rather than taxes specifically.

Like the next five books on the list, I read this one in as I worked on Money and Things, and in conjunction with the “Alternative Perspectives on Money” course I taught this fall.

Lev Menand, The Fed Unbound: Central Banking in a Time of Crisis.  I am a big admirer of Menand’s writing on monetary policy and the Fed. He’s a good example of how many of the most interesting conversations around economics these days are happening in law schools. I am constantly pointing people to his short piece on the “The Fed’s Sole Mandate,” which does a brilliant job reframing debates around monetary policy. I would love to see that argument developed at book length. Unfortunately, this is not really that. The book falls a bit awkwardly between two sets of stools — between a general history of the Fed and a comment on pandemic-era interventions, on the one hand, and between a popularization and original argument on the other. I’m sympathetic – these are both tensions I also struggle with. (Despite some encouragement from me, Lev also has not been quite able to give up the idea of a definite quantity of money.) I will certainly continue to draw on and assign his work in the future, but I think I’ll look more to his law review articles rather than this book. 

David McNally, Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire. I would also put this in the broad category of chartalism, again emphasizing the role of money as an abstract unit of measurement rather than as a specific commodity.  This is a more eclectic and Marx-influenced version, focusing on money as quantification as such rather than of obligations. The most importnat things being reduced to commensurable quantities, in McNally’s telling, are human bodies — for him, money is the obverse of slavery, and of coercive violence more broadly. The book’s title should be taken literally.

The historical material here makes an interesting complement to Ingham. Most chartalist writing, in my experience, draws from a relatively short list of historical parables — ancient Babylon, colonial Madagascar. Ingham mostly sticks to the canon, but McNally ranges more widely. As with many books of this kind (Graeber’s Debt is the notorious example) the analysis starts glitching a bit when the story reaches the modern world. It’s not surprising. When you are writing about a general topic like money or debt, there is nothing wrong with picking whatever particular examples from the vast palette of the past that work best for the picture you’re trying to paint. But when you are writing about recent history, you are stuck with the specific things that actually happened.

Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes. The subject of this book is the question — one which motivates so many debates about money — of how, and to what extent, the form and management of money shapes broader social relations. It’s the question of whether money is, in the broadest sense, neutral, or whether changes in the terms on which money is created can transform politics and relations of production. The book, to be clear, is not framed this way; it’s set up, rather as six distinct essays, on particular thinkers and milieus, from classical Athens through Locke, Fichte, Marx and Keynes to the “political theory of money after Bretton Woods.” As Colin Drumm suggests, the book is best understood (and perhaps read) backward. To make sense of current debates about money, we need to go back to the early 20th century Years of High Theory, and then back to the thinkers that influenced them, and on back to Aristotle. Personally, I learned the most from the Athens and Marx chapters; but the whole thing is very worth reading

Merijn Knibbe, Macroeconomic Measurement Versus Macroeconomic Theory.  This is a book-length struggle with a question dear to my heart, the disconnect  between the categories of economic theory and measurement. Concepts like output, employment, the price level or the capital stock can be defined unambiguously within a formal economic model. But when we use them to describe developments in the real world, their meaning depends on a whole host of specific decisions about what exactly to count, what to impute and where to draw various more or less arbitrary lines. The data we look at is highly sensitive to these choices —  a full third of US consumption, for instance, consists of non cash items like the notional rent paid by homeowners to themselves, services provided gratis by nonprofits and government, and the notional value of financial services provided by low-interest bank accounts. Mainstream economists — and, I’m afraid to say, many heterodox ones — are blissfully unconcerned with these choices. But it is impossible to make any meaningful statements about real economies except in the terms that they are actually observed.

Many economists will acknowledge this problem in principle but Knibbe’s book is a rare attempt to address it head on. It is brilliant, perceptive and original, but also digressive, a bit of a ramble. One of its strengths is the author’s less academic background — he has a deep knowledge of topics, like exactly how milk prices are set in the Netherlands, that are not taught in any economics program. A challenge for any book like this is how much work it takes to explain the intricate fantasies of orthodox theory as a prelude to dismantling them; I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, if one is going to write critically about economics at all.

I provided comments on early chapters of the book, and at one point we discussed coauthoring it. That didn’t happen, obviously, but he did just fine on his own.

Anitra Nelson, Marx on Money: The God of Commodities. The most thorough and convincing account of Marx’s (incomplete and sometimes contradictory) writing on money that I have read. I won’t attempt to summarize Nelson’s arguments here; perhaps I’ll do so in a future post.

Enzo Traverso, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945. This book presents itself as a history of Europe’s second thirty years war. It is organized not chronologically but thematically, around various concepts that structured what Traverso presents as fundamentally an intra-European rather than international conflict — dual power, the partisan, the trauma of industrial violence, the new legal concept of war crimes, and so on. At its heart is an effort to reclaim anti-fascism as positive political project. Resistance to fascism required, and called forth, a creative fusion of socialist and Enlightenment values. Antifascism, in Traverso’s telling, was not merely a negative reaction to right-wing authoritarianism. It was a “civil religion of humanity, democracy and socialism”; it was “a “shared ethos that, in a historical context that was exceptional and necessarily transitory, made it possible to hold together Christians and atheist Communists, liberals and collectivists.” Traverso amasses a great range of historical, artistic and literary material to flesh out this view of antifascism as a positive political program. Anti-fascism is not just resistance to movement in the fascist direction; it is pressure for movement  away from the status quo in the other direction. It’s a timely reminder that one cannot effectively defend democratic values and practices where they already exist without also fighting to extend them where they currently do not. 

This is very much an intellectual history — personally, I wouldn’t have minded if Traverso had included a few less reproductions of paintings and introduced some quantitative material. Its antagonists are liberal historians — Francois Furet in particular — who see “the West” following a steady path toward liberal democracy as a kind of technical progress, with the violent conflicts between Left and Right as a friction or distraction. Traverso’s argument – not stated in so many words, but the overarching theme of the book — is that there was no technological inevitability to universal suffrage, civil liberties or the rest of it. Human progress, such as it is, is the result of active struggle. The battle against fascism yielded something quite different from a  straight line projection from the years before 1914. 

Luciano Canfora, Democracy in Europe. Another book by an Italian historian, developing many of the same themes as Traverso, though on a broader canvass. The central argument is that if democracy means “rule by the people,” then we should think of this not as an institution but an event, as the rare episodes in which the propertyless majority are able to collectively exercise power against the interests of the rich. Democracy, in his words, means “the temporary ascendancy of the poorer classes in the course of an endless struggle for equality”. Elections with broad suffrage are at best an enabling condition of democracy, not a definition of it. They create an arena in which the mass of people may sometimes be mobilized if the conditions are right. As Friedrich Engels put it, elections are important because they offer “a means to make contact with the masses where they are still distant from us,” not so much as a direct route to power. 

By the late 19th century, Engels believed, democratic politics offered an open road toward socialism. In Canfora’s view, however, he underestimated the ability of elites to mobilize mass support for their own programs. The development of mass political participation in the early 20th century owed as much, he argues, to efforts by conservative government to inoculate the population against socialism, as to any advance of democratic values. Conservatives were nonetheless hostile to universal suffrage right down to World War One. The book quotes the British writer George Cornwall Lewis urging that “the attempt to attain perfect equality in … the powers of government seems … as absurd as the attempt to attain perfect equality in the distribution of property.” Canfora accepts this equivalence but turns it around — sustained equality in government has never been compatible with concentrated property ownership. Historically, expansion of formal democracy was either a step toward broader social equality, or a defense against it.

Like Traverso, Canfora emphasizes how “antifascism was widened from a negative concept — rejection — to a positive one. … the forces that had fought fascism … could by definition transform society in a progressive direction.” He sees a fundamental parallel between developments in eastern and western Europe after war. On both sides, the upheavals of war and and popular mobilizations created new opening for demands from the masses. In the immediate postwar period, governments gave ground to pressure from below both substantively and in terms of public participation; but as they became more established, genuine popular involvement was displaced by self-confirming legality. The relationship of the US to Italy was not fundamentally different from that of the USSR to Poland or Hungary, even if military intervention was only prepared and not carried out. To drive this point home, he notes that it was Churchill, not Stalin, who proposed the division of Europe into spheres of influence; while the latter, for his part, urged an acceptance of liberal norms by communists in Western Europe.

Moving to the present, Canfora firmly rejects the idea that the countries of “the West” are democratic simply by virtue of their electoral arrangements. At the same time he insists that changes to electoral systems are important for either narrowing or widening the possibilities for substantive democracy.  In particular, he sees the shift from proportional representation to single-member districts or hybrid systems (as occurred in both France and Italy in recent decades) as a way of closing off space for democracy. In his view, steps away from proportional representation are no different from outright restrictions of the franchise. They “combine the electoral principle … with the reality of the protected ascendancy of the … upper classes.”

Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History. This is a sympathetic but not uncritical account of Mao’s life and the surrounding history. One of the book’s big virtues — besides providing the basic narrative of events that I knew much less about than I should — is that its perspective is always the situation and context in which Mao himself operated. It tries to understand why he made the choices he did in the circumstances that he faced. This is partly a matter of how the book is written, but it also requires the writer (and reader) to be able to imagine themselves as part of the revolutionary project Mao was engaged in. 

I learned a great deal from this book. Here are a few general points that stand out. First,  Mao’s formative political experiences involved China’s political disintegration and subordination to outside powers and, interestingly, the subordination of women in the traditional Chinese family (the subject of his first significant political writings.) His embrace of class politics and Marxism came afterwards, as a response to the practical problems of national independence and revival. (And to the savage repression by the nationalists.) Second, despite being an early leader of the Communist Party, he was, in Karl’s telling, almost constantly in conflict with it. He never had the unquestioned  authority of a Stalin, and for much of the period after 1960 or so he was effectively excluded from day to day leadership. The cult of personality — the Little Red Book and so on — were real enough, but they reflected relative marginalization rather than dominance; they arose from, on the one side, his efforts to pressure from the outside a government he no longer dominated, and from the other, the Party’s efforts to claim his legacy even while rejecting his positions substantively. Conversely, the “reforms” after his death don’t represent a repudiation of the Revolution so much as a reassertion of tendencies that were there all along. Third, Mao’s worst mistakes were in large part overreactions to correctly perceived problems with the Soviet model. The Great Leap Forward — disastrous as it was — is in no way comparable to the great famines under Stalin. It was the result rather of a search for a form of industrialization that would not favor the cities at the expense of the peasants. The problem was a breakdown in the systems of coordination, communication and transport rather than — as under Stalin — a systematic extraction of grain from the countryside. The Cultural Revolution, meanwhile, came from the conflicts between Mao and the party leadership mentioned earlier — it was intended by Mao as a revolution against the party,  as an effort to prevent the consolidation of a new ruling class or stratum as he believed had happened in the USSR. 

These broad brush summaries don’t do justice to the book, which is much more concrete and historically grounded. One question that it does not answer, however — that it does not even pose, given its choice to write largely from Mao’s own perspective — is, how and to what extent did the Chinese revolution lay the groundwork for China’s astonishing success — maybe the greatest in history — as a late industrializer. (Isabella Weber’s book, while also very good, only addresses a small part of this question.) But I still found it extremely informative and worth reading. One other virtue: it is very short. I would love to see more books in this format. There are a lot of big topics on which I would be happy to read 150 pages, but probably would not manage 700. 

Fintan O’Toole, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.  A charming and very readable first-person account of Ireland since 1960, seamlessly interweaving historical and autobiographic material. When I picked this book up (at The Lofty Pigeon, a lovely new bookstore in my corner of Brooklyn) I knew a bit about the Irish war of independence and of course about the euro-era financial bubble and crisis, but but not much about the period in between. It’s a fascinating  story — 20th century Ireland has to be one of the outstanding cases of cultural transformation in just a generation or two, from a closed semi-theocracy to a fully “modern” country, for better or worse. O’Toole has an appealing ambivalence about this transformation. He is unflinching in his descriptions of the stifling cruelty of mid-century Irish schools and the treatment of women who violated sexual norms; it’s interesting how, in his telling even features of this society that might seem appealing — big multi-generational families with neighbors constantly present — could seem oppressive to those living in it. But neither does he whitewash the Irish modernization project or the politicians who led it. 

Edward Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham. A massive, comprehensive history of New York from the first European arrival to consolidation in 1898. I consumed this as an audiobook intermittently over the past year or so. Its episodic structure works well in that format, though not so much its profusion of names, dates, and places. (Someone should make a geographic concordance from it, if there isn’t one.)  What is there to say about it? If you want to learn about the history of New York City, this is the book. 

Adam Hochschild, American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis.  A history of US politics and political repression in the period around and immediately after World War One. As Hochschild makes clear, nothing in Donald Trump’s dreams comes close to the institutionalized racism, nativism and criminalization of dissent under Woodrow Wilson. If you’ve read some labor history, you won’t be shocked at the stories of the violent suppression of the IWW. But what about the movie director sentenced to four years in prison for making a film about the American Revolution that depicted the British in too negative a light? Or the Swiss-born orchestra conductor whose lynching on suspicion of German sympathies was hailed by The Washington Post as a “healthful and wholesome awakening” of patriotic sentiment? Or the mass roundups of young men suspected of evading the draft by vigilante squads? It’s an important reminder that fascism is a long-established and central strand in American politics, not something introduced by Trump or Newt Gingrich. 

Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe, A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe.  I enjoy books about ancient history and paleantology, especially ones that, like this one, are as much about how we know what we know, as about what we do know. The specific focus here is the new information from the reconstruction of genomes from ancient human remains, something that has only recently become possible; one of the authors is a pioneer in the technique. There is a rather serious problem, which is visible in the juxtaposition of the title and subtitle: Europe and humanity are quite different things. (The authors are hardly the only ones to have trouble remembering this.) Still, it’s fascinating how much detail is now known about ancient population movements. 

Thomas Lin, ed., Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire. Essays from online science magazine Quanta. I enjoy their podcasts, but this collection was underwhelming. This is the one book on this list that I do not recommend.

Abdelrahman Munif, The Trench and Variations of Night and Day. These are the second and third novels in the Cities of Salt trilogy telling the story of a fictional gulf monarchy over the first half of the 20th century. (At least, it’s a trilogy in English; I believe there are further volumes that haven’t been translated.) I wrote a bit about these books at the end of this post.

Annie Ernaux, A Man’s Place. A short, beautiful book about the author’s father, about class, education and the the distance between the center and the periphery, and about the irreversible passage of time. It’s one of those in-between-genres books that gets shelved with the novels in France and with memoirs in the United States.

Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile. An allegory of the position of intellectuals under right-wing dictatorships, how you simultaneously know and don’t know what is going on — metaphorically, but in the allegory literally — beneath the floors of your literary get-togethers.  It’s the story of a well-meaning priest, “the most liberal member of Opus Dei in Chile,” who, improbably … well, I won’t spoil it.

Natalie Ginsburg, The Dry Heart; Happiness, as Such; and Voices in the Evening. Sad, occasionally political, and very occasionally violent family conflicts in small-town Italy from the 1940s through the 1960s. They are good.

Previous editions:

2020 books

2019 books

2017 Books

2016 books

2015 books

2013 books

2012 books I

2012 books II

2010 books I

2010 books II