what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, May 13, 2019

The last straight?

What I’m hoping is the last stretch for the book proved more arduous than I thought – particularly checking that the 50 mini-essays which form its core actually hang together and give some sort of narrative. These mini-essays were originally drafted as blog posts in the last 5-6 years but have been updated and edited for this book. That’s 50 out of 1,350 posts over the past ten years – so they survived a tough selection process which was based on intuition rather than explicit criteria.
And they are grouped into six Parts (or chapters) whose titles, I hope, are self-explanatory.

Ways of Seeing” uses the title of John Berger’s seminal book of the 1970s to highlight what seemed to be the main subjects of controversy and debate (at least in America/Europe) from the 1930s - decade by decade. From the 1980s there was a tendency to reduce debate to a few competing “storylines” – reflecting the post-modernist “discursive turn” of the times.
As someone who studied Politics and Economics at Adam Smith’s old University (Glasgow) it is hardly surprising that political analysis should then put in an appearance at this point – ahead of the economics analysis which is the focus of Chapter 3 (“Putting Economics in its Place”).
In the 1960s, politics was an honourable pursuit and the reasons for its dramatic decline in respect is explored in a detailed consideration of one of the few books which has bothered to try to understand this loss of trust. The growth of technocracy is clearly one of the factors as managers and economists have been elevated to the status of high priests of a new religion…..

“Not in Our Name” plots the growth in the past 25 years of social protest and moral disgust.

Putting Economics in its Place” maps how writers of various sorts have tried to make sense of the post-war world – not least the 2008 global economic crisis – noting that economists somehow seem least able to offer satisfactory explanations…

Our Exploitative Society”, chapter 4, starts with a reminder that western societies are built on carbon exploitation – and then looks at how some of the key books since 2008 have mapped the efforts these societies have made to cope with the new realities

Other Ways” contains various essays about social movements and the solidarity economy

Chapter 6, “Changing the World”, return to the moral and political aspects – asking whether the “western model” can survive and how it will all end. It finishes by reviewing the literature on power and change

I’m now experimenting with Dropbox – so the current draft should be accessible here

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