The edited version of 2020's posts

 Three weeks of blog silence – and the new year is more than a week old without a peep from the blog......

I often go into hibernation at this time of the year. The contrast between the general drabness of the days and the feverish attempts at celebrations gets too much – even when, in this part of the world, snow and bright blue skies sometimes sparkle.

But these past few weeks brought no such relief..

And perhaps I had been a bit hyperactive in the weeks before – with all the writing and reading....The body does sometimes need to be switched off....that much, at least, I have learned about myself! We do need sometimes simply to accept the inevitable – and not fight against it.....

At least I managed to complete the editing of this year's posts which I've entitled - Peripheral Vision – perennial musings.

Last year’s collected posts were rearranged thematically – with an explanatory intro to each of the sections which descended (in order of frequency) from those about capitalism through administrative reform and events in the Balkans to Brexit

Although Covid19 has been this year’s unwelcome guest, it has accounted in its own right for only about 15% of the posts in 2020 - which have been dominated by book reviews and examples of good writing of which this is a good example.

So I have decided against a thematic approach this year and let the posts speak for themselves, with their own rhythm, largely decided by the serendipity of my mailbox and the subsequent surfing it generates.

And a new feature – Snippets – has been introduced to ensure continued access to worthy links which would otherwise get lost in my large file of such links

Last year’s big subjects – capitalism and organisational change – have certainly not disappeared. They are as significant as the pandemic posts.

The blog hit the 1,500 mark in the autumn – which was celebrated with a selection of the year’s posts which included such topics as scepticism, groupthink, capitalism, Human nature, intellectual history - with hyperlinks to the world’s best English-speaking journals, the learning process, the role of the state and extinction…

And, as I look back at the posts, I have the sense they this year’s offers the best collection so far…..

The year saw me a bit fixated on the irrelevance of most books written by social scientists (except generic ones) but this serves only as a contrast with those written, for example, by David Graeber whose death has been such a tragedy for anyone with common sense.

It’s interesting that the blog has taken recently to using the title “Whatever happened to??” to explore the sudden (and strangely unremarked) disappearance of a topic which used to be on everyone’s lips…We need to think more deeply about who’s pulling the strings of such intellectual fashions

Classifications are, in any event, highly arbitrary – this year’s “book reviews” include books about democracy, offshore money, governance, global warming, organisational change and neo-liberalism. From which I take the message – beware of labels….and labelling people…..