Bookmarks

I’m increasingly swamped by books – both physical and virtual – and just wanted to share some of the interesting titles which are on offer around me….. 

1. Histories of the entire region of east central Europe are not quite as rare you might think – although I have only one in my extensive physical library up in my mountain house. My virtual library can offer Inventing Eastern Europe – the map of civilization in the mind of the enlightenment by Larry Woolf (1994); and Companion to central and eastern Europe since 1989 by Adrian Webb (2008).

But most historians find it easier to focus on individual countries such as Poland.  I have, however, just come across a 1000 page study of the region which looks quite fascinating - entitled From peoples into nations – a history of Eastern Europe; by John Connelly (2020) reviewed here and with an interview here. 

2. Always a sucker for intellectual history, I liked the look of The Ideas Industry – how pessimists, partisans and plutocrats are transforming the marketplace of ideas; Daniel Drezner (2017). I used to dislike the American habit of long self-explanatory titles but now find it a fairly useful guide around the crap which deluges the conscientious reader. 

3. And always wanting to find texts which try to penetrate the souls of nations, I am intrigued with Bending Adversity; Japan and the art of survival by David Pilling (2014) which I found in my local English bookshop last week. Pilling was the lead journalist for the Financial Times for 8 years from 2001 but returned in March 2011 to cover the Tsunami events.   

His take complements superbly the very thorough study published recently by Edinburgh academic Chris Harding “Japan Story – in search of a nation 1850 to the present” (2018) which I am half-way through. It’s an easy read and particularly strong on social and cultural vignettes…. 

4. Donald Sassoon is one of these amazing writers who tries to do justice to an entire subject in one large volume. The history of European Socialism and European culture are two of the issues he has tackled - and his latest is a 700 page tome (with 170 of the pages being bibliography and notes) - “Anxious Triumph – the global history of capitalism 1860-1914” (2019); It’s reviewed here and here

It may be forbidding in size – but it has an engrossing style….It’s lying here on the table awaiting my attention 

5. Rethinking governance – the centrality of the state in modern society by S Bell and A Hindmoor (2009) is another book with a title I find appealing… 

At its simplest, the arguments that governments have been ‘hollowed out’ or ‘decentred’ and must now work with a range of non-state actors in order to achieve their goals…… are overblown. In fact, part of the motivation for writing this book was the lack of a sustained alternative account of governance in which the state played a central role in governance arrangements and relationships, but also steered or metagoverned them. Although we point to instances in which governments have been marginalised and collectively valued policy goals are being pursued by non-state actors, such cases are few and far between. 

In our view governments and the broader set of agencies and public bodies which together constitute the state are and should remain central in governance processes.

But while rejecting what we call ‘society-centred’ arguments about governance, we also express reservations about alternative ‘state-centric’ accounts in which governments are imagined to operate in splendid isolation from the societies they govern, descending from on high occasionally to impose their policy preferences.

Instead, we develop a ‘state-centric relational’ account of governance, arguing that states have enhanced their capacity to govern by strengthening their own institutional and legal capacities but also by developing closer relations with non-state actors 

6. Bill Mitchell is a leftist Australian economist whose Reclaiming the State – a progressive vision of sovereignty in a post neo-liberal world (2017) I’m trying to find the time to at least skim. He’s also one of the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory I’m trying to get my head around. The US Dissent magazine ran a dissenting article here…   

7. Rentier Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? By Brett Christophers (2020) is an epub book which looks another must-read! 

8. Adam Tooze is one of these polymaths whose skills I envy and admire – graduating as an economist, he then got a doctorate in economic history from Berlin University and the LSE and became Professor of modern German history at Yale - focusing on its economic aspects and producing impressive books on first economic aspects of the Nazi regime and then the definitive account of the global financial meltdown (“Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world”). He has blogged about different aspects of the book  https://adamtooze.com/2018/06/23/framing-crashed-1-trade-and-finance-two-different-visions-of-the-twenty-first-century-global-condition/ 

He is a prolific journalist and produces a regular economics newsletter – Chartbook - which is the best briefing on economic issues I know. The latest issue looks at Bitcoin