The Good Society

Three books have borne this title – by JG Galbraith, Walter Lippman and David  

Donnison respectively. Unfortunately Donnison’s book (about urban development 

published in 1980) is unavailable for downloading.
The Good Society Walter Lippman (1936) is a rather unpleasant book glorifying 

the idea that planning leads to totalitarianism. Its only redeeming feature is that it 

follows the old tradition of taking 15 pages to set out its argument chapter by 

chapter. Galbraith’s The Good Society – the humane agenda (1996) is a much 

more positive book -

Among the great nations of the world none is more given to introspection than the United States. No day passes without reflective comment by the press, on radio or television, in an article or book, in compelled and sometimes compelling oratoryon what is wrong in the society and what could be improved. This is also, if in lesser measure, a preoccupation in the other industrial lands Britain, Canada, France, Germany, elsewhere in Europe and in Japan. No one can deplore this exercise; far better and far more informative such a search than the facile assumption that all is well. Before knowing what is right, one must know what is wrong.

There is, however, another, less traveled course of thought. That is to explore and define what, very specifically, would be right. Just what should the good society be? Toward what, stated as clearly as may be possible, should we aim? The tragic gap between the fortunate and the needful having been recognized, how, in a practical way, can it be closed? How can economic policy contribute to this end? What of the public services of the state; how can they be made more equitably and efficiently available? How can the environment, present and future, be protected? What of immigration, migration and migrants? What of the military power? What is the responsibility and course of action of the good society as regards its trading partners and neighbors in an increasingly internationalized world and as regards the poor of the planet? The responsibility for economic and social well-being is general, transnational. Human beings are human beings wherever they live.

Concern for their suffering from hunger, other deprivation and disease does not end because those so afflicted are on the other side of an international frontier. This is the case even though no elementary truth is so consistently ignored or, on occasion, so fervently assailed. To tell what would be right is the purpose of this book. It is clear at the outset that it will encounter a difficult problem, for a distinction must be made, a line drawn, between what might be perfect and what is achievable. This task and the result may not be politically popular and certainly not in a polity where, as I shall argue, the fortunate are now socially and politically dominant. To identify and urge the good and achievable society may well be a minority effort, but better that effort than none at all. Perhaps, at a minimum, the comfortable will be afflicted in a useful way. In any case, there is no chance for the better society unless the good and achievable society is clearly defined.

Another book with “good society” in its subtitle is Barry Knight’s Rethinking Poverty – what makes a good society? (2017) which reminds us that an unequal society is a bad one. This, of course, was first spelled out in Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson’s The Spirit Level which is summarised in their short paper “The Spirit Level 15 years On” – for my money, however, the better book is Danny Dorling’s Injustice – why social inequality still persists (2015)

Why Do We Ignore Poetry?

It’s more than 5 years since I last raised this question with this post -

Most people ignore most poetry

Because

Most poetry ignores most people

Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008)

I have decided views about writing genres – with a rather strong preference for essays (and short stories). I sometimes wonder whether my lack of interest in fiction betrays an element of autism – although in 2010 I did an interesting list of the novels which had appealed to me in the previous decade. But some years ago I went so far as to suggest that the flood of books had reached such a point that we needed to consider rationing at least non-fiction books

Given the popularity of Twitter and the fear that our attention span is declining, one might have imagined that poetry might appeal to the younger generation. But I don’t sense any sign of this…The Music of Time – poetry in the 20^th Century is a book written by the Scottish poet John Burnside in 2020 which contains marvellous and convincing essays (in many cases translated) 

In The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century, Burnside moves through his personal life and those of writers responding to war, political turmoil and environmental damage. This is a book where Burnside shows us how to read, how to live a life formed by reading, how poetry knits its way into our minds. It is also a curiously uplifting, rousing book. “Hope”, he writes, “is of the essence for all poets. We might even say that to make a poem at all is an act of hope.”

Why do so few poets appeal to us? I have a few favourites - Bertolt Brecht, Norman MacCaig, TS Eliot, WS Graham, Charles Bukowski, Marin Sorescu and Adrian Mitchell. What is it about such poets which allows them to “reach parts other cannot reach”?

In Bukowski’s case the answer is obvious – he wrote about low-class life in a bawdy way and made not the slightest concession to the poetic structure. It seemed like a flow of semi-consciousness….Norman MacCaig and Marin Sorescu – from opposite ends of Europe – shared a wry, humanist approach to nature and events. See MacCaig’s “Smuggler” and Sorescu’s “Asking too Much?” - the latter about a man commuting between Heaven and Hell and unable to choose between a book, a bottle of wine and a woman

Bert Brecht and Adrian Mitchell – on the other hand - were both highly political

My favourite poem is probably Brecht’s “In Praise of Doubt” which you can find in this collected edition of Brecht’s poetry.

WS Graham and TS Eliot were pretty apolitical but I have always been fond of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets not only for its Zen like sense of time and the puniness of our efforts but for its references to the fragile nature of words – thus, in “Burnt Norton”

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

decay with imprecision, will not stay in place

You can read the entire poem here and later (in East Coker) a section I use a lot–

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

Little wonder, therefore, that Eliot was a great admirer of a little-known poet from my home town (Greenock) in the 1940s, WS Graham, who also wrote a lot about words eg

Speaking is difficult and one tries

To be exact, and yet not to

Exact the prime intention to death.

On the other hand, the appearance of things

Must not be made to mean another

thing. It is a kind of triumph

To see them and to put them down

As what they are. The inadequacy

Of the living, animal language drives

Us all to metaphor and an attempt

To organise the spaces we think

We have made occur between the words.

Update; when the post first appeared, I quite unforgivably omitted Tom Leonard from the list. He died, sadly, in February 2019, but his website richness is still available and the letters in particular give a true sense of Glaswegian literary life. His most famous poems were in contemporary street Scots – my favourite being “The Six o’clock News” which you will find my scrolling down this excellent extended tribute

Further Update; 2 British poets, John Betjeman reads Philip Larkin's poems

The 2000th Post

Today, I have much pleasure announcing, is the day I mark my 2000^th post. It’s taken some 16 years to reach this goal – that’s some 125 posts a year by my reckoning although I’m only hitting 46 so far this year. In 2014 I celebrated the 1000^th post in this way and have picked out some of my more neglected posts (starting with some older ones)

Some Notes on a Crisis 
Memorable Messages 
The Search for the Holy Grail  
What will it Take to rekindle our lost faith in the political process
Journeys in Scotland 
Why don't we ask more interesting questions?
What is to be Done?  
If you look at the right-hand column, you will see no less than 28 of the Ebooks 

I have made from the posts during these 16 years – several are complete books 

such as The Long Search for Democracy and “What is to be Done? – dispatches 

to the next generation” - but most are shorter eg

Diaries, Letters and Memoirs (August 2025) Gradually I’ve accumulated an annotated list of some 250 books of memoirs, letters, diaries and biographies with hyperlinks to the text of most

Notes on the concept of CHANGE (August 2025) classifies, lists and (briefly) assesses 130 books on this subject

Just Words? A sceptic’s glossary (March 2024) I’ve taken a great deal of pleasure in identifying all relevant texts and then developing my own caustic definition of some key and commonly used phrases

Puzzling Cultural Values (Jan 2024) În the brave 90s, talk of culture became unfashionable but has recently become more acceptable. This paper explores possible reasons for the change

The Chinese Mission

Some 15 years ago I had a rather bad experience of China which I retold here. I had won the position of Team Leader of a 4 year EC project in the country which seemed to consist of having a lot of European experts visit the country for a week or so but was so depressed that I threw the towel in after the first month. But the experience did allow me to draft a 70 page paper on Chinese Administrative Reforms which was updated recently and an explanatory note Lost in Beijing – loneliness of a long-distance consultant. One of the factors which attracted me to the country was the writings of a Canadian political scientist, one Daniel Bell – particularly his 2008 book China’s New Confucianism – politics and everyday life in a changing society. 

The Commfucianist is a 2024 article about him which seems rather biased but which I excerpt for its very partiality

In the West too Bell’s star has waned. Granted, his books find a committed publisher in Princeton University Press. Bell is also the founding editor of the Princeton-China Series. It is in the world beyond the academy where interest has slackened. Not long ago Bell’s op eds in the New York Times, The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, The Guardian, and Huffington Post, found avid readers, hungry to learn where China was heading. Today, these outlets are less welcoming. Editors who once feted Bell now ignore him, not because Bell is less challenging to Western prejudices but because he challenges them more in a bleaker time. When China was an object of Western wonder, Bell’s deciphering of the Middle Kingdom earned him admiration and respect. Now that China is an object of Western detestation, Bell’s Sinophilia is considered perverse

The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (2015) is Bell’s most impressive book. Carefully argued and copiously documented, it combines rigor with audacity. “China Model” is not Bell’s coinage. Since the early 1980s, it has referred to the combination of market capitalism and state authoritarianism said to characterize the post-Mao reformist era. Bell finds this usage too generic: it could just as well apply to many Middle Eastern or African states. To capture China’s true specificity, says Bell, “China Model” is best viewed as “democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy at the top,” a uniquely graded system of governance. The model, Bell adds, is to be viewed as a reality, which the PRC approximates to a significant degree, and as a work in progress, an ideal to which the CCP aspires or claims to aspire. Evidently, it is also Daniel Bell’s preferred political system.

Bell begins not by singing China’s praises but by cataloguing the West’s problems, particularly those of the USA, the leading Western democracy. Bell will show that “the ideal of one person, one vote” is seriously flawed and that “electoral democracies do not necessarily perform better than political meritocracies according to widely shared standards of good government”

His appraisal of electoral democracy is damning. It is not merely deficient. It is “tyrannical.” The term is central to Chapter 1. Consider the “tyranny of the majority,” the worry of J.S. Mill. Most voters lack the relevant information about politics to act rationally. They are ignorant of the latest findings in science and social science and, unlike scientists, who “value intellectual honesty” (CM, 28), the multitude is shifty and perverse. It has neither the desire, the capacity, nor even the time to read “articles and books designed to be helpful” (CM, 30). Furthermore, it demonstrates little “communicative talent and emotional intelligence” (CM, 35). A “tyranny of the wealthy minority” (CM, 42) is no better. Doners, lobbyists, and special interests in general block change beneficial to society as a whole. The upshot is stagnant wages and worsening life-chances for workers. And not content with raw power, the affluent complacently justify their position by claiming that anyone with sufficient talent and energy can rise to the top. Systemic impediments (class, regional, educational) to scaling the ladder are blithely ignored. Callous and self-regarding, segregated by its gated lifestyle from everyday concerns, the wealthy minority is not even competent, evidenced by the West’s “major financial and economic crises” (CM, 45). The benighted majority return in a different guise when Bell describes the “tyranny of the voting community,” meaning, the total sum of citizens and residents eligible to vote.

A voting community is not only insensitive to the welfare of “future generations” (global warming threatens them) and “foreigners” (whose interests are not “represented”; CM, 46). It is also feckless and temperamental. By contrast, China is far better positioned to plan for the future. After all, “the same party will likely still be in power several decades from now” and, hence, will be more “likely to stick to its long-term commitments” than fawning Western politicians (CM, 53).

The West’s final shortcoming Bell calls the “tyranny of competitive individualists” (CM, 54). Western democracies are notorious for “negative campaigning” and “identity politics” both of which polarize the populace and make “compromise a dirty word.” The most hallowed aspects of voting make matters worse.

Having desacralized Western politics, Bell proceeds to vaunt the excellences of its rival. His point of departure is the CCP’s success in alleviating the poverty of millions of its citizens since the early 1980s and advancing their life-chances more generally.

He adds that the CCP enjoys considerable legitimacy at home. What explains China’s great success? Bell detects it in the CCP’s refinement of China’s long meritocratic tradition, especially as this affects the selection of leaders. The resonance with Confucianism is clear. Comparable to the great scholarsages of yore, the new literati combine intelligence and virtue if caged within the bars of a monopolistic party.

I began this essay by relating Bell’s odyssey to Confucianism and to China. I close it by emphasizing what must be increasingly obvious to Bell, a decent and honest man. Marxists, Sinicized or otherwise, are creedal monopolists. They do not share doctrine. It cannot be over emphasized that Chinese Marxism is at root a European import, stamped by Leninism which in turn was influenced by the French Revolution of 1789 and the European uprisings of 1848. This explains the presence in PRC constitutions of such foreign concepts as democracy, democratic centralism, dictatorship, and rights. Confucianism and Leninism are incompatible. The first is a philosophy, the fruit of a great and ancient civilization. The second is the ideology of a Leninist “combat party.” The CCP is the antithesis of all that Confucians valued. Indoctrination is not humanist self-cultivation. Propaganda is not wisdom, nor is training and technique the same as education and culture. A Party preoccupied with shoring up its legitimacy no more resembles Confucius’ passion for righteousness than mass conformity resembles his idea of harmony. No Leninist organization has never prioritized benevolence, goodness, human heartedness—the cardinal jen—over control and domination. Or been a beacon of moral example. And how can a Party at war with truthfulness, that effaces its own history to hide its crimes, that describes the quest for factual exactitude as “historical nihilism,” be a vehicle of virtue? It follows that the Party’s relationship to Confucianism is superficial, opportunistic, and conditional, and that this is true no matter how often President Xi visits Shandong or blesses the opening of another museum devoted to China’s past, always curated à la mode. The Party takes the plant and spits out the pith. It much prefers political theorist Wang Huning, a brilliant Marxist tactician, raised in the bruising environment of power politics, to the unworldly seer of Montréal. Confucian hierarchy is congenial but only so long as the Party constitutes its pinnacle and occupies its descending rungs. Ritual and form—the Confucian li—are welcome too, but only so long as they pay deference to Party conventions. Confucianism will retain its value to the CCP provided it is useful for legitimating Party rule. Nor will the youngest generation rue Confucianism’s demise, at least according to opinion survey research.

To this point, Bell has tried to marry Confucianism with Marxism and the Maoist “mass line”. More recently he has taken to calling himself a “progressive conservative” who aims to graft feminism and LGBTQ onto the Party shoot. This hybrid—we might think of it as Commfucianism—is doubtless sincere. It is also no threat at all to the CCP. For now, the Party is content to expropriate China’s great humanist philosophy, and happy enough to have a famous Westerner in its camp. It will be reassured to read Bell describe himself as a “servant of the Chinese state.” He could have said, metaphorically, that he was a servant of learning or of the university community. He could have said that he was a university official or a civil servant. That he did not say these things suggests to me that the real threat to Bell is not from the Party but from Bell himself, to his coherence as a thinker and his integrity as a critic.

The article is by one Peter Baehr and compares Bell with another Sinologist 

Simon Leys which I find strange since Leys spent only a few years in the country 

and had to adopt a nom de plume to avoid being declared persona non grata 

whereas Bell has spent most of his life in the country (apart from brief spells at 

Oxford and Princeton)

In The Dean of Shandong – confessions of a minor bureaucrat (2023), Bell describes the evolution of his political-moral beliefs. The subject of his doctoral thesis at Oxford was Communitarianism, a political philosophy with which he was at that time enamored. Communitarians argue that the sovereign individual of liberalism is a fiction. Human beings are not self-actualizing monads. They are social to their core. Born into an already pre-formed society, with a history and a culture, the infant becomes a human person through being immersed in group life and group symbols. Family, neighborhood, and association are the soil of human development and the cement of society.

A life that pursues freedom, self-realization, and pleasure above all other goals is not only corrosive of solidarity; it is impoverished and self-destructive. Material satisfaction is as transient as fashion. Egoism is frustrated by other egos. Factionalism is self-cancelling. A meaningful life unfurls in the company of and for others. It requires cooperation, compromise, care, and durable commitments. And because the self is a social phenomenon, it follows that we have obligations to the society that nurtures and protects us.

Recommended Reading

Chinese Shadows Simon Leys (1977)
The Hall of Uselessness – collected essays Simon Leys (2011)
Simon Leys – navigator between worlds Philippe Paquet (2015)

Beautiful Books

I’ve reached the stage when I have as many books in my virtual books (5000) as in my physical. Neagu Djuvara was a Romanian intellectual (he died at 97 years old) and produced a Brief Illustrated History of Romanians which immediately went into my short list of Beautiful Books. To qualify for this honour, a book has to fit standards none too easy to specify – such as

• paper type (thickish and rough),

• format,

• balance of text and illustrations,

• typeface,

• graphics

• textual content. 
  
  

In principle, art and cookery books should be beautiful – but their glossiness is usually offputting – Beaneaters and Bread Soup - portraits and recipes from Tuscany (2007) and Food from Plenty (2010) were exceptions. And travel books should be attractive eg the Pallas Athene books on Czechoslovakia (out of print) and Romania.

John Berger and Jean Mohr’s A Fortunate Man (Penguin 1969) is probably top of my list of beautiful books. Its perhaps significant that its pictures are in black and white – as, naturally, is Andre Kertesz’s On Reading (see also here)

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel is also a treat - both for content and visual impact. Vincent van Gogh – ever yours is a marvellous mix of graphics and letters from and to Vincent and his brother Theo who gave him both moral and financial support. Another favourite is a Folio edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1970)

As someone who can spend a few hundred euros on a single painting, I should probably be willing to pay more then 20 euros for a book - and be more demanding in my requirements of books. Indeed, having (self-)published several little books, it is probably time again to venture down that path - this time perhaps producing a "beautiful book"!  

It was only a few years back that I realised that I had become a collector – not just of paintings but of various small objects which appealed to me in the various countries I worked in. Painted boxes; wooden spoons; ceramics; figurines and sculptures.... some of my favourite objects are (empty) unlined notebooks – products of those countries which craft superb specimens of such wood/paper products eg Italy, Latvia and Bulgaria.

Desert Island Library

This is a post I did all of 15 years ago - Paul Mason, one of the BBC economics correspondent (all of whom do excellent blogs), is running a lovely Christmas challenge at the moment – the 50 books which your library has to have. The challenge was apparently first made in 1930 by an American journalist who received a letter from a friend who wrote:

"As for the library, I want no more than fifty books. And none of them modern; that is, 

no novels that are coming off the presses these last ten years. Are there fifty intelligent 

books in the world? If you have time send along a list of fifty books, I promise to buy 

them and have them beautifully bound. I am consulting you as I would my lawyer. 

I have not time to develop a literary consciousness at my age. So if you were cutting 

your own library down to fifty books, which books would you keep?"

He has made the challenge more difficult by preventing us from consulting our 

shelves or the internet – so I did my best last night but have now had the time to 

reflect more and consult some booklists; What follows is therefore a slightly updated 

version of the entry I posted on his site (number 81 I think)

A library should be for consulting – the glories of novels, short stories, poetry, essays 

should be available there but also art and human knowledge. With only 50 books allowed, 

novels (of any sort) will have to be excluded - which means no “Buddenbrooks” (Thomas 

Mann) or “Candide” (Voltaire) let alone any of the powerful South Americans 

(Jorge Amado's "Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon", Allende’s “Eva Luna”, Marquez’s , 

“Love in the Time of Cholera” or Llosa ‘s “The War of the End of the World”) or Yehoshuova’s 

“The Liberated Bride” from Israel.

However, some books come in multi-volume collections eg Lewis Crassic Gibbon’s 

“Sunset Song”; Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandrian Quartet”; Olivia Manning’s “Balkan 

Trilogy”; and Naguib Mahfouz’s “Children of the Alley” and therefore give good bangs for 

bucks. Perhaps they might be allowed to stay.

And remember what Nassim Taleb calls Umberto Eco's "antilibrary" concept - that read 

books are less valuable than unread ones - a library should be a research tool. 

Collections of essays, poetry and short stories also give much more reading per book 

(unless it’s War and Peace) - so the collected poetry of Brecht, TS Eliot, Norman McCaig 

and WS Graham would be the first four books; as well as the Collected Short Stories of 

Nabokov, William Trevor, Carol Shields, Heinrich Boell and Alice Munro; and the essays 

of Montaigne.

If allowed, I would also have a few collections of painters eg the Russian Itinerants or 

Scottish colourists. Chuck in an Etymology and a couple of overviews of intellectual 

endeavours of recent times such as Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything” 

and Peter Watson’s “A Terrible Beauty” - and I would then have space for 35 individual 

titles.

My basic criteria would be (a) the light thrown on the European dilemmas of the last 

century and (b) the quality of the language and the book as a whole.

The books I would keep are

Robert Michels; Political Parties (1911)

Reinhold Niebuhr; Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932)

Joseph Schumpeter; Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

Arthur Koestler; The Invisible Writing (1955)

Leopold Kohr; The Breakdown of Nations (1977)

Gerald Brennan; South from Granada (1957)

JK Galbraith; The Affluent Society (1958)

Ivan Illich; Deschooling Society (1971)

Robert Greene; 48 laws of power (for the breadth of the stories from the medieval world including China)

Tony Judt; Postwar History of Europe since 1945

Richard Cobb; Paris and Elswhere

Vassily Grossman; Life and Fate

Roger Harrison; The Collected Papers (in the early days of organisational analysis)

Clive James; Cultural Amnesia (on neglected European literary figures particularly of 

the early 20th century – written with verbal fireworks)

JR Saul; Voltaire’s Bastards – the dictatorship of reason in the west

Amos Oz; Tale of Love and Darkness

Claude Magris; Danube

Julian Barnes; Nothing to be Frightened Of

Michael Foley; The Age of Absurdity – why modern life makes it impossible to be 

happy

Toby Jones; Utopian Dreams

Michael Pollan; The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Nassim Taleb; The Black Swan – the impact of the highly improbable

Roger Deakin; Notes from walnut tree farm

Geert Maak; In Europe – travels through the twentieth century

Donald Sassoon; A Hundred Years of Socialism – a history of the western left in 

the 20th century

Theodor Zeldin; The Intimate History of Humanity

Of course Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Machiavelli’s The Prince should be there – 

and at least one book on the Chinese contribution to the world.

This leaves 6 empty spots - about which I shall think carefully!

This time in 2009 I was in the mountain house (also with minimal snow) and 

thinking about the useful literature on public administrative reform!