Links I liked

I confess that I surf too much and collect too many hyperlinks and excerpted text which I am too lazy to read - let alone post about. The result is that the file which I label “rawtext” is currently 180 pages long….Don’t take my word for it – thanks to pcloud you can actually view it for yourself here (and it does contain some great material – including paywalled text from my LRB and NYRB accounts!)

One blogger deals with this by posting a weekly “Links I liked” - a great way of honouring good reads without having to spend a few hours on a post…

It’s in that spirit that this post is written – but also in the vague hope that it might flag up material for me to return to in future posts…….

My mail is generally the first thing I turn to when I open the PC - Dave Pollard’s blog has a feed to which I subscribe and his latest post is a typically thoughtful one about “good questions”

For a variety of reasons (not least technology) we do tend, these days, to be very self-centred – which makes “good listening” something we have to work at according to a podcast inspired by a book called “You’re not Listening”. That, in turn, took my thoughts back to the idea of good conversations, encouraged by the likes of Theodor Zeldin and the Conversation Café people.

Another feed I get is from Oxfam’s resident blogger, Duncan Green, which duly alerted me to Global Megatrends – mapping the forces that affect us all (Oxfam 2020) which looks a must-read!

Another feed from “Reviews in History” told me of Thatcher’s Progress – from social democracy to market liberalism through a market town (2019) an interesting-looking book by Guy Ortolano which explores how the national mood changed in the 1970s. Googling the title alerted me to an intriguing blog which invites authors to apply the “page 99 test” viz looking at a single incident on that page and briefly explaining how it relates to the book’s wider analysis.

Having exhausted the contents of the mail, The Guardian newspaper is my next destination. Their ‘Long Read” is generally a useful source and so it was with today’s which dealt with the crucial issue of food and its adulteration - a terrific article which alerted me to a fascinating blog  

Michel Albert (who died, sadly last year) was a Frenchman I have admired since I first came across his “Capitalism v Capitalism “ in the heady days of 1990 and random googling brought me today to Occupy theory, the first of a 3 volume series Michael Albert wrote to mark the Occupy movement, the others being Occupy Vision and Occupy Strategy. But it turns out, after some confusion on my part, that it’s a different Albert, this one being still alive; one of the architects of the participatory economics movement; and author of what looks to be a great memoir - https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/remembering-tomorrow-introduction-by-michael-albert/

I know that the UK left the EU a couple of weeks ago - but the question of what attitude “progressives” should take to the EU still exercises me. Lexit was the position adopted by British leftist Leavers to which I didn’t pay much attention. Busting the Lexit Myth was a pamphlet issued in 2018 by Open Europe which attracted a fairly withering response from  https://www.labourleave.org.uk/the_lexit_mythbuster_that_never_was

And I’m sorry that I also missed England’s Discontents – political cultures and national identities; Mike Wayne (Pluto 2018)

Dissent magazine is a US leftist journal whose articles can be accessed in full. Try, however, to copy the url of an article you like and you will be blocked. Excellent approach which I wish more journals would use.......

Naomi Klein has a powerful article on the Green New Deal which explores the intellectual and moral as well as political challenge it poses

But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way out. And how could it be otherwise? Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not offer a road map for a way to live that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal relationship with nature.

This is where the right-wing climate change deniers have overstated their conspiracy theories about what a cosmic gift global warming is to the left.

It is true that many climate responses reinforce progressive support for government intervention in the market, for greater equality, and for a more robust public sphere. But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis—that humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting regeneratively rather than extractively—is a profound challenge to large parts of the left as well as the right.

-       It’s a challenge to some trade unions, those trying to freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their members deserve.

-       And it’s a challenge to the overwhelming majority of center-left Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of traditional measures of GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes from low-carbon sectors or rampant resource extraction.

Some other hyperlinks

Podcasts is a medium I have tended to ignore. And the BBC archives are the best for English speakers see, for example

-       Arts and Ideas https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02nrvk3

-       free thinking BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn

-       https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0144txn/episodes/player

https://www.mixcloud.com/notebookoncitiesandculture/sonic-curator-david-toop-the-sound-of-silent-art/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview5

Styles of Thinking.....and writing

I’ve been quiet these past few weeks largely because of the arrival here in the mountains of a (rare) Amazon package containing a fascinating and diverse collection of titles covering art criticism, capitalism, the European Union, populism, Denmark, the Soviet Union, France, political memoirs and…. reflections on death!! I’ve been going through them – flicking and casting the memoirs aside; and keeping a very interesting The Passage to Europe for later close study 

The pick of the bunch was ” How the French Think – an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people” (the link accesses a great summary of the various issues by the author) and a book which has encouraged me to explore further the issue of “national mentalities” or ”cultural thought patterns” which had been the main focus of some recent posts.

The book resists the temptation of just tracking “cultural traits” (eg that the French are “disputatious”) and chooses instead to focus on the arguments of some of the key French figures (starting with Descartes) and on the wider context of their work. Indeed, if I have a criticism, it is that the author probably resists that temptation too well – I would actually like to have seen more treatment of these supposed cultural traits……

The notion that rationality is the defining quality of humankind was first celebrated by the 17th-century thinker René Descartes, the father of modern French philosophy. His skeptical method of reasoning led him to conclude that the only certainty was the existence of his own mind: hence his ‘cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think, therefore I am’).

This French rationalism was also expressed in a fondness for abstract notions and a preference for deductive reasoning, which starts with a general claim or thesis and eventually works its way towards a specific conclusion – thus the consistent French penchant for grand theories. As the essayist Emile Montégut put it in 1858: ‘There is no people among whom abstract ideas have played such a great role, and whose history is rife with such formidable philosophical tendencies.’ The French way of thinking is a matter of substance, but also style. …….

 

Typically French…, is a questioning and adversarial tendency, also arising from Descartes’ skeptical method. The historian Jules Michelet summed up this French trait in the following way: ‘We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects.’ A British Army manual issued before the Normandy landings in 1944 sounded this warning about the cultural habits of the natives: ‘By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point.’ 

 

Yet even this disputatiousness comes in a very tidy form: the habit of dividing issues into two. It is not fortuitous that the division of political space between Left and Right is a French invention, nor that the distinction between presence and absence lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion. 

Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission. This is a feature of all exceptionalist nations, but it is rendered here in a particular trope: that France has a duty to think not just for herself, but for the whole world. In the lofty words of the author Jean d’Ormesson, writing in the magazine Le Point in 2011: ‘There is at the heart of Frenchness something which transcends it. France is not only a matter of contradiction and diversity. She also constantly looks over her shoulder, towards others, and towards the world which surrounds her. More than any nation, France is haunted by a yearning towards universality.’ 

The book is so good that I began to realize how few books there are which tell a compelling and reasonably comprehensive story about a country’s intellectual journey. Theodor Zeldin has written brilliantly about French Passions; Perry Anderson has been a fairly solitary English-speaking writer paying serious attention to contemporary debates on the European continent – whether France, Germany, Italy or even Turkey.

Peter Gay wrote amazing books about the Austro-Hungary legacy; Peter Watson’s “German Genius” has the scope but lacks the narrative …it’s just a bit too much of an Encylopaedia. But I am still racking my brains to identify a book which does justice to the UK’s intellectual and political traditions in the gripping style of Hazareesingh (the author of the book on the French). There is a guy called Stefan Collini who has covered some of this ground – but I’ve never read his stuff……        

The other question which Hazareesingh’s book raises for me is why so few other “knowledgeable people” seem able to write clearly….indeed seem to take positive pleasure in hiding their thoughts in impenetrable language…

In recent years I have been trying to gather my disparate thoughts on public sector reform which are currently mainly in the form of papers, blogposts and hyperlinks. Most writers on this subject are academics or consultants (with the latter being in a tiny minority) and I like to think that I have something distinctive to say by virtue of having straddled – at various times – the diverse roles of academic, political leader and consultant (and in 10 different countries). I recently developed a table which divides the huge academic literature on the subject into five schools  

I’m still a firm believer in the adage that if you want to know something about a subject, you write a book about it. It sounds paradoxical but the act of writing forces you to confront your ignorance and helps you to develop the questions to allow you to identify the most appropriate books for you to read.

I may have 200 pages in the present draft but I know they are essentially random notes – there is no “dominant narrative” of the sort you can feel in Hazareesingh’s book. I don’t particularly want to begin at the beginning again but the text needs the discipline of a clear structure and set of questions…..I decided to let my thoughts run free and look at some academic books on the subject

The Sage Handbook of Public Administration was produced in 2003 by Guy Peters and Jon Pierre and is actually quite well written for an edited book – as is The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions (2006) but the language of Ideas and Politics in Social Science Research; D Beland and Robert Henry Cox (2011) is quite incoherent despite containing articles by authors such as Mark Blyth, Colin Hay and Vivian Schmidt for whom I have a great deal of respect. 

I got so angry with the language being used that I went back to some points I had written a decade ago for a group of students in Bishkek - and tried to update and extend the argument in the light of what people like Stephen Pinker have been saying recently….

The sociologist C Wright Mills once famously took a turgid 400 page work of Talcott Parsons and reduced it to some 10 pages! And I notice that novelists (such as Benjamin Kunkel, John Lanchester and James Meek) have started to turn their hand to summarising political and economic texts and trends…..

We really do need a lot more writers helping us make sense of social science writing….. 

A Resource

A presentation of “How the French Think”  by the author - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLpHCT8GfYk

“the pessimistic turn in French thought” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izsO2AQ7qk8

Two reviews of the book -

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/french-thought/

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-how-the-french-think-an-affectionate-portrait-of-an-intellectual-people-1-3808527

https://focusderguini.wordpress.com/livres/la-pensee-tiede-interview-de-lauteur-perry-anderson/

the British scene

http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/555

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24209

https://acbookweek.com/the-20-academic-books-that-shaped-modern-britain/