Six Questions about the new draft

The book has now expanded to 140 pages – each of which seems to have half a dozen hyperlinks. That makes almost 1000 of them. The book still needs a proper conclusion – but can be accessed in its current state here. It's been constructed from the notes I have made over the years  as I tried to make sense of what “experts” were saying in the hundreds (indeed thousands) of books which have deluged us about “the crisis”. Your eyes may glaze over when you come across some of the lists which appear from time to time - so let me anticipate some of your questions….

1.   Why should we read it? After all, you’re the guy who said we needed to ration non-fiction books!

And that’s precisely why I have taken so long to write this damned thing…..at least 10 years. When I wrote that post, I offered the reader some tests to apply to any new non-fiction book. These included explaining what was distinctive about it; annotated reading lists; typologies showing the variety of perspectives the field offers; and visuals and other material to make the text less boring

2.   If you’re so critical of economists, who do you mention so many Economics books?

The majority of well-written books about the global crisis are actually not written by economists! There’s a table in this section (page 46 or thereabouts) which gives examples of the key books about the global crisis in 9 other disciplines apart from economics

3.   OK but why inflict so many titles on us?

Three reasons – First, anyone who wants to be taken seriously in discussions needs to be aware of some of the key names and titles in “the literature” – even if you only flick a few pages to get a sense of their style

People, secondly, differ in their tastes – and I’ve tried to structure the lists by various categories to allow you to find what suits you…For example, p43 gives you access to 8 introductory books which are great reads in themselves….

I would agree, finally, that academics are too good at throwing bibliographies at us. Indeed they overwhelm us with them – whether in footnotes, brackets or end-pages. It’s almost a virility test with them. I get very frustrated with this – since all these lists do is to flaunt their superiority – they don’t actually tell us anything interesting about each book. And that’s why I decided to try not just to list the more interesting of the books – but to add a few notes to give readers a sense of whether it was their sort of book..

4.   Surely neoliberalism has been discredited?

You would think that, as the deregulation which was its hallmark blew up in our faces, this would have led to a rethink but as Colin Crouch first showed in 2011 (and Philip Mirowski in 2013) the doctrine of commercialising anything that moves has actually strengthened. Most people are still scratching their heads to try to understand how this happened and why it seems so difficult to put an alternative agenda together…

5.   Why can’t progressives unite around an agreed agenda for change?

There are a lot of egos at stake! But also so many different perspectives. And it is a notorious fact of history that progressive forces tend to fight one another more than “the enemy”. Understand that, and we will be half way to achieving consensus

6.   Why should I trust anything you say?

If this is the first time you have come across my material, this is precisely the question you need to pose..The only answer I can give is that you will see from the blog I have had for 10 years that I try to keep an open mind on issues – painfully aware of the legitimacy of the different ways of seeing things

spring cleaning - with a difference

Spring cleaning is generally a chore but can, if serendipity is in the air, be a pleasure – particularly if the focus of removal is .......books. Space needs to be created in the cluttered shelves if new finds are to have a home…. 
Getting rid of books which had disappointed is the easy part – so no question about recent buys which had let me down – eg Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom; Euan Davies’ “Post-Truth”; and Craig Oliver’s “Unleashing Demons” although I should probably take another look at Slavoj Zizek’s “The Courage of Hopelessness”, much as his style annoys me. (the last link by the way is to a real skewer of a review by novelist Will Self) which helps direct the book into the reject category…

I also have quite a few titles from the Lonely Planet and Footprint series – particularly France, Italy and Turkey…..but also an enticing couple on India and Andalucia

I thought it would be a simple matter to evict the titles which had been lurking unopened for several years but She Who Must Be Obeyed likes her stock of books about the operation of the EU which go back almost 25 years and includes, for example, Keith Middlemas’ Orchestrating Europe (1995) So reprieve is graciously granted these….

Howard Zinn’s  “A People’s History of the United States” causes a minor twinge as it goes – it is such a good read….Laurence Cosse’s “A Novel Bookstore” and “Eva Luna” are both great novels but don’t fall into the category of books which should be reread    particularly when I still haven’t done justice to the likes of Dostoyevski, Conrad or gone back to reread Aldous Huxley and HG Wells (eg his "The New Machiavelli")

But before I release Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism or John Carey’s The Unexpected Professor – an Oxford Life in Books, I would like a last few minutes with them – providing, that is, they are destined for a good home!! 
A couple of self-help books also could do with a quick skim before they join the haul of a dozen or so books which I will now offer up to friends…

But, as I’ve been carrying out this exercise, I’ve been very aware of how many of the 400 books in my virtual library are also still not properly read – and, more to the point, offer much more powerful reads than most of the titles in bookshops these day…..
So there’s another project for me – it is a matter of a few hours to transfer the url to my blog (uploading any which are no longer available to my website).

The pity, however, is that the world doesn’t know what an amazing resource/library my blog and website is…..Time perhaps for some marketing??

Books which can be immediately downloaded in full – just click on the title (UPDATED)
New Entries

Political Order and Political Decay; Francis Fukuyama (2014). The second volume (which can be downloaded in full!!) of Fukuyama’s magnum opus. Its introduction summarises the first volume – and the opening chapters set out his framework showing the link between economic, social and political development and how ideas about legitimacy have shaped our understanding of the three basic building blocks of “modern” government – “the state”, “rule of law” and “democratic accountability” (see the figure at p43)

This first chapter spells out how very different social conditions and traditions in the various continents have affected the shape and integrity of government systems (The sequencing of bureaucracy and challenge to political power is of particular interest)

Politics and Governance in the UK; Michael Moran (2005) is actually a textbook – aimed at undergraduates - from one of the best UK political scientists whose focus was much wider than most such academics. Somehow such people are clearer writers than those with narrow specialisms. 
Given the breadth of his reading and the originality of his thought, it's ideal reading (even at 500 pages) for a foreign audience 

Original Titles

Against Power Inequalities – reflections on the struggle for inclusive communities; Henry Tam (2010) One of these rare book aimed at activists but written by an academic… Positively inspiring

Capitalism and its Economics – a critical history; Douglas Dowd (2000). The Pluto Press is a rare British leftist publisher which ensures that its titles are clearly written – since it is aiming not at academics but the committed citizen.

The Economics of the 1% - how mainstream economics serves the rich, obscures reality and distorts policy, John Weeks (2014) One of the small bunch of economics titles I strongly recommend

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; Stephen Covey (1989) I have been recommending this book to change-agents since its publication (and often giving a version translated into a foreign language). It is, of course, the sort of self-help book despised by bien-pensants – but, as I say, it’s well worth study….

The Primacy of Politics – social democracy and the making of the 20^th Century;  Sheri Berman (2006)

I’m a despairing social democrat and find it ironic that one of the best treatments of the subject is by an American academic

A Brief History of NeoLiberalism; David Harvey (2005) One of these essential books….a good review is here http://rebels-library.org/files/d3Thompson-1.pdf

The Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists; ed P Arestis (1992) Don’t be deceived by the humble title – this is fascinating stuff…History is, as someone once said, written by the victors. I had heard of few of the almost 100 individuals in this book (although I was taught by 2 – Meek and Nove) but it tells the story of those whose courage deserves to be remembered

How to change the World  - reflections on Marx and Marxism; Eric Hobsbawm (2011) Like most people, I tend to be put off by those who talk about Marx. This is my loss, I readily agree…and Hobsbawm is one of the few people who could persuade me to lift my self-imposed cynicism on the subject….

The Fifth Discipline- the art and practice of the learning organisation; Peter Senge (1990) A seminal book which started a long-lasting fascination with “organizational learning” (personal note - in the 80s I even wrote a master’s thesis on the subject!)
Building the Bridge as you walk on it – a guide for leading change; Robert Quinn (2004) With “Change the World”, one of my all-time favourites. Before attempting the entire book, you might find this summary useful; as well as this excerpt from the first chapter.

Memorable Texts

Rereading a book after a gap of 50 years can be a grave disappointment – that was certainly the case for me recently when I was able to download Stan Andreski’s Social Sciences as Sorcery which I had read in the 1970s. What I had remembered as a series of caustic witticisms turned out to be rather belaboured and cheap digs..  

Thanks to researchgate, I am currently rereading with a great deal of pleasure a book which made a huge impact on me in the early 60s - during my Politics and Economics course at the University of Glasgow. The Twenty Years’ Crisis is the first classic of what was to become the prestigious discipline of International Relations. 

It opens with the fascinating story of how any field of study generally starts with a utopian stage - which focuses on the ideal or how things should be, eg the study of gold for example started with alchemy. Only after major disappointments and no little strife do people move on to adopt a more scientific approach. Thus the high hopes with which the 20^th Century started were dashed by the horror of the First World War – paving the way for the efforts in the 20s and 30s to “end all war”. “The Twenty Years’ Crisis” was written not just to challenge such naivety – but to explain it. It was at the printers on the very day in 1939 that the Second World War was declared…

What was it about Carr’s writing – almost 60 years ago – that gave his words such impact then and now? At the time I know I was also reading Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) which also left a lasting impact. It must have been the bluntness with which the doctrine of Realism was spelled out in the two books – against the chimera of utopianism which had been so well taken apart by Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1944) 

Another important – if less memorable - book in the course was “Ideology and Utopia” (1954) by Karl Mannheim, an early text on the sociology of knowledge…. 

The texts in the Economics part of the programme offered no such exciting reading - with one noticeable exception – Schumpeter’s powerful Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942)

All in all, it’s perhaps not surprising that I emerged from my studies as a reformist convinced of the benefits of Fabianism….Ironic that my LSE tutor on the political sociology MSc programme I briefly enrolled in should turn out to be Ralph Miliband of Parliamentary Socialism fame (1961) - but even more ironic that his two sons should in the 2000s rise to such heights in the party he despised.

And if you think these titles were dated even for the 1960s, that was all that universities could offer in those days – even if JK Galbraith used the term “The Affluent Society” for his famous 1958 book. SM Wolin’s Politics and Vision – continuity and innovation in western political thought was quite exceptional as a 1960 textbook which was given pride of place in our reading list…

What is History? is based on lectures Carr gave in 1960 and contains a sentence which has stayed with me for half a century….   

facts are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what we catch will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean we choose to fish in and what tackle we chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish we want to catch. By and large, we will get the kind of facts we want

I mused recently about what it was that accounted for the originality of good writing – suggesting that straddling of boundaries (whether national or intellectual) does help give an extra dimension to one’s understanding. Carr was a Brit through and through but straddled the worlds of the civil service (Foreign Office); journalism (Deputy Editor of The Times no less) and academia. It’s increasingly rare to find such career combinations these days – which is very much our loss!!

update; https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/eh-carr-what-is-history-truth-subjectivity-facts

The crayon drawing which adorns this text is by Grigor Naidenov - one of my favourite Bulgarian artists of the first half of the 20th century, well known for his aquarelle cafe scenes...

Books on Big Issues - Prefaces and marketing blurbs

I did a rare thing yesterday – I went back to the "Defending Politics" book I had just finished and reread it from beginning to end, this time more carefully marking the key sections with a pencil.

I had started my last post by saying that it was a “model of the sort of writing we need in these times” - and then went on to create a table which explored different aspects of the 8 basic arguments the book presented. 
I would now like to try to identify what it was that so impressed me – and to use that hopefully to make a wider point about the craft of publishing our thoughts

What I liked about “Defending Politics”…

- The book was short (180 pages) – almost an extended essay. You felt the guy had a thesis – and knew how to hone it down to its essentials

- The text was broken up – every third or fourth page or so had a heading or an indented section which signalled a movement in the argument. My eyes glaze over when I see a chapter of 30 pages of densely-written text - with no graphics, tables or pictures to relieve the pressue….

- each chapter gave an early hint of the basic argument it would present. This was clearly someone who had reread his text with a reader’s eye; asked himself what it was saying; and then ensured that the words actually expressed his intended meaning!

- there were lots of book references – but not of the normal sort in footnotes; or end bibliographies (which often leave me with the feeling of one up-manship!). These were, rather, short lists in the body of the text – generally exemplifying different sides of an argument.  

I readily admit to being a policy geek - and have therefore too readily exposed myself to turgid academic prose. But my patience started to wear thin some years ago with books on important topics which were simply unreadable. Life is simply too short to waste time on writers who feel they have to use clumsy sentence structure and/or pad their material with verbosity. 

A year or so ago I revealed some litmus tests I used whether to buy/read a book on any of the "Big Issues of the Day" – as well as my ten tricks for fast reading and comprehension – which are worth repeating –

How to get the most out of a non-fiction book

General

- Read a lot (from an early age!)

- Read widely (outside your discipline)

- Read quickly (skim)

- If the author doesn’t write in clear and simple language, move on to another book asap. Life’s too short……Bad writing is a good indicator of a confused mind

For each book

- before doing anything else - read the reviews (surf)

- identify the questions these suggest – you should never read a book without knowing what you want to get out of it!

- Mark (with a pencil) passages you both like and don’t like – with underlines, question-marks, ticks, comments and expletives

- Write brief notes to remind you of the main themes and arguments (this will help you remember better; and also helps build up an archive)

- see whether the author explicitly recognises and properly discusses other schools of thought than the one (s)he is pushing

- Check the bibliography at the end – to see if there are any obvious names missing (I grant you that this requires some familiarity with the subject)

This, of course, puts the onus on readers - but the real problem rests with authors and publishers...It is they who swamp our minds with thousands of titles and excessive verbosity. Greater self-discipline is needed..I suggest that, when they come to draft their Prefaces and marketing blurbs, they consider the following -  

- tell us what’s distinctive about your book; ie why you feel you need to add to what is already a huge literature on the subject

- “position” your book – at best this will require you to offer a typology of the different schools of thought on the issue
- convince us that you have not only read the “relevant literature” but that you have done so with a reasonably open mind; At best, offer an annotated list of key reading - with your preferences. This will give us a sense of your stance and fairness

- give a “potted version” of each chapter. Most think-tank reports have executive summaries. I don’t know why more authors don’t adopt the same approach. Amazon, some publishers and Google offer free access to excerpts – but the selections are fairly random.

- use more tables….and graphics