What about Intellectual Fare? The state of English-speaking journals and mags

It’s some 5 years since I last did an annotated list of interesting journals, As the number of newspaper titles shrinks, the number of weekly, monthly and even quarterly journals seems to increase - although substack is now offering a highly competitive (paying) model which may challenge their future.

My question then was - which (English language) journals would pass a test which included such criteria as –

- Depth of treatment

- Breadth of coverage (not just political)

- Cosmopolitan in taste (not just anglo-saxon)

- clarity of writing

- sceptical in tone

That’s a tough test but this was the list -

3 Quarks Daily; I last said “my daily fix - an amazing site which offers carefully chosen articles which suit my demanding taste perfectly” but I don’t actually receive it any more. But Nous y verrons

Aeon; an impressive cultural journal (online since 2012) whose articles are about big issues and have real “zing”

Arts and Letters Daily; this daily internet service highlights an article and book but I’ve only recently resubscribed.

Boston Review; a mag I rate highly for originality

Brave New Europe; greatly improved site which contains essential reading for leftists such as this conversation between Varoufakis and Jeffrey Sachs

Consortium News; a leftist radical US site

Current affairs; a bi-monthly and slightly anarchistic American mag

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Dublin Review of Books; great crack

Eurozine; a network of some 90 European cultural mags which gives a great sense of the diversity of European writing

Jacobin; a leftist mag which has improved with age.

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian.

Literary Hub; a literary site with daily selections but one, for some reason, I haven’t looked at recently

London Review of Books; my favourite for the past 40 years to which I generally subscribe

Los Angeles Review of Books; tries too hard to run with the politically correct

Marginalia; gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. a personal endeavour of a Bulgarian woman now living in the States which, recently, I’ve found it a bit too predictable 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; a centrist mag published only 3 times a year

New Humanist; an important monthly strand of UK thought

New Left Review; THE UK leftist journal publishing every 2 months since 1960. Always worth a look 

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth centrist UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate

Quillette; a "free-thinking" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; dependable UK Green mag

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Social Europe; a european social democratic E-journal whose short articles are a bit too predictable for my taste

Soundings; if you want to keep up with UK leftist thought, this is the journal for you – issued only 3 times a year

Spiked; a libertarian net-based journal with challenging articles always guaranteed to be anti-PC

Sydney Review of Books; still can’t make up my mind

The Alternative UK; an excellent new platform aimed at establishing a "friendly revolution" to transform politics - it actually gives  space to interesting new thinkers

The Atlantic; one of the US oldest mags (founded in 1857)

The Baffler; great writing. Apparently founded in 1988, it surfaced for me only recently

The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists 

The Cultural Tutor; an amazing site which offers each week a taste of music, literature and architecture – produced by Sheehan Quirke

The Nation; America's oldest (1865) weekly, for the "progressive" community

The New Republic Progressive US monthly which has been publishing for more than a century

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing

The New York Review of Books; I used to love this journal but have not renewed my sub – partly in protest about what’s happening in US politics

The Point;  a quiet rightist mag

Tribune; the original left paper for which Orwell wrote and to which I am currently subscribed. Has some great writers such as Owen Hatherley and Grace Blakely

Verfassungs blog; an excellent Anglo-German site which focuses on constitutional issues

Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

Words without Borders; a journal of translation

Wrong Side of History; Ed West writes that “every writer has an axe, or multiple axes to grind, and I’m obviously politically conservative – although I would more describe myself as a depressive realist – but I’m not anti-liberal. Liberalism works in certain circumstances, but it needs saving from itself. If there’s a campaigning theme to Wrong Side of History, it’s my belief that there is a political drift towards a form of soft totalitarianism, which includes a fixation with inserting activism into every aspect of our lives, whether it’s sport, education or visiting a cultural attraction. I want less politics in our daily lives”

Substack favourites

Aurelien; very thoughtful posts

Chris Hedges Report; the guy who rivals Chomsky

Critical perspectives; rigorous international research revealing how global systems actually shape our world- from Rex McKenzie

The long memo; posts on politics, collapse, and the architecture of exit by William Finnegan

Thoughts from the shire; highly literary thoughts from a wee Hobbit trying to escape clown world

https://www.kitklarenberg.com/; a male investigative journalist explores global risks

https://athenamac83.substack.com/; Anthropologist and a rare female author, specializing in bioethics and anthropogenic existential risk.

Academic journals

I would not normally deign academic journals with a second glance since theirs is an incestuous breed – with arcane language and specialized focus which breaches at least two of the above five tests. But Political Quarterly stands apart with the superbly written (social democratic) analyses which have been briefing us for almost a century and to which I have recommenced an (internet) sub. Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

A concept with unrealized potential, I feel, is that of the “global roundup” ” with selections of representative writing from around the globe. Courrier international is a good, physical, Francophone example – with Eurozine takes the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 90 cultural journals

The archive on journalism

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/03/investigative-journalism.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2011/07/british-bread-oz-circus-and-bulgarian.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-big-brother.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/04/suborning-democracy.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2012/06/getting-under-skin.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/confessionals.html Pat Chalmers
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-british-journalism-dead.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/05/journals-worth-reading.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/08/in-praise-of-journalists.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2017/09/making-sense-of-global-crisis.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/why-we-should-not-be-so-cynical-about.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/03/brexit-and-reassertion-of-nation-state.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/06/the-writers-craft.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/kenneth-roy-voice-to-renew-faith-in.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-stuff-of-journalism.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-praise-of-literary-magazines.html
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-does-brexit-tell-us-about-ourselves.html

The Long Search for Democracy – final chapters

The final chapters of my book are four in number – ”the voice of praxis in administrative reform”; ”the process of change”; ”taking back control” and the Inconclusion. You can read the 74 pages here. A couple of these consist of posts from some years back and need a tighter rewrite to make it clearer what I’m trying to say. The ”process of change” is essentially an annotated list of books about change – preceded by an attempt at classifying the different genres into which they fall.

The (rare) Voice of Praxis in administrative reform (ch 6)

Introductory Remarks

Go to the ”management” section of any bookshop and you will be overwhelmed by the number of titles – with pride of place generally given to the profiles of the latest management ”heroes” whose habits we are enjoined to follow.....Despite the best intentions of academics like Mark Moore to encourage leadership in the public sector, almost no leader there has followed suit. Clearly they are too busy to write books..... As someone who has straddled the worlds of politics, academia and consultancy, I am disappointed by the sparseness of the consultants’ contribution to the literature. Clearly they keep their powder dry for those who pay them! But the public have a right to know with what sort of insights these highly-paid wizards earn their money - and

This part therefore attempts the difficult task of entering the minds of the tiny number of consultants who have actually written seriously about their metier. I focus on Chris Foster, Jake Chapman, Ed Straw and Michael Barber. A few of the academic have taken time out to train senior officials – eg Matt Andrews at Harvard and I therefore include their musings in this chapter.

The Process of CHANGE (ch 7)

“Life is flux,” said the philosopher Heraclitus. The Greek philosopher pointed out in 500 BC that everything is constantly shifting, and becoming something other to what it was before. Like a river, life flows ever onwards, and while we may step from the riverbank into the river, the waters flowing over our feet will never be the same waters that flowed even one moment before. Heraclitus concluded that since the very nature of life is change, to resist this natural flow was to resist the very essence of our existence. “There is nothing permanent except change,” he said.

As the new millennium got underway I produced an “Annotated bibliography for Change Agents” which represented the short notes I had made about the range of books my new assignment in countries recently liberated from communism required me to become familiar with – viz the challenge of transitioning to new systems of accountability and public management, European systems of local government, different civil service systems, the nature of organisations and the management of change. This updated version focuses less on the governmental aspects of change and more on the intrinsic issues of change – as it affects individuals, organisations and societies. It argues that the subject has been hugely compartmentalised in the past century and more – with scientists focusing on technology; psychologists on the individual; economists on the organisation; and sociologists and others on society as a whole. Very few have tried to integrate these perspectives – although a few attempts have been made very recently.

At one level, we are told that the pace of change has never been as great. But then we read this passage (by Keynes) written a hundred years ago

… any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages; or he could decide to couple the security of his fortunes with the good faith of the townspeople of any substantial municipality in any continent that fancy or information might recommend.

He could secure forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could despatch his servant to the neighbouring office of a bank for such supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much surprised at the least interference.

But, most important of all, he regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

But the technology we had expected in the 1960s to arrive in our lifetime has not materialised – such as teletransporting and flying cars. Change had perhaps stalled? My personal introduction to this subject came in the 1960s – with the Penguin Specials of “What’s Wrong with Britain?” but crystallised in the stunning 1970 Reith Lectures by Donald Schon on “Beyond the Stable State” of which I have vivid memories listening to on my parents’ radio.

From that point on, I was hooked into the importance not only of change but of organisations – with the focus being more practical than academic. In 1968 I had become a councillor representing working class people in a shipbuilding town and about to assume managerial responsibilities for a new Social Work agency when the UK was at the start of what became the ravages of de-industrialisation. Donald Schon caught the mood of the times very well when he wrote in 1971

We’re experiencing a general rather than an isolated or peripheral phenomenon. The threat to the stability of established institutions carries with it a threat to the stability of established theory and ideology, because institutions like the Labour movement, the Church, social welfare agencies, all carry with them bodies of theory, ways of looking at the world, and when the institutions are threatened, the bodies of theory are threatened as well. Most important, when the anchors of the institution begin to be loosened, the supports that it provides for personal identity, for the self, begin to be loosened too. We’ve lost faith, I think, in the idea of being able to achieve stable solutions to these problems.

Why is the treatment of change so compartmentalised?

We use the concept of “change” all the time but there seems to be surprisingly little written about it as an all-embracing concept. The literature on change is, of course, immense but is divided very much into several completely separate fields which, curiously, seem totally uninterested in each other - dealing with the individual, the technical, the organisational and the societal respectively

• the first field draws on psychology and tends to be interested in things like stress;

• the second focuses on the technological aspects – and how they are commercially exploited

• the third focuses on the management of change aș organisations react to the technological changes (with companies, the public sector and the NGO field receiving different treatment);

• the last field is interested in collective challenges to power which often go under the label of “social change” but has also attracted the interest of scientists exploring the world of complexity

Taking Back Control? (ch 8)

Introductory Remarks

I haven’t had a chance so far to explain the quote on the front page of the book

We've spent half a century arguing over management methods. If there are solutions to our confusions over government, they lie in democratic not management processes.

JR Saul

John Ralston Saul is a true original – one of the very few who has chosen to carve out his own life of choice, In 1992 he published a blast of a book called “Voltaire’s Bastards – the Dictatorship of Reason in the West” - which I found at the time simply one of the most brilliant books of the decade. Years later, when I started my blog, his words were still in my mind and used for the first-ever masthead quote. I chose the quote, I suppose, because of a certain ambivalence about the managerial role I’ve played in the final 20 years of my working life.

Feeling the Tension?

For the first 22 years of my adult life, I had been a (fairly scholastic) politician - for the next 22 years an apolitical adviser. It’s perhaps only in the past decade that I’ve been able to go back to being truly “my own man”.

In 1973 or so – based on my experience of working with community groups and trying to reform a small municipal bureaucracy – I had written a pamphlet called “From Corporate Management to Community action” (sadly no longer available) which reflected my disillusionment with the technocratic fashions of the time.

In 1977, in what is, I grant you, a rather long and technocratic article entitled Community Development – its political and administrative challenge, I drew on my reading of the previous decade’s literature (UK and US) about urban politics and community power to challenge the validity of the “pluralist” assumptions underpinning our democratic practices.

The article looked at how community grievances found voice and power and were subsequently dealt with by political and administrative processes. I wasn’t a Marxist but the sort of questions I was raising seem now to indicate a greater debt to that sort of analysis than I was perhaps aware of at the time, I wasn’t just saying that life chances were unevenly distributed – I was also arguing that, from an early age, those in poor circumstances develop lower expectations and inclination to challenge systems of authority. And the readiness of those systems to respond was also skewed because of things like the “old boy network”.

The piece explored the functions which political parties were supposed to perform under pluralist theory – and found them seriously wanting. And then I became a consultant!

Do we expect too much from our institutions?

On Thinking Institutionally was a little book published a decade ago by Hugh Heclo, now a retired American political scientist with form for an interest both in political institutions and in European aspects of political culture. I remember his name vividly from the 1970s from his superb anthropological study of the British budgetary process The Private Government of Public Money which he wrote jointly with that great doyen of political analysis (and of the budgetary process) Aaron Wildavsky.

Heclo’s later book looked at our loss of respect for institutions. Way back in the 60s, Penguin books had published a series of popular paperbacks with the series title “What’s Wrong with…….?” – in which virtually all British institutions were subjected to a ruthless critique. When I was in Germany for a couple of months in 2013, I noticed a similar rash of titles. And France has been flooded in recent years by the literature on its doom…..

I like a good critique like anyone else – but we’ve perhaps reached the point when critical analyses of our institutions has destroyed our trust in institutions. A few years ago the Britain “expenses scandal” hit the political class – was it a coincidence that this happened just when the global economic crisis required some determined political action?

For whatever reason, trust in our institutions – public and private – has sunk to an all-time low. This is the issue with which Heclo’s book starts – indeed he gives us a 5 page spread which itemises the scandals affecting the public, private and even NGO sectors in the last 40-50 years – arguing that mass communications and our interconnectedness exacerbate the public impact of such events.

“The past half-century has been most unkind to those discrete cohering entities, both formal and informal, that "represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations." Today, people almost universally denigrate institutions, including those of which they are members.

Attacks on institutions come from our hyper-democratic politics but stem from the Enlightenment with its unshakeable confidence in human reason; its subsequent obsessive focus on the self; and, latterly, its belief that an institution has no value beyond that which an individual can squeeze from it for personal gain

The last 60 years has seen a process which designates institutions as, at best, annoying encumbrances and, at worst, oppressive tools of the past. Students are taught to believe what they like and express themselves as they see fit. Even people understood to be conservatives—at least in the way we conceptualize political ideology today—assail institutions. Free market economics places a premium on self-interest and assumes institutions stifle innovation and entrepreneurship

But institutions provide reference points in an uncertain world. They tie us to the past and present; furnish personal assistance; and institutionalize trust. They give our lives purpose and, therefore, the kind of self-satisfaction that only the wholesale rejection of them is supposed to provide.

How, then, do we protect and promote them?

Inconclusion

In 1975 Samuel Huntington and others published (for the Tripartite Commission) 

a report entitled “The Crisis of Democracy” which was a diatribe against the 

hoi poloi and our aspirations. It reflected the contemporary mood of fatalism

 and helped prepare the neoliberal onslaught which has been inflicted on us 

for the past four decades and to which there has been no real answer. 

What passes for the left seems to have accepted that individualism is here 

to stay – with Richard Wolff’s  “Democracy at Work – a cure for Capitalism”, 

Thomas Pikety’s “Time for Socialism” and Jeremy Gilbert’s “Common Ground – 

democracy and collectivity in an age of individualism ” (2014) and 

“21st century Socialism” (2020) being honourable but rare exceptions . 
What seems very clear is that progressives need to give much more thought 

to human nature if we have any chance of convincing the electorate of our 

programmes. Rutger Bregman’s Humankind – a hopeful history would be a 

good start.  
Democracy has very much been in retreat since I wrote that first book with 

a similar title in 1977 with the Thatcherite attack not only on trade unions 

but all possible challenges to corporate power. And the populism we’ve seen in 

the last couple of decades has given new energy to that attack. 
The saving grace has been the new discourse about direct democracy and citizen juries – at least in western Europe. 
But central Europe and the Balkans remain disfigured – with oligarchic elites 

consolidating their power.