Journals worth Reading?

A few weeks back I made a nasty crack about the superficiality of newspaper coverage. Some personal exchanges I’ve had since have raised the question of 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

- skeptical in tone

My own regular favourite reading includes The Guardian Long Reads and book reviews, London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books – and the occasional glance at the New Yorker; New Statesman; and Spiked.

This choice betrays a certain “patrician” position – not too “tribal”…….although my initial google search limited itself to such epithets as “left”, “progressive”, “green”;; “radical” and “humanist”. 
It threw up a couple of lists – one with “progressive” titles, the other with “secular” . 
From these, I have extracted the other titles which might lay some claims to satisfying the stringent criteria set above…..

Aeon; an interesting new cultural journal
Book Forum; an amazing daily service which gives you about a dozen links from mainly academic journals –  a good idea but just far too US centred for my taste…..

Brain Pickings; a superb personal endeavour which gives extended excerpts from classic texts about creativity etc. One of the best

Dissent; a US leftist stalwart 

Jacobin; a new leftist E-mag with a poor literary style

Lettre International; a fascinating quarterly published in German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian and Romanian (where it has just celebrated its 100^th edition), it makes available translated articles with superb etchings..

Literary Hub; a literary site with original selections and frequent posts – ONE OF MY HOT FAVOURITES
Los Angeles Review of Books;great new journal 

Monthly Review; an old US stalwart with good solid analysis

Mother Jones; more journalistic US progressive

N+1; one of the new and smoother leftist mags

New Humanist; an important strand of UK thoughtNew Left Review; THE UK leftist journal - running on a quarterly basis since 1960 

New Republic; solid US monthly

Prospect (UK); rather too smooth UK monthly

The American Prospect (US); ditto US

Public Books – an impressive recent website (2012) to encourage open intellectual debate
Quillette; a "free-thinkng" contrarian and libertarian journal 

Resurgence and Ecologist; ditto UK Greens

Sceptic; celebration of important strand of UK scepticism

Slate; more right wing

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

The Atlantic; one of my favourite US mags
The Conversation; a rare venture which uses academics as journalists 

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

The New Yorker; very impressive US writing
Washington Independent Review; a new website borne of the frustration about the disappearance of so many book review columns

World Socialist Website; good on critical global journalism

After due consideration, I would now add Book Forum, Brain Pickings, Literary Hub and Public Books to the small list of my current regular reads – although I wish there were an English version of Lettre International or even Courrier International

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.

Parliamentary Affairs; West European Politics and Governance run it close with more global coverage.

Self-styled “Radical“ journals 
seem, curiously, to be gaining strength at precisely the moment the left is collapsing everywhere  and got a not unfair treatment here ….

Beyond the small grove of explicitly revolutionary titles lies a vast forest of critical publications. From “Action Research” to “Anarchist Studies”, from “Race and Class” to “Review of Radical Political Economics”, an impressive array of dissident ventures appears to be thriving. As Western capitalism jabs repeatedly at the auto-destruct button, it may seem only logical that rebel voices are getting louder. But logic has nothing to do it with it. Out in the real world, the Left is moribund. Socialism has become a heritage item. Public institutions, including UK universities, are ever more marketised. Alternatives seem in short supply.

So, far from being obvious, the success of radical journals is a bit of a puzzle. And they have proved they have staying power. The past few years have seen a clutch of titles entering late middle age, including those in the Marxist tradition, such as “New Left Review” (founded 1960), “Critique” (1973) and “Capital and Class” (1977), as well as more broadly critical ventures, such as “Transition” (1961) and “Critical Inquiry” (1974). Numerous other titles have emerged in the intervening years. And they are still coming.
 Recent titles include “Power and Education”, “Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies” and “Human Geography: A New Radical Journal”. Of course, some disciplines provide more fertile soil for such ventures than others. In cultural studies, politics, geography and sociology, radicalism has entered the mainstream. But even the more stony ground of economics nurtures a wide assortment of dissident titles.

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 – the others being “virtual” or E-journals eg Arts and Letters Daily a good literary, anglo-saxon exemplar; The Intercept a political one; with Eurozine taking the main award for its selection of the most interesting articles from Europe’s 80 plus cultural journals

I learn one main thing from this review - how tribal most journals are. Most seem to cater for a niche political market. Only N+1 (and the New Yorker) makes an effort to cover the world of ideas from a broader standpoint...The lead articles which Eurozine gives us from different parts of Europe makes it an interesting read; and Political Quarterly is a model for clear writing - even if it is a bit too British in its scope.  

But I give away both my age and agnostic tendencies when I say that my favourite journal remains "Encounter" which was shockingly revealed in the late 80s to have been partially funded by the CIA and which therefore shut up shop in 1990....

The entire set of 1953-1990 issues are archived here – and the range and quality of the authors given space can be admired. European notebooks – new societies and old politics 1954-1985; is a book devoted to one of its most regular writers, the Swiss Francois Bondy (2005) 

A generation of outstanding European thinkers emerged out of the rubble of World War II. It was a group unparalleled in their probing of an age that had produced totalitarianism as a political norm, and the Holocaust as its supreme nightmarish achievement. Figures ranging from George Lichtheim, Ignazio Silone, Raymond Aron, Andrei Amalrik, among many others, found a home in Encounter. None stood taller or saw further than Francois Bondy of Zurich.

European Notebooks contains most of the articles that Bondy (1915-2003) wrote for Encounter under the stewardship of Stephen Spender, Irving Kristol, and then for the thirty years that Melvin Lasky served as editor. Bondy was that rare unattached intellectual, "free of every totalitarian temptation" and, as Lasky notes, unfailing in his devotion to the liberties and civilities of a humane social order. European Notebooks offers a window into a civilization that came to maturity during the period in which these essays were written.

Bondy's essays themselves represent a broad sweep of major figures and events in the second half of the twentieth century. His spatial outreach went from Budapest to Tokyo and Paris. His political essays extended from George Kennan to Benito Mussolini. And his prime metier, the cultural figures of Europe, covered Sartre, Kafka, Heidegger and Milosz. The analysis was uniformly fair minded but unstinting in its insights. Taken together, the variegated themes he raised in his work as a Zurich journalist, a Paris editor, and a European homme de lettres sketch guidelines for an entrancing portrait of the intellectual as cosmopolitan.

Update; Current Affairs is a fairly new American radical journal which looks to be very well-written eg this take-down of The Economist mag

Some Landmarks for the blog

Blog traffic has been increasing here – hitting 10,000 last month for the first time (a 3-fold increase since last year) and now totaling 200,000 for the entire period since 2010. 

Native English speakers account for only one third of that (almost 30% comes from the US alone) – with Russian and Ukraine readers coming in (in the past year) at a strong 15% share. 

It’s not idle speculation to feel that part of this latter interest may be a reflection of official Russian oversights of western blogs and accounts – although I don’t get any comments on posts from that source - perhaps because it’s not been my policy to comment on Russian politics and Putin’s intentions?

But why the strong interest from Ukrainian readers? After all, recent posts have, if anything been even more “reflective” than usual, trying to put recent events in a fifty-year timescale…..  And it's not easy for those used to cyrillic to cope with the roman alphabet....

Readers in France, Germany, Bulgaria and Romania account for some 20% of the traffic – the latter two for obvious reasons. I’ve blogged quite a bit on Germany (indeed put a little E-book up on the list at the top-right corner of the blog) and am pleased to find readers from that source.

I often moan about the insularity of the Brits and was therefore delighted recently to get this rare perspective from someone testifying to a German parliamentary committee. And, amongst the current coverage of British local and General elections, at least The Guardian was prepared to give some space to the debate about German values (or Leitkultur) which has broken out there (for more see this piece from Deutsche Welle).

Which leaves the two questions of what has happened to the British Labour Party – and the French Left? As it is news from Paris which will dominate the next news cycle, I should refer you all to my favourite French blog - French Politics – an American observer who recently put me on to another excellent blog on France. They will certainly give you insights I can’t. 
And Tom Gallagher has a good post here....

It’s a dreadful reflection on how British insularity has grown that the last English-language book which gave a really detailed insight into French society (in all its regional variety) was John Ardagh’s France in the New Century (1999). Theodor Zeldin’s History of French Passions and “The French” (published in the early 90s) gave an additional quasi-philosophical dimension. But these books first came out some 20 years ago.

Yes I know about cyclist Graham Robb’s “Discovery of France” (2007) – and, of course, some journalists and historians have produced great books eg journalist Jonathan Fenby’s France on the Brink (first edition 2000); La Vie en Bleu – France and the French since 1900 by academic Rod Kedward (2006); and the more recent How the French Think – an affectionate portrait of an intellectual people by Sudhir Hazareesingh (2015) - but only Ardagh and Zeldin tried to cover all the key aspects….

The French, of course, are the ideologues par excellence not least the French left – with Jean Jaures perhaps being its most inspirational figure. But I remember being trapped in a church in Lille when Francois Mitterand came visiting in the 1980s - and being decidedly unimpressed with the atmosphere of obsequity! Despite the decentralization policy of that period, the country has remained centralized – and its periphery ignored….until now..

The Brits are the pragmatic shopkeepers – and its left had, post-war, real moral strength from the likes of RH Tawney, Keir Hardie and Aneurin Bevan; the Cooperative and union movements; its various (liberal and New Left) intellectual dissenters. But they could never get their act together – and then the Bliar spin doctors took over and blew everything up….

Macron has “reengineered” French politics. Jeremy Corbyn has tried to take Labour back to the 1980s. 
I hate reengineering and everything it stands for (remember Skvorecky’s Engineer of Human Souls?) but it seems that a substantial bit of reengineering may now be needed for the UK left!!

An Ode to the Palate

After 10 years (this September) of living in Bulgaria (alternately with Romania), I thought I knew my Bulgarian wines – at least the whites to which my metabolism still allows me access.

I had, after all, spent full weekends at the last three of Sofia’s most recent annual wine fairs (which take place in November) – and duly swilled, spat and carefully awarded my scores (out of 5.0) in the little note books with which they supply you….

Last year, indeed, I had posted the results of this courageous endeavor…..  making the distinction between my basic favourites (at just over 3 euros) and the new (slightly more expensive) vintages

But that was before I stumbled on the superb new little wine-shop Tempus Vini here in Sofia since last autumn. Kallin’s in his thirties and will shortly qualify as a sommelier – which shows, since he is the first person I’ve met in more than five decades of appreciating wine who has actually helped me understand why I get the variable impressions I do on my palate and throat when I swill, view, smell and then first hold the liquid on my tongue and then lei it trickle down the back of my teeth…..and into my throat….Quietly, with no pretensions, he offers his various explanations – which have deeply enriched my wine experience..

I’ve been able to visit his k(Aladd)in’s cave every few days since February – each time tasting about three whites, discussing the effects and then moving on to get reasons - and directions for future tastings…..all the while updating my copy of the little Catalogue of Bulgarian Wines which the KA and TA team produces annually in time for the Sofia wine fair and which carries the details of more than 150 wineries in the country…... Kallin’s policy is not to stock the wines found in the supermarkets – but he will happily find and deliver a crate for you – which he did when I recently found an amazing  Riesling/Varnenski Misket from Varna Winery (at 5 euros)

The result has been a delightful educational experience – with the drawback that each year’s harvests are always different… (last year’s wines began to come into the shop in April) and that I am becoming more daring in buying bottles at 6 euros!!

Remember that Sofia boasts quite a few of these enticing shops where you can buy regional wine in barrels and caskets – for 2 euros a litre! My favourite is one (near the Eagle Bridge) that stocks Karlovo wines – including the famous Chateau Copsa and its Karlovski Misket

At the beginning of the year I was particularly impressed with the Miskets (particularly Sandanski and Karlovski); then moved on to Muscat; Viognier; Tramin; and Dimiat; discovered the amazing Macedonian Stobi range; moved back to Moscato Bianco; and cuvees such as Chardonnay/Sauvignon Blanc. Last week Kallin gave us a presentation of wines from Malketa Zvezda – the Enigma range

Last night I tried a bottle with a rare blend of Chardonnay (85%) and Tamianka in the Symbiose range produced by Bratanov winery – from the same (southern) part of the country

Little wonder that when I visited my dentist yesterday, she commented on how happy I looked!

Again - it proves that independent shops offer so much more value than supermarkets! 

Interlude

I had a welcome visit last week from one of my daughters – the reason for my blog silence. A round trip to Koprivshitsa, the old town of Plovdiv and Rila Monastery ensued – with a lovely night spent at the Old Plovdiv Hostel right in the heart of the cobbled old town and a superb meal at the Hebros restaurant just round the corner.

The highlight however (apart from wine-tasting in Sofia) was our discovery of an amazing junk yard on the road back from Rila – with powerful relics of Bulgaria’s recent history….  

In March the post on Mood Music subjected readers to a bibliographical tsunami of texts - which plotted (chronologically) perceptions since the 1950s of the western system of political economy….

Inevitably I missed some important books, the most important of which was probably Economics and Utopia – why the learning economy is not the end of history; by Geoff Hodgson (1999) – the link accesses the complete text……

It’s a clear and tough analysis by a top-class economic historian of why socialism lost its way – and exploration of what it will take for it to restore its energies. If you want to get a sense of the range of arguments which have convulsed economists and activists over the past century, this is the book for you.

Denial, Distraction and Despair

What the corporate media considers important are, for this blog, mere farts……hot air and smelly……

The last post was the blog’s first reference to the political events which have been gripping the European and British press for the past week – the French Presidential Election and the recently-announced British General Election. For “groupies”….fantastic opportunitities to rave….but, for the more sober amongst us, events “full of sound and fury but signifying…nothing”

A couple of months ago I referred to the critique of modern television which Neil Postman had published as far back as 1985 - Amusing ourselves to death.

Postman was ahead of his time in suggesting that politics was becoming a mere spectacle – those, after all, were the days when people such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were forging their neoliberal vision and dramatically changing the institutional landscape.

Nobody could suggest then that politics and political power were of no significance….

But globalisation and privatization have changed all of that…..Macron and May don't even have the stupidity to behave like Canute but happily allow the tide to swamp them…..  

The last line of the previous post mentioned a little book – Journey to Earthland – which puts the sound and fury in proper perspective. It is one of these rare books which impresses from the start – with a powerful, extended metaphor of the train-wreck of a journey the world is on - with the various passenger reactions of “denial, distraction and despair”.

The author is founder (some 20 years ago) of a small institute which “conducts studies and simulations to illuminate global challenges and possibilities. It summarized its insights in a 2002 essay Great Transition; the promise and lure of the times ahead which set a broad historical, conceptual, and strategic framework for contemplating the global future”. 
Its wider aims can be read here – and some of those associated with it profiled here. One strand of its thinking can be read in this pamphlet -The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (2010); a very short video seen here; as well as this presentation.

The author is Paul Raskin and he sets out 3 fundamental scenarios (each with 2 varieties) -

- Conventional worlds ("market forces"; and "policy tinkering")

- Barbarization ("Fortress World"; and "Breakdown and dystopia")

- Great transformations ("Eco-communalism"; and "New paradigm")

Readers will know that I am not, these days, easily impressed by books on these subjects…..but this one impacts on all sorts of levels – the tautness of its language; the clarity of the various schemas it presents; the imaginative use it makes of sketches of the future and "retrospective stories"; and its brevity – just 110 pages. 

The one criticism I have is the usual one - that it lacks a “further reading” section with a clear structure which pays attention to the various “schools of thinking”; and, ideally, a short explanation of the reason for each book's selection…As it stands the booklet refers almost exclusively to the Institute's own writers. Some other assessments can be read here 

Update; review of book here - from the great Irish Feasta people.
Those interested in pursuing the theme could usefully dip into Organising for the post-growth economy

The painting is my only example of Tony Todoroff's work.....from his Cyprus collection

The Left on its Knees

I’m grateful to the library of the European Council of Ministers for the monthly selection they send me of relevant papers from the more prestigious of the European Think Tanks. Thanks to their efforts, I was able to download a booklet from the Fabian Society called Future Left – can the left respond to a changing society? (160pp).

Its opening section gives an excellent account of how the British left have responded to the changing conditions of the post-war period - and nicely complements the post I did last month about intellectual responses as a whole. 
It follows that with a thoughtful section about the different strands in the debate about the future of work which we have been having for the past 30 years. Migration, housing and the future of public services are some of the other subjects which receive good treatment.

                                                                 

Readers will know that a General Election is now underway in the UK – which, for the first time in living memory, the Labour party has absolutely no chance of winning. It will go down to the biggest defeat in its hundred-year history – just as the French Socialists today will suffer its most ignominious defeat….And this despite the Labour party (in England at any rate) enjoying its largest growth of membership for about 20 years…..

I am no fan of the present leader of the British party – but the way thecorporate media have treated him has been a powerful confirmation that the media no longer performs the role democratic theory (if not the public) requires of it. Of course, Labour MPs have been their own (and the party’s) worst enemy – by the manner in which so many of the shadow cabinet manoeuvred a mass resignation just weeks after Corbyn’s election - creating a real rift with the wider membership of the party.

The scene is now set for some real blood-letting after the June election….. In 2015 the Labour party was left with just one MP in Scotland (having previously had 50). I expect a few more than that to survive in England……

Another British Think Tank (Demos) has just produced a book Nothing to Fear but Fear Itself which looks at the forces which have rocked the UK, France, Germany, Poland, Spain and Sweden in the last 20 years - and brought the left to its knees……The book contains extensive case studies of each of these countries…

By way of total contrast - here's a fascinating blog which offers great links - this one, for example, on the joys from good writing.....
And I also liked this summary of a book about future scenarios we face - Journey to Earthland

the sketch is an Ilyia Petrov - who lived through this period inc the Spanish Civil War

Power - the elephant in the room

My field of endeavour over the past half century has been “development” – but not of the international sort. I started with “community development”, moved through different types of urban and regional development to a type of organizational development; then left Britain’s shores and found myself dealing more with what is now called “institutional development” and, latterly, “capacity development”……

I have to report that the development world is…..full of funding bodies, Think Tanks and prolific writers – and that you have to crawl through a lot of shit to find any pearls of wisdom.

Robert Chambers (as the link shows) is one of the few guys worth listening to on the subject. For 40 plus years he has worked with rural people in the world’s poorest areas and shamed the “powers that be” to let ordinary people speak and take their own initiatives.  

 What follows is a table from his great book - Ideas for Development (2005) which captures what professionals in the field feel they have learned in those 40-odd years (and, no, I do not think it is too cynical to think that perhaps the one they have learned is a bigger vocabulary!!)

                                                     

Four approaches to development

Approach	1. Benevolent	2. Participatory	3. Rights-based	4. Obligation-based
Core concept	Doing good	Effectiveness	Rights of “have-nots”	Obligations of “haves”
Dominant mode	Technical	Social	political	Ethical
Relationships of donors to recipients	Blueprinted	Consultative	transformative	Reflective
Stakeholders seen as	Beneficiaries	Implementers	Citizens	Guides, teachers
accountability	Upward to aid agency	Upward with some downward	multiple	Personal
Procedures	Bureaucratic conformity	More acceptance of diversity	Negotiated, evolutionary	Learning
Organizational drivers	Pressure to disburse	Balance between disbursement and results	Pressure for results	Expectations of responsible use of discretion

One of Chambers’ early books was titled, memorably, “Putting the Last First”. As you would expect from such a title, his approach is highly critical of external technical experts and of the way even “participatory” efforts are dominated by them.

The unease some of us have been increasingly feeling about administrative reform in transition countries is well explained in that table. The practice of technical assistance in reshaping state structures in transition countries is stuck at the first stage (eg the pressure to disburse in the EC Structural Funds programmes!!) – although the rhetoric of “local ownership” of the past decade or so has moved the thinking to the second column.

Mention of vocabulary prompts me to put a plug in for my Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power. Also well worth looking at is -

Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and Fuzzwords (Oxfam 2010)

It's All About...Values

For almost 30 years I have been living in central european countries (actually seven of the years were in central Asia) and working on projects designed to adjust their administrative and political cultures to European (indeed ”global”) norms of transparency and accountability.

A battery of techniques (variations of ”stick”, carrot and moral rhetoric) has been used over this period - by a legion of missionaries and mercenaries from organisations such as the World Bank, OECD, the EC and private consultancies - to pursue this task.

I drew on my own experience to present in 2011 a detailed analysis - The Long Game – not the log-frame – with the title trying to summarise the main thrust of the paper’s argument that too much emphasis was laid on rationalistic techniques which didn’t fit the local context - and which were expected to deliver overambitious results in ridiculously short time-periods.

The paper coined the phrase ”impervious regimes” to suggest not only that the elites of these countries treated their citizens with utter disdain but that this was hard-wired into their DNA – ie that the underlying social values made it difficult for the elites to behave in any other way....

There was a further strand to the argument I have been conducting for more than a decade – namely that the management techniques imported into these countries by the missionaries and mercenaries (who have morphed into local experts) have given the ”power elite” a new weapon in the armoury used to keep citizens in servility....

I might indeed have added that the EC’s Structural Funds have also given a powerful additional boost to the corruption which had for so long been systemic in most of the countries....  

But I realised yesterday that this ”values” and ”path dependency” argument is far too static....after all, so much of my writing of the past 20 years has been about the moral corruption of our very own ”Western elites”  (see the latest version of Dispatches to the Next Generation) .....

This week I came across an important book by the famous Francis Fukuyama - which he had written in 1999 but which had passed me by - The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order and which is a critique of the loosening of our social fabric (and declining social trust) which he argued has been going on since 1965.

At first glance, it bears some similarities to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism which does, however, bear the curious sub-title “American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations”.

Both books are important correctives to the all-too-familiar refrain from “the West” that “the East” has some catching up to do….More importantly they touch on a theme central to this blog’s very existence – the tension between what I might call “the moral universe” and “technocracy”. Remember one of the quotations which grace this blog (if you scroll far enough down the right-hand boxes) – 

"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 (1992) 

The final section of The Long Game – not the log-frame was a rare attempt to place the unease we feel about management techniques in that wider moral universe......but this post has been long enough.....

Tomorrow I will try to pick up the argument where I seem to have left it all of six years ago........