Should I buy this book?

A year or so ago I devoted an entire post to the need to ration the production of non-fiction books. When I’m browsing in a bookshop and come across an interesting title, I ask three questions –

1. Can the author clearly demonstrate (eg in the introduction or opening chapter) that the book is the result of long thought and not just an inclination to jump on the latest bandwagon? 

Put bluntly why, despite these other previous efforts, does the author still feel compelled to inflict another book on us??? This is so important that I would ideally like an entire chapter on this – particularly if it’s on a subject which attracts a lot of interest.....

2. Is there a clear list and comment on what the author regards as other essential texts? 

And I don't mean a long "bibliography" viz reading list which I see as little more than a sign of "penis envy"  My favourite writers have an endnote they call "SOURCES" which identify the books which the author has found particularly useful in her/his writing. We begin to get a sense of the author’s likes and dislikes - and perhaps even of their prose style

3. Is it written in an “inviting” style? Last year I held up Yanis Varoufakis’ writing style as an exemplar - for the sheer originality of his prose – showing a mind at work which is constantly active……rejecting dead phrases, clichés and jargon… using narrative and stories to carry us along…..thinking constantly about how to keep the readers’ interest alive…

There’s also a couple of other features I look for –

- 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 for their chapters (eg this book on Defending Democracy).

- para headings, tables….and graphics. Readers can absorb only so much continuous text. And if the subject matter is difficult, it helps if, at least every couple of pages, there is a heading which gives a sense of the argument…

If the book survives these tests and is brought home, the post then goes on to give some hints about what we might call “active reading” – eg identifying some key questions to use in the book’s interrogation; scribbling comments; and writing these up to have a record of the book…

The basic message is reinforced in the conclusion with advice to publishers and authors when they write their “blurbs” -

- 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 – ie tell us what you consider the key texts in the field (and why) and how your book relates to them. At best you can 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

A new book has just come out to which I can’t apply the tests – because it’s not yet in the physical bookstores – only on Amazon. It’s Capitalism on Edge - How fighting precarity can achieve radical change without crisis or utopia (2020) by Albena Azmanova who was a Bulgarian dissident in the 1980s and now teaches at the University of Kent’s Brussels School of International Studies, where she chairs the postgraduate program in international political economy.

She obtained her PhD at the New School for Social Research in New York and her recent work “aims at bringing the critique of political economy back into critical social theory, with publications tracing the metamorphoses of neoliberal capitalism”. As it happens I posted about a fascinating book about the Frankfurt school of critical social theory whose German refugees had helped found that famous New York School in the 1930s.

I can’t hold “Capitalism on Edge” in my hands and skim – as I would in a bookshop – but I do have cyber sources which allow me to apply most of the required tests….The sources are -

- 60 or so pages of Amazon excerpts which include not only the intro and a tantalising few pages from the opening few chapters and Conclusion - but also the notes and the entire bibliography (16 pages)

- a very thorough 11 page review

- a podcast interview  

- 2 of her (rather academic) articles on related subjects here and here

Having looked at all of these quite closely (well, not the last two!!) my initial judgement is that the book fares reasonably well on the tests…

- it recognises that a non-academic audience does require a clarity which is not expected by an academic audience

- reference to other books is woven into the text itself, not just relegated to the end of the book

- it makes an effort (in chapter 2) to explain what’s distinctive about the book

- it could have made more of an effort with tables, graphics and summaries

- and, every now and then, the academic jargon shows up. What, for example, are to be make of “What places them in an agonistic dialogue of a meaningful disagreement about injustice?” or “structural antinomies that translate into historical patterns of social injustice within the trajectories of relational, systemic and structural domination????”

On balance, I would be tempted to buy it – but for the price - 25 pounds….Just for the paperback version!! That’s more than double the normal price.

But what, I can hear some of you say, about the content…the drift of the argument???

It’s all very well for you to sound off about the style, the presentation, whether there is an annotated bibliography or enough tables and graphics…….even the price. But we want to know how well argued it is……. whether it gives us an angle we hadn’t thought of??…..  

And to that question, I’m not so sure….I liked the challenge she raises to the grip ”inequality” has taken recently on our language - which she argues should be seen not as a symptom of capitalism’s crisis but rather of its unfailing good health! Why, she asks, do people seem more distressed by the rich than by the poor? That’s an interesting question…..

One of her basic theses is that “neoliberalism” has been replaced by what she calls “precarity capitalism”. I’ve never been happy with the word neoliberalism – but I need some persuasion that the new millennium saw a fundamental change in what I’ve called the Beast that drives the world. At one stage she suggests three reasons for this - the nature of discontent; the agent of change; the mechanism for change

Her conclusion talks of “socially irresponsible rule” and “discerns 2 main contradictions generated by contemporary capitalism’s basic drive for competitive production of profit” – what she calls “surplus employability” (AI Robots etc) and “acute job dependency” (the state’s inability to supply jobs) respectively.

At this point my eyes began to glaze over…….

But I’ve read less than a quarter of the book. This very thorough and sympathetic reviewer has read the entire book and given us 11 pages to think about

No-Man’s Land

Smuggler

Watch him when he opens

His bulging words – justice

Fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,

peace, peace. Make it your custom

to pay no heed

to his frank look, his visa, his stamps

and signatures. Make it

your duty to spread out their contents

in a clear light

Nobody with such language

Has nothing to declare

Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)

As usual, the last post – explaining the blog’s strange title - got a bit out of hand…

I was trying to make the point that boundaries – whether between countries, fields of study, professions, classes, religion or political party – are usually heavily protected.

But that those able and willing to cultivate cross-border connections are often hugely rewarded – not just with monetary profit but with new insights.

Just look at the Hanseatic League and the intellectual and cultural – let alone commercial - richness of towns and cities which lay on trading routes.

The first table in the last post looked at a small number of academic fields and then identified no fewer than ten separate sub-fields in a single one of them (Economics). That second table goes into important detail about the distinctive operational assumptions each of these ten sub-fields of Economics tends to bring to the subject. Most practitioners in each of these specialisms are trapped in their particular intellectual bubble  

Another recent post – 57 Varieties of Capitalism – looked at the very different treatment three broad schools in 11 different academic disciplines gave to the subject of capitalism.  

That’s another 33 intellectual bubbles!

My argument is that bacademic disciplines (and their sub-fields) are like countries – protected generally with barbed wire, passports, visas, customs etc. 
This is why I honour those who try to break out from their narrow specialisms and to look at the world with a different lens – Albert Hirschmann memorably called this “trespassing” and wrote an entire book about it in 1981. He was one of a very few academics who attempted this straddling act – JK Galbraith was another….

Of course, straddling borders can be painful and it can arouse suspicions – with loyalties often being questioned. Consider the Jews!

Journalists too (some of whom are to be found in academia) are often treated with suspicion when they enter a country undergoing turmoil. But, as generalists rather than specialists, they offer us fresh vistas…

The coverage of recent years of the centenary of the First World War has given “No-man’s Land” the image of devastation and the term, of course, contains the implication of dispute. “Trespass”, equally, carries a connotation of illegality. And, in these days of EasyJet, it is usually capitals we visit – rather than borderlands….

But is there a better metaphor for venturing into territory where you're a bit of an outsider?

Recommended Reading

Crossing Borders – stories and essays about translation; ed LS Schwartz (2018) - the link gives a rather jaundiced review of the book from LARB 

Essays on Trespassing – economics to politics and beyond; AO Hirschmann (1981) A master of the craft

Border – a journey to the edge of Europe; Kapka Kassabova (2017) very poetic exploration of the borderland between Bulgaria and Greece
A Seventh Man; John Berger and Jean Mohr (1975) The classic and prescient book about migrants some excerpts of which are here and a recent updated analysis here

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/24/subtle-art-of-translating-foreign-fiction-ferrante-knausgaard a nice piece about our growing appetite for foreign fiction

https://aeon.co/essays/is-the-translator-a-servant-of-the-text-or-an-original-artist

Explaining the blog's title

The blog was ten years old last autumn – making it one of the longest-running (english-speaking) blogs of its kind.  It first saw the light of day as "Carpathian Musings" because the blogging started in my mountain house in that area but, after a few winters spent in Sofia, I realized that the title was no longer a precise description of its source.

The blog was therefore, for 5 years or so, called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”.

But neither the word "Balkan" nor "Carpathian" are keywords people use when they are googling on the topics the blog deals with - such as "the global financial crisis", "organisational reform", "social change", "capitalism" - let alone "Romanian culture", "Bulgarian painting", "transitology"etc.... 
So clearly the blog needed a name which better expresses its content and objectives. I realise, of course, that the way to increase the profile of a blog or website is to manipulate the algorithms – but this costs money I’m not willing to pay…

Let’s be clear, I’m not interested in raising the profile as an end in itself…..I have no illusions about my significance. But I am confident that my blog (and website) is an almost unique “resource” or, if you prefer, “library”…..Not perhaps so much of my writing – but of the insights of others whose books and papers I’ve taken the time and trouble to seek out and whose significance I’ve both recognized and wanted to pass on……Two crucial but not necessarily connected factors!!

So, let me try to explain why, for the past few months, I’ve been running with the title “Exploring No-Man’s Land”. The images of battlefields this summons up are quite deliberately chosen.

First, an accident of birth had me straddling the borderland of the West and East ends of a shipbuilding town in the West of Scotland – with class, religious and political tensions simmering in those places. 

Then political and academic choices in my late 20s brought me slap into the middle of the no-man’s land between politicians and different sorts of professional and academic disciplines.

Then, when I was almost 50, I became a nomadic consultant, working for the next 25 years in ten different countries

Previous posts have tried to give a sense of how that experience has made me who I am….

I was the son of a Presbyterian Minister (or “son of the manse” as we were known) and received my education in a state school which still then possessed the positive features of Scotland’s Democratic Tradition……now, sadly, much traduced.

It would have been easier for my parents to send me to the secondary school just a few blocks from our house but, as home was a manse (owned by the Church of Scotland) in the exclusive “West End”, that school was fee-paying. And my parents (although no radicals) would never have contemplated taking a step which would have created a barrier with my father’s congregation who were stalwarts of the town’s lower middle classes with modest houses and apartments in the centre and east of the town.

Thus began my familiarization with the nuances of the class system – and with the experience of straddling boundaries which was to become such a feature of my life. Whether the boundaries are those of class, party, professional group intellectual discipline or nation, they are well protected if not fortified…..And trying to straddle such borders – let alone explore them – can be an uncomfortable experience.

When I became a young councillor in 1968 (for the Catholic-dominated Labour party), I found myself similarly torn I developed loyalties to the local community activists but found myself in conflict with my (older) political colleagues and officials.

And I felt this particularly strongly when I was elevated to the ranks of magistrate and required to deal with the miscreants who confronted us as lay judges every Monday morning – up from the prison cells where they had spent the weekend for drunkenness and wife-beating……..

The collusion between the police and my legal adviser was clear but my role was to adjudicate “beyond reasonable doubt” and the weak police testimonials often gave me reason to doubt….I dare say I was too lenient and I certainly got such a reputation – meaning that I was rarely disturbed to sign search warrants!

And, on being elevated a few years later to one of the leading positions in a giant new Region, I soon had to establish relations with - and adjudicate between the budgetary and policy bids of - senior professionals heading specialized Departments with massive budgets and manpower.

It was at that stage that I developed a diagram for my students to make sense of the “conflict of loyalties” to what I saw as 4 very different pressures (audiences) to which politicians are subjected – 

- local voters (if the electoral system is based on local constituencies);

- the party (both local and national)

- the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered;

- their conscience.

Politicians, I argued, differ according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these sources – and the loyalties this tended to generate. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – “populist”; “ideologue”, “statesman”,  “maverick”.

The effective politician, however, is the one who resists the temptation to be drawn exclusively into any one of these roles. Each has its own important truth - but it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership.

And I would make the same point about the different professional and academic disciplines.

Each generates its own way of looking at the world – as you will see from the table below which looks only at seven academic disciplines

The core assumptions of academic subjects

Discipline	Core assumption	Most Famous exponents (not necessarily typical!)
Sociology	Struggle for power	Durkheim, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, C Wright Mills,Robert Merton,  Herbert Simon, A Etzioni, Ralf Dahrendorf
Economics	Rational choice	Adam Smith, Schumpeter, Keynes, P Samuelson, M Friedmann, J Stiglitz, P Krugman
Political science	Rational choice (at least since the 1970s)	Robert Dahl, Gabriel Almond, David Easton, S Wolin, Peter Hall, James Q Wilson, Bo Rothstein, Francis Fukuyama
Geography	??	Mackinder, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, Danny Dorling
Public management	mixed for traditional bodies - rational choice for New PM	Woodrow Wilson, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt, Guy Peters, G Bouckaert,
anthropology	shared meaning	B Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Claude Levi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Mary Douglas, Chris Shore, David Graeber
Political economy	draws upon economics, political science, law, history, sociology et al to explain how political factors determine economic outcomes.	JK Galbraith, Susan Strange, Mark Blyth, Wolfgang Streeck, Geoffrey Hodgson, Yanis Varoufakis,

And, of course, each of these seven fields has a variety of sub-fields each of which has its own specific “take” even before you get to the eccentricities of individual practitioners – let me remind you of this table about 10 sub-fields in Economics which I used in a recent post

Pluralism in Economics

Name of “school”	Humans….	Humans act within…	The economy is…..
Old “neo-classical”	optimise narrow self-interest	A vacuum	Stable
New “neo-classical”	can optimise a variety of goals	A market context	Stable in the absence of friction
Post-Keynes	use rules of thumb	A macro-economic context	Naturally volatile
Classical	act in their self-interest	Their class interests	Generally stable
Marxist	do not have predetermined patterns	Their class and historical interests	Volatile and exploitative
Austrian	have subjective knowledge and preferences	A market context	Volatile – but this is generally sign of health
Institutional	have changeable behaviour	Instit envt that sets rules and social norms	Dependent on legal and social structures
Evolutionary	act “sensibly” but not optimally	An evolving, complex system	Both stable and volatile
Feminist	exhibit engendered behaviour	A social context	Ambiguous
Ecological	act ambiguously	Social context	Embedded in the environment

This is an excerpt only – the full table is from Ho-Joon Chang’s “Economics – a User’s Guide” but can be viewed at diagram at p61 of The Econocracy – the perils of leaving economics to the experts; Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins (2017)

Please understand, I’m not trying to confuse – rather the opposite….I’m trying to liberate!

Once we become aware of the very different worlds in which people live, our world suddenly becomes a very richer place – in which we have choices about the particular lens we use to make sense of it all…

I remember the first time I really became aware of this – when I did the Belbin team test. And The Art of Thinking by Bramsall and Harrison (1984) very usefully sets out different types of strategic thinking..

Here’s another example - https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/01/framing-capitalism.html

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

In Case you missed this

Since my subscription for a dedicated website ran out a year ago, I’ve been using the Dropbox facility to supply the URL of any paper I upload to the blog. 

But a spell using an old PC has made me appreciate Dropbox's deficiencies….....which include its reliance on a limited number of operating systems.

My old HP uses Windows Vista (no longer supported by GoogleChrome) which is not one of the operating systems used by DropBox. When I’ve tried to access the files on my blog which has been using Dropbox, I get a useless frozen opening page with neither a download facility nor column to allow scrolling down

Pcloud, however, allows access to Vista and therefore, in turn, to the downloading and scrolling facilities - so I have installed it experimentally….

The year may so far have seen only 15 posts but they have been significant ones - with definitive posts detailing the best reading on a variety of key subjects - eg capitalism (here and here); admin reform; and postmodernism
I have therefore been so cheeky as to upload them in pamphlet form - to allow reading from the beginning of the year....And the latest version includes an introduction with a proper explanation to the blog and its strange title

Postscript; The experience has made me realise that those using Windows XP or Vista must have been experiencing the same problems.....so I have now adjusted the urls to the pcloud genre which should allow downloading for those on XP and Vista.
Let no-one say I don't take care of my readers!!