In Praise of the Short Book/extended essay

15 years of serious blogging has created almost 2000 posts here – some of which are extended essays to be grouped together, with some editing and an introduction, to become mini-books. This is the process in which I am currently engaged around the topic of populism – sparked by a reading of The Populist Moment – the Left after the great Recession by Arthur Borriello and Anton Jaeger (2023).

This post, however, is more by way of a tribute to the format of the extended essay or short book for which I’m beginning to notice an admirable growing trend. ”The Populist Moment”, for example, is only 147 pages long and another Verso book (this time about the Italian right) - First They Took Rome - is just 174 pages. For several years, I’ve been urging authors and publishers to exercise more self-discipline – so this is indeed a welcome trend.

But the unannointed king of the contemporary extended essay is Perry Anderson whose extended essays in the London Review of Books have become the stuff of legend. ”Highly readable but serious” is the best way to describe the writing of this Marxist historian who has been based variously in the UK and the US and is the subject of a very inadequate Wikipedia entry. This Jacobin article does him more justice. I tried to google for other prominent extended essayists but all I got were guidelines for writing extended essays for the Internațional Baccalauriat!

George Orwell and Arthur Koestler wrote extended essays but the only contemporary exponent of the art I’ve come across is Aurelien

Some recommended reading

Contesting the Global Order – the radical political economy of Perry Anderson and Immanuel Wallerstein by Gregory Williams (2020)

The H Word – the peripeteia of Hegemony Perry Anderson (2017) is 156 pages

Pessimism of the Intellect – history of the New Left Review Duncan Thompson (2007)

In Praise of the Essay/Book Review

I have always been a fan of tables and matrices – reducing ideas to the simple format of a 2x2 or 6x3 (or whatever) table. They not only relieve the text but force you to whittle text down to the bare essentials. Perhaps that’s why I love these Central Asian and Russian miniatures so much. And it might also explain my preference for ESSAYS as against books - for which I’m developing increasing distaste. London, of course, from the 16^th to the 19^th centuries, was home to the great Englosh essayists - Francis Bacon. (1561-1626); Joseph Addison (1672-1719) William Hazlitt (1778-1830) and Charles Lamb (1775- 1834)

But, these days, I am more interested în the political essayists – two of 

whom I would like to draw to me readers’ attention, a Brit and a German
William Davies is one of my favourite political scientists with several books 

to his credit. He’s just penned a review of two important books about the 

apparent decline of the left and some of his other essays can be found here
This is not normal – the collapse of Liberal Britain is a collection of his 

essays which appeared in 2020.
Wolfgang Streeck is a German sociologist whose writing has been celebrated 

several times on this blog. But I have failed to mention the essays he gave us 

in  Critical Encounters – capitalism, democracy, ideas (2020) which reviews 

books by the likes of Mark Blyth, Perry Anderson, Quinn Slobodian, Yanis 

Varoufakis, Jurgen Habermas and Peter Mair. It’s

... a collection of essays on political economy, stimulated by reading books for review. It is also a celebration of the book as a medium of communication among scholars and with a wider public....

Different book reviews by the same author, as collected in this volume, are only loosely connected: by accident of personal acquaintance, of time believed to be free, or of the reviewer’s sense of adventure.

How to review a book that is worthy of being reviewed? For me it requires deep reading, beginning usually with the last chapter, then the introduction, then several expeditions into the interior. This takes time. During reading sessions, I highlight what I find remarkable and sketch my own emerging views in the margins, or on the last pages where the publisher advertises other, often related, books. When I am finished with a book, it looks a little deranged. Having let it sit for a while in this condition, I return to it and read my notes. Where they yield a pattern, for example by repeating themselves, is where the reading has left an impact. Then I begin writing. Writing book reviews means taking the book seriously as a vehicle of scholarly communication; or, as in my case, even extolling it. In the social sciences, journal articles have come to predominate, which I find deplorable.

On the logic of minimalism, I should be a fan of poetry but draw the line at Brecht, Burns, Eliot and Mitchell (Adrian)

The Importance of Good Questions

 Rachel Donald is a climate change activist and podcaster/blogger who invited her subscribers over the New Year period to send her questions – with some impressive results, grouping them into a dozen - viz

- Is there a picture building in your head which brings together and synthesises these 

threads, or could start a conversation to do just that?
- What political ideology would you say you closest identify with?
- How can we quickly change the way everyone on the planet understands and engages 

with the causes and effects of climate change, so that we can have more concerted and 

faster progress to prepare for it's effects and stop it from becoming worse?
- Truly deeply madly, what do you, (you personally) - based on all the knowledge you have 

acquired through your interviews - think this world will look like in 2100?
- What role do you see for religious innovation/improvisation in our civilisations ongoing 

& unavoidable decline?
- People talk of the gut/brain axis, and the heart/brain axis. When you were moving 

towards Planet: Critical, what was your road between your gut, your heart, and your mind?
- How has what you have learned from Planet Critical changed you? Your mindset, priorities 

and how you live?
- Can climate action happen without the government?
- Do you think mainstream centrist politics will ever come round to the idea of degrowth 

or the steady-state economy?
- Can women save the world?
- What helps you stay steadfast and optimistic in the face of so much knowledge of how 

deeply tragic our situation is?
- Members of Novara Media say it is very important to them that they work in a team with 

editors. You seem to be all alone. How do you manage?

Good questions are a spur to creative thinking....they take us out of the groove in which we so often find ourselves. At the start of the new millennium I had a 3 year Civil Service project in Uzbekistan which involved training their civil servants. I used to start each session by inviting the participants to pose questions about the subject of the "lecture" which I would use to give off-the-cuff responses. I then wrote the presentation up afterwards in the light of what I had found myself saying in these exchanges with the “students”. The results were quite fascinating – at least for me!

One of the books I admit to dipping into from time to time is Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic which poses, for each day of the calendar, such questions of ourselves. And it’s a discipline I recommend to others. Indeed I recently wondered why we don’t ask ourselves more interesting questions

The great practitioners of asking great questions were, of course, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare whose interviews can actually still be heard on this BBC podcast.

There are, of course, others who have gained reputations for interviewing such as Lynn Barber (otherwise known as Demon Barber) one of whose efforts (on JG Ballard) can be read here

Changing One's Mind

 I have been totally blown over by Dougald Hine’s At Work in the Ruins (2023) which I read as the most profound exploration of our world views - and of how the combination of his experience of

• climate activism

• changing his domicile to Sweden a few years before Covid struck

caused him to question those world views. And to pose more profound challenges than simply those of global warming. The book digs deep into the ways we try to make sense of the world - a subject which I dealt with not so long ago. Here's how Hine describes it -

“Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly-lit highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad swathe of liberal opinion, to the wilder fringes of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships, oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without.

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, will lead inexorably to their solutions.

However far it may be from our political roots, we find that we have more in common with assorted conservatives, dissidents and sceptics – including some whose scepticism extends to climate science – than with the mainstream progressive currents that have so far had a claim to be on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. Under the authority of ‘the science’, talk of climate change will belong to the advocates of the big path, and those of us who do not wish to contribute to that future will need to find another place to start from when we want to talk about the depth of the trouble the world is undoubtedly in.” (pp34/35)

Along the way the author meets other travellers who also challenge the conventional wisdom – people like my compatriot Alastair McIntosh and others such as VM de Oliveira (“Hospicing Modernity”), James Bridle (“New Dark Age”) and Justin Smith. The book continues thus -

The path we are on now looks like a dead end and we are left to look for other paths worth taking. The way we answer such a question can be informed by science, but science alone cannot answer it for us because we’re not dealing with the kind of question that can be answered definitively through processes of observation, measurement and calculation. Rather, what we have is a question that calls for the exercise of judgement. And it cannot not be answered, since any response to climate change will contain an implicit answer. If the question is not made explicit – if the existence of upstream questions, these questions that take us beyond the boundaries of what science can tell us about climate change, is not recognised – then the default answer will be to treat it as bad luck and pursue some combination of techno-fixes and lifestyle adjustments.

The trouble is, compared to the promise of science, the exercise of human judgement looks terribly fragile and fallible. Indeed, from early in the development of modern science, before it even got that name, there have been those who hoped that scientific ways of seeing and knowing the world could free us from dependence on the exercise of judgement and the disputes to which it often leads. You can trace this hope within the history of environmentalism and the climate movements arising from it. Yet to expect scientific knowledge to take the place of the exercise of judgement is to ask too much of science, and those who have done so tend to end up disappointed, as we shall see.

In 1987, the Brundtland Report had established ‘sustainable development’ as the frame within which the international community would talk about the planetary situation: a framing which yoked the pursuit of ecological sustainability to the trajectory of economic and technological development, without any proof that this pairing could pull in the same direction. In hindsight, the five years between its publication and the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 appear as a high tide of international concern and intergovernmental action around the environment that remains unsurpassed to this day. This was also the moment at which the environmental movement drew back from the terrain of culture and established a new relationship with science. No longer was the scientific evidence a starting point for a larger questioning of society or making political arguments; now the evidence itself was to make the case for change, to carry the weight and do the work of politics.

This turn is not hard to understand: in countries where Green politicians had entered parliament, the demands of working within existing institutions drove a certain kind of ‘realism’. Meanwhile, the journey of David Icke from BBC sports presenter to Green Party principal speaker to promoter of lizard-related conspiracy theories offered a cautionary example of how the attempt to call your whole culture into question could unravel. pp59-60

UPDATE
The conventional wisdom tells us that people strongly resist challenges to 

their world views – they have a bias toward confirmation of their belief 

system. If there is one book I would recommend on this subject of changing 

minds, it is Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds – the art and science of changing our 

own and other people’s minds (2004) which is nicely summarised in this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHzyYMgVaqk

Some Politicians can – and do - make a Difference

 ”Emancipations” is a ”journal of critical social analysis” edited by Albena Azmanova and James Chamberlain to both of whom I am grateful for their acceptance of Dilemmas of Social Change for publication in a future issue. The article’s title may be a play on the title of a famous book from 1967 Dilemmas of Social Reform but it really does spend a few pages spelling out the dilemmas some of us faced aș we wrestled with developing, in the early-1980s, the UK’s very first social strategy.

The article is an update on one I drafted last year ,choosing to ask at both its start and end, the simple question of why it is now so difficult to get politicians to give any sort of priority to the ”marginalised”. Instead they are stigmatised and hounded. This is how the article starts -

There was a sense of shock when poverty appeared on the agenda in the 1960s – the 

US launched an official War against it - the UK, typically, was more restrained in its 

reaction to such television portrayals as “Cathy Come Home” in 1966 and 

the establishment of the Shelter campaign. After all, the 1945-51 

Labour government was supposed to have eradicated it. And it was to take 

a couple of decades before it became an issue for the Europeans.

In looking at the circumstances which created the UK’s first “Social Strategy”, 

this article asks the larger question of why politicians are so 

reluctant to take action against the scourge of poverty. Is it simply public 

indifference – or do the roots lie deeper in various myths and rationalisations 

as argued by Daniel Dorling viz that exclusion is necessary; prejudice 

is natural; greed is good and despair is inevitable. 

I had the good fortune to be in at the start of a great adventure in 1974 – the inauguration of a new system of Scottish local government and, more specifically, the creation of Strathclyde Region covering half of Scotland’s population. In May of that year I was one of 74 newly-elected Councillors who assembled one Sunday to find myself in a leadership position and able to help forge its priority strategy relating to the scandal which had emerged the previous year (in the “Born to Fail?” report) about the conditions in which many people in the urban areas lived viz of what we then knew as ”multiple deprivation” or a triple whammy of insults – poor housing, poor health and unemployment.

My luck extended even further – the Region had attracted the most talented of officials and politicians who discovered new ways of getting the best out of each other in something, for example, called ”Member-officer” groups and were also blessed by a serie of other innovations from the Labour government of 1964-70, not least a new planning regime and corporate management.

But, equally, the Region’s very legitimacy was in question from the start by virtue both of its size and the prospects of a Scottish Assembly which were then being actively discussed - before being settled by the 1979 devolution referendum. Arguably, however, this was one of the factors which pushed us into commiting to the more open and community-based style of policy-making which was our legacy. It was just a few politicians and officers who pushed those initiatives but we rarely felt any pushback – whether from councillors, officials or the wider public. 

The behaviour of politicians does not receive the attention it deserves in 

political science. Political psychology - despite Trump’s arrival – still seems 

a marginalised subject. Here’s how the Oxford Handbook (see below) defines the subject - 

Political psychology, at the most general level, is an application of what is
known about human psychology to the study of politics. It draws upon 
theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality,
psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, social psychology,
developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and intergroup
relations. It addresses political elites—their personality,
motives, beliefs, and leadership styles, and their judgments,
decisions, and actions in domestic policy, foreign policy,
international confl ict, and confl ict resolution. It also deals with
the dynamics of mass political behavior: voting, collective action,
the influence of political communications, political socialization
and civic education, group-based political behavior, social justice,
and the political incorporation of immigrants.
I remember the impact Leo Abse’s “Private Member” made on me when it 

was published in 1973. It did a Freudian dissection of the personalities of 

people such as Hugh Gaitskell and Harold Wilson in a way I had never seen 

before – and, later, of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown
 
These are the only books I feel able to recommend on the subject 
The Psychology of Politics B Richards (2019) focuses too much on populism
How Statesmen Think – the psychology of international relations Robert Jervis (2017) 

limits itself to foreign affairs
The oxford handbook of political psychology ed L Huddy et al (2013) runs to 1000 pages!
The Psychology of Politicians; Ashley Weinberg (2012) For me, the most interesting and 

readable of the titles

SNIPPETS

1. Down with Centrists

I have just unsubscribed from ”The Rest is Politics” podcast which has consistently been voted the number one podcast în the UK. My reasons are well caught în this recent post from Rikki - but I did at least convey to Cambell and Stewart my reasons for stopping the subscription viz that Alaister Campbell, despite my initial admiration for openness about his mental health, is a criminal warmonger who deserves prosecution; and Stewart, despite my initial respect, is a self-confessed egocentric

2. Brexit.

I’ve been a bit remiss în not keeping my readers updated on this subject on which, each week, there is no better chronicler than Chris Grey. For almost 8 years now he has regaled us once a week with his analyses of this discourse. His most recent post is, for me, one of his best – în suggesting that Brixiteers are like communists with their argument that it has never been properly attempted or has been betrayed

A recent example is the discussion on GB News between Jacob Rees-Mogg and 

Nick Tyrone, which Tyrone described on his Week in Brexitland Substack. Tyrone 

did as good job as anyone could of responding to Rees-Mogg’s salvoes, the more so 

given the huge advantages his interlocutor had by virtue of being the host. But it is 

impossible to ‘win’ such encounters because they are intended to confuse rather than 

to clarify, and setting innumerable false hares running is one of the easiest ways of 

doing so. This doesn’t just apply to broadcast interviews. In any number of published 

comment pieces, Brexiters layer falsehoods upon half-truths upon questionable 

assumptions, in ways which can only be unpicked through line-by-line ‘fisking’, which 

is incredibly time-consuming, and not especially effective.

Nevertheless, it’s worth disaggregating and examining some of the commonest arguments 

currently used to defend Brexit, an especially those about sovereignty and democracy, 

which are the Brexiters’ last redoubts. Even so, despite being the longest ever post 

on this blog, it’s impossible to provide an exhaustive analysis.

Stonewalling and denial[ These are the now boilerplate defences of Brexit, so 

commonly made as to not need specific links. They include the claim that ‘it hasn’t 

been done properly’, which comes in variants ranging from ascribing this to governmental 

incompetence, to blaming it on EU punishment, right through to positing betrayal by 

various actors up to and including ‘the deep State’.

All of these were virtually baked into Brexit, partly because it made utopian promises 

that could never come true, and partly because it thrives on narratives of betrayal, 

treachery and victimhood. So, like apologists for communism, Brexiters say it has 

• ‘never really been tried’ 

• fallen victim to counter-revolutionaries and to renegades from the true path 

of purity

3. EP Thompson’s 100th Anniversary

This famous British historian and activist was born on 3rd February 1924 with one of the few tributes being in The Tribune. His “Writing by Candlelight” (1980) gives a flavour of the quality of his writing. And Bryan Palmer has given us a superb Homage to the man – in two parts, the first here and the second here.

Travails of Socialism

Britain, it seems, is so cautious, conservative and class-ridden a country that it has taken a hundred years for it to come to terms with the first Labour government of 1924. That is, if we are to believe 2 books which have just appeared on the subject – Peter Clark’s ”The Men of 1924” and David Torrance’s ”The Wild Men. A possible explanation for this sad state of affairs was explored in Guardians of Power – the myth of the liberal media (2006) namely that the british masses are simply too stupid to understand where their true interests lie. The Brits have every reason to be grateful if not complacent – the country was the first to industrialise and used this to build an Empire - little wonder, then, that they felt, what a friend of mine used to call, ”illusions of adequacy”. Such feelings were understandable in the immediate post-war period – when I grew up – but surely the younger generation knows better?

In Scotland it does and has said very clealy ”A plague on both your houses” in preferring the SNP in recent polls.

But why does the Labour party remain so unattractive? After all, a majority of British citizens support the renationalisation of public utilities.

Last autumn I discussed several books here which analysed the debates which have torn the party apart in recent decades – but none of them dealt properly with the critical question of why people apparently feel such resistance in voting for the party.

It’s understandable that progressives feel antipathy to Keir Starmer – the media has done an effective job în painting him aș an unreliable, indeed duplicitous, individual. For a better treatment of the question, I recommend

Warring Fictions - left populism and its defining myths (Christopher Clarke 2019)

whose basic argument is that conventional ways of understanding Labour’s 

civil war focus on the wrong issue. The conflict doesn’t really run along a political 

spectrum – between ‘left-wingers’ and ‘centrists’, between ‘radicals’ and ‘moderates’

, or through degrees of egalitarianism. Instead, it is a clash between two world 

views: characterised by the author as ‘left populism’ and ‘left pluralism’. 

As the book’s title suggests, it’s at the level of narrative and analysis where 

the crux of this distinction lies. This review puts it well -


“Warring Fictions” focuses on three myths, which sustain left populism but are not 

found on the pluralist left: the Dark Knight, the Puppet Master and the Golden Era.

• The Dark Knight claims that the political spectrum is a moral one; that 

• the left is where virtue lies and that the further to the right you go the 

• more wicked or self-serving. It frames policy questions in terms of good 
• and evil, and treats those with different values as enemies and traitors.

• The Puppet Master myth describes the belief that far-sighted elites 

• coordinate and control society for personal gain. It holds that there is a 

• singular ‘will of the people’ which is frustrated by ‘the establishment’ – and 
• that governments wield immense power, oppressing wilfully rather than 
• mediating badly.

• The Golden Era is the declinist view that a left-wing Arcadia – a spirit 

• of ‘original socialism’ – once existed but has been polluted by modernity. 

• This is fed by the notion of a drift to the right on all fronts. It undermines internationalism, and stops the left engaging with an interconnected world.