REFORM – AGAIN

There is a good chance that Reform will win the next election in Britain and I’m indebted to Matin Stanley for alerting me to Fixing the Centre (2026) by Reform MP Danny Kruger which draws on an earlier paper he had written the previous year.

For some reason, I prefer critiques to the genuine article. So I appreciated this 
article dealing critically with a pamphlet from Demos - 
Treating the Symptoms not the causes Political Quarterly (2026) 

A recent report by Demos is the latest in a series of think tank analyses of Whitehall’s problems. In what follows, we argue that the report’s focus on culture risks treating the symptoms of governance problems, not the causes. Academic literature has shown that systemic structural reform of the state is necessary to grasp the nettle of Britain’s governance issues. Because of this failure to get to the nub of Britain’s political malaise, the report exhibits limitations typical of a genre of think tank critique of Whitehall. We maintain that think tanks tend to offer narrowly drawn, incremental reform initiatives aimed at Whitehall. We argue that these are not only unlikely to bed in without broader structural reforms, but they might also deepen the crisis they aim to address.

The Human Handbrake is subtitled: How Whitehall Culture Holds Back Public Service Reform, Demos’s report argues that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

Culture is defined as ‘the shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solves its problems’. The report identifies five obstacles to the adoption of a reforming culture in Whitehall:

(1) An outsized focus on risk in politics, which leads to cautious and defensive behaviour

(2) Incentivisation of an individualistic ‘policy hero’ culture where only those in frontfacing policy roles rise to the top

(3) The separation of people into tribes, undermining trust and collaboration

(4) A preference for standardisation and simplicity, at the expense of adaptive and messy solutions

(5) An impatience for quick, discernible results, at the expense of enduring change. Considering these cultural obstacles, the report suggests several commensurate solutions which include:

• The use of iterative methods and risk stratification, alongside stronger leadership to mitigate against risk aversion

• Altering performance frameworks and changing ministerial role model behaviour to combat individualistic hero cultures

• Building shared identities across institutions to combat tribe forming

• Creating a tolerance for complexity and unevenness alongside improving data systems to overcome the desire for simple and standardised policy

• Telling better stories to combat impatience

Liberated Public Services Demos (2024)  
Another Demos pamphlet whose saving grace is that it quotes from real, live cases which 
 prove its argument “So the limitations of the current approach to public service 
delivery have become more and more apparent by the day; yet we have failed to transition,
 at least at a national level, to a new operating model for public services. 
We believe one reason why is the lack of a credible, coherent and complete alternative. 
This report seeks to define this alternative and, crucially, to show its rigorous 
intellectual foundations and how it coheres as a system. 
In doing so, we are greatly indebted to other recent attempts to develop the concept 
of a ‘new paradigm’ in public services, both at Demos and elsewhere, including the 
Centre for Impact, Collaborate CIC, the IPPR, New Local, the RSA and many others, 
not least Hilary Cottam”. 

Diamond’s “Hyperactive Incrementalism” is an article reflecting on the 
British State’s inclination for reform

The Return of Political Patronage? How special advisers are taking the 
place of civil servants and why we should worry about it Al Palmer (2015)
Should be read with the above.

 
Elites and Democracy Hugo Drochon (2026) Given my interest in elite 
theory this book seems just up my street. These are the contents -

Introduction 1

I: Elite Theory 4

II: Democratic Theory 7

III: Dynamic Democracy 11

Movement 12

Dynamism 17

Regimes 25

Pessimism 28

IV: Book Structure 36

1 Mosca and the Ruling Class 39

I: Sicily 45

II: Making Italians 52

III: The Ruling Class I 58

IV: The Ruling Class II 69

Conclusion: Dynamic Democracy 78

2 Pareto and the Circulation of Elites 82

I: France, Italy 88

II: Lausanne, Economics 94

III: The Application 98

IV: The Treatise 101

V: The Transformation of Democracy 112

VI: Fascism 116

Conclusion: Dynamic Democracy 120

3 Michels and the Iron Law of Oligarchy 122

I: Germany, France, Italy 123

II: The Iron Law 128

III: Michels and Weber 133

IV: Michels and Mussolini 138

V: Democracy’s Two Palliatives 141

VI: Dynamic Democracy 145

Conclusion 149

4 Schumpeter and Elite Competition 154

I: Elite Competition 158

II: Economic Competition 163

III: Economic Democracy 166

IV: The Conditions of Minimalism 168

V: Pareto 172

Conclusion: Dynamic, Transformative and Oppositional Democracy 174

5 Dahl and Mills, Polyarchy or Power Elite? 182

I: The Power Elite 188

II: Minorities Rule 192

III: Conspiracy Theories 195

IV: Muncie or New Haven? 199

V: Radical or Conservative? 202

VI: Mosca, Pareto or Michels? 206

Conclusion 209

6 Aron and Divided Elites 212

I: Machiavellians 216

II: Pareto and Burnham 220

III: Divided and Unified Elites 224

IV: Political Sociology 226

V: The Centre Raymond Aron 230

Conclusion 236

The Strategists – Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler – how war made them and how they made war Phillips O’Brien (2024)

O’Brien is an American contemporary commentator on war now working in Scottish Universities

The Death of Consensus – 100 years of political nightmares Phil Tinline (2022)

The consensus whose death we’ll trace in Part One had long roots in orthodox Victorian economics. We’ll start with how it hit a huge financial crisis in 1931. Then we’ll trace the fourteen-year struggle that followed, until a new consensus was secured in the wake of the Second World War.

In Part Two, we’ll explore how that post-war consensus began to break down in the industrial strife of the late 1960s—and how politicians repeatedly struggled to remake the old compromise with the unions, until Thatcherism overwhelmed them.

Then, in Part Three, we’ll follow what has happened since the consensus established by Margaret Thatcher was riddled with fissures by the 2008 Crash. This, of course, is still unfolding, so our story here is more provisional. And each of these three periods is very different. But within each of them, I think a process is discernible. Stripped down to essentials, it

might run something like this:

There is a political consensus, based on a taboo: some nightmarish thing that must not be allowed to happen. Perhaps it is happening in another country, or has happened in our own past. The taboo enables the development of what you might call a ‘concentration of power’, a group whose interests it protects. The death of consensus begins when a crisis strikes, and the existing solutions no longer seem to work. At this point, the existing system can only be kept going with a blatant assertion of dominance by those holding that concentrated power, forcing people to choose whether they still support it.

Those for whom the crisis is a worse nightmare try to fight the concentration of power, but it’s a hopeless struggle. While the old nightmare prevails, it blocks politicians from trying anything radically new.

Opposition to the concentration of power eventually puts the taboo under intolerable pressure, but even then it proves impossible to dislodge, precisely because it is secured in place by fear. This impasse plunges politics into flux and crisis, as the realisation that the old ways no longer work edges closer to the heart of power, yet every alternative still seems unthinkable. Every road leads to a nightmare.

Amid all this, leaders struggle to reinvent the consensus model—their only safe option. But this cannot last. More and more people decide that one of those alternatives might actually be worse than the existing taboo, the old nightmare still governing the limits of politics. Finally, through a new crisis, or a shift in public mood, the breakpoint comes. With the old taboo no longer protecting it, the old concentration of power is exposed to a much more effective challenge. Leaders still hemmed in by the old fears start to look weak and out of time, next to the once marginal figures who step forward to fight them, break the taboo, and take power.

The incoming leaders have a new story to tell about what has gone so terribly wrong, and about the weakness—and treachery—of the old leaders. This marks a sharp break with the past. The way through to a new democratic consensus at last becomes clear: it comes once enough people accept the newly dominant nightmare, the new ‘thing to which we must never go back’. 

Of course, it doesn’t happen exactly this way. There is no precise template, and none of this is to suggest that history is somehow circular. These steps have not necessarily happened in exactly this order. Sometimes they have happened more than once. One major difference is that in 1931–45, the breakpoint was caused by an external threat (Nazi attack, and war), whereas in 1968–85, it sprang from internal conflict (between government and trade unions). It is hardly surprising, however, that societies move through periods of relative consensus and relative crisis, rather as economies move through phases of growth and recession. Nor is it so strange that this process, as it has played out across Britain’s first century of mass democracy, does show some consistent patterns, which may help us understand our current predicaments. To trace how all this played out in messy reality, let’s try looking at British democracy from a fresh angle. We will track a series of people who played a major role as leading politicians in the 1970s: Labour’s Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle and Michael Foot, and Conservatives Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham), Keith Joseph and Edward Heath. But we will meet them first as youngsters in the 1930s, as they participated in that process of consensus change; at first from the margins, and then more decisively. We will see how they were shaped by the process too—particularly through their relationship with the nightmare of mass unemployment. So, as we follow the story of consensus from 1931 to 1945, we will trace a series of remarkable connections, from the teenage Harold Wilson’s reverence for the Labour defector Philip Snowden, to the far-left political debuts of the twenty-something Barbara Castle and Michael Foot, at the side of the upper-class firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps. We will move from the student Keith Joseph’s encounter with Yorkshire miners to the young Edward Heath and Quintin Hogg fighting over appeasement. Only then will we jump forwards to the 1960s and 1970s, to trace how memories of the unemployment nightmare of the 1930s shaped these individuals’ actions in the governments they ran. We’ll follow the increasingly desperate attempts by Wilson, Castle, Foot and even Heath to reinvent and rescue the old consensus, and Keith Joseph’s effort to replace it. Finally, we will jump again, to the period from the 2008 Crash, via the travails of the Big Society, Red Tories and Blue Labour, through the Brexit wars, to Covid and ‘levelling up’. And as we do so, we’ll trace what the 1930s and the 1970s can tell us about today’s struggles and nightmares—about our own experience of the death of consensus, and what might be coming next.

Blood and Iron – the rise and fall of the German empire from 1871-1918 Katja Hoyer (2021) An important analysis from this Anglo-German historian

And more books for your study

 George Scialabba is one of America’s greatest writers – despite being a retired building manager at Harvard University. Two of his most recent books were picked up on the internet by yours truly and can be found here -

• The Sealed Envelope – toward an intelligent utopia George Scialabba (2026) His thoughts on such writers as John Gray, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Barbara Ehrenreich, William Bucley and Jonathan Haidt

• Only a Voice - essays George Scialabba (2023) The contents sheet read thus - 

Introduction: What Are Intellectuals Good For?

PART I. THE PROBLEM WITH PROGRESS

1 Progress and Prejudice

2 The Workingman’s Friend: Adam Smith

3 Are We All Liberals Now? Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine

4 Shipwrecked: D. H. Lawrence

5 The Radicalism of Tradition: T. S. Eliot

6 Agonizing: Isaiah Berlin

7 Still Enlightening after All These Years: Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin

8 A Whole World of Heroes: Christopher Lasch

9 The Wages of Original Sin: Philip Rieff

10 Against Everything: Ivan Illich

11 Back to the Land? Wendell Berry

12 Preserving the Self: Matthew Crawford

13 Last Men and Women

PART II. THE LEFT

14 South of Eden: Leonardo Sciascia

15 A Critical Life: Irving Howe

16 The Common Fate: Victor Serge

17 A Conservative-Liberal Socialist: Leszek Kołakowski

18 Yes to Sex: Ellen Willis

19 How (and How Not) to Change the World

PART III. THE ROLE OF THE CRITIC

20 The Promise of an American Life: Randolph Bourne

21 An Exemplary Amateur: Dwight Macdonald

22 The Liberal Intelligence: Lionel Trilling

23 Just a Journalist: Edmund Wilson

24 An Enemy of the State: I. F. Stone

25 People Who Influence Influential People Are the Most Influential

People in the World: New Republic

26 Living by Ideas: Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball

27 Fearless: Pier Paolo Pasolini

28 The Price of Selfhood: Vivian Gornick

Shared Prosperity for a Fractured World – a new economics for the middle
 class, the global poor and our climate Dani Rodrik (2025)

We want to live in societies that are free, a world without poverty, and a climate that is hospitable. We want, in brief, democracy, prosperity, and sustainability. How can we achieve all three, in a global economy that has become more conflictual, is rapidly moving away from its previously established norms and arrangements, and faces a fragile geopolitical context marked by US-China rivalry?

How can we render them compatible, when so many policy currents are at cross-purposes, moving us away from the other goals even when they appear to advance one of them? These are the questions that lie at the heart of this book.

Poverty – by America Matthew Desmond (2023)

Why is there so much poverty in America? I wrote this book because I needed an answer to that question. For most of my adult life, I have researched and reported on poverty. I have lived in very poor neighborhoods, spent time with people living in poverty around the country, pored over statistical studies and government reports, listened to and learned from community organizers and union reps, drafted public policy, read up on the history of the welfare state and city planning and American racism, and taught courses on inequality at two universities. But even after all that, I still felt that I lacked a fundamental theory of the problem, a clear and convincing case as to why there is so much hardship in this land of abundance.

Putting Civil Society in its Place Bob Jessop (2022) Jessop is not the easiest of reads and this is his latest

A Scotsman Abroad  Ronald Mackay (2016) 
A fascinating account of a philolog’s stay in Romania in the late 1960s
Non-Violence – a history beyond the myth Domenico Losurdo (2015) 

Introduction: From the Broken Promises of Perpetual Peace to Non-Violence.

1 Christian Abolitionism and Pacifism in the United States 7

2 From Pacifist Abolitionism to Gandhi and Tolstoy 21

3 Gandhi and the Socialist Movement: Violence as Discrimination? 47

4 The Anti-Colonialist Movement, Lenin’s Party, and Gandhi’s Party 77

5 Non-Violence in the Face of Fascism and the Second World War 93

6 Martin Luther King as the “Black Gandhi” and Afro-American Radicalism 111

7 Gandhi’s Global Reputation and the Construction of the Non-Violent Pantheon 147

8 From Gandhi to the Dalai Lama? 159

9 “Non-Violence,” “Color Revolutions,” and the Great Game 191

10 A Realistic Non-Violence in a World Prey to Nuclear Catastrophe 205

Contention and Democracy in Europe 1650-2000 Charles Tilly (2004)

Censorship in Romania Lidia Vianu (1998) 
Lidia Vianu is a University Professor here in Bucharest who has established a 
strong reputation as a translator of English and sponsor of many publications 
of which this is one. It deals with a range of writers who suffered from censorship 
during the communist regime – such as Nina Cassian, Mircea Dinescu, Ana 
Blandiana and Marin Sorescu.

More Reading

For the third month running, the clicks have hit more than 100,000 and threaten to be more than the 154k of last month!

As I insert a list of the books I’ve been reading in recent days, I thought it would 
be useful to remind people of what you gain from reading – and this post puts it 
rather nicely

The Complete Notebooks Albert Camus (2025)
Camus was not only a famous French writer – author of L’Etranger – but the 
keeper of notebooks in which he scribbled his thoughts on various matters, 
including other booksThe Fight of Our Lives – my time with Zelensky, Ukraine’s battle for democracy 
and what it means for the world Iuliia Mendel (2022)
A book by someone who was Press Sec to Zelensky for a couple of years (just before 
the Russian invasion of the country) which is very positive about the experience but 
has now turned into one of Zelensky’s sharpest critics but spoiled by petty wrangling 
amongst the press corpsNotes from an Apocalypse – a personal journey to the end of the world and back 
Mark O’Connell (2020) I’m always a sucker for books about journeys and this is no exception – being a text 
about one man’s coping with climate change. Be warned, it’s a bit journalistic. Let’s 
start with the intro -
This book is about the idea of the apocalypse, but it is also about the reality of 
anxiety. 
In this sense, everything in these pages exists as a metaphor for a psychological state. 
Everything reflects an intimate crisis and an effort at resolving it. I went out into 
the world because I was interested in the world, but I was interested in the world 
because I was preoccupied with myself. 
A final disclaimer: though this book might seem to be about the future, its true 
concern is the present moment. I offer no visions of what the future might be like
—partly because I claim no authority from which to do so, but mostly because the 
future interests me only as a lens through which to view our own time: its terrors, 
its neuroses, its strange fevers. 
Either we are alive in the last days or we are not, but the inarguable thing in any 
case, the interesting thing, is that we are alive.
The text then starts with the preppers with a trip to the Chernobyl disaster zone thrown 
in for good measure

Navigating the Polycrisis – mapping the futures of capitalism and of the earth 
Michael Albert (2024). Not so sure about this book, having read the introduction. 
Its a bit too academic for my taste – see, for example, this excerpt - 
The key goals of the theoretical framework that I call “plan­etary systems thinking.” 
This approach falls under the broad umbrella of what is often called “complexity theory.” 
But we should emphasize that there is not one single form of complexity theory, 
but rather a set of related approaches aiming to transcend the analytic reductionism, 
disci­plinary isolationism, human/nature dualisms, and assumptions of linear change 
and causality that dominate the Newtonian scientific worldview. 
Planetary systems thinking can thus be considered a variant of complex­ity theory—
one that is particularly inspired by world-systems theory, eco­logical Marxism, 
Manuel Delanda’s framework of “assemblage theory,” Edgar Morin’s notion of 
“planetary thinking,” and the neo-Gramscian “complex hegemony” approach 
developed by Alex Williams. 

Planetary systems thinking is the subject of chapter 3, but for now I’ll briefly 
elabo­rate two of the key concepts that form the foundation of this approach. 
The first is the concept of a complex system: an open and dynamic system that 
emerges from a set of feedbacks between component parts but with­out negating 
the autonomy of the parts. Rather than the closed or tightly controlled homeostatic 
systems conceived in the traditions of cybernetics, Parsonian social theory, and 
Hegelian Marxism, complex systems should be understood as open systems 
or “dissipative structures” that are con­tinuously exchanging matter and energy with 
their surrounding environ­ments. They exhibit provisional and often fragile forms of 
stability that are reproduced through negative feedback mechanisms, though they 
are able to rapidly shift between alternative states in response to external shocks 
or slow shifts in key system parameters. Complex systems also range on a spectrum 
of systematicity from more heterogeneous and net­worked “assemblages” on one 
side, in which the parts retain a high degree autonomy (eg ecosystems) to more 
tightly integrated and hierarchically ordered systems on the other (eg biological 
organisms). Throughout this book I often use the term assemblage to refer to 
complex systems that are on the more loosely integrated and heterogeneous side 
of the spectrum (such as when I speak of security and ideological assemblages). 
But all complex systems in reality fall somewhere between these two poles, and 
over time they may shift in one direction or other. The capitalist world-system, 
for instance, became a more tightly integrated global system dur­ing the 
corporate-led hyperglobalization drive of the 1990s, though rising geopolitical 
tensions and calls for “decoupling” between the US and Chi­nese economies may 
be starting to reverse this trend. The second key concept is less familiar but equally 
important to the argument of this book as a whole. 
This is the concept of the problematic, which refers to a nexus of problems that 
shape and constrain the possible trajectories of a complex system. 
My use of this concept comes from the work of Manuel Delanda though he borrows 
it from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I am interested in how Delanda’s reworking 
of this con­cept can deepen our understanding of the widely used but undertheorized 
notion of “problematique.” The Club of Rome, for instance, in its infamous Limits to 
Growth report spoke of a “World Problematique”: a conjunction of intersecting 
ecological and economic problems that constrains the possible trajectories of the 
world-system. As William Watts wrote in his foreword to the report, “We continue to 
examine single items in the problematique without understanding that the whole is 
more than the sum of its parts, that change in one element means change in the 
others.” 
Edgar Morin shares this notion of problematique when he writes that there 
“is no single vital problem, but many vital problems, and it is this complex 
intersolidar­ity of problems, antagonisms, crises, uncontrolled processes, and the 
gen­eral crisis of the planet that constitutes the number one vital problem.” 
Following Delanda, Morin, and the Club of Rome, the concept of the problematique 
or problematic gives us a way to think about problem-spaces composed of numerous 
reciprocally determining dimensions. This is exactly the sort of concept we need 
to analyze the unfolding polycrisis and understand the constraints it places on the 
possible futures of global capitalism and the earth system. The planetary polycrisis—
or what I later call the “planetary problematic”—is the simultaneously singular and 
mul­tiple crisis that emerges from the interlocking challenges we confront. 
It is the field of problems that collectively structure the future possibility space, 
though the future that ultimately emerges will be determined by struggles between 
competing hegemonic projects to frame, narrate, and pro­vide “solutions” to the 
problematic. Like the Marxist concept of “totality,” the planetary problematic is an 
abstraction that can guide theoretical and empirical analysis, though its substantive 
content can emerge, as in Marx’s method, only by “ascending from the abstract to 
the concrete,” thereby elaborating the problematic as a “rich totality of many 
determinations and relations.” This book will illuminate the intricate architecture 
of the plan­etary problematic in order to inform a counter-hegemonic praxis of 
navi­gation. The point is not to try to include everything in our analysis, but rather 
to highlight the key dimensions of the problematic that are most causally relevant 
to the planetary future, analyze the positive and negative feedbacks between them, 
and explore future trajectories that are “coher­ent” in the sense of following the 
feedback structure that entangles them. 

More Books

Navigating the Polycrisis – mapping the futures of capitalism and of the earth Michael Albert (2024) I thought this was by the famous political scientist who wrote about participatory democracy but it turns out to be by a British environmentalist from London who has recently been appointed by the University of Edinburgh. Well worth the read...

The 2020s have gotten off to a rocky start (to put it mildly). Words like “permacrisis” and “polycrisis” have become common currency, reflecting a broadening awareness that ours is an age of interconnected systemic cri­ses with no clear end in sight. The year 2021 was already a year of stress in global energy and food markets, ratcheting geopolitical rivalries, record levels of global military spending, and accumulating risks for the world economy—trends that were all turbocharged by Vladimir Putin’s Febru­ary 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It remains far from certain how these ongo­ing crises will unfold. But we know that deeper challenges loom on the horizon, from the climate and mass extinction crises to future pandemics, “net energy decline” for fossil fuels, an unsustainable and unstable global food system, the brewing new cold war between the United States and China, the simmering specter of far-right populism, the nascent threat of weaponized synthetic biology, and the destabilizing impacts of artificial intelligence on work, war, and human freedom. This book asks where the world-system is headed as a result of these intersecting challenges. It makes three overarching arguments.

• First, I argue that that we must devote more systematic attention to the question of possible futures. “Business-as-usual” will come to an end—whether by choice or by disaster. Thus we need more future-oriented scholarship that can illuminate the possible roads ahead, their branching pathways, the dangers that lurk, and the opportunities that may emerge for progres­sive transformation.

• Second, I argue that to illuminate the space of possible planetary futures, we need a holistic approach that highlights the relations and feedbacks between the numerous challenges that compose our planetary predicament. As more and more analysts recognize, we confront not simply a climate crisis, nor simply a collection of numer­ous isolatable problems that can be studied by separate disciplines, but rather a “polycrisis” or nexus of reciprocally entwined crises character­ized by complex feedback loops, blurred boundaries, cascade effects, and (in many cases) mutual amplification.

• Third, I argue that a theoretical framework informed by complexity theory and world-systems theory can provide a new form of critical-futures analysis capable of grappling with the polycrisis condition. But the point here is not to claim superi­ority for a single theoretical approach, but rather to develop a concep­tual framework that can facilitate synthesis across numerous disciplines and theoretical traditions—including international relations (IR), critical political economy, ecological economics, energy studies, the earth system sciences, critical security studies, and many others.

The goal of this book is thus to develop a new way of thinking about planetary futures that can help us create more useful and comprehen­sive maps of the possibility space. Such an approach must be planetary in scope, voraciously synthetic, and utterly indifferent toward disciplin­ary boundaries. In a word, it must be “transdisciplinary,” in the sense of pragmatist scholarship that emerges directly from problems in the world demanding response (rather than from stale disciplinary debates) and that synthesizes knowledge across numerous disciplinary, theoretical, and methodological traditions.

In this sense, as Sanders van der Leeuw writes, transdisciplinary research analyzes “that which is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond each indi­vidual discipline.” Transdisciplinary research has its risks (as I elaborate below). But it is also the necessary precondition of rigorous futures analysis that can inform contemporary strategies for progressive socioecologi­cal transformation. As the late Immanuel Wallerstein wrote more than forty years ago, our “ability to participate intelligently in the evolution” of the world-system is “dependent on [our] ability to perceive the whole. The more difficult we acknowledge the task to be, the more urgent it is that we start sooner rather than later.” In short, if we think the task is daunting, this is all the more reason to get started now.

Adam Smith’s America – how a Scottish philosopher became an icon of America 
Gloria Liu (2022)

Smith’s reputation as an economist is towering. Economists across different subfields have laid claim to Smith’s legacy in behavioral economics, development economics, “mainline” economics, and most recently “humanomics.” The Wealth of Nations has been assigned on over 5,000 college syllabi nationwide, primarily in economics, but also in history, political science, business, philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, religion, and law. In 2021, The Wealth of Nations ranked forty-fourth among millions of books assigned in college courses, putting it ahead of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and even Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Meanwhile, Smith’s first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ranked far below, appearing on just over 1,000 syllabi

Despite all this, a persistent theme of Smith scholarship of the last several decades has been that Adam Smith was not an economist, or at least not merely an economist. Rather, he is remembered as an ambitious social scientist of the Enlightenment, whose The Wealth of Nations was but one part of a larger “science of man.” This science sought to reveal and explain the hidden forces that governed human behavior and human society. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, seventeen years before The Wealth of Nations, Smith explored how and why people learn moral behavior through the process of imaginative projection and sympathetic exchange. Smith also planned a work on the general principles of law and government, as well as a history of literature, philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric, both of which he never completed and ultimately had destroyed before his death in 1790. However, Smith did save a few essays for posthumous publication. Moreover, with the later discovery of student notebooks in 1895 and 1958, readers have been able to access Smith’s lost ideas as they were recorded by his students in his lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence. Today, readers can appreciate the immense range of Smith’s teaching and writings, which were not limited only to economics and moral philosophy, but also included topics such as theories of language, polite learning, the history of science, literary and artistic criticism, poetry, law, and government. Given the breadth and richness of Smith’s oeuvre, it is hardly surprising that intellectual historians, political theorists, and social scientists often complain that distorted notions of self-interest, free markets, and “the invisible hand” have eclipsed Smith’s moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and more, and that Smith has become little more than an emblem for think tanks or a historical sound bite in textbooks. Yet few scholars have asked—let alone answered—the question of how and why these reductive, sloganized, and often politicized versions of Smith came about in the first place. This book is about who Adam Smith was and who he became in America. It charts how Americans have read, taught, debated, and used Smith’s ideas throughout history. It shows how Smith’s reputation as the “father of economics” is an historical invention and that the foundational status of The Wealth of Nations is a belated construction. More importantly, though, this book tries to make sense of the political work that engaging with Smith has done throughout history and what the implications for our political and economic thinking are. Repeated contestation over Smith’s original intentions, his method, and the contemporary import of his ideas has provided opportunities for past and present readers to define the relationship between ethics and economics, between politics and the economy, between past thought and present action.

Weimar – life on the edge of catastrophe  Katja Hoyer (2026)
Hoyer is an anglo-german historian and here evokes the reality of life in a 
German town from the start of WW1Fool’s Gold – how the bold dream of a small tribe at JP Morgan was corrupted 
by Wall Street Greed and unleashed a catastrophe Gillian Tett (2009) 
This by the famous financial journalist who just happens to be an 
anthropologist

The story of the great credit boom and bust is not a saga that can be

neatly blamed on a few greedy or evil individuals. It is a story of how an

entire financial system went wrong as a result of flawed incentives within

banks and investment funds, as well as the ratings agencies; warped

regulatory structures; and a lack of oversight. It is a tale best understood

through the observation of human foibles, as much through economic or

financial analysis. And though plenty of greedy bankers—and perhaps a

few mad, or evil, ones, too—play crucial parts in the drama, the tragedy of

this story is that so many of those swept up in the lunacy were not acting

out of deliberately bad motives.

On the contrary, in the case of the J.P. Morgan team members who form

the backbone of this tale, the bitter irony is that they first developed their

derivatives ideas in the hope that they would be good for the financial

system (as well, of course, for their bank and their bonuses). Even today,

after all the devastation, some of the tools and innovations developed

during the credit boom should be seen as potentially valuable for twentyfirst-

century finance. In order to understand how that could be, though, a

deep understanding of how and precisely why they came to be so abused is

vital. I offer this journey through the story as one attempt to begin to come

to grips with the answers to that crucial question

A Few More Books to Tempt You

Adam Przeworski was born in Poland and has become one of the US's most famous political scientists - here he was interviewed in 2003 by Gerardo Munck  

The Insatiable Machine – how capitalism conquered the world Trevor Jackson 
(2026) reviewed in Jacobin here 
This book is a history of the economic system that we call capitalism. 
It explains the origins, spread, and internal dynamics of this system, with the 
intention of explaining to nonexperts how the world we live in got to be the way it is. 
The book’s scope is the subset of the world economy that can reasonably be 
termed “capitalist,” beginning in dispersed and sporadic parts of the Atlantic world 
in the 16th century and continuing until the global dominance of capitalism 
at the onset of the 20th. In other words, it begins roughly during the life of 
Martin Luther and ends during the life of Vladimir Lenin, and it will use each of them 
(Luther in 1517, Lenin in 1917, and with Isaac Newton in the middle in 1717) 
as an illustrative example of how the global economy changed over the course 
of centuries. This is a book about where capitalism came from, 
how it spread around the world, and how it came to be the dominant way of 
organizing human life. There are good reasons to tell this history again, 
and in a new way. The first is the simple fact that capitalism is the economic 
system we live in today: It spans more of the globe and encompasses more 
aspects of human life than any economic system ever has before. 
Since at least the 2008 crisis, there has been an increasing sense that it may 
have gotten out of control and might now threaten democracy, society, 
the environment, and the habitability of the planet. 
But unlike countries, people, or events, capitalism is an abstraction with 
no agreed-upon definition and no physical location. There is no single place 
to find it, or single person in charge of it, and no single way to understand or 
study it. So how do we tell the story of capitalism? 
The place to start is to think about capital, and capitalists, which is a form of 
power and group of people distinctive to capitalism. 
Over the past half millennium, capitalists have been among the most 
important agents of change in human history, and capital has been the central 
tool they have used to transform the world. 
Historians care a great deal about agency, by which they mean the ability 
of people to effect change in the world. Agency is closely related to power: 
In order to change something, someone must have the power to do so. Artificial Intelligence, Politics and Political Science ed Tucker and 
Persily (2026)

At the time that I launched the Task Force, my untested hypothesis was that political scientists had sorted into three “cultures” on AI. The first being a culture of embrace among those early andeager adopters who took to AI models and tools like a five-year old to their first Lego set. The second being a culture of denial among the Never AI-ers, who would just as eagerly teletransport to an alternate universe where AI did not exist and where its future discovery would be unimaginable. And the third, probably biggest, being a bloated middle culture of those who are infelicitously torn on alternate days between being AI-curious and AI-skeptical, who have dipped their toes into its potential but are not ready to fully reckon with the scope of change that AI portends.

In his essay, C.P. Snow entreated a closing of the gap between cultures so that the pressing problem of his time – global inequality – might be tackled together. In the interceding decades since his essay, global inequality has only deepened. To that wicked problem we now add newer menacing threats from polarized polities and backsliding democracies to the fragmentation of shared facts and the existential threats from climate change, all in a changing political environment of diminishing public investments in knowledge and research. AI may ameliorate these threats, or it may aggravate and accelerate them. What is clear in any scenario is that AI is upon us and that AI will impact our ability to teach, research, and learn about any of these pressing problems.

My aspirations for the Task Force were thus to agenda-set for a reckoning between cultures in political science on AI. Concretely, I hoped to extract from the collective wisdom of Task Force members an empirical foundation and a set of apposite tools and theories to meet AI’s challenges and opportunities. This volume far exceeds my highest expectations. Readers will of course judge for themselves. What should nonetheless be clear by any generous reading is that Persily and Tucker have masterfully orchestrated a remarkably broad and insightful set of contributions that will inform all of us on how AI may alter how we study politics, how we teach about politics, and what politics itself will look like.

Then a change of mood – with a youtube interlude - Berlin in 1933 – 
through the eyes of diplomats

Carbon Democracy – political power in the age of oil Timothy Mitchell (2011)
 reviewed in 3 journals here, here and here

Beyond the Wall – East Germany 1949-90 Katja Hoyer (2022) 
Katja is an East German historian who has made her mark in both Britain 
and Germany with her writing

An Education – my life might have turned out differently if I had just said no 
Lynn Barber (2009) A celebrity journalist now in here 70s tells all

Jobs for the Boys – patronage and the state Merilee Grindle (2018)

Methods of appointments to public office seem a dull focus for a book about the politics of change. Yet how public servants are recruited, how their careers unfold, and how they think about their jobs are central to the historical evolution of countries around the globe and to the conflicts that punctuate and shape that evolution. Kings and parliaments, politicians and their parties, reformers and moralists, demo crats and authoritarians have, throughout history, struggled to control how public offi ce was acquired and used. Their conflicts shaped institutions of governance in widely divergent circumstances and help explain the differences among them. Far from dull, these struggles are intriguing; they are also consequential for states.

This book is about these struggles. It considers how patronage, as a mechanism for staffing the public service, was important in the histories of a variety of countries but also how these systems were challenged and, at times, replaced by those who sought to institutionalize Weberian civil ser vice systems. Research and reflection about these issues address a number of themes that have been of interest to me in prior work— patronage and its uses in government, the role of institutions in shaping the way po liti cal decisions are made and the content of those decisions, and the pro cesses that account for institutional creation or innovation.

Long ago, I studied how a finely constructed patronage system in Mexico was an essential factor in promoting policy change and accomplishing some of the modern activities of government, even while it buoyed an unjust political system and encouraged corrupt behavior (see Grindle 1977). Over the years, I have seen how patronage systems in other Latin American countries are critically important in electoral dynamics, policy change initiatives, regime stability and failure, organi zational trajectories, and concerns about corruption and mismanagement. In writing this book, I have had the opportunity to study a series of initiatives to replace such institutions with merit- based civil service systems. Manichean rhetoric often accompanies these efforts at reform, making them seem essential and even inevitable, yet patronage systems resist change with remarkable consistency.

I have tried to understand such struggles against the background of countries that were— eventually—successful in altering the institutions that manage recruitment to the public sector. In doing so, similarities across countries in terms of how change happens became as evident as the differences among them in how legacies of the past colored what was possible in introducing reform. This work suggests some ideas about why institutional change often does not happen, why and when it sometimes does, and how winners and losers grapple over the shape of change long after major policy decisions have been made.

Jobs for the Boys considers the ubiquity and flexibility of patronage systems in the public ser vice of a signifi cant number of countries, explores the historical process through which they have been replaced by meritbased civil ser vice systems, and attests to ongoing struggles over how the public ser vice is or ga nized and managed. It takes a historical and processoriented perspective on how systems work and how they change. It makes a claim for the primacy of politics in the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of systems of appointment to public office.

Thus, in contrast to what is often discussed in technical and administrative language— the language of job descriptions, pay scales, criteria for promotion, conditions for dismissal and retirement, rights to pensions and benefi ts, mechanisms of control and delegation, bud get constraints— I focus attention on larger themes of the persis tence, change, and consequences of institutions of governance and on the struggles between advocates of change and those who seek to undermine reform initiatives. My purpose is to explore what we can learn from history and how that knowledge might help in understanding contemporary efforts to alter institutional parameters in government.