First off, the comment thread to the part 1 resulted in something of an informal pomocon booklist. Here are a few of the more interesting recent titles from it, IMO:
Richard Velkley, Heidegger, Strauss, and the Premises of Political Philosophy
Richard McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates
Let’s have some more, dear readers, por favor? Meantime, I’ll say some more on my selections:
9) Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi
Not as immediately engaging as Anna Funder’s Stasiland, but gives you a much better picture of the organization. Bruce did extensive research, including the sorts of interviews of ex-Stasi agents, and their victims, that Funder’s book featured, focusing in on just two regional Stasi offices. Mentioning it reminds me to let you know that my and Flagg Taylor’s edited collection on the must-see film The Lives of Others, has been given the go-ahead, and so you will likely see the book within a year’s time. Meantime, the best theory-oriented book on communism of late is Flagg Taylor’s edited collection The Great Lie.
10) Pete Townshend, Who I Am
This was in the “pretty bad book” category. Yes, you will wind up agreeing that Pete was wrongly accused in and portrayed by the press on the child-pornography purchasing charges, and this perhaps was his main motive for writing it, but the big result is that you will find yourself wondering where the man behind the “thinking man’s rock band” is. Or, if this is the real guy, how he ever got a reputation for being so thoughtful. Very little insight into the music scene swirling around him, and very old baby-boomerish rock attitudes about lots of things, such as how profound Tommy and Quadrophenia are. You learn things here and there about the music, such as the importance of performance for The Who, and why the demand for that was the real impetus behind the Tommy-esque pattern of the 70s. You see why Live at Leeds is really the pivotal Who album, from this perspective. I have fond memories of that album, and this hard-rock-justifying perspective makes some sense, but I’ve issues with the post-Tommy Who, as I laid out here.
Pete also reveals that the groupie appetite of his fellows, especially Keith and John, was limitless, while displaying an odd and annoying desire to discuss his own sexual conquests one by one by one into one affair after another, particularly after he gave up on his marriage sometime in the mid-70s. Weirdly tone-deaf, and depressing, really. You just come away thinking much less of the man…which is not what the more successful Keith Richards bio does to you, for example. Maybe heroin is better for you than being declared the thinker of big rock thoughts.
11) David Mayer, Liberty of Contract: Rediscovering a Lost Constitutional Right
Libertarian theorists of the purist sort (think: Nozick) either make me laugh or retch, libertarian economists, at least once they get beyond the Hayekian basics, are above my pay grade, but I think libertarian constitutional law scholars are AWESOME. Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, David Bernstein, and this guy. I typically don’t agree with their most fundamental points, but I’m always shifting my feet, admitting they have a point here and there, and getting nervous. A more readable book on the key issue here, whether the 14th amendment really contains a right to contract in its protection of liberty, a la the majority opinion in Lochner, is Bernstein’s Rehabilitating Lochner. But that book is ultimately too limited in scope to get you seriously wrestling with the possibility that Founders and the entire American legal tradition (pre-30s)really had a place for right-of-contract protecting “substantive due process.” Will Mayer convince me? Stay tuned…I don’t think so, but only have read a third of this.
12) Alan Gibson, Understanding the Founding, 2nd edition
The reason you want the 2nd edition is that it contains a chapter that partially refutes the over-vindication the Founders and especially TJ on the slavery question in the essential Vindicating the Founders by Thomas West. (In doing so he also takes apart the main over-prosecutor of TJ, Paul Finkelman. While he presents it as an even-handed rejection of both, West comes off far better.)
Gibson is a review-the-scholarship guy, and with respect to the Founding, given the interaction of both historians and political scientists, such work is really needed. His most necessary work on that score is the shorter book Interpreting the Founding, do start there, but this one is more free-wheeling, indulging in a re-examination of the Charles Beard here, and in a summary of our Jim Ceaser’s “foundational ideas” approach there. Much to benefit from.
January 21st, 2013 | 7:31 pm
Good take on Who I Am. There was little noteworthy in it on the music scene or the times. I saw Townshend on Morning Joe and he said more of interest there regarding his generation in relation to those earlier, the impact of the 60s than he did in the book. I read about half of it (up thru the Quadrophenia parts), and found little insight.
His manner of describing his sex life was off putting. And while I don’t think he was guilty of any crime regarding the whole child pornography thing, he didn’t give an adequate account of it. Is Keith Richards’ Life really worth reading (i.e., if you enjoy rock memoirs)?
I guess I’ll have to look at the 2nd ed. of Gibson’s book. Thee was an interesting exchange on it in Interpretation about two years ago between Gibson and Jerry Weinberger (I think).
January 21st, 2013 | 10:23 pm
We’re in a Progressive-ascendancy era, so we have to do our due diligence. Indispensable readings of the past year, therefore: the Claremont Review of Books 10-year anthology, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, as well as Jean Yarlbrough’s fine study of TR and the American Political Tradition. Limited, of course, by their founders-and-Lincoln-are-perfect normative dogmatism. Hence, the need to read Carey McWilliams’s more expansive (if flawed by anti-framerism) view of America: Redeeming Democracy in America and The Democratic Soul. His “Standing at Armageddon: The Religious and Ethical Views of Progressives” is a nice link with the Claremont position. Two more off-the-beaten-track books: I found Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression, by John Fliter and Derek Hoff surprisingly good, given their own liberal sympathies. All the elements of the issue — federalism, contract clause, state police powers, etc. — are brought in, so one can disagree with their conclusions while learning a lot along the way. And, finally, I reread the two volumes of the Kelly/Harbison/Belz work, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development. A very informative blend of political history and constitutional debate and development. The first two authors were New Deal liberals, Herman Belz is a political conservative who did very good work on the slavery and the Constitution, including Reconstruction; the reworking of the original text by Belz produced a remarkably balanced text. Gibson is very good on laying out the scholarly landscape; Carl’s right, Interpreting is the better book. (BTW: did you see Finkelman’s longish anti-Jefferson, anti-founders, op. ed. in the New York Times a while back? A tissue of half-truths and, especially, omissions masquerading as scholarship-for-the public.)
January 22nd, 2013 | 1:02 am
[...] First off, the comment thread to the part 1 resulted in something of an informal pomocon booklist. Here are a few of the more interesting recent titles from it, IMO: Richard Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 22nd, 2013 | 7:25 am
John, the Richards book is fun and remarkably well-written. That ghost writer was worth his weight in gold. Insightful stuff on the music throughout, and other odds and ends, such as certain police dynamics. It is ultimately more than a bit Polly-Annish–its (strange-to-say-it) sunniness comes from its not brooding on certain issues of responsibility, societal breakdown, the 60s-gone-sour, etc. Richards has no major reflection or apologies to make for his junkie-ism (which we learn was only physically possible because his pop-star riches allowed him to mainly use only the best-grade dope, not the case for 99.5% of junkies) or for the Stones/rock phenom in general.
I will say that read together, the two memoirs indicate that ALMOST FAMOUS if anything downplayed the decadence of the 70s rock scene, and that that was closely connected to the sexual aspect of screamin’ female fans’ Elvismania/Beatlemania which came earlier. Prior to punk, rock really was more about “gettin’ some” than I, for one, had realized.
P.S. If anyone knows of any responses to Richards’s portrayal of what was “normal” with respect to partying and sex in the black communities of the 60s and 70s, let me know.
January 22nd, 2013 | 7:34 am
Oh, and thanks, Paul. Those McWilliams books are really good, and if we really are in an era of “progressive ascendancy,” then the Blaisdell case would be one useful to revisit.
January 22nd, 2013 | 11:13 am
Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada, (trans. for the first time in ’09 or ’10). Based on real events, this is a story about everyday resistance to the Nazis that was greatly admired by Primo Levi.
January 22nd, 2013 | 1:57 pm
In the spirit of Mr. Seaton’s post above, a must read is John Allison’s (new Cato CEO and former CEO of BB&T) book on the financial collapse and its progressivist origins in the affordable housing programs of the 90′s:
http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Crisis-Free-Market-Cure/dp/0071806776/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1358880401&sr=8-1&keywords=john+allison
Allison’s former finance company, BB&T, managed to weather the fiscal collapse just fine posting profits when other institutions like Citi and Bear Stearns were needing a lifeline from the government. Why? Because BB&T operated from an Austrian Economist orientation and understood the inevitable consequences of the affordable housing policies that were being imposed on banking and finance institutions by regulators. Consequently their policy was to limit their exposure to affordable housing type mortgage offerings while still operating within the letter of the law.
Allison gave a terrific talk at AEI, and his stories relating the sorts of things that were occuring on the regulatory level in the finance industry would have made Kafka blush. If you don’t have a chance to read his book, I highly recommend watching his talk at AEI:
http://www.aei.org/events/2012/12/06/culture-of-competition-ceo-series/
January 22nd, 2013 | 3:49 pm
As I’m on the “ignorant youth” side of the spectrum, my past year has mostly been playing catch-up/discovery with “classics.” However, I might as well mention a few notables:
Democracy and Poetry – Robert Penn Warren
If I ever get the chance of focusing a class on the relationship between literature and political thought in the American tradition, I’d certainly include this. I need to read it again to give a more-informed opinion, though my initial thoughts are that Warren’s comments on the self ought to be read along with some of Walker Percy’s essays and Lost in the Cosmos, as well as perhaps Maritain’s chapter on the rise of the self in literary history in his Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry.
Catholicism and Democracy – Emile Perreau-Saussine
I found the central thesis of this work – that Vatican I and II serve as two poles between which the Church oscillates in her relation to liberal democracy – compelling, though I have not made up my mind in agreement/disagreement with it. Definitely worth a read for the political history of Church/State relations in France following the Revolution.
The One Thomas More – Travis Curtright
I began reading this when I was last at Dr. Curtright’s house, but haven’t had the time to continue in my own copy (though I do plan on making that foremost among my reading goals for 2013. While Dr. Wegemer’s A Portrait of Courage and On Statesmanship were good reads for anyone interested in an alternative to current revisionist scholarship regarding More, they were limited in their scope. I’ve high hopes for Dr. Curtright’s work for being more encompassing of More; if it was anything like Dr. Curtright’s class on More, it should be excellent.
January 22nd, 2013 | 4:49 pm
Colin, welcome aboard. We’re all ignorant, just older or younger, more or less aware of the fact. Emile P-S’s book is superb. (I commissioned a review of it for PPS.). Just got the Curtright book but haven’t had the time two read it. Don’t know the Penn Warren book.
January 25th, 2013 | 12:01 pm
[...] Here’s the third and final part of what I began with this 12-book-list. I knew my description of Mishra’s book would be the longest, which is why I changed order to treat it last. Second part here. [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact