| A
superficial balance
China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society,
by Daniel A Bell (PUP)
Like pretty much everywhere else on the planet nowadays,
China is undergoing a cultural malaise triggered by the end of its recent
ideology.
Bill
Durodié
Best
laid plans
Britain's Lost Cities, by Gavin Stamp (Aurum Press)
In the 1960s, ‘local government leader and criminal’
T Dan Smith attempted to transform Newcastle into ‘the Brasilia,
or the Milan, of the North’. As Stamp says, today’s Newcastle
is ‘more like the Croydon of the North’.
Nicky
Charlish
Uncivilised
nation
This is Civilisation, by Matthew Collings (21 Publishing)
In the past, whenever people have failed to change society
for the better, they have nearly always taken to religion to console
themselves. In our more profane times, when similar setbacks occur,
we seek solace in culture or sport instead.
Aidan
Campbell
Joy
without mawkishness
Miracles of Life - Shanghai to Shepperton: an autobiography, by
JG Ballard (Fourth Estate)
Winning a short story competition in the student weekly
newspaper, Varsity, in 1951 steered him from medicine towards writing
– and he wanted to be the sort of writer ‘devoted to predicting
and, if possible, provoking change’.
Nicky
Charlish
Dis
me please
The Disrespect Agenda: or, how the wrong kind of niceness is making
us unhappy, by Lincoln Allison
Just as the government’s Respect Agenda was only lip-service
to being nice to each other and really about reporting each other’s
bad behaviour to reward it with ASBOs, so Allison may talk big about
treating each other as autonomous human beings, but really he is full
of contempt for the wrong kind of people.
Angus
Kennedy
Granta's
second century
Granta 101, edited by Jason Cowley
Much of the coverage of Granta 101 has highlighted the title’s
anachronism at a time when Britain seems to value vacuous celebritism
and disdain anything perceived as ‘intellectual’, worrying
whether such a ‘highbrow’ title can survive without softening
its intimidating stance. Yet surely that is the point.
Dean
Nicholas
Environmentalism's
fig leaf
The
Ethics of Climate Change: right and wrong in a changing world,
by James Garvey (Continuum)
We are asked to engage with Garvey’s view of the world
as culprits. And as culprits, we are asked to stop what we are doing,
and ‘give’ back to the poor what is theirs by some kind
of right. In this relationship, the poor are like puppets that Garvey
uses to act out a kind of morality play to elicit our sympathy –
or guilt - for his cause.
Ben
Pile
An
offside argument
Foul Play: What's Wrong with Sport, by Joe Humphreys (Icon Books)
The book does not fall into the trap of turning sport into
a cause, a trend amongst sports bodies and government policy makers.
It does, however, manifest a particularly nihilistic and fearful attitude
to sporting competition.
Dan
Travis
Demystifying
secularism?
A
Short History of Secularism, by Graeme Smith (IB Tauris)
Smith suggests that ‘because of the radical equality
of Christianity, expressed in the universal notion that all people are
moral agents… then liberalism is but a different form of Christianity’.
The individual relationship with God that characterises Christian thought
thus enables the individual-centred outlook that respects human rights.
Rob
Walsh
Thrills
from arts TV
Vision
on: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain, by John Wyver (Wallflower
Press)
We have populist programming which isn’t popular,
arts programming that is scared of art. What happened? Wyver demonstrates
this shift isn’t simply down to a new generation or a major change
of personnel. Many controllers today were involved in good TV twenty
years ago. Something more profound has taken place.
Tiffany
Jenkins
Wordy
wisdom
What Not To Say: Finding the Right Words at Difficult Moments,
by Mark Vernon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) / Cynical Maxims,
by William Ferraiolo (self-published)
Do you find yourself grappling for the right words in difficult
situations? If so, then the philosophical advice of Mark Vernon may
be of help – if only it could deliver on its promise. Alternatively,
you can reach for William Ferraiolo's collection of incisive and delightful
aphorisms that may just help you to break the ice.
Aiman
Baharna
Not
just a war
War
and Ethics, by Nicholas Fotion (Continuum)
Fotion’s approach to Just War Theory risks reducing
it to little more than a checklist, so that decisions about whether
or not to risk mass death become a kind of box-ticking exercise. This
stops Fotion from really sinking his weapons into the ethical conundrums
he proposes, so that the book poses more questions than it answers.
Amol
Rajan
The
most disappointing generation ever produced?
1968ers
from the Barricades to Baghdad
The ‘68ers’ failure to lead a revolution in
the West was followed in the 1970s by the failure or corruption of many
causes they held so dear in the Third World. The end of the Vietnam
War took much of the wind out of the sails of the American ‘68ers,
many of whom were more interested in dodging the draft than fighting
imperialism.
Lee
Jones
Ali
Shari’ati: between Marx and the Infinite
An
Islamic Utopian, by Ali Rahnema (IB Tauris)
Is Ali Shari’ati, the so-called ideologue of the Iranian
Revolution, a poster boy for a utopian Islamic left, lost but not forgotten?
Or is his legacy rather an allegory of good intentions gone awry and
the irresponsibility of pursuing an exotic Leninist eclecticism at the
edge of unreason?
Nathan
Coombs
Like
imperialism? Love sharia
The
Fall
and
Rise of the Islamic State,
by Noah Feldman (Princeton University Press)
What is of course excluded from this entire discussion is
any reference to the most defining discourse in the Middle East: anti-imperialism.
Nathan
Coombs
Urbanisation
without industrialisation
Planet of the Slums, by Mike Davis
Excremental surplus, Davis argues, is the primordial urban
contradiction. Even eight generations after Engels’ depiction
of latrines in working class Manchester, shit still cakes the lives
of the urban poor—‘a virtual objectification of their social
condition, their place in society’, Davis quotes another urban
theorist.
George
Hoare
Social
circuitry
Love + Sex with Robots: the evolution of human-robot relationships,
by David Levy
Levy’s book poses interesting questions – why
do humans tend to gender their objects? Or think their computers have
personalities? But rather than engaging with the why and how of these
issues, he simply takes their existence as further evidence for the
inevitably of human-robot affairs.
Kathleen
Richardson
Crazy
women?
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800,
by Lisa Appignanesi
A
second line of argument implied in this work is the shift away from
the notion of human responsibility. With the rise of secularism that
parallels the rise of the mind doctors, bad or criminal behaviour is
increasingly ‘explained’ in diagnostic, morally neutral
terms. Science is made to do the work of social control and perfectibility.
Rob
Weatherill
You
won't fool the children of the 'revolution'
Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy: Corporate PR and the Assault on Democracy,
edited by William Dinan and David Miller
The
‘follow the money’ line of argument actually contributes
to the diminishment of public debate. Dismissing political opponents’
ideas on the basis of ‘guilt by association’ means adopting
a less critical approach than if one actually sets out to argue against
them.
Dolan
Cummings
Zombies-in-waiting
What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American
Politics, edited by András Szántó
Szántó
believes that the power of PR and imaging ensures that citizens’
emotions and opinions are shaped without them being able to react. It
is a kind of Soma, that we are not aware we are digesting. The goal,
he concludes, is not control the public by political means, but rather
to ‘seduce them’.
Alan
Miller
Reading
public critical
Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics, by Stefan Collini
Yes,
these essays are sometimes difficult and sometimes the subject matter
may be unfamiliar, so all the more reason to take up the challenge and
learn something new from a real authority.
Angus
Kennedy
Grey
skies thinking
Creativity: Unconventional Wisdom from 20 Accomplished Minds,
edited by Herbert Meyers and Richard Gertsman
The
editors' strange view of creativity, to be fair, is not entirely their
fault. We live in a society obsessed with cultivating the creative mind:
on this view, the mental attitude is all that matters, regardless of
what end product it actually creates.
Munira
Mirza
Guilding
the craft
The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett
We
tend to see material things as obscure ‘because most of us use
things like computers and automobiles that we did not make and do not
understand’. But to overcome our fear of technology, we must reinvent
our relationship with it rather than retreat altogether.
Martin
Earnshaw
Making
the case for knowledge
Bringing Knowledge Back In, by Michael FD Young
Young
makes a strong case for the power of formal knowledge and the role of
sociology in understanding the conditions that enable its development,
and he persuasively demonstrates that schooling plays a unique role
in initiating pupils into the intellectual traditions that enable them
to think for themselves.
Toby
Marshall
Submit
to the human touch
The Human Touch, by Michael Frayn
This
sort of thinking is exactly what philosophy needs right now –
a celebration of man and his unique ability to relate to himself. Philosophy
needs to appreciate that consciousness and its creations are not chimerical
dreams; they are just as much a part of reality as the stars and planets
are.
Ciaran
Guilfoyle
The
uses of psychogeography
Psychogeography, words by Will Self, pictures by Ralph Steadman
Anthologising
old columns in a book introduced by a discursion on the meaning of psychogeography
could, to some readers, conscript the pieces for an end to which they
were not intended. It should be made perfectly clear: Psychogeography
is not a socio-political tract but a pot of (skunk laden) potpourri.
Alistair
John
In
search of eco-sin redemption
Last Chance to See, by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine
Adams'
humour is dryly quizzical more than infectiously funny; his wry deflation
of the green standpoint in a supposedly environmental book makes for
refreshing reading. Writing nearly two decades ago, Adams’ Pythonesque
surrealism chips away at the ecological principles we accept today as
good coin.
Aidan
Campbell
The
Nymphet and the Granny
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov / The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz,
translated and edited by David Cairns
Indispensible
as both books are, they have quite another effect when read in parallel,
the resonances from each forming interesting interference patterns inside
the reader’s head. In their obsessive overlap, unavailing devotion
appears almost lubricious, while greedy carnality is validated as a
kind of love.
Robert
Latona
Engineers,
boffins, geeks and rude mechanicals
Design: Intelligence Made Visible, by Stephen Bayley and Terence
Conran
Modernism
was presented as an architecture that was moral, bearing the load of
a socially-progressive Zeitgeist. The authors don't stop to consider
the idea that there is no necessary link between morality and architecture
and that Modernism should just be seen as simply another architectural
style.
Nicky
Charlish
Don't
blame it on the Puritans
God Won't Save America, by George Walden
The
reaction to America is a mix of attraction and repulsion. The attraction
is easy enough to understand, but the repulsion works on two levels:
‘a genuine horror of America’s crass materialism, and a
revulsion at our own sneaking attraction to it’. A lonely sufferer
the USA is not; we too are profoundly confused.
Tomas White
The
stone and the chicken
On Practice and Contradiction, by Mao Zedong (introduced by
Slavoj Žižek)
Questioning
what Mao calls the dogmatism of Hegel’s ‘idealism’,
the Sinification of Marx involved the positing of certain irresolvable
categories of opposites, as a rebuttal to the idea that all social contradictions
are resolvable. Only a hammer, not historical mediation, can crack those
which are irresolvable.
Nathan Coombs
A
spectacular failure
Critical Lives: Guy Debord, by Andrew Merrifield
The
politicised art advocated by Debord has captured the affections of everyone
from European premiers to anti-globalisation protesters. From being
a revolutionary ideology in the 1960s, Debord’s ideology was reshaped
into a harmless political brand in the 1990s.
Aidan Campbell
Essay:
Cynical
capitalism, cynical anti-capitalism
How an unloved system survives by default, and how its would-be critics
condemn us to more of the same
In contrast to the solidity of the Protestant work ethic, the meaning
and identities derived from brands and so on have an unmistakeably ersatz
character. If the emperor’s new clothes in fact barely cover his
cash nexus, it is not naivety so much as ironic resignation that keeps
most of us from labouring the point.
Dolan Cummings
The
end of faith is not the answer
The End of Faith, by Sam Harris / The Islamist, by
Ed Husain
Leering
under the surface of both these texts is a fear of ideology, of anything
with a utopian tinge, and a tendency to merge having ideals with both
these things. Rather than vetting individual beliefs for rationality,
Harris would be better settling for rationality as a bearer of value
and cornerstone of a broader world-view.
Sarah Boyes
Putting
the hippies on the payroll
Green Capitalism, by James Heartfield
In
Heartfield’s view, ethical consumption is little more than the
traditional snobbery of conspicuous consumption dressed up in green
garb. Far from restraining consumption, environmentalism inflates its
scale and scope, so that it expresses not only the refined taste but
also the superior morals of the (rich) consumers.
Philip Cunliffe
Reasoning
out mass suicidal murder
The Second Plane, by Martin Amis
Amis
may be reflecting accurately a neurotically dependent fixation to an
allegedly protecting God, but to condemn all religious sensibility in
the same breath betrays the same autistic incuriosity that he condemns.
Why, for instance, has the liberal so-called independent free mind been
so catastrophically unable to confront nihilism?
Rob Weatherill
Say
no to counterknowledge
Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories,
Quack Medicine, Bogus Science and Fake History, by Damian Thompson
It
is not that people are ignorant and lack discernment; nor are they beguiled
by the power of the internet; rather there is an attraction, sometimes
cynical, sometimes desperate, but an attraction nonetheless to dogmatic
points of view at a time the power of human reason and our ability to
make history are both seen as discredited.
Angus Kennedy
Why
not ditch genocide studies?
Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political
Murder, by Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley
It
speaks to the bankruptcy of our postmodern liberal ethics that they
provide us with no moral resources with which to condemn the barbarism
and atrocity that is less than genocide, but no less barbaric for it.
Philip Cunliffe
Essay:
A
Teacher's Life
Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of
America’s Teachers, by Daniel Moulthrop, Nínive Clements
Calegari and Dave Eggers
Behind
the authors’ seemingly optimistic, progressive vision both for
education and for society, lies the acceptance of a world shaped by
forces beyond the influence, let alone the control, of human beings.
Their view of education is a preparation for such a world.
Michele Ledda
Dandy
in the Underworld: an Unauthorised Autobiography
by Sebastian Horsley
'Eccentricity
is to individuality what 'a character' is to a person of real character.
It is willed. Even worse it is a mask for nonentity. True individuality,
like true character, is earned and involves moral effort'.
Aidan Campbell
Enhancing
Evolution: The Ethical Case for Making Better People
by John Harris
Choosing
not to enhance is as much a moral choice as choosing to enhance –
those advocating restraint have as much as a case to answer as their
opponents. Harris’ arguments need to be taken seriously by all
of those with an interest in scientific development and the bigger question
of what it means to be human.
Robin Walsh
The
Death of the Critic
by Rónán McDonald
It
is a sophisticated argument that recognises the relative autonomy of
the critical, rather than treating it as a mere adjunct to the creative
process or handmaiden to the market. Criticism is part of a cultural
dialogue; a strong critical voice is crucial in a vibrant culture, with
writer and critic in a tense but symbiotic relationship.
Michael Savage
Why
Truth Matters
by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
The
battle lines have been drawn, armies marshalled and weapons assembled,
welcome one and welcome all to the catch-all conflict of our times:
Truth vs Postmodernism. Choose your side wisely or you’ll be lost
in the crossfire...
Sarah Boyes
Philosophical
Ridings: Motorcycles and the Meaning of Life
by Craig Bourne
For
once, Bourne’s judgement is unerring when he decides to dedicate
a mere page to discussing Zen’s incoherent 'metaphysics of quality'
(likening it to - you guessed it - existentialism). One can only hope
that his own similarly ill-fated journey marks an end to philosophy’s
two-wheeled adventures.
Paul Jump
Essay:
The
Sounds (and Politics) of Silence
Music, silence and shared meaning
It would be worrying if ‘too much music’
or ‘too much talk’ were the be all and end of the problem,
as the answer seems to lie instead in better structured discussion and
more collective decision-making about what music is heard and where.
Sarah
Boyes
The
Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?
by Deborah Cameron
According
to Cameron, it’s educated people who adhere most to the myth that
men and women speak different languages, and this is because it’s
among them that the greatest amount of change in socio-sexual roles
has taken place over recent years, thus giving rise to unwanted uncertainties
and the desire for some social stability.
Nicky Charlish
The
Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times
by Earl Shorris
Shorris
is surely right to dismiss the ‘left-liberal’ thesis of
people like Thomas Frank that people are simply voting against their
own interests as tantamount to calling people stupid, an anti-democratic
thesis. Yet his own view of the masses is scarcely better.
Lee Jones
From
Anger to Apathy: the British experience since 1975
by Mark Garnett
Garnett
shows that the British have adopted an attitude of ‘contemptuous
subservience’ to their rulers over the past three decades. He
rightly highlights the sense of powerlessness that grips people today
because of the fact that neither party offers any real choice to the
voters.
Nicky Charlish
A
Farewell to Alms
by Gregory Clark
The
developing world has been failed by globalisation in the past, and more
than a hundred years on much of the world is being failed still. But
the problem isn’t unfair trade or the appropriation of wealth
but a lack of productive activity in the world’s poor economies.
Stuart Simpson
Surviving
New Labour as an artist
Artistic independence and the pitfalls of state funding
Perhaps
it’s high time to reassess this distinction between ‘fine’
artists and everyone else. After all, it’s only relatively recently
that artists stopped being seen as useful, productive members of society
and got stuck on pedestals, regarded as odd, gifted shamans in some
remote ivory castle called ‘the art world’.
Jan Bowman
When
Ways of Life Collide: Multiculturalism and Its Discontents in the Netherlands
by Paul M Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn
The
result of multiculturalism is a divided society, uncomfortable with
its commitment to tolerance. But ironically, the very conformism which
makes people resent minority groups for being different also makes people
reluctant to criticise multiculturalism, which is enforced ‘top-down’.
Munira Mirza
Public
Emotions
by Perri 6, Susannah Radstone, Corrine Squire, Amal Treacher (editors)
Today’s
emotivist advocacy discourse takes for granted a very dispassionate
and uncompromising consensus about individual responsibility for one’s
health, which crucially means only ‘innocent victims’ are
likely to be ‘included’ in the new social frame of entitlements.
Hugh Ortega Breton
The
Time of the Rebels
by Matthew Collin
Collin
can’t explain why the uprisings in Belarus and Azerbaijan didn’t
take off, whilst those in other countries did. The really important
question – why did political and business elites, the police,
and the armed forces switch sides to support the protestors in certain
places and not others – is not addressed.
Robin Walsh
Detoxing
Childhood: What Parents Need To Know To Raise Happy, Successful Children
by Sue Palmer
Palmer
literally gives hints on what parents can say to their children in the
morning, at mealtimes, at bedtime, in the shop, in the kitchen, outdoors
and in the car. What family has got itself into a situation where parents
cannot talk to their children without having to read a book to find
out what to say?
Jane Sandeman
The
Cultural Contradictions of Democracy: Political Thought Since September
11
by John Brenkman
Ultimately,
Brenkman produces an incoherent and dangerously weak critique of the
Iraq war. If the problem was the war's lack of legitimacy and inadequate
attention to nation-building, then presumably a more competent, powerful
US administration doing the same things legally would pose no problem
whatsoever for Brenkman.
Lee Jones
Bad
Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
by Clive Stafford Smith
It
is one thing to hear an allegation of a crime and quite another to hear
the testimony of the victim. Clive Stafford Smith is one of a band of
lawyers representing the Guantanamo detainees and, with unique access
to the incarcerated, he provides us with extended and comprehensive
accounts of the crimes alleged.
Alistair John
Music:
Healing the Rift
by Ivan Hewett
As
Hewett says, 19th century audiences listened with their hands as well
as their ears to the same symphonic repertoire that struggles to find
an audience today. Participation is absolutely necessary for classical
forms to continue as living art rather than a passive and nostalgic
pastime.
Cara Bleiman
War
in Human Civilisation
by Azar Gat
Although
the historical detail is often interesting, Gat’s syncretistic
approach yields a vague and indeterminate level of abstraction. Thus
Gat’s sweep is broad enough to stimulate anyone by providing eclectic
insights, but rarely deep enough to satisfy anyone with an in-depth
knowledge of a particular field.
Philip Cunliffe
In
Defence of Atheism
by Michel Onfray
The
closer Michel Onfray gets to elucidating a positive worldview of his
own – based on a version of hedonism – the further he leaves
behind other ‘atheists’ who don’t happen to share
it. Indeed, atheism itself ought to be the least interesting thing about
its advocates.
Dolan Cummings
Austerity
Britain, 1945-1951
by David Kynaston
The
introduction in 1947 of the New Look, with its long, voluminous skirts,
was regarded as frippery by socialists (‘The ridiculous whim of
idle people’ thundered Labour MP Bessie Braddock): by the end
of the year, some 10 million women had or desired the New Look.
Nicky Charlish
Before
Their Time: the World of Child Labor
by David L Parker
It
is difficult to know what conclusion you are supposed to draw when child
labour is made to sit next to images of imminent child abuse. Its all
the same apparently, an indictment of what adults do to children in
Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Nepal, Morocco, Mexico, India, Bolivia and
Turkey – the world over.
David Clements
The
Corruption of the Curriculum
edited by Robert Whelan
Standish
convincingly argues that global citizenship seeks to eradicate national
government from the political consciousness of young people. Young people
are literally taught to ‘think global, act local’ but not
to engage in national politics.
Charlynne Pullen
The
World of Beryl Cook
by Jess Wilder and Jerome Sans
Fat
ladies, saucy sailors, hen parties. Yes, we’re in the garish,
giggly girly world of Beryl Cook. But there’s more to Cook than
the art establishment view of an amateur painter who got lucky and captured
the public imagination.
Nicky Charlish
Radical
Thinkers II
Pulling up the roots
Verso’s
neat series brings together some of the best of the last century’s
thinkers in a handy, heady package, aiming to popularise radical thought
for a wider contemporary audience.
Various reviewers
Political
Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project
by Antonio Negri
Negri
points to how Descartes' dualism retains an implicit awareness of the
hegemony of the bourgeois form of social existence, and how this can
be translated into an imposition on the state’s mode of producing
and existing. The seeds of the revolution are sown.
Sarah Snider
A
Russian Diary
by Anna Politkovskaya
Politkovskaya’s
entries on the Russian regime's abuse of the poor and powerless should
be required reading for anyone who thinks the absence of independent
media or the subversion of the rule of law only impinge on the rights
of the intelligentsia.
Alistair John
Hezbollah:
A Short History
by Augustus Richard Norton
Norton
carefully records how Hezbollah has come to accept the limitations of
the politics of identity, and to celebrate them, discarding in the process
any threat it might have paused to the Lebanese ‘system’
for which it once had so much disdain.
Karl Sharro
The
Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was hijacked and how we can
reclaim it
by Dan Hind
‘Science,
not theology, has become the arena in which we must fight for the victory
of Enlightenment, since it is through their claims to rationality and
scientific understanding that our guardians bind us in obedience to
the established order.’ This is a brilliant insight, but sadly
it is not followed through.
Dolan Cummings
Socrates
in Love: Philosophy for a Passionate Heart
by Christopher Phillips
Passion
hasn’t historically meant the sort of gloss-thin enthusiasm it
denotes today, and neither does it fit easily with the rational life.
‘Philosophy for a passionate heart’ should be more about
a steam-rolling mania for knowledge than about a comfortable (albeit
sort of interesting) pondering over love.
Sarah Boyes
What
More Philosophers Think
by Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom
It
seems that our intellectual positions arise largely out of our individual
temperaments, experiences and aspirations, rather than, as people like
to think, out of pure reason. (This is why even the most rigorous debate
almost never results in anyone changing their mind.)
Paul Jump
Personalised
politics
How 'personalisation' devalues education and diminishes citizenship
The personal in ‘personalised public services’ has more
than one meaning. As well as promising greater flexibility in the provision
of services, it also means the citizen taking 'personal' responsibility
for them, and consequently that the state becomes involved in the personal
life of the individual, helping to ‘shape the self’.
Michele Ledda
Regulating
Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire
by Wendy Brown
The
state’s call to tolerate other people’s deviant or minority
culture is a way of affirming the neutrality or ‘culture-less’
character of liberal society. We are outside culture, whilst the sub-group
we tolerate is unable to achieve the same level of transcendence.
Munira Mirza
Late
Marxism: Adorno or the persistence of the dialectic
by Fredric Jameson
The
problem with using Adorno to reveal the alienating praxes at work within
capitalist social relations, is that it’s not really capitalism
that’s the problem for Adorno. The ‘reification’ discerned
under capitalism is ultimately absorbed back into what Adorno perceives
as a far longer history of reification per se.
Tim Black
Politics
and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx
by Louis Althusser
Whether
one subscribes to the now-deceased Althusser’s now-deceased project
or not, his attempt to identify what makes a thinker radical deserves
serious consideration; and the book is indeed ultimately worthy of inclusion
in this Verso series.
Alex Hochuli
Censoring
Culture: Contemporary threats to free expression
by Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva (editors)
In
contemporary society, censorship is rarely recognised as such. And rather
than shielding children from the evils of violent and sexual art, ‘being
sensitive’ by banning often serves to create a comfort zone for
adults, where difficult questions never arise and important issues are
never addressed.
Sarah Boyes
The
Politics Without Sovereignty: A critique of contemporary international
relations
by Christopher J Bickerton, Philip Cunliffe, Alex Gourevitch (editors)
There
is much to admire in the way the book tries to situate the loss of confidence
in the merits of democratic accountability, and expose how new developments
in international relations theory and practice represent a degradation
of human agency from the high point represented by Enlightenment ideals.
Ravi Bali
The
Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms,
Schools and Society
by Scott E Page
This
is an economist’s take on diversity. As such, those looking for
a tract on fairness and tackling cultural conflicts should look elsewhere.
Such issues are dealt with merely by implication and inference, if at
all. Rather, the ‘better society’ of the title is a society
that can better solve its practical problems.
Alistair John
What's
left of Christianity?
The politics of belief in 2007 AD
Just
as the demise of the political left forces us to rethink what is at
stake in politics, and how we might seek to shape the future, the transformation
of religious thinking raises important questions about the meaning of
truth and morality, the nature of authority, and indeed what it means
to be humane.
Dolan Cummings
Imaginary
Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village
by Richard Barbrook
Barbrook
asks why he is still being offered the same version of the future he
was forty years ago. The answer is that technology, while presenting
itself widely to military and civilian consumers, has very rarely and
for only short periods of time acted to temper unequal production and
distribution processes.
Sarah Snider
Made
in Brighton
by Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven
With
its long-standing status as a home to gangsters, gays and showbiz types,
Brighton is a sort of Soho-on-Sea, making it look glitzily unpromising
as a source for many nationally applicable norms. But the couple are
able to mine plenty of national truths from their seaside home.
Nicky Charlish
Inventing
Human Rights: A History
by Lynn Hunt
Human
rights is a concept that only came to prominence during the eighteenth
century. The central questions Lynn Hunt seeks to address are how human
rights were invented, and why this invention – and its self-evidence
– occurred in when it did.
George Hoare
The
Happiness Hypothesis
by Jonathan Haidt
Haidt
mentions in passing what it took this former moral philosophy student
six years of study to see clearly: that the crucial point about human
behaviour is not so much that we very rarely act purely rationally,
but that rationality has no meaning without desire.
Paul Jump
Yo,
Blair!
by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Although
Blair was not the sharpest tool in the box (you don’t have to
be an Aquinas or Ayer to spot the philosophical flaw in his declaration,
‘I only know what I believe’), he was considered to be the
man who could fulfil what it was felt that Middle England wanted, that
is ‘market economics powdered with caring rhetoric’...
Nicky Charlish
Emancipation(s)
by Ernesto Laclau
The
real disappointment for this reader is not the rarefied language, but
the fact that Laclau rejects the possibility of formulating the Enlightenment
notion of a totalising universal identity, and with it washes down the
drain any project of uniting the world under a single banner of rationality.
Sarah Boyes
Politics
of Modernism: Against the New Conformists
by Raymond Williams
Williams'
critique of cultural pessimism remains relevant given the still current
trend to disavow the future and its alternative potential, and to categorise
new technologies alternately as both determinants of social change and
threats to established artistic, now 'classicalised', forms.
Hugh Ortega Breton
Imagined
London
by Anna Quindlen
Having
come to terms with British English, Quindlen was relieved. 'I had purchased
an adaptor! I could convert the current!' The attraction and the power
of this writer is this directness and lack of guile, which renders what
to an American may seem a weakness on her part, into a strength.
Peter Inson
Containment:
Rebuilding a Strategy Against Global Terror
by Ian Shapiro
While
Shapiro argues that containment aimed to defend 'diversity', was an
'anti-imperial stance' and is essentially 'to refuse to be bullied,
while at the same time declining to become a bully', its actual record
is precisely the opposite. The very problem Shapiro confronts is itself
a product of that policy.
Lee Jones
Fragments
by Jean Baudrillard
It
is always tempting to imagine Jean Baudrillard preparing to write a
book by sharpening an axe, swinging it into his computer monitor, then
gluing the shattered pieces to a celluloid film reel, projecting it
to a crowded room full of admirers and absolutely forbidding them to
take it seriously.
Sam Haddow
Stalking
by Bran Nicol
How
can a phenomenon so ingrained in our consciousness be so recent an occurrence?
This is the question driving Bran Nicol's survey of the subject. Throughout
the book, Nicol asserts that stalking is both an old and new phenomenon.
Alistair John
Leonard
Woolf: A Life
by Victoria Glendinning
This
is the story that Glendinning tells: Viriginia as demanding genius,
Leonard as selfless husband. And though she convinces quite thoroughly
that Leonard was undoubtedly an unselfish, kind, good person, one if
left wondering whether this goodness meant that his own potential was
unfulfilled.
James Topham
The
Trap: What Happened to our Dream of Freedom?
BBC2
The
conclusion of Adam Curtis' new three-part BBC series is that liberal
democracies have diminished our humanity, not by deliberately setting
out as the Communists did to make a perfect society, but simply by organising
around an impoverished notion of freedom.
Dolan Cummings
Welcome
to Everytown: a Journey into the English Mind
by Julian Baggini
Julian
Baggini is off to discover what people really think about politics,
food, aesthetics, holidays, immigration, metaphysics, youth, gender
and the good life, in short, to find out what the English folk philosophy
is. Which means he's actually off to Rotherham: statistically the most
average place in England.
Sarah Boyes
Rough
Guides to Climate Change and Ethical Living
by Duncan Clark and Robert Henson
The
second of these titles is an entire book dedicated to small scale self-flagellation
- without the first's interesting titbits of climate science. It is
more along the lines of the traditional Rough Guides - a handbook to
dip into, rather than a textbook - if, God help you, you felt compelled
to live by it.
Robin Walsh
American
Vertigo: On the Road from Newport to Guantanamo
by Bernard Henri-Levy
'America'
has supplanted 'the city' as the focus of fear and loathing in the centuries-old
critique, described so well by Ian Buruma as 'Occidentalism', of modernism,
of soulless rationality, commerce and rootless cosmopolitanism.
Martin Summers
Modern
Liberty and the Limits of Government
by Charles Fried
Fried
argues
that our liberties must be pre-political rather than created by the
state, and that liberty cannot be based on what freedoms the government
of the day decides to grant us, but the question of where the rights
of the individual and the interests of the majority collide is never
entirely resolved.
Clarissa Woodberry
Estates:
an Intimate History
by Lynsey Hanley
Hanley
describes how Minister for Housing in Wilson's 1964 government, Richard
Crossman, 'set about the task of rehousing the slum dwellers of the
major cities with a pragmatic zeal that would have made him a star of
future Labour administrations'. Well not this one, with its 'sustainable
housing' agenda.
Dave Clements
D'you
wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang?
The audience new music needs
What
matters is not simply bums on seats, but the engagement of a particular
audience. Before
any artform can be universal, it has to be particular. It is particular
scenes or artistic milieux that give birth to new ideas, and also keep
a tradition alive; without them, tradition quickly degenerates into
heritage.
Dolan Cummings
On
the Shores of Politics
by Jacques Rancière
Rancière's aim is to criticise the post-political consensus that
has replaced yesterday's battles. Some genuinely winning and original
insights come through, but beneath the arch-theorising, Rancière's
vision of politics amounts to little more than a tired fantasy of liberal
pluralism.
Philip Cunliffe
Strategy
of Deception
by Paul Virilio
There
is no consistent argument in any article, let alone any broader theme
developed across the collection as a whole. Instead, it is a jumble
of categories and neologisms ('globalitarian') with no analytical heft,
mixed in with portentous quasi-mystical rambling about technology.
Philip Cunliffe
Retro:
The Culture of Revival
by Elizabeth Guffey
For
Guffey, retro isn't simply nostalgia. She argues that the rise of retro
amounted to ambivalence about modernity. She doesn't consider that people
may have rejected Modernism in the plastic arts not because of any dislike
of modernity as such, but because it's boring and unattractive.
Nicky Charlish
Politics:
Cutting Through the Crap
by Bali Rai
This
is a book that depicts political life as acne, not aspiration. It takes
as its premise the unsophisticated assumption that the only way to engage
young people is to adopt their view that politics and politicians are
full of crap. Never once is political activity shown to be exciting
or laden with potential.
Amol Rajan
Is
Democracy Possible Here?
by Ronald Dworkin
Dworkin
seems to be clutching at straws when he starts making concrete suggestions
about how to improve things politically. No matter how much legislation
is introduced to try to 'wise up' political debate on television, it
unlikely to happen unless the substance is there in the first place.
Patrick Hayes
Three
cheers for selection: how grammar schools help the poor
by Norman Blackwell
Most
supporters of comprehensive education see the relevance and need for
some streaming (or setting, banding etc.) within a mixed-ability school,
but are completely averse to the idea of selective education, because
fundamentally it does mean something different.
Charlynne Pullen
The
f word
Reflections on post-feminism
The
embrace of what you might call 'girliness' marks a retreat from the
traditional feminist urge to underplay physical and psychological differences
between men and women. Indeed,
there almost seems to be a cultural pressure these days towards the
exaggeration of gender differences.
Paul Jump
A
Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in
Nigeria
by Daniel Jordan Smith
Just
as occult practices are sometimes blamed for all manner of problems
and injustices in Nigeria, this book shows how corruption has become
detached from any description of actual events and has instead
become
a mystical explanation for anything and everything bad that happens
in Africa.
Stuart Simpson
Time
to Emigrate?
by George Walden
It
is disappointing that another anti-immigration polemic is drowned not
in rational argument but in a despairing voice and that ubiquitous tone
of disillusionment, alienation, and weakness in the face of destructive
power that seems to define political language today.
Amol Rajan
The
Thought Box
Very Short Introductions to 19th century philosophy, by various
authors
Sometimes
short introductions serve as intellectual polyfilla, simply plugging
a gap in one's knowledge, but the
overriding impression here is of a century of thinkers peddling the
practical import of philosophy. And the distinction between thinking
and acting is not always straightforward, and needs teasing out.
Sarah Boyes
Donald
Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side
by Rebecca and Sam Umland
The
tortured artist is a regular fixture of the cultural scene. But is he
a product of nurture, nature, or a combination of both? To answer this
question is as difficult as resolving the nature/nurture debate itself.
How good a job does this biography of an artist who indeed walked on
the wild side do?
Nicky Charlish
Why
Heidegger?
How to Read Heidegger, by Mark Wrathall; Being and
Time, by Martin Heidegger
Heidegger's
critique of modernity, interpreting a particular social experience as
an ontological predicament, actually presupposes and perpetuates alienation.
Severed from a collective political project, Heidegger's portrait of
the senseless rationality at work in the social world touches the alienated
nerve.
Tim Black
Welcome
to the Desert of the Real
by Slavoj Zizek
The
prospect that terrifies our leaders is that we might recognise mere
survival as a fate worse than death. How convenient, then, to use the
most irrational form of self-sacrifice to tar the very possibility of
political alternatives in general.
Alex
Gourevitch
The
Pathology of Democracy
by Jacques-Alain Miller
The
pathology in question, it seems, is the desire of the state to regulate
psychotherapy - to intervene in that intimate relationship between therapist
and what is called, for want of a better word, 'client'.
Here is Miller's reply on behalf of all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists
in France.
Rob
Weatherill
|
