Reading Highlights 2023
Happy holidays everyone!
I thought I’d send along a brief newsletter highlighting a few books I’ve enjoyed over the year.
First of all, the published reviews.
I really enjoyed Michael Walzer’s The Struggle for a Decent Politics and wrote about it for City Journal. Walzer recontextualizes one of the hot topics of the moment—debates about “liberalism.” As I wrote:
Rather than conjuring some titanic clash between isms, Walzer offers a more parsimonious account of “liberal” as an adjective. Here, what is liberal is not the product of some grand ideology, nor does it necessarily lead to a single set of conclusions (as ideological narratives often do). Instead, it is marked by ambiguity, toleration, pluralism, and an acceptance of openness. That spirit of generosity is not the same as moral relativism: liberals “oppose every kind of bigotry and cruelty.” But it is marked by some acceptance of difference and an openness to correction. For Walzer, the “liberal” is not an ideology but an accent for an ideology; it is “not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.” The “liberal” is thus compatible with a wide range of ideological orientations, and the course of the book is dedicated to exploring the liberal flavors of different ideologies (all dear to Walzer’s heart): liberal democrats, liberal socialists, liberal nationalists and internationalists, liberal communitarians, liberal feminists, liberal professors and intellectuals, and liberal Jews.
Later this year, I also reviewed for CJ a new book by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira on Democratic struggles with working-class voters: Where Have all the Democrats Gone?
In their new book, the two veteran observers argue that Democrats’ embrace of neoliberal economic policies (characterized by financialization, globalization, and a market-oriented approach to public policy) and a divisive politics of identity have imperiled their standing with the working class. Two interrelated topics drive the narrative: the changing shape of the Democratic coalition, and the bigger transformation of American life during the neoliberal and, arguably, post-neoliberal periods.
For this newsletter, I wrote about Philip Wallach’s fascinating study of Congress as an institution, fittingly titled Why Congress. Wallach digs into the kind of institutional analysis that is particularly pressing at the present moment.
The thematic core of Wallach’s book is a reconsideration of what a legislature is supposed to accomplish. Here, he offers a welcome corrective to various ideological accounts of democracy (or “Our Democracy”). For Wallach, legislating is only partly about achieving specific policy goals. Another purpose of the legislature is to be a vehicle for channeling conflicts in order to find some kind of workable compromise.
Here are quick hits for some of the other books I enjoyed this year:
Nikhil Krishnan, A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960: Krishnan offers an engaging survey of the consolidation of what we would now call “analytic philosophy” in Oxford in the first half of the 20th century. Analytic philosophy remains the dominant flavor of philosophy in most English-speaking philosophy departments, and Krishnan’s narrative explains the philosophical motivations and social context for this academic turn toward the analysis of language. It prompted me to dust off some of the classics from this era, such as J.L. Austin’s essay “A Plea for Excuses.”
Nick Riggle, This Beauty: A wonderful volume I’d like to write more on (if I get a chance), This Beauty gives an imaginative explanation of why the aesthetic matters—how it deepens our lives and speaks to our great inner yearnings. Now an academic, Riggle is a former professional skater, so perhaps that background makes him particularly attuned to human life’s combination of fragility and beauty.
Liberalism and the Good: This collection of papers by academic luminaries (including Martha Nussbaum and Amy Gutmann) offers a good reminder of how some seemingly “new” debates about the “liberal” are in fact not so new after all—it was published in 1990.
Adrian Pabst, Postliberal Politics: Written by one of the leading “Blue Labour” theorists, Postliberal Politics offers one sketch of a post-neoliberal politics focused on social solidarity, state decentralization, and ecological commitments.
James Merrill, Collected Poems: Merrill was one of the more decorated poets in the second half of the 20th century, but I hadn’t really read much of his work. I recently started going through this volume. There’s some gorgeous poetry here.
As a parting gift, here’s an early Merrill poem, “The Broken Bowl.”
To say it once held daisies and bluebells
Ignores, if nothing else,
Its diehard brilliance where, crashed on the floor,
The wide bowl lies that seemed to cup the sun,
Its green leaves curled, is constant blaze undone,
Spilled all its glass integrity everywhere
Spectrums, released, will speak
Of colder flowerings where cold crystal broke.
Glass fragments dropped from wholeness to hodgepodge
Yet fasten to each edge
The opal signature of imperfection
Whose rays, though disarrayed, will postulate
More than a network of cross-angled light
When through the dusk they point unbruised directions
And chart upon the room
Capacities of fire it must assume.
The splendid curvings of glass artifice
Informed its flawlessness
With lucid unities. Freed from these now,
Like love it triumphs through inconsequence
And builds its harmony through dissonance
And lies somehow within us, broken, as though
Time were a broken bowl
And our last joy knowing it shall not heal.
The splinter rainbowing ruin on the floor
Cut structures in the air,
Mark off, like eyes or compasses, a face
Of mathematic fixity, spotlight
Within whose circumscription we may set
All solitudes of love, room for love’s face,
Love’s projects green with leaves,
Love’s monuments like tombstones on our lives.
Thanks for reading—and best wishes during the holiday season!