R.R. Davies, Domination & Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, 1100-1300 (1990)

This slim volume is a masterpiece. It's tightly argued and clearly written, using apt quotations from many primary sources to support its case. Davies deftly combines observations about basic trends with acknowledgement of complexities and countervailing trends. His basic argument is contained in the title, which initially puzzled me. I had assumed that conquest came first, followed by domination. However, the reality was the other way around: first came domination - a slow, sometimes invisible process, by which the Welsh and Irish (and to a lesser extent the Scottish) adapted themselves to "Anglo-Norman" patterns of thought, economic relations, acknowledgement of a diffuse feudal "overlordship," Church practices, etc. Domination was not limited to soft power, however. Anglo-Norman "conquistadores" were its sharp cutting edge, as they claimed small islands of direct control, extending outwards from their castles, though rarely very far. The English kings only intermittently took an active role in this aristocratically driven enterprise. The lack of written records and the predominance of customary relations, for one thing, limited the reach and power of the English colonizers. Only in the thirteenth century did domination take on a harder edge, part of the growth of centralized, bureaucratic state power across Latin Europe. The book fits well with Robert Bartlett's The Making of Europe, which was published just a few years later and probably draws on Davies. Both books are helpful for understanding Europe's growing vitality and drive to expand in this pivotal period. Domination & Conquest is also invaluable for its convincing portrait of the varieties and subtelties of colonization.

Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (1989)

I read this with an eye to my upcoming course on capitalism(s) since 1945. I'd read Gerstle's book on The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, which was excellent and which I'll use extensively in the class. The book under review here is a different beast. By no means do I mean that it's bad, only that it's an edited volume, so the chapters don't fit together seamlessly. And in many cases, they're written for an academic audience, which means they just won't work in my classes. My main impressions about the New Deal were the following: 1) the experimentation and lack of coherent plan, at least in the first few years of the ND, was something I knew about, but several chapters drive this home. 2) the ascendance of the labor movement - how much influence and prominence it enjoyed - was something I hadn't fully appreciated. That influence waxed from the late 19th century and probably peaked in the war years. 3) I had been unaware of the widespread sense, even before the Depression, that American capitalism had "matured" and hence lost its vitality. This sense helped to sustain the idea that planning - of some kind - was necessary to manage the sluggish economy. The booming war economy put paid to the belief in stasis and, along with other factors, took the wind out of the sails of labor's most ambitious hopes.

Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

Written in an informal, engaging style (Varoufakis frames the book as a long letter to his beloved, and morally and intellectually inspiring, Marxist father, and he frequently makes pop-culture references, for example to Don Draper from Mad Men), Technofeudalism is thought- and discussion-provoking (my Zoom book club read it). It's also - ultimately - unpersuasive. Varoufakis is an unorthodox Marxist, who is willing to concede forthrightly that Marxism failed in many ways. He also parts with orthodoxy in his assessment that capitalism is currently being eclipsed, not by a bright socialist replacement, but but a technofeudal one that will be and already is much worse. Varoufakis's central claim is that what he calls the two pillars of capitalism - markets and profits - are no longer operative in an economy increasingly dominated by digital-tech behemoths, whom Varoufakis refers to as "cloudalists." The idea is that Amazon, Google and Facebook have created monopolies of one kind or another, eliminating competitive markets. As a result, their income is due not to profits, but "rents" in the technical sense of the term. We have been turned into cloud serfs (and also cloud prols, if we work for or by means of tech - think the gig economy). The comparison to feudal lords is stimulating, but a closer look reveals that competition is not really dead. Amazon competes ferociously, for example, with Walmart's e-commerce side. Social media platforms increasingly resemble each other (so I've heard) and hence abandoning one for another happens all the time.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 (2020)

This is a quietly impassioned, but simultaneously extremely cogently argued, account of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though I can't claim deep knowledge about this issue, I found the book quite plausible and compelling. Though Khalidi's main critiques are reserved for the Zionist project and its great-power enablers (first Britain, and then the US), he hardly shies from criticism of Palestinian leadership and the autocratic rulers of Arab states. Khalidi's most basic contention is that Zionism was a settler colonial project from the start. Given that in 1895, when Theodor Herzl's Der Judenstaat launched Zionism, hundreds of thousands of people already lived in Palestine/Zion, nearly 100% of whom were not Jewish, it's hard for me to imagine a credible counter-argument. Perhaps Adam Kirsch's description in his chapter on Herzl in The People and the Books (see earlier review) offers the most charitable case: Herzl wrote in his book that the current residents of Palestine would benefit from an influx of enlightened, motivated Jewish settlers. In short, the indigenous would be uplifted - a Jewish "civilizing mission." On this view, then, early Zionists like Herzl were at most ingenuous. Khalidi challenges this charitable view, using an entry in Herzl's diary to show that he was quite conscious that hundreds of thousands of indigenous inhabitants would have to be displaced. Revisionist Zionists like Yabotinsky, of course, were unabashed in calling for what later would come to be known as ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population. I would be interested in reading more about how early Zionists spoke - both publicly and privately - about this issue. For me what was most eye-opening about this book was Khalidi's commentary on the Mandate system (1921-1948) and the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. I hadn't realized that the British Mandate for Palestine had stacked the deck so decisively in favor of the Zionists and against the Palestinians. Basically, it accepted the British commitment in the Balfour declaration and failed even to mention the Palestinians as a people deserving of self-determination. Khalidi himself was involved in talks in Washington that preceded Oslo. (He's from a politically and academically prominent Palestinian family, with members serving in various political offices in Ottoman times and later in Mandate Palestine; his father was a respected historian in the US, as is the author himself, now at Columbia. Khalidi integrates his family history and autobiography here and there, but it's not a main strand in the book, as I had hoped it might be - as Ari Shavit had done so brilliantly in My Promised Land) Though Khalidi participated in some of the negotiations, he became increasingly skeptical of the US's role as an ostensibly honest broker and also of the PLO's woeful ineptitude in negotiation and desperation to reach a deal, any deal. In Khalidi's view, Oslo only appeared to recognize Palestinian wishes and to dangle the prospect of Palestinian statehood, which however, was never on the cards. Though he's arguing a brief, Khalidi's tone remains sober, measured, and humane throughout, adding to his persuasiveness.

Adam Kirsch, The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature (2016)

Alex Star recommended this to me, as he did the books by Halbertal reviewed below, when I asked him about books on Jewish thought and history. Kirsch's book was superb, each of its chapters a gem about a different classic. I came away feeling that my understanding of the tradition had been both broadened and deepened. In many cases - as with the medieval Zohar, the source of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, or the Tsenerne, the early modern Yiddish-language digest of Biblical stories and lessons for the shallowly literate - I had simply not been aware of these works at all. In other cases, as with Deuteronomy, Philo of Alexandria, Spinoza, and Herzl, Kirsch significantly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the texts and authors. Next I plan to read Kirsch's book about the Talmud, based on his own seven-plus year reading of it.

Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (1986)

This is a fine book, which I stopped reading after 50 pages. Why? The book is insightful and illuminating, but it's written by an English professor and relies largely on literary evidence. It didn't provide what I've come to want in my books - evidence about the world and theory, ideally, evolutionary theory, as the framework. I may come back to it, though. Stay tuned.

Allen Buchanan, Our Moral Fate: Evolution and the Escape from Tribalism (2020)

This is an amazingly stimulating book - speculative, to be sure, as the author admits, but fascinating and, in my eyes, fairly persuasive. Buchanan starts with an important and largely overlooked puzzle: how to explain what he calls two Great Expansions in human moral sensibilities in at least parts of the world in the last three centuries. First, some people overcame the default stance of moral tribalism - only "we" are fully human and hence deserving of the highest moral standing - and began to think and act as if all humans qua humans deserved that standing. Second, some people extended the idea of rights to include some non-human animals. Buchanan acknowlegdes that some other scholars have tried to explain the First Great Expansion, but he makes the case that their answers are not persuasive, and suggests that nobody has even tried to explain the Second Great Expansion. Buchanan's puzzle seems like a genuine and quite important one. Buchanan argues that these Great Expansions are incompatible with two dogmas among the evolutionary thinkers he otherwise draws on: the dogma of tribalism, i.e. humans are naturally and ineluctably tribalistic; and the dogma of cooperation, i.e. morality is only a matter of facilitating cooperation. A key idea for Buchanan is that human morality is shaped both by our genetic inheritance but also by our social environment. Furthermore, we are niche constructors - at least partly, we make the world to which our moralities respond. Our moralities are "adaptively plastic" - in environments where tribalism is the safer bet, we will be tribalistic. But when the social environment changes - when we create safer and richer niches, for example - our morality has the room to change and become less or non-tribalistic. For Buchanan's purposes, the historical rise of the state and of markets created the conditions in which non-tribalistic moralities became possible. However, on Buchanan's account, this new niche only opened the door to the Two Great Expansions. Something more was required for people to walk through the door. Here's where he emphasizes the importance of moral consistency reasoning and moral identity. The former meant that people might expand the circle of their moral regard, first to all other people, and then to some animals. The central importance of moral identity - a term new to me, and seemingly quite promising - is in motivating people to become morally consistent. Toward the end of the book, Buchanan suggests how ideology can short-circuit the expansive power of moral consistency reasoning and moral identity and instead shore up the defenses of resurgent tribalism - as we are seeing now.