Bruce M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (2016)

This is an extremely impressive, well-written, and stimulating book. It successfully instantiates what Michael McCormick called for in 2011, a "science of the human past" that integrates traditional historical methods with new scientific measures of historical climatic change and ancient DNA. Nonetheless, after reviewing the book's many strengths, I also note some lacunae. Campbell skilfully toggles between the three domains identified in his subtitle, climatic change, disease, and economic life, showing both their independent trajectories and interconnections. Though trained as an historian (or perhaps social scientist), Campbell seems to have made himself expert in the other two fields, an impressive accomplishment. He writes knowledgeably of the factors contributing to Europe's commercial expansion from roughly 1100 to 1300, subsequent plateau and outright contraction from the 1340s. For me some of the most interesting sections were about the reorientation of European economies in the fifteenth century, especially in the Low Countries, England, and a few other places in response to the demographic collapse and blockage of most trade with the east. While I'd known some of this in outline, Campbell filled in much interesting detail, including the role of "Smithian" growth, transaction costs, factor markets, etc. The real innovation of the book, however, is to place all this human activity in a much broader context. After reading this book, any traditional economic history of the time will seem woefully incomplete - climatic changes, especially the onset of the Little Ice Age in the late fourteenth century, and the various animal and human epidemics (not just the Black Death and follow-on waves) must be included and integrated in the account. While Campbell casts an eye on other parts of Eurasia, as well as the Americas and Africa, his focus is Europe. Given how impressive this book is, it may seem churlish to offer any criticisms. But I wish he had, at least occasionally, used comparisons to strengthen his causal claims. We learn next to nothing about the Bubonic Plague in China. Campbell suggests that the Great Transition prepared the way for the Great Divergence between Europe and China. But without explicit treatment of China, his argument remains at most suggestive. This is also true of his effort to integrate human, climatic, and epidemic history. Since all three domains turned in a negative direction starting in the early fourteenth century, we don't know quite how much of the downturn was due to the Black Death, the beginnings of the Little Ice Age, and, say, increasing warfare and rising transaction costs. Only comparison - between Europe and China and, even more importantly, between different explanations - might have helped tease out their different contributions.

Branko Milanovic, Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World (2019)

I read this book a few years ago and thought highly of it, but realized, as I was recently reading Mike Davis's Planet of Slums for my book club, that I remembered very little of Milanovic. So I reread it. Milanovic is a highly respected economist, who served in a senior post in the World Bank and has made his name by gathering and analyzing data on global inequality. In this book, he casts a sober eye on the system that, as the subtitle says, rules the world. Today capitalism comes in two forms, liberal meritocratic capitalism (the US, Western Europe, etc.) and political capitalism (China, above all, but also Russia and some others). One of the great strengths of the book is that Milanovic carefully, and to my mind, very judiciously, assesses both the advantages and disadvantages of each. The main problem of the liberal variant at present are the several, mutually reinforcing tendencies that are strengthening a closed elite. The US, in particular, is moving in the direction of becoming a plutocracy. In contrast with classical capitalism (late 19th century), those today who are capital rich are also rich in terms of income from labor. The main problems of political capitalism are, similarly, income and wealth polarization, but also the corruption that's endemic to the system. Milanovic is a somewhat heterodox economist as he credits Marx (and Marxists) with getting some things right, for example, that the bourgeoisie has captured the political system in liberal meritocratic capitalism and that capitalism was the main cause of WWI. He also explains why communism was necessary for creating the conditions in which political capitalism might emerge. Finally, Milanovic sketches out some potential positive future developments, but he seems to think that we are most likely headed toward ever greater atomization and commercialization, as market relations dissolve (nearly?) all others. This sober and tragic view reminded me of Weber.

Stephen Gaukroger, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (2010)

This is the second volume in Gaukroger's four-volume history of modern science. Gaukroger is extremely erudite, to the point that I often had trouble following. Nonetheless, pride and stubborness kept me going, though I only made it about three-fifths of the way through. The basic tension that Gaukroger follows is that between "matter theory" and micro-corpuscular "mechanism." At times, the two were connected, and each came in several variants. Basically, matter theory explains natural phenomena in terms of the nature (or natures) of matter itself; mechanism explains them in terms of interactions between inert matter. Gaukroger also draws an interesting contrast between a metaphysical tradition of this period launched by Leibniz and an "experimental natural philosophical" one justified by Locke (who looms much larger here than I would have guessed). Gaukroger often goes to the trouble of explaining what terms mean, but they come so fast and furious, and in such intricate connections, that I only occasionally felt I was "getting it." Overall, I was left thinking that my understanding of the scientific revolution is very superficial, indeed.

Malcolm X (with Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

This was thrilling for me to read, for both personal and intellectual reasons. My son, Sammy, is entering 9th grade next week at Bard High School Early College, Manhattan, the first of the BHSECs established and the sister school to my own BHSEC in Queens. At Bard Manhattan, they ask each class, including freshmen, to read a book over the summer, and the ninth-graders are reading The Autobiography. Stacy and I decided to read the book, so we could accompany Sammy and discuss it with him ahead of time. Talk about "concerted cultivation" among the Bildungsbuergertum! The book itself was gripping and fascinating. Previously I'd only read a couple of short excerpts. I knew the outlines of Malcolm X's conversion to Islam (or, really, the Nation of Islam) in prison and his subsequent conversion to true Islam, and to a less hostile and somewhat more cosmopolitan outlook, upon his hajj to Mecca in 1964, one year before his assassination by Nation of Islam gunmen. But I hadn't known the details and I hadn't known much about his life before the Nation of Islam, which itself had involved a primary metamorphosis into a hustler in Boston and Harlem. Intellectually, what was most interesting was to learn how different the Nation of Islam was from Islam proper. In addition to its Manichean view of originally Black (and good) Man and the "white devils" spawned by an evil mad scientist some 4,000 years ago, two radical deviations from Islam proper stood out: 1) the NoI elevated its leader Elijah Muhammad to the role of Messenger of God, replacing the original Muhammad, who appears to have played no role whatsoever in the NoI and 2) the NoI denied the existence of heaven and hell, describing these concepts as a ruse to anesthetize the downtrodden. The Nation of Islam seems to have been both a cult dedicated to Elijah Muhammad and also a creative, briefly somewhat successful, effort at nation building.

Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (1962)

This is a stimulating meditation on politics, which Crick defines, borrowing from Aristotle, as the "master science." It is this master science because politics, on Crick's definition, means the hard work of conciliating the plural interests in a given society, a balancing act that is the prerequisite for individual freedom and the pursuit of all other worthwhile activities. Early in my reading, I wondered whether the book wasn't merely a defense of pluralism and "open access socities," which I thought had been made earlier (the Federalist Papers, especially nr. 10) and perhaps more persuasively elsewhere (Mill? Hayek? Popper? North?). As I read on, though, I began to think that Crick's argument was something else - namely, not just a defence of pluralism as a necessary evil, but a positive endorsement of the compromises, empathy, fallibilism, etc. necessary for such conciliation. These original elements came out especially when Crick drew contrasts between politics in his sense, on the one hand, and "ideologies" - whether of Communism, democracy, nationalism, technology - on the other. There were some echoes in the book of Max Weber's "Politics as a Vocation."

Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (1991)

Though written in what now feels like an entirely different epoch, this carefully argued book addresses a problem that still plagues us. Since the 1950s, more and more of our politics has been defined and argued over in terms of individual rights, which ostensibly are absolute, inhere in solitary rights-bearers, and imply no corresponding responsibilities. As a result, Glendon argues, complexity gives way to black-or-white thinking, legal conflict over these all-or-nothing stakes replaces compromise, and politics as the art of negotiation withers. The emphasis on hyperindividualistic rights fostered in our legal system subsequently shapes talk - and thought - in politics and everyday life. Occasionally the book addresses cultural and social changes, for example, the decline of civil society organizations. But mainly Glendon focuses on the early modern philosophical origins of rights talk and, especially, on the decisions of prominent American jurists. British and American law first deviated from continental law in this regard when Hobbes and Locke painted pictures of monadic individuals asserting their rights, while Rousseau retained more of the classical and Biblical traditions that had always paired responsibilities with rights. This distinction was wholly new to me. A further step on the American path to hyperindividualist conceptions of rights was taken by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who argued that law has no basis in morality. An especially valuable part of the book are Glendon's detailed comparisons of American and European or Canadian rulings on issues such as abortion or the legal duty to come to the aid of strangers. Rights Talk nicely complements the work of Michael Sandel, whom Glendon acknowledges as an influence, and other communitarian thinkers.

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2006)

I just finished this for my Zoom book club. Four of us (the others are Paul Lachelier, Eric Kurlander, and Christian Thorne) have been meeting every few months since 2015! Sometimes we share some comments ahead of time (more often, though, afterwards). Here's what I wrote to the others ahead of our meeting: The book is well argued and full of shocking data and descriptions. I hadn't read or thought much about the problem of slums. Now it's on my radar. However, I have two main critiques: 1) What is the scope of the problem, exactly? The title, of course, would seem to suggest that much of the world's population will one day fill the slums. Davis's observations that the world is becoming more urban and that urban residents are increasingly slum dwellers point to the same apocalyptic end-state. But what do the numbers so far show? I found Davis frustratingly elusive about the scope of the problem. Of course, Davis does include lots of data -  we hear estimates of the numbers of slum-dwellers in many places and even globally. But we never hear, as far as I remember, about proportions. Has the percentage of the world's population living in slums grown over time? What was it in, say, 1945 and 1970 and at the time of writing (2006)? Most of the things I've read about global trends in income and wealth (and by extension, in slum-dwelling) over the last 50 years, say, suggest that the problem of dire poverty has remained intractable for some billion people. That accords with Davis's numbers. However, the other six to seven billion have fared better (of course, with tremendous internal variation) over the same period. As a proportion of the world's population, dire poverty is a diminishing - not a growing - problem. Two relevant, widely cited works are Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion and Angus Deaton's The Great Escape. And this is a great website with all sorts of data: Our World in Data. Davis's work would be just as searing - and more credible - if it dropped the apocalyptic framing. 2) Davis's Causal Account He points the finger at neoliberal policies from the 1970s to 1990s. But much of his own evidence attributes the growth of slums to other factors, many predating the 1970s. The drive to industrialize and urbanize at any cost characterized both communism (at least in its Soviet form) and import-substituting industrialization, the policy pursued in many newly independent countries after 1945. This isn't to discount the role of neoliberal policies in perhaps accelerating slum formation in some or even many cases - just to suggest it's implausible to pin all of the blame on them. I also wonder about population growth as a driver of slum-building and the "bright lights" phenomenon attracting people from the dreary (and dark) countryside.