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.

Moshe Halbertal, People of the Book: Canon, Meaning, and Authority (1997)

This is a pithy, profound book. In its 130 pages, Halbertal traces the evolving nature of the "rabbinic revolution," which roughly 2000 years ago replaced the priest and prophet with the rabbi and book. In Weberian fashion he distinguishes different species of a common genus - whether canon, meaning, the hermeneutic principle of charity, Kabbalah, esotericism, etc. First came the Bible, of course; but then came the Mishnah and the Talmud, both of which were open-ended, polyphonic, and contentious - the first a collection of legal rulings, the second a discussion of them. The Talmud in particular displaced the Torah as the central text of this text-centered community. In the middle ages, philosophy and Kabbalah (mysticism) each claimed to complement the Talmud. As I was reading about these intense efforts in hermeneutics and legal reasoning, I found myself wondering about the interaction between Jewish and Christian thinking, especially after, say, 1000, when Christian efforts to revive Roman law and to integrate Christianity with Aristotelian philosophy began? Were these Christian and the similar Jewish efforts Halbertal describes merely running in parallel, or was there cross-fertilization between them? My guess would be that any influence there might have been went only one way, from the Christian to the Jewish - simply because I don't believe the dominant Christian thinkers took much interest in the tiny Jewish minority, at least not until the Reformation. But I may be wrong. In any case, this is not a question Halbertal here addresses. The focus is on the evolution of Jewish texts and text-centeredness, but there are all sorts of connections to fundamental questions of interpretation, religious evolution in general, the meeting of cultures (Judaism and Greek philosophy in the middle ages), etc. The second I finished this book, I started Halbertal's intellectual biography of Maimonides, which looks to be superb as well.....

Christopher Beckwith, The Scythian Empire: Central Eurasia and the Birth of the Classical Age from Persia to China (2024)

This is an audacious book. Beckwith claims that the Scythians 1) created the first great empire, spanning much of the central Asian steppe from the 8th century BC on, 2) pioneered a feudal structure of decentralized rule that was later copied by numerous others, including the Persians. 3) spawned the Median and then Persian Empires in the west, the Mauryans in south Asia and, most shocking to me, the earliest unified Chinese empire, the Qin 4) were monotheists and sparked the Axial Age in Eurasia's disparate civilizations. Any one of these claims would be striking on its own; together, they are nothing short of gobsmacking. Beckwith's main evidence is linguistic - for example, that words in all of these languages (which this astonishingly erudite man knows) for royal house and language are cognates (Hariya, Ariya, etc.). I can't judge the soundness of these claims, and I know Beckwith has faced criticism. I would love to know what evidence there is from the other two pillars of ancient studies - archeology and ancient DNA. Beckwith spends much more time on the impact of the Scythian Empire than on the Empire itself, about which there is perhaps little linguistic evidence. Again, I'd love to learn what archeologists and ancient DNA scholars have to say about the ostensible source of so much innovation. According to Beckwith, what probably allowed the empire to arise and expand was the mastering of horse-borne fighting, which he thinks first became possible around 900 BCE. Apparently, there's a debate about when this happened, as horse domestication occurred much earlier, around 3000 BCE. And as I understood it, the reason for the initial success of the Yamnaya/proto-Indo-Europeans in spreading was precisely their domestication of the horse and use of it for riding, which allowed them to control much larger herds of animals and thus gain wealth. Did it take 2000 years to go from riding for the sake of herding to riding for the sake of fighting? Also, though this was not of central interest to Beckwith, I was surprised by the fact that the Scythians were Indo-Europeans but originally came from the Altai mountains deep in central Asia. That is, some IEs first went east, far east, but then came back to the west.