Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)

For a tutorial on social capital, I've had the chance to reread this modern classic. What a joy! Bowling sets the standard for how to do social scientific research. Putnam has a knack for writing in a very accessible way, for finding all sorts of relevant data, and for humanizing the data with stories. Published 25 years ago, it's fascinating to see how he discerned trends that have only gotten worse - for example, the crisis in mental health, especially among the young (when I read Jonathan Haidt's book The Anxious Generation, I assumed that this crisis had started around 2010 - but Putnam points out that it goes back decades earlier). And of course, the collapse of community of his subtitle has now morphed into disastrous polarization. Putnam is one of my heroes.

Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality (2023)

Incoherent wishful thinking I read this for a reading group I've been in for the past 10 years. It's one of the worst books we've read. I'll start with some relatively minor (but still significant) flaws: 1) This reads like a piece of journalism blown up to 200 pages. Much of the book consists of Saini setting the scene of her encounters and quoting conversations with scholars rather than pointing to specific, more substantive evidence and scholarly arguments. 2) There are insinuations of gender biases in the literature (male scholars argue this way, female that) and of the role of European colonialism in spreading patriarchy to the rest of the world. These remain at the level of insinuation, so are never defended systematically. Some of Saini's own evidence undermines her own insinuations, especially in the case of Europe's impact (this is an instance of the incoherence I mentioned above; for more of which, see below). This is not to deny that European colonialism may in some cases have reinforced or changed patriarchy. I suspect this happened in smaller-scale societies, where patriarchy may not have existed already or been as entrenched. 3) Saini explains that her title - Patriarchs - is meant to acknowledge that there is no single thing patriarchy, just different versions of it. Yet repeatedly she discusses patriarchy precisely as a single thing. Furthermore, patriarchy, according to Saini, hasn't really diminished over time - a strange conclusion to anyone familiar with world history, especially in the last 100 or so years. 4) The greatest incoherence and wishful thinking occurs when it comes to Saini's central thesis. She argues that patriarchy is not at all rooted in biology, but rather took off when the state, needing growing populations, imposed rigid gender categories on their populations. But Saini's own evidence undermines her theses! She points to genetic bottlenecks that occurred before states formed as men who were successful in raiding and war were able to capture females and have lots of kids (this was one of the main rewards, and presumably drivers, of early warfare) while other men failed to reproduce. While she occasionally acknowledges these inconvenient facts (without, of course, recognizing how they simply don't dovetail with her the-state-launched-patriarchy thesis), she never wrestles with the extensive literature on the millenia of raiding and warfare before the state. Looking deeper in evolutionary time, Saini's treatment of human evolution is wholly inadequate. For example, she never discusses the fundamental evolutionary point that male and female mammals generally have different reproductive strategies - the former, whenever possible, favoring many offspring, the latter fewer and of higher quality. (These strategies don't apply at all times or under all circumstances, but they are a good starting point for explaining mammalian reproductive behavior). Saini never considers Richard Wrangham's influential work on male violence among the great apes (Demonic Males) or Bernard Chapais's on the evolution of pair bonding (Primeval Kinship). She mentions Christopher Boehm once, but does not explore the potential relevance of his ideas for the origins (and now decline) of patriarchy. Namely, Boehm argues that hunter-gatherers were not more egalitarian than chimpanzees because their individual desire to dominate had disappeared; rather HGs developed collective mechanisms to tame alpha males. Once agriculture happened, and population increased, however, those mechanisms broke down. The alphas were unleashed. My hunch is that this tracks what happened with patriarchy as well. And in recent times, of course, conditions have changed once again with industrialization, urbanization, democratization, modern communications. And the pendulum is swinging back the other way, toward equality. Boehm's explanation includes biological elements, but also an important role for circumstances of one kind or another. 

Menachem Fisch, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (1997)

I can't recall exactly how I came to this book. It may have been that by familiarizing myself (a little) with Scholasticism and medieval Muslim explorations of the relationship between revelation and reason, on the one hand, and having some superficial impressions of what I understood to be a Talmudic culture of debate about Biblical interpretation, on the other, I began to wonder just what this Jewish tradition was like, and whether it, perhaps, bore some similarities to the Christian and Muslim scholasticisms. I may have been intrigued, I can't really remember, by the possibility that a tradition had developed a critical tradition on its own, largely without the "outside" impetus of Greek philosophy. I hoped Fisch's book might provide an intellectual prosopography of this tradition. In fact, it was rather different than I had expected, but nonetheless still fascinating. In the first, much shorter part, Fisch, an eminent philosopher of science in his own right, developed a kind of meta-Popperian account of rational projects, a standard independent of the projects' goals. I found this part to be quite persuasive. In the second, much longer, and for me quite challenging part, Fisch tried to show that Talmudic texts contained both traditionalist and antitraditionalist - i.e. critical in the meta-Popperian sense - strands. The persuasiveness of this part I really couldn't judge. The material was simply too dense, and I didn't have the patience to try to follow Fisch's argumentation. So I can't say how rational the rabbis were, though I want to think that Fisch is correct. I did come away struck by just how much of the Talmud dealt with "halahkik" questions, very specific issues of ritual law.

Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People (2024)

I thought I knew the basics, or some of the basics, about the various Jewish denominations today. This deeply thoughtful, nuanced, and humane book taught me otherwise. Not only was I unaware of entire categories of contemporary Judaism (for example, I thought Hasidim were the entirety of ultra-orthodox Judaism [or Haredi], but there are also the Yeshivish, whom I had never heard of before; nor did I know about the Evolutionists or the....). Perhaps even more importantly, I hadn't known about the complex mutations of many of these denominations or of particular beliefs of theirs, especially about Zionism and, later, Israel. I hadn't really understood that the original secular Zionism had wanted a state for the Jews, not a Jewish state - what became Israel was to displace the Jewish religion and make Jews just another "normal" nation. I hadn't known that for Progressive Jews, at least until the last couple of decades, the Holocaust and Israel had been interpreted (un- or subconsciously) in almost christological terms: the Holocaust was the Passion of the Jews, Israel their Resurrection. I hadn't known that Religious Zionism has since the 1990s more or less displaced the original, secular one, even as Israel has become increasingly central to the identities of many Jews in the Diaspora. Or that Jabotinsky, Begin, and Netanyahu also wanted/want to occupy all of Biblical Israel, like the Religious Zionists do, but with a different justification. And I learned much else besides. Feldman expresses opinions about much of this, but he always does so after open-minded, nonjudgmental consideration of the paths different groups of Jews have taken. He unflinchingly addresses uncomfortable questions, like whether Judaism isn't a form of tribalism, or the reasons for Jews' spectacular successes in many fields in the last 150 years. He weaves in parts of his own story, revealing how various encounters shaped his beliefs and even shook them. By the end, I felt I hadn't only learned many particulars but had also gained a deep appreciation of Feldman's own, and more generally, the Jewish people's, "struggles with God together" (which is his concluding definition of what it is to be Jewish).

Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea, The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America (2024)

A very important book in our current, politically unstable, moment. Before I praise the book, however, I'll allow myself a few words of complaint. Unfortunately, this important book is marred by dozens, if not hundreds, of careless errors. These range from typos, missing commas, and missing or mistaken words (e.g. riff instead of rift) to flaccid paragraphs (the authors announce two or three points about something, but then in the following text one can't distinguish the different items). In one or two cases, the poor editing means that important questions are alluded to, but not addressed (for example, how could Obama do better in rural America in 2008 than Kerry had in 2004, but then do much worse in 2012? This shift from 2008 to 2012 marks one of the biggest downward steps in support for Democrats in rural America, and the initial support for Obama and subsequent withering of it are important in light of the issue of rural America's racial attitudes.) I find it baffling that an elite university's press (Columbia) would allow so many errors to slip through its fingers. Nonetheless, the book makes a persuasive contribution to current debates about why (and even whether) our country is as divided as it appears to be. The authors start by observing that even delineating what parts of America should count as "rural" is not as easy as one might think. Many states often referred to as rural - based on state-wide population density - in fact have significant portions, even majorities, of their populations living in suburban or urban tracts. If I remember correctly, only four states have populations that are majority rural. Many media commentators (including Paul Krugman) fall victim to this basic mistake, when they write, for example, about rural states receiving far more funding from urban states than they give. A further, and even more important, contribution is based on the authors' Rural Voter Survey, which they have administered several times in the last few years. This survey provides an unprecedented look at how rural voters think about their own lives and communities, as well as politics more broadly. Anxiety about the local economy and the future of their way of life has contributed to strong loyalties to their locales and a sense of "linked fate." The rural voter really is different than people of the same demographic background (white, Christian, older, etc.) who live elsewhere. At the same time, though, the rural voter is much more complex than one would think, based on how he/she is often portrayed. For example, the authors use their survey data to tease apart different strands of racial attitudes in rural (and suburban and urban) America. The results don't exculpate the rural voter but add important nuance - to the extent that racial animus is stronger in rural America than elsewhere, it derives from the belief that poor African-Americans (and other minorities) are poor because they allegedly don't work hard. Jacobs and Shea describe how the Republican party, starting around 1980, worked to create an image of rural America as "the real America" - an effort that largely succeeded. But this success was facilitated by the Democrats' lack of interest in rural Americans, and at times outright disdain. I plan to use parts of the book in a course I'm currently teaching, How Democracies Die.

Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation's Founding (paperback edition, 2018)

Excellent. In this book, Wilentz explores the "paradox" contained in the Constitution's treatment of slavery. Namely, while some of the founding document's elements (3/5th clause, 20-year delay in the possibility of banning the importation of more slaves, fugitive slave clause) strengthened slavery and slave states, the fact that the Constitution gave no explicit sanction to slavery in national law (as opposed to state law), indeed did not even use the terms slave or slavery, would prove to be an important potential support for the antislavery movement from 1788 until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In other words, the Constitution tolerated slavery, but did not explicitly endorse it. And this proved to be important in the run-up to the Civil War. Wilentz tracks the legal and political wrangling in extremely close detail. I was frequently reminded of Max Weber's comment that politics is the "slow drilling of hard boards." (Another book that had this effect on me, though on a very different topic, was John Judis's excellent Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab/Israeli Conflict.) The book explores the range of views on both the anti- and proslavery sides. I didn't realize that William Lloyd Garrison was an outlier among the abolitionists in viewing the Constitution as a "pact with evil." I think it would be salutary if high school and college students could be exposed both to the numerous shades of opinion (rather than just the racist/anti-racist dichotomy) and to the work of politics and negotiation (of course, in this case, negotiation ultimately broke down). The latter (familiarizing young Americans with the sausage making of politics) might be helpful in improving our civic education, which, as far as I can tell, is in a woeful state. Wilentz rightly acknowledges that the abolitionist movement, which started in northern states (but reached as far south as Virginia) in the 1780s, was the first anti-slavery political movement in world history. I frequently found myself asking how the New York Times could publish its 1619 Project, which so flies in the face of excellent scholarship like this book.

This blog is back

After a 14-year hiatus, I plan to begin posting again. I think the format will be short book commentaries.