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.

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.