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.

Bruce K. Alexander, The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in the Poverty of Spirit (2008)

This is a remarkable book - quietly, and often persuasively, radical. I was alerted to it by David Courtwright, in Age of Addiction. Alexander makes three main claims: 1) what he calls "psychosocial integration" - basically, people's embeddedness in community - is necessary for human well-being; 2) in modern times, the spread of the free market ineluctably destroys communities, thereby "dislocating" individuals; 3) addictions - which Alexander defines as negative "overwhelming involvements" - are an adaptation to this dislocation. I agree with these points, though I think Alexander could have spent more time fleshing out what, exactly, psychosocial integration looks like. This is all the more necessary because Alexander defines addiction (and by implication the absence of psychosocial integration) so broadly. "Overwhelming involvements" with alcohol and drugs are only a small fraction of addictions in his eyes; other addictions are to gambling, eating, love, work, attention, fame, having more stuff, religion, etc. By contrast, he implies, only a life of balance, and in a community, is whole, healthy, and integrated. The majority of the world's population is addicted, Alexander speculates. This broad definition of addiction, and the damning picture of modern, capitalist life that follows, is what makes the book so radical. Questions remain - for example, is there any place here for Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" state? According to Csikszentmihalyi, this is the "optimal experience" that occurs when we are fully engaged (overwhelmingly involved?) in mastering a challenge. Alexander does make room for positive addications, but seems to imply that these, too, may be incompatible with complete psychosocial integration. Alexander aknowledges the enormous material gains brought about by capitalism; he doesn't advocate its overthrow, only its taming. I think this non-Marxist stance made the radical arguments go down easier for me. I found myself nodding along to thinkers I had previously scorned, such as Karl Polanyi and even Noam Chomsky! It would be worthwhile to weigh this book's arguments against those in Angus Deaton's Great Escape to develop an overall assessment of capitalism and modernity.

Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control The Fate of Humanity (2025)

This is a good (not great) book. It opened my eyes to the truly vast ambitions of today's tech billionaires. Ambitions here does not refer to wealth or political influence or anything else merely of this world, but something incomparably greater. Key ideas are the Singularity (the imminent time when AI blows past human intelligence, creating a radically different situation); the importance and inevitability of human colonization of space, including eventually the entire universe, perhaps with swarms of nanobots carrying human consciousnesses in silicon form; long-termism (the valuing of all future lives as highly as those now alive), etc. While there is some disagreement among the carriers of these ideas, there's general consensus that the long term human (or human-AI) colonization of the universe is of such great importance that all other problems fall by the wayside. The Singularity will usher in utopia - or perhaps apocalypse. These highly dubious ideas would not matter much, of course, were it not for the fact that their advocates have so much wealth and power. Becker skillfully explains the main ideas and nearly as skillfully he debunks almost all of them. He points to the deep inconsistency between, on the one hand, the tech billionaires' championing of science and, on the other, their refusal to face basic facts. He also offers a plausible account of some of the origins of, and motivations behind, these ideas: ultimately, they are rooted in Christian hopes to escape death and reach some kind of heaven, now conjoined to technological salvationism. Disseminating and funding these beliefs, especially the philosophy of effective altruism, gives the tech billionaires a patina of intellectual and even moral respectability. Their insistence on the overriding importance of the Singularity and "aligning" AI's interests with humanity's allows them to sidestep all other contemporary problems as trivial. I sometimes wished Becker had dug more deeply into certain topics. He tends to rely on interviews for his evidence. When it comes to precursors to this generation of science-obsessed utopianists, Becker never considers Condorcet and mentions Frederick Winslow Taylor only once in passing. Sometimes Becker assigns guilt by association, however tenuous. For example, the fact that these people talk of "colonizing" the universe associates them with European colonists (the only kind, apparently) and hence with racism. Capitalism, racism, and white men are sometimes tossed in, casually, as stock villains. In the end, though, these minor gripes don't detract too seriously from Becker's timely, valuable work.

Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Conceptualizing Capitalism: Institutions, Evolution, Future (2015)

This book is somewhat challenging to comment on. I found many parts quite interesting, but I don't think it ranks up there - for me, at least - as a great book. Hodgson knows a lot about many things - and he comments smartly on many debates - but at times I lost sight of what he cared most about. Or why those things mattered. For example, as his title suggests, Hodgson insists that getting the definition of capitalism right is of great importance. Conceptual precision, he says, is as important as mathematical precision. I was not completely persuaded. Midway through the book, around p. 200, he finally offered his most detailed argument why definitions mattered. Hodgson makes a case that capitalism is more than just private property and markets, which have existed for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Of crucial importance are the state and law, which make property "collateralizable" - i.e. property is the usual collateral for loans, which in Hodgson's eyes are the real motor of modern growth. So capitalism is not a timeless system, but a historical, conditional one (and it may not always be with us). Hodgson also spends considerable time making the case that too many economists have remained wedded to a "physicalist" notion of property, i.e. viewing roperty as stuff. Instead, drawing on the philosopher John Searle's ideas about collective intentionality and institutional facts, Hodgson wants us to reconceptualize property as an institutional or social fact - something we together believe in and, hence, make real. I think these are his main claims. To be honest, I stopped reading about halfway through. I found myself agreeing with his intellectual affiliations (institutional economics, evolutionary economics) and admiring his relentlessly independent judgment.

Richard R. Nelson and Sidney G. Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982)

I was already familiar with, and persuaded by, the general arguments in this book: orthodox economic theory makes many unrealistic assumptions, about maximizing behavior, perfect knowledge and rationality, highly competitive markets, static equilibria, competition occurring only over price, etc. Nonetheless, I still found this book extremely interesting and well-argued. The authors draw on work in many fields, including Michael Polanyi's ideas about "tacit knowledge" and organizational sociology and, of course, modern evolutionary thought, to offer a much more realistic picture of how individuals and firms behave than does orthodox economics. The book draws extensively on Joseph Schumpeter's ideas and tries to formalize them (I have to admit I couldn't follow the models and math and skipped these sections).The book has been enormously influential, having been cited more than 55,000 times. I wish I knew the lineaments of its influence - which arguments have been challenged, modified or further developed. Several years ago I read and greatly appreciated Robert Frank's more recent Darwin Economics, which made a generally similar argument (though I don't remember Frank's book in enough detail to say what the differences might be). Finally, as I read this book, I was struck by the parallels to Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), which came out just three years later and also proposed, and made a persuasive case for, an evolutionary approach to significant aspects of human history.