Daniel Noah Moses, The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan (2009)

This is a wonderfully written, sensitive, nuanced, and persuasive account of Morgan, a 19th century pioneer of anthropology and social theory. Morgan was the only author cited by Darwin, Marx, and Freud. For me this is not just any old good book. It's a bridge back to a meaningful experience and set of friends. Daniel is a close friend, whom I got to know more than 20 years ago when were both teaching the sophomore tutorial in Social Studies at Harvard. This great books course, in which a handful of smart students and I read and discussed Rousseau, Smith, Mill, Weber, Freud, Beauvoir, Habermas, and others, is where I cut my teeth as a teacher and has shaped my approach to teaching ever since. (It's no accident that teaching the First-Year Seminar class has consistently been my favorite class to teach at BHSEC Queens). On Thursdays, Daniel, Paul Lachelier, Thomas Ponniah, and I would meet, usually at Grendel's, for nachos and drinks, to debate the world. After reading this book, I see why Daniel was the perfect teacher in Social Studies 10. Daniel paints a vivid, persuasive picture of Morgan's life and thought in an industrializing America. Born in 1818 to an affluent, educated, Calvinist family in the Finger Lakes region of NY State, which benefitted from the nearby Erie Canal, Morgan's thinking combined classical reverence for the virtues with liberal confidence in progress. Early on he became fascinated by, and drawn to, the remnants of the nearby Iroquois Nation. He befriended some of them and spent considerable time living with them, which launched his scholarly career as an ethnographer (which he pursued alongside his more traditional career as a lawyer). The Iroquois' tribal conception of property seemed utterly different than the Europeans' and convinced Morgan that kinship was both malleable and profoundly important. Eventually, he would expand his study of kinship, and its varieties, to encompass the rest of the world and changes over the long run. Morgan's mature theory, as presented in Ancient Society, was teleological - there was a single path, from simple kinship to more complex (and ultimately, the European nuclear family), along which different societies were travelling at different paces. Through this teleology, Morgan remained hopeful that the communal aspects of the Iroquois could be reconciled with the gains made by individualistic societies. Namely, while the Iroquois were fated to disappear, Morgan hoped that progress would lead full circle back to a newly invigorated community.

Jennifer M. Silva, We're Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America (2017)

This slim volume adds fascinating, often moving ethnographic detail to our understanding of what the hell is happening in American politics. Silva allows down-and-out working class residents of an anonymous Pennsylvania coal belt community to tell their own stories (she comments only occasionally and always empathetically and gently) - and what their experiences mean for how they think about politics. The common thread is that these people's painful experiences with physical and emotional abuse, unemployment, addictions, racism, and ephemeral relationships have for the most part left them deeply distrustful of elites, institutions, and politics as a way to improve things. Instead, they cope by means of anger, addiction, conspiracy theories, self-help, radical acceptance, etc. The book fits in the genre of ethnographies of the disaffected that has grown enormously since 2016, such as Kathleen Cramer, The Politics of Resentment, Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in their Own Land. I read the book in the hope that I might be able to use an excerpt in my How Democracies Die course. I was looking for something as perfect as the chapter from Robert Putnam's Our Kids, which I used to introduce Wealth and Power. This book doesn't quite provide what I had hoped - a before and after snapshot told through affecting personal stories. The "before" is, for the most part, missing. And the book studies only one slice of the working class, rather than the entirety of the electorate. But I do think I'll use a chapter of We're Still Here - for the connections it draws between people's life stories and whether they see democracy and politics as worth engaging in; for its portrait of the white working class and suffering, which many of my students will be unfamiliar with; for its suggestions about the deep anger that motivates at least some of Trump's base; and for its engaging stories.

Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, Polarized By Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics (2024)

This book is like Jalen Brunson on an off night. One wishes it had been as good as one knows it could have been. But it's still very good. Grossmann and Hopkins teamed up on an earlier book that I found quite illuminating - Asymmetric Politics, about the role of specific policies and interest groups, on the one hand, and general attitudes (liberal or conservative), on the other. The current collaboration is about a very important topic, the reshuffling of Republican and Democratic voters over the last 30 years, and especially since 2016. Above all, the Democratic Party has lost significant support among the white working class, and instead gained the loyalty of whites with college degrees. Republicans are now the political home for the vast majority of white working-class voters. This switch has happened as both parties focus increasingly on cultural and social - "post-material" - issues. As the Democrats have become dominated by educated whites, the party has openly and assertively taken ever more progressive stances on these cultural issues. The topic will be much more prominent in my the next iteration of my course "How Democracies Die," which I'll be offering this fall. Unfortunately, Grossmann and Hopkins' writing is too dense and academic to serve my students well.