Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural & the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (2016)

This is the third in Gaukroger's four-part series on the emergence and transformation of a modern scientific culture. Gaukroger is astonishingly erudite. I only read parts of this book as my aim was to get back into reading for my project on historical methodology. The most interesting point for me was the contrast between Herder and advocates of a "natural history of man" (think Hume, Voltaire, Smith, Ferguson, Buffon, etc.). Both see themselves as pursuing a science of man, both subscribe to the notion of man's development over time. Yet, they work quite differently and will lead to very different schools or approaches. Herder is one of the founders of historicism. He focuses on differences between particular cultures or peoples and sees the study of language as the key to understanding their thought. Advocates of the natural history of man, on the other hand, rely on comparison across time and space as their essential tool. Many of them adhered to stadial theories of human development - hunter, pastoralist, farmer, trader and craftsman - which meant that their topics were on the grandest of scales. This seems to me like a pivotal moment, in which a comparative and, in my eyes, truly scientific approach to history was available, but lost out to historicism. A few decades after Herder, Ranke supplied historicism with an apparently scientific veneer in source criticism. I'll most likely incorporate this into my methodology manuscript. Next up: Frederic Beiser's history of German historicsm.

Michael Albertus, Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies (2025)

This is not exactly a bad book. I learned some interesting facts about parts of the world that I don't know well. For example, I learned that many dictatorships in Latin America made efforts to redistribute land from the wealthy to the poor. I learned that the Aboriginal movement in Australia has been much more successful than the Native American movement in the US. Down under, Aborigines now lay claim to more than half the land, albeit in remote and desert-y places. Also, I hadn't realized how widely the US promoted land reform after World War II. In this connection, Albertus makes some helpful distinctions between different kinds of land reform: collective (the Soviet Union, for example), communal (many Latin American countries), and tiller (as in land to the tiller, those who are already working it). Nonetheless, this is an extremely disappointing book, certainly one of the worst we've read in our Zoom book club. I came to the book with very high expectations. The title and subtitle suggested a bold, big history and big theory work. Albertus's position as a 40-year old full professor of political science at the University of Chicago suggested a scholar of great promise. Finally, the blurbs came from a who's who of eminent thinkers - Piketty, Acemoglu, Ziblatt, and Fukuyama. Measured against these great expectations, the book was a complete dud. Let's start with two of Albertus's key concepts - land power and the Great Reshuffle. Albertus fails to carefully explicate what land power is, exactly. Rather, he simply invokes the term, over and over. Once in a while he acknowledges that things like property rights and a functioning legal system matter to land power. But it would seem that property rights matter above all when it comes to economic development; they matter less, or perhaps not at all, when it comes to traditional, collectively used land. Albertus wants to honor traditional land uses, but never bothers to provide a theoretical framework that encompasses both them and the goal of economic development. Besides this major lacuna, Albertus vastly exaggerates the significance of land, again without much justification. He repeatedly suggests that land power (whatever it may be) is decisive, "determining the fate of societies." But does it really? Aren't there today whole societies that are doing pretty well without advantageous land holdings? One thinks of Japan or the Netherlands. And what about the biggest land power of all, Russia? Albertus suggests that control of land is key to uplifting the fortunes of downtrodden groups. But many immigrant groups to the US and elsewhere (Jews, East Asians, Nigerians, etc.) have done quite well for themselves not by dint of land holding. In short, while I don't want to suggest that land does not matter, it behoves Albertus to compare its importance to that of other things, like education and culture. The Great Reshuffle is another damp squib that Albertus trots out repeatedly. The ostensible Great Reshuffle commences with European land grabs all over the world, though Albertus equivocates whether this starts in 1492 or only in the 19th century. (He designates this "settler reforms.") But then it also includes the attempts, whether in collective, communal, or tiller form (in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, etc.), to spread land more equally. What's the rationale for lumping settler colonialism - conquest - together with these reform efforts? Albertus's big history, such as it is, is unrecognizable to me. In order to legitimate the idea of a single, early modern or modern Great Reshuffle, he must ignore the continuous history of land reshuffles plural since farmers began to displace hunter-gatherers, if not since homo sapiens displaced neanderthals, denisovans, Indonesian hobbits, etc. In general, there's very little argumentation here. For example, he distinguishes between land reforms that have failed and those that have succeeded, at least partially. But he never explores what explains the difference. Instead we have, along with his repeated recourse to mantra-like terms, only basic (and often redundantly told) narratives of his case studies.

Natasha Dow Schuell, Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012; new edition, 2026)

Since its publication in 2012 this has become a touchstone for anybody trying to understand (and counteract) how screens have taken over the world. Schuell starts from the plausible premise that addictions develop out of the confluence of traits and behaviors of the addict and features of the object of addiction. Her book explores the lives of the gamblers and their internal states while gambling, as well as the persistent and increasingly systematic efforts by the gambling industry to "hook and hold" their customers. In terms of the experience of gambling, Schuell's most noteworthy finding is that persistent gamblers are not motivated by the possibility of winning. Rather, they speak of a "zone" in which they lose themselves and their worries. Schuell has very interesting things to say about how this zone both resembles and differs from Mihaly Csikszentmihaly's "flow state." I found myself wondering how it might resemble and differ from the Stoics' tranquillity and, furthermore, from Aristotle's eudaimonia/flourishing. Topics for further research....In her illuminating new preface, written in 2024, Schuell identifies four characteristics that machine gambling and other screen addictions have in common: 1) isolation and asociality 2) continuous action and immediate feedback 3) randomness (as is well known, intermittent reinforcement is most addicting of all 4) non-resolution (i.e. infinite scroll).

Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (2021)

This book was extremely interesting. Lembke draw both on her clinical work as a psychiatrist and on her research (she's the head of a program at Stanford devoted to addiction research), which makes for gripping, highly stimulating reading. The book is of relevance to my course on Media and Minds, to my thinking about the modern condition, and, not least, to my own efforts to live well. It joins David Courtwright's Age of Addiction and Bruce Alexander's Globalization of Addiction as the third book in my addiction trilogy. A central point Lembke makes has to do with the pain-pleasure balance and how, in complex ways, the brain's homeostatic tendencies respond to pleasure. Like Courtwright and Alexander, Lembke recognizes the unprecedented nature of the modern age of plenty, in which we are inundated by dopamine-generating substances and behaviors. Her recommendations include various forms of self-binding (a la Odysseus) and even the pursuit of moderate pain, in order to stave off greater pain.