Jesse Ball, Silence Once Begun: A Novel (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014).
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014) (See blogpost, 4/24/2015.).
Steven Brill, America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System (New York: Random House, 2015) (See Marcia Angel, "Health: The Right Diagnosis and the Wrong Treatment," NYRB, 4/23/2015; Zephyr Teachout, "What Ails Us," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/11/2015.).
David Bromwich, Moral Imagination: Essays (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("This is a book about works of the mind of various sorts, and the people who wrote or spoke them. The common subject of the essays is the relationship between power and conscience. A politician like Lincoln or a political writer like Burke, as much as the author of a novel or a poem, is engaged in acts of imagination for good or ill. At the same time, he is answerable to the canons of accuracy that prevail in the world of judgment between person and person. These writers and several others whom I deal with recognize that the will of the powerful can induce a blindness to the nature of their actions which is one of the mysteries of human life. All of the essays in this book are concerned with that mystery, too." Id. at xi.).
Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism (New York & London: Norton, 2014) (See blogpost for 5/2/2015.).
Vincenzo Ferrone, The Enlightenment: History of an Idea, with a new afterword by the author, and translated from the Italian by Elisabetta Tarantino (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015).
Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization to Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014) (See Sheri Berman, "As the World Turns," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/14/2014.).
Lily Geismer, Don't Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (See blogpost for 5/6/2015.).
Thomas Geoghegan, Only One Thing Can Save Us: Why America Needs a New Kind of Labor Movement (New York & London: The New Press, 2014) (This book argues that the right to join a union should be a civil right. "Of course, there has to be an effective right to join a union in the first place, freely and fairly, without being fired. It is even more urgent as right-to-work laws spread. It's a matter of fairness to labor. It is the only thing that can save us." Id. at 188.).
Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and The Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
Marie Gottschalk, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders today, yet reforms to reduce the number of people in U.S. jails and prisons have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, a carceral state has sprouted in the shadows of mass imprisonment, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It includes not only the country's vast archipelago of jails and prisons but also the growing range of penal punishments and controls that lie in the never-never land between prison and full citizenship, from probation and parole to immigrant detention, felon disenfranchisement, and extensive lifetime restrictions on sex offenders. As it sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship, this ever-widening carceral state poses a formidable political and social challenge." "In this book, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state, with its growing number of outcasts, remains so tenacious in the United States. She analyzes the shortcomings of the two dominant penal reform strategies--one focused on addressing racial disparities, the other on seeking bipartisan, race-neutral solutions centered on reentry, justice reinvestment, and reducing recidivism." "In this bracing appraisal of the politics of penal reform, Gottschalk exposes the broader pathologies in American politics that are preventing the country from solving its most pressing problems, including the stranglehold that neoliberalism exerts on public policy. She concludes by sketching out a promising alternative path to begin dismantling the carceral state.").
Ramachandra Guha, ed., Makers of Modern India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011) (From the bookjacket: "Modern India is the world's largest democracy, a sprawling polyglot nation containing one-sixth of all humankind. The existence of such a complex and distinctive democratic regime qualifies as one of the world's bona fide political miracles. Furthermore, [note: in marked contrast to the United States's political players] India's leading political thinkers have often served as it most influential political actor--think Gandhi, whose collected works run more than ninety volumes, or Ambedkar, or Nehru. All recorded their most eloquent theoretical reflections at the same time as they strove to set the delicate machinery of Indian democracy on a coherent and just path." "Out of the speeches and writings of these thinker-activist, Ramachandra Guha has built the first major anthology of Indian social and political thought. Makers of Modern India collects the work of nineteen of India's foremost generators of political sentiment, from those whose names command instant global recognition to pioneering thinkers whose works have until now remained obscure and inaccessible. Ranging across manifold languages and cultures, and addressing every crucial theme of modern Indian history--race, religion, language, caste, gender, colonialism, nationalism, economic development, violence, nonviolence--Makers of Modern India provides an invaluable roadmap to Indian political debate." "An extensive introduction, biographical sketches of each figure,and guides to further reading make this work a rich resource for anyone interested in India and the ways its leading political minds have grappled with the problems that have increasingly come to define the modern world.").
Friedrich A. von Hayek, The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek: Volume 15, The Market and Other Orders), edited by Bruce Caldwell (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014) (see blogpost 5/8/2015.)
Dilip Hiro, The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan (New York: Nation Books, 2015) (From the book jacket: "Since partition, there have been several acute cries between the neighbors, including the secession or East Pakistan to form an independent Bangladesh in 1971, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by both sides resulting in one narrowly avoided confrontation in 1999 and another in 2002. Hiro amply demonstrates the geopolitical importance of the India-Pakistan conflict by chronicling their respective ties not only with America and the Soviet Union, but also with China, Israel, and Afghanistan.").
Tony Judt, When the Facts Change: Essays 1995-2010, edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) (See Samuel Moyn, "Unfinished Arguments," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 1/18/2015.).
Adam Seth Levine, American Insecurity: Why Our Economic Fears Lead to Political Inaction (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "Americans today face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being, such as job and retirement insecurity, health care costs, and spiraling college tuition. While one might expect that these concerns would motivate people to become more politically engaged on the issues, this often doesn't happen, and the resulting inaction carries consequences for political debates and public policy. Moving beyond previously studied barriers to political organization, American Insecurity sheds light on the public's inaction over economic insecurities by showing that the rhetoric surrounding these issues is actually self-undermining. By their nature, the very arguments intended to mobilize individuals--asking them to devote money or time to politics--remind citizens of their economic fears and personal constraints, leading to undermobilization and nonparticipation." "Adam Seth Levine explains why the set of people who become politically active on financial insecurity issues is therefore quite narrow. When money is needed, only those who care about the issues but are not personally affected become involved. When time is needed, participation is limited to those not personally affected or those who are personally affected but outside of the labor force with time to spare. The latter explains why it is relatively easy to mobilize retirees on topics that reflect personal financial concerns, such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, however, when political representation requires a large group to make their case, economic insecurity threats are uniquely disadvantaged.").
Richard H. McAdams, The Expressive Powers of the Law: Theories and Limits (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "When asked why people obey the law, legal scholars usually give two answers. Law deters illicit activities by specifying sanctions, and it possesses legitimate authority in the eyes of society. Richard McAdams shifts the prism on this familiar question to offer another compelling explanation of how the law creates compliance: through its expressive power to coordinate our behavior and inform our beliefs." "People seek order, and they sometimes obtain a mutually shared benefit when each expects the other to behave in accordance with law. Traffic regulations, for example, coordinate behavior by expressing an orderly means of driving. A traffic sign that tells one driver to yield to another creates expectations in the minds of both drivers and so allows each to avoid collision. McAdams generalizes from the traffic to constitutional and international law and many other domains. In addition to its coordination function, law expresses information. Legislation reveals something important about the risks of the behavior being regulated, and social attitudes toward it. Anti-smoking laws, for example, signal both the lawmakers' recognition of the health risks associated with smoking and the public's general disapproval. This information causes individuals to update their beliefs and alter their behavior." "McAdams shows how an expressive theory explains the law's sometimes puzzling efficacy, as when tribunals are able to resolve disputes even though they lack coercive power or legitimacy. The Expressive Powers of Law contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms by which law--simply by what it says rather than want it sanctions--generates compliance.").
Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2001) (From the bookjacket: "Critics have long treated the most important intellectual movement of modern history--the Enlightenment--as if it took shape in the absence of opposition. This groundbreaking study demonstrates that contemporary resistance to the Enlightenment was a major cultural force, shaping and defining the Enlightenment itself from the moment of it inception and giving rise to an entirely new ideological phenomenon--what we have come to think of the 'Right.' Born in France, but spread throughout Europe and the New World in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Counter-Enlightenment was neither a rarefied current in the history of ideas nor an atavistic relic of the past, but an extensive international, and thoroughly modern affair." "Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Darrin M, McMahon shows that well before the French Revolution, enemies of the Enlightenment were warning that the secular thrust of modern philosophy would give way to horrors of an unprecedented kind. Greeting 1789, in turn, as the realization of their worst fears, they fought the Revolution from its onset, profoundly affecting its subsequent course. The radicalization--and violence--of the Revolution was as much the product of militant resistance as any inherent logic." "In the wake of the Revolutionary upheaval, enemies of the Enlightenment assumed positions of immense cultural authority, consolidating their political vision of the Right into the first third of the nineteenth century and spreading their construction of the Enlightenment throughout the world. In doing so, they developed a critique of modernity that remains with us to the present day." "The most original and in-depth study available on this important topic, this volume is required reading for historians and political theorists, as well as for anyone interested in the history of religion and the development of modernity.").
Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford U. Press, 1958) ("I never tire of reading Montaigne's Essays. I spend hours and hours at night in bed. They have a calming, sedative effect and usher in a delightful rest. Montaigne's wit lost never runs dry; he is endlessly full of surprises. One source of surprise derives, I think, from Montaigne's precise estimation of the insignificant position man occupies on earth." Josep Pla, The Gray Notebook, translated from the Catalan by Peter Bush, Introduction by Valenti Puig (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), at 50.).
Robyn Muncy, Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton & Oxford: 2014).
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Is The American Century Over? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015) (Regardless of whether one thinks the answer to the question posed in the title is yes or is no, what is certain is that the United States's relationship(s) with the rest of the world will be very different than it is today, or has ever been in the past. And a central question Americans need to answer is this: Does the United States want be a leader? There is a strong argument that it is not acting as though it does. "Another debate is over how to build and bolster institutions, create networks, and establish policies for dealing with the new transnational issues . . . Leadership by the largest country is important for the production of global public goods. When the United States does less, others do less as well. Unfortunately, domestic political gridlock often blocks such leadership. For example, the US Senate has failed to ratify the Law of the Seas Treaty despite its being in the national interest and the fact that the United States needs it to bolster its diplomatic position in the South China Sea. Similarly, Congress failed to fulfill an American commitment to support the reallocation of International Monetary Fund quotas from Europe to emerging market countries, even though it would cost the United States almost nothing. And in terms of leading on responses to climate change, there is strong domestic resistance to putting a price on carbon emissions. Similarly, there is domestic resistance to international trade agreements. Such attitudes weaken the ability of the United States to take the lead in dealing with global public goods, and that in turn can weaken the legitimacy and soft power that are critical to the continuation of the American century."' Id. at 122-123.).
Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Is The American Century Over? (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015) (Regardless of whether one thinks the answer to the question posed in the title is yes or is no, what is certain is that the United States's relationship(s) with the rest of the world will be very different than it is today, or has ever been in the past. And a central question Americans need to answer is this: Does the United States want be a leader? There is a strong argument that it is not acting as though it does. "Another debate is over how to build and bolster institutions, create networks, and establish policies for dealing with the new transnational issues . . . Leadership by the largest country is important for the production of global public goods. When the United States does less, others do less as well. Unfortunately, domestic political gridlock often blocks such leadership. For example, the US Senate has failed to ratify the Law of the Seas Treaty despite its being in the national interest and the fact that the United States needs it to bolster its diplomatic position in the South China Sea. Similarly, Congress failed to fulfill an American commitment to support the reallocation of International Monetary Fund quotas from Europe to emerging market countries, even though it would cost the United States almost nothing. And in terms of leading on responses to climate change, there is strong domestic resistance to putting a price on carbon emissions. Similarly, there is domestic resistance to international trade agreements. Such attitudes weaken the ability of the United States to take the lead in dealing with global public goods, and that in turn can weaken the legitimacy and soft power that are critical to the continuation of the American century."' Id. at 122-123.).
Frederick Schauer, The Force of Law (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) ("Understanding for its own sake is valuable. Much of the enterprise of jurisprudence seeks simply to enrich our understanding of the phenomenon of law, without purporting to prescribe to those who make law, follow law, or adjudicate with it. And that is as it should be, at least as long as we take the academic enterprise itself, of which jurisprudence is a part, as a worthwhile enterprise." "That said, however, a potential but often neglected practical side effect of jurisprudential inquiry is at the level of institutional design. Law is not the entirety of political or social organization. It does some things and leaves other things to others. Law is good at some tasks and deficient in others. And thus an important job for law-informed institutional design is in determining which social roles should be filled by legal institutions and which should not." Id. at 167. From the bookjacket: "Reinvigorating ideas from Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, and drawing on empirical research as well as philosophical analysis, Schauer presents an account of legal compliance based on sanction and compulsion, showing that law's effectiveness depends fundamentally on its coercive potential. Law, in short, is about telling people what to do and threatening them with bad consequences if they fail to comply. Although people may sometimes obey the law out of deference to legal authority rather than fear of sanctions, Schauer challenges the assumption that legal coercion is marginal in society. Force is more pervasive than the state's efforts to control a minority of disobedient citizens. When people believe that what they should do differs from what the law commands, compliance is less common than assumed, and the necessity of coercion becomes apparent.").
Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014).
Adam Tooze. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (New York: Viking, 2014) ("But if there was one common denominator in all these frustrations it was the overshadowing of the European power states -- a model originating in seventeenth-century Europe and imported to Asia by Japan -- by the challenges of a new era and the rise in the form of the United States of a different focus of economic, political and military authority. As a memo compiled by the British Foreign Office put it in November 1928: 'Great Britain is faced in the United States of American with a phenomenon for which there is no parallel in our modern history -- a state twenty-five times as large, five times as wealthy, three times as populous, twice as ambitious, almost invulnerable, and at least our equal in prosperity, vital energy, technical equipment, and industrial science. This state has risen to its present sate of development at a time when Great Britain is still staggering form the effects of the superhuman effort made during the war, is loaded with a great burden of debt, and is crippled by the evil of unemployment.' However frustrating it might be to search for cooperation with the United States, the conclusion could not be avoided' 'in almost every field, the advantages to be derived from mutual co-operation are greater for us than for them'. If this was true for Britain and its empire, it was all the more so for all the other, one great powers. The question it posed for all of them was the same. If confrontation was not an option, what would be the terms of 'mutual cooperation' under this new dispensation?" Id. at 463-464. Might China be, for the twenty-first century, what the United States was for the twentieth century? And, if confrontation is not a real option, what might the terms of cooperation be? Also see Gary J. Bass, "Last Country Standing," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/16/2014.).
Dernot Wagner & Martin L. Weitzman, Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("What precisely are the costs of unabated climate change? What's known, what's unknown, what's unknowable? And where does what we don't know lead us?" "That last question is the key one: Most everything we know tells us climate change is bad. Most everything we don't know tells us it's probably much worse." Id. at xi. Also, seeWilliam D. Nordhaus, "A New Solution: The Climate Club," NYRB, 6/4/2015.).
Benjamin Wittes & Gabriella Blum, The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones--Confronting a New Age of Threat (New York: Basic Books, 2015) (see blog posting, 4/26/2015).
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian, translated from the French by Grace Frick in collaboration with the author (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951) (see blogpost of 5/11/2015.)
Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848 (New York: Basic Books, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "For the ruling and propertied classes of the late eighteenth century, the years following the French Revolution were characterized by intense anxiety. Monarchs and their courtiers lived in constant fear of rebellion, convinced that their power--and their heads--were at risk. Driven by paranoia, they chose to fight back against every threat and insurgency, whether real or merely perceived, repressing their populaces through surveillance networks and violent, secretive police action. Europe, and the world, had entered a new era." "Zamoyski argues that the stringent measures designed to prevent unrest had disastrous and far-reaching consequences, inciting the very rebellions they had hoped to quash. The newly established culture of state control halted economic development in Austria and birthed a rebellious youth culture in Russia that would require even harsher methods to suppress. By the end of the era, the first stirrings of terrorist movements had become evident across the continent, making the previously unfounded fears of European monarchs a reality." "The turbulent political situation that coalesced during this era would lead directly to the revolutions of 1848 and to the collapse of order in World War I. We still live with the legacy of this era of paranoia, which prefigures not only the modern totalitarian state but also the now pre-eminent contest between society's haves and have nots.").
Julian E. Zelizer, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for The Great Society (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("We as citizens and as politicians must study not only the great personalities who have inhabited the White House but also the full history of the political landscapes in which they operated and which made their achievements possible. Only if we understand how political landscapes change and can be changed will we ever have a chance of breaking the current gridlock in Washington." Id. at 324.).
Sapere aude--dare to know.
