What We're Reading

I've seen a few bloggers update their readers on what they've been reading. Seems like a good exercise, particularly if we're reading relatively obscure stuff.

Daniel

I just finished reading Bertrand Russell's Freedom vs. Organization, which is basically a history of Europe from 1815-1914. What I liked about it was that it combined intellectual history and more traditional history. The chapters were very thematic. Malthus, Ricardo, Owen, James Mill (not John Stuart, oddly), and Marx were covered in depth, with others making appearances. It was largely about the breakdown of the conservative order, the liberal and/or nationalist orders that emerged from that, and the impending breakdown of that world order with WWI.

I just started Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution, which should be self-explanatory. If it isn't clear, I'm trying to read up on my 19th century history. I read a lot from the late 18th and early 19th century, and I've recently read more about the 1920s and the depression, and I'm trying to fill in the gap. This is very good so far, although I'm not very far into it. Getting a great portrait of Metternich painted for me right now.

After this I'll read either J.R. Hicks's Value and Capital, which I've been meaning to read for a while, or the first volume of Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind in American Civilization (Dorfman, as I understand it, was Murray Rothbard's dissertation advisor). I wasn't aware of that when I got this three-volume set.

In terms of articles and other stuff, I've been reading some Orwell, Achebe, and Wittgenstein for a fleeting idea I had about language. May or may not return to it. I've also been reading up on aggregate labor supply issues (Hall, Prescott) for a new paper I'm working on about job creation tax credits.

Evan

During the past few weeks my reading has revolved around a course I'm taking in the history department at UChicago on structures of knowledge in modern Europe. Most of this has been selections rather than full books. I did work through all of Foucault's History of Sexuality v.1, however, and a sizable portion of Discipline and Punish, both written during his genealogical period (1976 and 1977, respectively). I'm sorry to say that this was my first real interaction with Foucault, but I was utterly impressed and do hope to get into some more of his work before too long. My interests have recently shifted much more to the sort of historicization of knowledge with which Foucault's projects are identified, and his work has been a real contribution to my current thinking on this process (I've discussed some of these issues at my other blog... this was written before I had any interaction with Foucault). I've also just finished part of Andrew Abbott's The System of Professions. Abbott is a Chicago sociologist and another writer worth your time; he's done a lot with questions of method and exploring academia from a sociological perspective. This book is his 1988 study that presents a theory of professional knowledge. His main concern is to counter previous professionalization theories that inadequately account for variation amongst the professions, and to present an account based on competition for jurisdictions of professional knowledge. Alongside Abbott, we read two essays by Pierre Bourdieu, again my first interaction. In both "Intellectual Field and Creative Project" and "The Field of Cultural Production", Bourdieu examines the structures of recognition and reception for cultural and artistic work. From all of these readings, I'm gaining an appreciation of the genuinely useful work of social theory, but also a frustration at the depth of the literature that needs to be engaged for any serious benefit of it. From the vantage point of my studies in theology, the task is daunting considering I have my own disciplinary literature to work with.

I also just recently finished Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, one of my few non-research related readings of late. My wife was shocked that I was actually reading a book with so many prizes and so much critical acclaim attached to it, and it's true that this isn't my normal material... usually I'm blissfully ignorant of what's on the wider cultural radar and sort of make my own way with the problems that I'm working on at the moment. Paths crossed in this case, however, as I'm trying to read more on pragmatism; this is the philosophical background of my doctoral adviser at Chicago and I've recently formed a strong interest in it through his influence. The book was a delight to read, covering important intellectual figures between the Civil War and World War I who were central to what's now called "pragmatism". One thing that struck me as I went along, however, was that Menand spoke much less explicitly about pragmatism than I would have expected. There were as many pages devoted to Darwinism or probability as there were to any straightforward account of pragmatism. I appreciated this approach, as it resisted any temptation to lump figures into a monochromatic school of thought. This was an account of biographies and intellectual trends forming a broad web of development during a pivotal time in American history, and the telling of it all was as seamless as it was diverse.