Ongoing Learning

Rating Scale:

✭✭✭✭✭: Fundamentally shapes how I view the world

✭✭✭✭✰: Exceptional

✭✭✭✰✰: Very Good/Good

✭✭✰✰✰: Fine/Bad

✭✰✰✰✰: One-Star

See "Empires of the Sea" (October 2021) for further elaboration on the rating system

This page only includes posts from 2023. For previous years, check out the archive.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is a really cool book with a ton of information. It answers a ton of questions I had about the Middle Ages, and raises a bunch of new ones. In sum, it argues that "Europe" is a shared social system which expanded and homogenized c. 950 and 1350. Interlocking political, economic, and ideological institutions mutually reinforced this change, and created parallel phenomena in the Celtic, Scandinavian, Slavic, and Iberian frontiers. There was a material shift, as intensification of both production and exploitation created more elites able to then colonize new areas. The formerly urban South of Europe and the less materially complex East were both warped to fit this mold. Human relations were literally objectified in coins and charters.

The takeaway here, besides how correct Wickham and Moore are, is the way that social organization ("institutions")—more concrete than "culture" but airier than "technology"—are very powerful even under methodological individualism. Bartlett succeeds under these terms, and I think it is possible to further scale up his work to help explain the Great Divergence.

[Re-read]: This is the blog's first repeat, I believe, being a book I originally reviewed back in October 2021. I re-read it with an eye to putting it in dialogue with Against the Grain and The First European Revolution [both reviewed below], which proved extremely productive.

✭✭✭✰✰: I read this 1100-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the early Civil Rights Movement in preparation of teaching the post-war period. As one might imagine, it was detailed, well-written, with vivid portraits of many important individuals. Yet, it was not the synthesis I had hoped. Major events have their moment-by-moment minutiae reconstructed, but without Taylor Branch pulling back and clearly arguing why what happened happened. So when we have Kennedy saying such-and-such thing which contradicts a thing he said before—am I to understand that he is confused, misinformed, cynical, or actually his views changed? A different book could have used these ambiguities to emphasize the messiness of real life, but Branch is instead intent on on maximizing the theatrical power of each utterance and decision by a Great Man. It makes for a good story, but my notes are scattered with unanswered questions.

I wonder if the book's high reputation is in part due to the political context of its publication. In the 1980s, the Civil Rights Movement was only just gaining mythic status among white America (the first federal MLK day was celebrated in 1986). As the book put King on equal footing with the other leaders of the era, it was a validation for the liberal white boomers who have dominated cultural taste my entire lifetime.

✭✭✭✭✭: Rejecting the traditional search for an origin in the Classical Mediterranean, historian R. I. Moore compellingly argues that out of the collapse of Carolingian society emerged “European civilization—a mutually reinforcing set of social, political, religious, and environmental institutions, emerged. I list “social” first because, despite not being explicitly stated in the work, it seems the nexus for everything else. There was a shift from horizontal to vertical kinship, from partible inheritance to primogeniture, from de facto polygamy to enforced monogamy, from peripatetic to settled elites. At the heart of this is a change to the importance of marriage to procreation. This is not a revolution in how people actually had sex, but a change in the legitimate family. In 1035, the bastard William succeeded his father as Duke of Normandy; upon the death of his son Henry I in 1135, none of Henry’s illegitimate children were even plausible as successors, despite the obvious looming catastrophe.

Why this shift matters to politics should be obvious—just imagine English history where Henry VIII could have kept both Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth Blount alongside Catherine of Aragon—and in religion, Europe’s dominant religion (Catholicism) emphasizes the sacral importance of the boundary between licit and illicit sex. But where I think Moore is most insightful is the economic implications of shifting the unit of social reproduction. A society ruled by a collection of atomized lineages is different than that ruled by an extended clan. The problem of “second sons'' became more acute, swelling the ranks of professional warriors and clerks. Cerealization and sedentarism transformed humans’ relationship to nature, and encastellation and monastization allowed the more numerous lords to police and exploit peasants more extremely. Northern Europe’s population tripled and urbanized. It is in this sense that I think it is useful to talk of a “civilization” in the sense of a society increasingly legible to and controlled by centralized, sedentary, literate, and (sometimes) urban exploiters. (I am drawing from James Scott [reviewed: below]) If the social change was the most central, then this material one was the deepest. To this day, Europe has not again had such a small or nomadic population as it did prior to this “revolution.”

Upon this foundation, a new cultural edifice was erected: Chivalry, Scholasticism, Gothic Architecture, Gregorian Catholicism. When the upper orders wanted to emphasize their nobility, they did it by contrasting their adherence to the sacred calendar to the peasant’s earthly cycle. When the lower orders wanted to rein in their rulers, they supported a “Peace and Truce of God.” When one wanted to exalt the aristocracy, one could point to the gifts they gave the church; when one wanted to criticize the clergy, one could point to the same thing.

This is only one interpretation of this work, and I am not sure this is the one Moore intended. The book actually climaxes with the creation of a trans-national circulation of elites, both warrior and scholarly, which seems to be the sine qua non institution of “Europe” to him. As his contribution to the Great Divergence debate, he locates (similar to Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome [reviewed: March 2021]) the continent’s later dynamism to the resulting polycentrism. This inter-regional comparison is very broad and does not seem well-supported in the text, though that does not make it wrong.

“We are broke right now, more or less." -President George H. W. Bush (1991)

✭✭✭✭✭: In Collapse, Vladislav Zubok masterfully chronicles the unraveling of the Soviet Union, providing what will undoubtedly remain the authoritative account for years to come. Many passing conversations, near-forgotten moments, phone calls, and canceled meetings—the ephemera of which the past consisted—are recovered and compiled. The terrible intimacy punctures many of the era's myths, most notably that of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. He is revealed to not just be a brilliant idealist, but also, sadly, a blowhard who several times fumbles the bag to catastrophic results.

The story begins with Yuri Andropov, the KGB's top spook, attempting to invigorate the Soviet economy through top-down reforms. This pulls Gorbachev, whom Zubok describes as a "true Leninist," into the top ranks of Soviet leadership. However, these early economic changes exacerbated the systemic issues they aimed to solve. The reduction in alcohol production slashed state revenue, while the failure of cooperative firms to reinvest their earnings exacerbating the financial instability. Top-down quality checks led to a dilemma of what to do with all the subpar goods: either they could capitulate to economic inefficiency, or they could allow firms to go bankrupt. The leadership chose the former, avoiding immediate crisis of unemployment and shortage at the expense of long-term sustainability. Perhaps the single worst decision was to allow newly entrepreneurial Cooperatives and State-Owned Enterprises to perform financial functions. This policy led to a de facto multiplication of the money supply as every firm was incentivized to turn easy rubles into real resources, and real resources into foreign currency. Wild arbitrage ensued, leaving the Soviet economy flush with cash and low on goods, a recipe for disastrous inflation.

In stark contrast to other sectors of the Soviet economy, the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) maintained a level of innovation and productivity comparable to the West. Its members had a unique position within the Soviet hierarchy, with more open intellectual and cultural life. Even while it became a key source of liberal dissent, it remained the institution most reliant on the continuity and stability of the USSR. As the crisis barrelled on, the MIC would find itself not transformed into a Russian Silicon Valley, nor the germ of a social-democratic care economy, but simply torn up and left in the wake of the collapsing USSR.

Gorbachev's navigation of the crisis deserves criticism. He constantly weakened himself at home to win support abroad, only for the praise to not lead to material support. This is a brutal lesson in realpolitik, and one I think still lingers in the back of countries considering negotiating with the United States. In the end, the reform efforts spiraled out of control, requiring increasingly radical changes that the existing political structure could not sustain. New political actors seized control of the sub-Soviet republics and seceded, destroying the USSR and the MIC. A few of them have fared well, but I cannot help but wonder if the USA should have spent a few dozen billion helping out Gorby. At the very least, it would have probably helped avoid the current gas prices.

✭✭✭✭✭: In Armageddon Averted, Stephen Kotkin masterfully interprets the period before, during, and after the Soviet Union’s collapse. His choice to center the economy—by 1980 so dysfunctional that laborpower decreased the value of its products—is in alignment with Hobsbawm’s adage that "It is the paradox of the USSR that, in its death, it provided one of the strongest arguments for the analysis of Karl Marx." 

The exact course the Soviet Union took after this point came down to the remarkable Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev. As the first Soviet leader actually born within the USSR, Gorbachev was a "true believer" at heart—someone who had faith that the masses would embrace socialism if only given the chance. This spurred him to implement sweeping reforms known as Perestroika (economic restructuring), Glasnost (openness), and Demokratizatsiya (democratization). However, Kotkin points out, the brute fact of history is that these reforms, particularly the key "Law on State Enterprise" and "Law on Cooperatives," did not improve production but rather harmed it, while simultaneously allowing semi-autonomous entities to take advantage of their new capitalist powers to dump money into the system.

This double shock—less goods and more cash—led to inflation, exacerbating the economic woes of the average Soviet citizen. Faced with a choice to retreat from these policies, Gorbachev instead doubled down on “acceleration”, a decision that Kotkin argues sealed the fate of the Soviet Union.

Until practically the last moment, Gorbachev could have reimposed the old systems of control. Yet, he did not. The largest army in the world stood idly by as the largest country in the world dissolved itself. A useful contrast can be made with fascism: once it became certain the Nazis would lose, they only intensified the murder of the disabled, the drafting of teenagers, the shooting of their own women and children. Two doctors conceived and executed a complex scheme—with help from every level of the German army—to infect a quarter million Italians with malaria. Hitler’s dying regret was not that he had destroyed his own country, but that so much of it had survived to surrender. To the extent fascism meant anything, it meant an all-encompassing rage. And to the extent communism meant anything by 1990, it meant the promise of something better. Once that promise became impossible, the state’s ideological glue became a solvent.

✭✭✭✭✭: Against the Grain by James C. Scott is a short book packed with fascinating and compelling arguments about the interplay between states and their subjects. Scott breaks with those who see the state as a natural outgrowth of human society; rather, he portrays it as an actor that shapes individuals to suit its needs, often through coercive means. The title itself hints at the core theme: as states develop, their subjects become increasingly pressured to adopt a grain-based diet. This shift, while less healthy or enjoyable for the populace, ensures that a surplus can be captured by the tax collector.

The state's efforts to make society more legible and manageable, through measures such as standardized measurements, language, and legal codes, are shown to be both a means of control and a facilitator of state logistics. However, Scott equally centers the resistance and adaptability of populations, whose responses continually shape and subvert state policies. This dynamic is not depicted as a simple binary but as a complex, ongoing, dialectical negotiation. While it is not obvious to me what role the "domus" (our personal ecology which we use to imperialize new territory to our biological preferences) plays in his argument, the idea is useful and interesting.

Above all, though, I cannot stop thinking about how Scott's framework lends itself so well to so many other topics: why poaching (a non-legible food source) is so central to Robin Hood, what a useful concept of "civilized" would entail (to be en-stated), and what exactly is going on in Central and Eastern Europe during the Early Middle Ages (c. 500 - 1066). It compares favorably, in my view, to Scott's fellow anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber (whose Dawn of Everything I reviewed in March 2023 and Debt: The First 5000 Years in June 2022).

✭✭✭✭✭: After Virtue is Alasdair MacIntyre taking a sledgehammer to the fields closest to my heart: history, philosophy, and the social sciences. The book's central claim revolves around the historicization of philosophy: what usually constituted “morality” (or “ethics”, or “virtue”) was never the result of abstract reasoning, but was rooted in a community’s idea of what was prosocial. This is why different societies can adopt such different perspectives on morality. Achilles’ slave raiding was seen as good to Greek oligarch and democrat alike because both agreed that it furthered humanity’s fundamental purpose (“telos”)—in this case, socially reproducing one’s own polis. In this sense, “moral” simply means “advancing the telos.”

Due (primarily?) to the inability of Latin Christendom to re-homogenize after the Reformation, state “tolerance” towards different personal moralities became a necessity. The Enlightenment project justified this with a sharp severing of instrumental rationality (means) from teleological rationality (ends). Thus, once social goals are decided upon, those who value it for conflicting reasons could work together despite mutually irreconcilable beliefs. What was once a pragmatic response to political realities became, like all other governing methods, the basis of a moral discourse: liberalism. Liberalism posits that diverse personal moralities can be mediated by an acceptable public framework of shared civic values.

While capable of marshaling tremendous resources, liberalism’s public sphere is morally vapid. It both affirms that the vast majority of the population has very important beliefs on teloi and yet also says that these must be set aside for the sake of liberalism, a meta-political principle of discourse. (A good argument can be made that our very concept of “religion” names a slice of human experience which liberalism excludes from the domain of politics.) Modern society is thus unusual in the extremity of the gap between public and private discourses of morality. Our terms for morality, then, are not expressions of a shared telos (for our society lacks any), but vestigial from when we last had telos embedded in the language community.

This project has two additional parts I think are also very good: his fourfold argument against deterministic “social science” (on the grounds of: conceptual innovation, human freedom, game theory, and chaos), and the fact that moral frameworks are incommensurate, yet not impervious to critique and transformation. Philosophies fail when they cannot deliver on their own terms. The Fall of Berlin disproved Nazism, and the brutal exploitation of Soviet workers disproved Stalinism. Initial conversions to systems which delivered the desired telos better ended up dialectically changing the participants' telos. Adenauer proved a better protector of Germans than Hitler, and then some Nazis-cum-Christian Democrats came to adopt other of Adenauer’s values as teloi themselves.

✭✭✭✭✰: Freedom From Fear is David Kennedy's contribution to the "Oxford History of the United States", whose editorship he took over shortly after publication following the 1999 death of C. Vann Woodward. Two of my absolute favorite books—Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought and Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands—were put out under his imprimatur. 

The book itself is very solid, having clear and defensible lines of interpretation on the Great Depression, New Deal, and World War II: e.g., that the stock market crash was epiphenomenal, that FDR was not a Keynesian, that Operation Torch was a distraction from the task of ending the war in Europe. In writing style, it reminds of me other books on the New Deal like Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself or the works of Eric Rauchway. It feels a little under-edited, but it is impolite to speculate too much on whether Woodward's then-failing health (he was 90 and months away from death when the book was published) had an adverse effect on this aspect of the book. The fact that the book could be marketed in two halves covering the Great Depression and World War II attests to its under-integration, and the opening chapters on Herbert Hoover's presidency (1929 - 1933) are a slog. Still, these are minor complaints.

For the first time since starting this site, I fell behind on writing reviews, even as I read less than previously. This is a result of having a much better outlet for my love of history: my new job as a classroom teacher. Because of that, everything between Ages of American Capitalism [reviewed: August 2023] and The Inheritance of Rome [reviewed: March 2024] were written long after I finished the books in question, and I feel the reviews are resultingly of worse quality.

In 2023, I read 47 books, 9 essays, and 9 substantial sections of other books. This is a noticeable decrease from 2022, when I reached 55 books, 35 essays, 33 pieces of Ancient Greek oratory and short prose, 5 plays, and 2 longer poems. The drop-off corresponds to the last third of the year, exactly when the school year started. The quality is apparently also a bit lower: of the full-length books, 9 were five-stars, 16 four-stars, 18 three-stars , and 3 two-stars (1 was an unrated re-read). The average score dropped from +0.76 above '3' in 2022 to +0.67 in 2023, even as I became a little more generous.

The nine books which rated "five-star" are on the left: two books on modern European history, six books on US history, and a book on contemporary politics.