What I’ve been Reading (April 10, 2023)
readings and reflections
People seem interested in what I’ve currently been reading, so I’ve decided to occasionally post what books (among the many that I read) have managed to make the most impact on my reflections and understanding of the world and think worthwhile recommending to others. Hopefully, I’ll manage to do this on a fairly recurring basis, especially if people find this book list and reflection worth engaging with. Feel free to discuss the books in the comments, or to suggest books you think I’d find interesting.
Politics as Radical Creation: An exploration into Arendt and Marcuse’s political thought and an engagement with the “political” as an ontological category. Engaging, but probably requires that you have knowledge beforehand of philosophical anthropology, critical theory, and civic republican thought. A good exploration of where a lot of left/radical democratic theory misses out the importance of the political, as well as a immanent (but constructive)’s critique of Arendt account of action.
A Theory of Freedom (Shay Welch): A critique of the social contract tradition from a feminist perspective, building on Pateman’s and other’s work on the implicit biases inherent within social contract theory. Returns back to a central question that runs through contemporary political theory which is: how do we define freedom, and which actors are capable of exercising it as a whole? There’s also the additional question of given how the public/private distinction doesn’t in reality turn out to be such a binary, how then should we consider what is considered “legitimate” and “illegitimate”. (Sidebar: Something that isn’t directly related to this book, but that I’ve been thinking about recently is how exactly we concieve of freedom in the Anthroprocene, given that *some* economic and political choices raise the question of how far we imagine freedom to go. More on this later.)
Crisis and Transition: A dissertation written by Jane Ball on what the feudalism to capitalism transition can tell us about our transition to a new mode of post-carbon provisioning. The challenge of contemporary ecological politics is primarily that our current mode of living is built on a mode of consumption (as well as production) that requires high amounts of extractivism and is a huge factor in breaching ecological thresholds. In order to address this, the way we reproduce our everyday life has to change - the question is, how? Ball elaborates on how moving to a post-carbon order likely requires a major shift in social relations and political economy, as much of the contemporary carbon-political order has been built for the benefit of vested interests (many of whom were as motivated by racism against profit).Highly recommended.
Horizon Work: A book on the challenge that climate change raises for humanity in terms of understanding. Something that I keep coming back to is much of the contemporary difficulty with climate change is that the time scale is so long and the impact so large, many people have a hard time conceptualizing the reality of climate change, and many either end up in an eco-denialism which ends up turning a blind eye to the violation of many ecological boundaries, or a eco-pessimism that just sees overwhelming ecological and political collapse as the future of mankind. This is compounded by the fact that ecological and labour interests may not always converge, despite the hopes of eco-socialists otherwise.
Future Politics (Susskind): A reflection on how the future of politics is intertwined with technology and how the technical advances we are likely to see in the coming years are going to shape the way we do politics. Despite some of its more optimistic claims (e.g. thoughts on how autonomous driving was closer than it is), for the most part, the book remains fairly realistic in pointing out that the questions we face are as political. What happens when employers start using algorithmic detection to root out union organizers? What happens when LLMs are used to generate models of deceased individuals? All of these are questions we are likely going to face in the coming years as the pace of technological innovation increases.
Keystroke Capitalism: An engagement with how the credit system works under capitalism. Honestly, if you’ve read your Minsky, this is fairly obvious to you, especially on how money creation is endogenous, but for a short introduction to “how does credit work in a modern financial economy”, it does the job.