Books I had a hard time putting down

There are some books where even getting through the publisher’s blurb is a chore. Others you discover in the first ten or twenty pages are not worth reading. Within the category of books that you end up having a good relationship with, however, it is possible to create sub-categories and/or rankings. This is because while you get to read many interesting books in a lifetime, there are a select few that are unusually stimulating and pleasurable all the way through.

It's been possible for me over the years to extract many great ideas, insights, observations, facts and general information from books that nonetheless had dull, forgettable and even disagreeable passages. As an example, recently I’ve been reading quite a bit about the welfare-state capitalist model favoured by social democratic parties in the twentieth century. While there’s a lot of great stuff in these books – stuff that allows me to call myself a social democrat with some understanding of what that means – I can’t say that everything in them went straight into my head, never to escape (I’m thinking mainly of all those of graphs and charts of growth rates and expenditures on health care).

What I have in mind with the books on the list below is that, rather than simply enlighten and inform, they made the reality around me negligible and unimportant. In conveying my experience of reading them, and what I got from them, I have to be permitted two things: self-indulgence and perfect sincerity. The first is easy, the second slightly less so especially if for the most part you have an ironic take on things. Explaining your feelings towards a piece of art that has stirred something in you, for example, calls on a vocabulary cleansed of false sophistication and clever phraseology. Although the sorts of books that I read are not by any means artistically elevated, some are objects of genuine enthusiasm for me. Hence it helps, when talking about them, to take seriously that enthusiasm and be direct about it, rather than to sarcastically nullify it.

Enjoy. Or whatever (that's my sincerity talking).

• Russian Thinkers by Isaiah Berlin (1978, 1994)

The experience of reading Berlin’s prose for the first time is something I’ll never forget. I like to tell people that I was physically shaking with excitement as I was reading his description of the renowned Russian radical Alexander Herzen, but I wonder if retrospectively I made this up. Because it is an unusual image, and my life is comprised mainly of normal ones, I stick with it to make myself seem more eccentric than I am. The world illuminated in this series of essays – the milieu of 19^th century Russian intellectuals – is one I’m still getting to know, and won’t exhaust for some time considering it is such a fecund reservoir. But none of my subsequent readings will compare to this one, because it struck me at the time as so amazingly fresh. And this was due mostly to the relentless intensity of Berlin’s voice.

His approach to the history of ideas – broad, sweeping, over-confident, generalising – is one that most likely died with him. I don't imagine critical readers would today tolerate the central thesis of his famous essay ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox’, as indicated by one of its first passages:

For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel – a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance – and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and often contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological and physiological cause, related to no moral or aesthetic principle.

Although Berlin brought up qualifications to this division – mainly by stressing its literary rather than scientific nature – he ran with it for around 70 pages, ending up with the adventure of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history. Throughout the book we find similar propensities for grand themes and grand statements. Of Herzen’s memoirs My Past and Thoughts we have this: ‘...perhaps the most extraordinary self-revelation on the part of a sensitive and fastidious man ever written down for the benefit of the general public’.

Berlin’s essays were for the most part printed versions of his verbal performances, lectures and conversations and the like. And this is why he could get away with loose psychological portraits of individual thinkers in the place of rigorous social-scientific reasoning. As his biographer Michael Ignatieff pointed out, he was no John Rawls. Berlin was what Peter Ustinov would’ve been like had he chosen academia over show business: A great raconteur whose subject matter was the whole sweep of European intellectual history. As introductions to this subject go, Russian Thinkers could not have been better. I’ll always be thankful to Berlin for being my first guide.  

• The Last Intellectuals by Russell Jacoby (1987)

The lasting virtue of The Last Intellectuals is that it introduced me to Dwight Macdonald, who went on to become my favourite writer. It also led me to a writer who has an entry on this list, Lewis Mumfod and another, C. Wright Mills, whose works are unlucky not to be here. Edmund Wilson I also had never heard of before reading this book, nor Paul Goodman, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Howe and Harold Stearns (the last one is not such a big name but his The Young Intellectual in America is interesting). But the immediate virtue of reading it was that it was not on the selected reading list in any of my university courses at the time. This made it a deeply desirable book. No book that I was assigned could match a book I came across on my own in terms of interest.

As it turns out The Last Intellectuals was one of a number of books - before and since - that looked fondly back on the days of the NYPIs: the New York Public Intellectuals. The distinction in Jacoby’s case, and the reason it attracted so much attention, came from his outstanding skills as a polemicist rather than his more-than-adequate skills as a scholar. Jacoby must have had a great time composing all his attacks, rebukes and one-liners. The Last Intellectuals was more romance than history, but I nonetheless fell in love with his portrait of an era where you could make a living in Greenwich Village writing regular copy for ‘small magazines’ like The Dial, Seven Arts and Partisan Review.  

• Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford (1934)

To be truthful I’ve selected this book at random from Mumford’s oeuvre to be on this list. It could just as easily have been his less successfully received The Condition of Man or his more robust The Culture of Cities. I’ve chosen this one mainly because I do remember breathlessly going through it to and from school and work, at home on the couch and everywhere else in between. Because I had gone through Mumford’s work in reverse-chronological order (for some reason), I was already deeply acquainted with his style. Even so, the experience of reading Technics and Civilisation was exciting and profound. On every page there was a stimulating idea, a striking observation, a daring interpretation of technology, progress, economics, philosophy, literature, architecture and urban design. A largely self-taught writer who proudly stood apart from the academy and specialisation, Mumford was a composer of mountainous generalisations, who would demonstrate his wide-reading in annotated bibliographies where he would go into detail about what he extracted from other writers.

Despite becoming cold on Mumford in recent years – due to his moral priggishness, apoliticism, sexism (Donald Miller’s biography reveals in detail how awfully he treated his wife in the early years) and his embrace of eugenics or ‘moral hygiene’ – it remains impossible to deny the extraordinarily audacious output of this ‘Professor of Things-in-General’. Van Wyck Brooks said of Mumford’s work that it wasn’t animated by ideas so much as by an idea: how our relations with our tools shaped the organisation of social and political life. Today that’s a fairly standard approach to history, but remember Mumford began working on his project in the 1910s. Technics and Civilization is as good as any of his works in demonstrating the consistency of his overall life project, albeit explored alongside countless other interconnected ideas. If Isaiah Berlin reviewed his work, he’d undoubtedly say he was a most unusual combination of a Hedgehog and a Fox: a man with one big idea, and many other small ones.   

• Enlightenment 2.0: Restoring Sanity to Our Politics, Our Economy and Our Lives by Joseph Heath (2014)

See here for my gushing non-review for this book. As with Mumford, I really could have selected any work by this author to appear on this list. But this one takes the cake over The Efficient Society, The Rebel Sell, Filthy Lucre and Morality, Competition and the Firm because its the most wide-ranging and carries the biggest implications. I’d be happy to devote all my spare time to haranguing friends, family, world leaders and local gangsters to read this book until they pay me money to stop bothering them. The fact that Enlightenment 2.0 is not more widely-known beyond the author’s native Canada is a travesty, with the only major write-up appearing in the Literary Review of Canada. A short review can also be found here on Kirkus. 

Enlightenment 2.0 is about human reason and modern politics, and in this sense forms part of a growing literature that purports to unmask the illusions we have regarding our rationality and in so doing reveal its true nature. As well as serving as a rebuke to books such as The Righteous Mind  (Jonathan Haidt) and The Social Animal (David Brooks), it shares a lot in common with titles such as The Knowledge Illusion (Philip Fernbach & Steven Sloman), The Edge of Reason (Julian Baggini), The Death of Expertise (Tom Nichols), The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber), In Praise of Reason (Michael P. Lynch) and so on. And even though I’ve come to see in the passage of time the many strands that influenced Heath’s thought– the works of Keith Stanovich, Robert Frank, Cass Sunstein, Joseph Stiglitz, Russell Hardin – his book commands attention because although professionally Heath is a philosopher, he ranges pretty effortlessly over the whole of the social sciences. Enlightenment 2.0 contains Heath the philosopher, the economist, the political scientist, the evolutionary psychologist, the sociologist and the policy wonk. 

This book wasn’t dull at any stage. The amount of ground covered in its 350-odd pages truly dazzles. I happily read it a second time a few years later and it remained just as engrossing. Like your favourite movie, you become acquainted with it to the point where you can recognise its shortcomings better than its opponents and still stick by it. The best way for me to convey what this book is like would be this: if you see yourself on the political spectrum as a 'principled centrist' (Heath's own self-definition), one who may have arrived there from the left and is looking for a contemporary distillation of what this means, then read this book. Do it now. If you read it and don’t take to it then there’s not much I can do for you. And it would be best if we avoid each other for, like, the remainder of our lives. 

• Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty (1989)

For me 2016 was the Year of Rorty, which is lucky when you consider for most people 2016 was the Year of Trump. While Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is the book that established Rorty’s fame as a philosophical renegade, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity is the book that guaranteed him the wide interdisciplinary readership he subsequently enjoyed. It is a strange piece of work in the best possible way, a sort of guidebook for Interesting People. Rorty’s voice in CIS is wonderfully laid-back, straightforward, charming, yet serious; his whole take on the philosophical enterprise, on the value of literature, the importance of the ironic attitude, the concept of having a ‘final vocabulary’, the unconventional defence of liberalism, is all terribly attractive. However I can’t help but feel that I’m in the minority when it comes to this book. The reasons that people did not take to Rorty and his enterprise are numerous: the charge of relativism, the lack of seriousness, complacency, brandishing dull reformist (rather than radical) politics. I suspect that an underlying lack of sophistication on my part partly determined my enthusiasm for his work. After all, a philosophical critique of Rorty is beyond my grasp. I cannot get upset at him for the reasons that professional philosophers got and still get upset. I can only claim to having had a great time, and finding in Rorty an intellectual who, for better or worse, is wholly and uniquely himself. 

• Critique of Political Reason by Regis Debray (1981, 1983)

In the mood for intellectual seduction? Well then you’re incredibly weird. Thankfully, or unfortunately, so am I. Even through what I am sure is an inferior English translation, Regis Debray comes across in this book as one hell of a literary Cassanova. Virtually every page of The Critique of Political Reason has some ingenious epigram that either explains nothing or explains everything. On the first page we come across this: ‘The intellectual never says ‘I’ ’. Okay. On page 78 we have this line: ‘A vacuous idea which has effects is a serious idea; a serious idea that has no effects is vacuous’. Sure. Page 229: 'Tired of being the Aristotle of his century, Auguste Comte set out to become its St Paul.' No worries. The whole book is like this, and its freakin' awesome.

The book is essentially nothing more than a re-working of Durkheim, one that doesn’t bother empirically verifying any of its many propositions and ends up not really advancing our knowledge on any major subject. Even as I was on the fence about what he was saying or how convincing he was, I drilled through the last 150 pages of the book on one windy afternoon, glued to the page as if in some hypnotic trance. I usually go for prose over poetry in my political readings, but the Critique is a very happy exception. For whether the intent is serious or comic, every page of the Critique is an 'invitation to thought', as Perry Anderson said of historian Carlo Ginzberg.

Incidentally, it was Anderson who made the claim some years ago in the London Review of Books that Debray, along with jurist Alain Supiot, was the most original thinker on the Left. This may or may not be true, and even if it were there aren't enough people in the know to lend affirmation. I suspect the likes of Badiou and Zizek fill out bigger lecture halls. Debray is known primarily as that one-time radical who went to fight on behalf of the proletariat in Cuba only to wind up in a Bolivian jail for four years. His subsequent fame as a public intellectual has been seen as a less interesting second act; well, maybe a third act considering that strange period when he was an adviser to Mitterrand in the 80's. Like most French intellectuals I've read, Debray is more of an entertainer than a persuader. Then again I could be misreading him, which is an outcome I'm sure he'd be cool with.