Fall Forward

Last week’s column began to preview the fall and winter offerings from university presses. The first batch included books on higher education, the digital and dead-tree humanities, and speculation regarding the mind and emotion.

Now we move on to race, class, gender, war, and sundry other topics of heated public interest. The very titles of certain volumes may outrage some people, which can’t be helped. I will opine a little, on the fly -- but the most interesting thing about the whole process has been looking for possible or implicit connections among the books. With luck, readers will come across a few titles of interest here they might not have noticed otherwise. Including the institutional affiliation of the authors and editors of this many books would have bogged things down too much, but for each volume there is a link to the publisher, which usually has a web page providing that information.

Democracy and its discontents are the focus of several new books on political theory and history. The most philosophical of them is by Étienne Balibar – one of Louis Althusser’s students and collaborators, as it’s impossible not to mention even after more than 40 years. Balibar sums up the deepest conflict at the heart of the constitutional nation-state by coining the neologism he uses as the title of Equaliberty: Political Essays (Duke University Press, Feb. 2014), originally published in France three years ago.

The eminent (and prolific) American political theorist William E. Connolly continues to think through the conditions and consequences of pluralism. His latest report, also from Duke, is The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Sept.). Connolly worries that making the marketplace the ultimate arbiter of institutional legitimacy leaves us with a brittle and empty polity. Nadia Urbinati reflects on the same condition in Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, Feb.), with its criticism of “technocrats wedded to procedure, demagogues who make glib appeals to ‘the people,’ and media operatives who, given their preference, would turn governance into a spectator sport and citizens into fans of opposing teams.” (As a resident of Washington, I’d say that about covers it.)

In The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (Princeton University Press, Oct.), David Runciman warns that liberal democracy -- hitherto capable of managing its economic and political troubles, and even emerging from them strengthened – remains vulnerable to unforeseen developments it has no guarantee of being able to fix. Pushing the discussion in another direction is Anti-Crisis (Duke, Nov.) by Janet Roitman, who questions the reliance on the concept of crisis in narrating our social, political, and economic ordeals.

It’s been said (by whom I can’t recall) that all really serious problems now are either too big or too small, too general or too specific, for the nation-state to handle them. Perhaps that explains why the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber -- whose Jihad vs. McWorld was one of the more prominent globalization books of the 1990s – now stresses the efficacy of municipal politics with If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (Yale University Press, Nov.).

Biographer of Isaiah Berlin, champion of human rights, and erstwhile standard-bearer for liberals who rallied to Operation Iraqi Freedom, Michael Ignatieff had at last report returned to Canada to serve as leader of the Liberal Party. Non-admirers south of the border may reasonably have assumed, with relief, that they would never hear from him again. Indeed, to judge by one recent book and Inside Higher Ed's reports, some Canadians were of a like mind. But now Ignatieff returns to print – presumably invigorated from leading his party to massive, history-making defeat in the 2011 elections, when he also managed to lose his own seat in Parliament – with Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics (Harvard, Nov.) From lemons to lemonade -- on the double!

Scholars and warriors alike contribute to How 9/11 Changed Our Ways of War (Stanford University Press, Sept), edited by James Burk, and Jacob N. Shapiro’s new book analyzes The Terrorist's Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations (Princeton, Aug.). Promising “a groundbreaking look ahead at what may happen after the war in Afghanistan ends” (which could be soon, reportedly) David Kilcullen’s Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (Oxford University Press, Oct.) identifies “four megatrends” at work in shaping the future of political violence by non-state forces. His use of the term “urban guerilla” calls to mind the 1960s and ’70s, when most of the developments that Lindsey Churchill discusses in Becoming the Tupamaros: Solidarity and Transnational Revolutionaries in Uruguay and the United States (Vanderbilt University Press, Jan.) took place.

Zaid Al-Ali draws a balance sheet on The Struggle for Iraq's Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism Have Undermined Democracy (Yale, Feb.), while Christopher J. Fettweis offers his own diagnosis of The Pathologies of Power: Fear, Honor, Glory, and Hubris in U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, Oct.). That is perhaps the most Noam Chomsky-like title ever attached to a book written by someone other than Noam Chomsky. The linguist’s political interventions come up for assessment in Anthony F. Greco’s Chomsky's Challenge to American Power: A Guide for the Critical Reader (Vanderbilt, Jan.).

A blurb for Exploring the Power of Nonviolence: Peace, Politics, and Practice (Syracuse University Press, Oct.) says that its editors, Randall Amster and Elavie Ndura, have assembled writings by “a modern-day who’s who of nonviolent thinkers, bring[ing] fresh new perspectives to the urgency and practicality of alternative recourses to violent conflict.” The catalog doesn’t indicate who is on that list. It can’t be a good sign for the state of the world that the only potential contributor who comes to mind is the Dalai Lama.

Blithe as its contemporary practitioners can often be, economics was once called “the dismal science” – a characterization that now seems at least as suitable for ecology. The fields converge in William Nordhaus’s The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World (Yale, Oct.).

But then they converge in life as well. Both economic and ecological issues are easy enough to infer from the subtitle of David Sedlak’s Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource (Yale, Jan.). Something else ecologists and economists share, evidently, is an itch to extrapolate. Paul Sabin’s The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (Yale, Sept.) looks at a famous wager between a free-market optimist and an environmentalist catastrophist.

It will be interesting to see if Walter A. Friedman reports any evidence of a hybrid species, the free-market catastrophist, in Fortune Tellers: The Story of America's First Economic Forecasters (Princeton, Nov.) Analyzing the history of policy misfires in WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them (Oxford, Nov.), Richard S. Grossman argues that terrible consequences follow when a particular ideology trumps attention to “cold, hard economic analysis.” Okay, but if you can find anyone on Wall Street who admits to ignoring cold, hard economic analysis in the interest of a particular ideology, I will trade your credit default swaps for a nice, newly foreclosed home.

Meanwhile, much further down the socioeconomic spectrum, we have a few assessments of the labor movement that seem like S.O.S. messages in book form. That’s definitely the case with Save Our Unions: Dispatches from A Movement in Distress (Monthly Review, distributed by New York University Press, Nov.) by Steve Early -- a freelance contributor to The Nation, Labor Notes, and In These Times, among other journals -- who is one of the two or three labor journalists whose byline I’m always glad to find. (For a while I also thought he was a great singer and songwriter, but that turned out to be Steve Earle.)

On the other hand, Jake Rosenfeld’s What Unions No Longer Do (Harvard, Feb) sounds less like an S.O.S. than a toast at a wake. Organized labor in the middle of the 20th century  "was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States," its publisher's description says. "Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver tangible benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. The labor movement helped sustain an unprecedented period of prosperity among America’s expanding, increasingly multiethnic middle class." With the smallest percentage of workers in unions now in a century, Rosenfeld stresses the policy impact of labor’s decline: "curtailed advocacy for better working conditions, weakened support for immigrants’ economic assimilation, and ineffectiveness in addressing wage stagnation among African-Americans." In Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market (University of Minnesota Press, July), Marc Doussard describes jobs where employers routinely practice “denying safety equipment, fining workers for taking scheduled breaks, [and] requiring unpaid overtime.” It’s a fair bet that some of those workers are parents of the kids Walter J. Nicholl writes about in The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate (Stanford, Aug.).

Its publication next month timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates’s A Freedom Budget for All Americans: Recapturing the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in the Struggle for Economic Justice Today (MR/NYU, Aug.) revisits and updates A. Philip Randolph’s proposal for egalitarian reform. Ian Haney López proposes one explanation of the continuing and growing extremes of wealth and poverty in the U.S. in Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class (Oxford, Jan.).

In Tough on Hate? The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes (Rutgers University Press, Feb.), Clara S. Lewis suggests that federal anti-hate-crimes laws have backfired in perverse ways, while John D. Skrentny points to the even more convoluted side-effects of anti-discrimination legislation in After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace (Princeton, Jan.).

An interesting example of argument within the ranks of the conservative intelligentsia is Richard A. Posner’s Reflections on Judging (Harvard, Oct), which criticizes Justice Anthony Scalia’s judicial philosophy from Posner’s own perspective as both legal theorist and federal judge. Donald T. Critchlow revisits a largely forgotten chapter in the history of American conservatism in When Hollywood Was Right: How Movie Stars, Studio Moguls, and Big Business Remade American Politics (Cambridge, Sept.).

Two more titles looking at the history of the U.S. right wing – focusing on activists in the trenches at least as much as the big-name strategists – are Joshua C. Wilson, The Street Politics of Abortion: Violence, and America's Culture Wars (Stanford, Aug.) and Isaac Martin’s Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns to Untax the One Percent (Oxford, Sept.) Taking a long-term perspective on the American right’s foreign policy is Conservative Internationalism: Armed Diplomacy under Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan (Princeton, Sept.) by Henry R. Nau, who is implicitly in dialogue with Milan Babík’s Statecraft and Salvation: Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism as Secularized Eschatology (Baylor, Aug.) whether either of the authors is aware of it or not.

Enough politics! Let’s talk about sex. Or about sexual politics, at least. (Sorry about the bait-and-switch.)

Actually, “asexual politics” seems closer to the mark in the case of Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Duke, Nov.) by Benjamin Kahan. Decoupling celibacy (if that’s how to put it) from assumptions about religious inhibition or repressed gay identity, Kahan maintains that celibacy is “a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures.” Well, to each his or her own. Perhaps the author will be celibacy’s heroic equivalent of the now almost legendary German sexologist whose life and work Ralf Dose recounts in Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement (MR/NYU, Feb.).

That said, the celibate lifestyle seems unlikely to face the kind of legal and political issues portrayed in When Sex Changed: Birth Control Politics and Literature between the World Wars (Rutgers, Nov.) by Layane Parish Craig, or Katrina Kimport, Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States (Rutgers, Dec.).

The early stages of family formation typically include reading one of the pregnancy manuals that Marika Seigel studies in The Rhetoric of Pregnancy (University of Chicago Press, Dec.), teasing out the genre’s history and subtexts. Jocelyn Elise Crowley thinks about how to make parenthood and employment compatible, rather than a zero-sum trade off, in Mothers Unite: Organizing for Workplace Flexibility and the Transformation of Family Life (Cornell University Press, May).

Sarah S. Richardson goes in quest of Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago, Nov.) -- where we also find the coding that produces death, which is even more persistent. (Mortality has no equivalent of the option for celibacy.) Billy G. Smith offers one view of the Grim Reaper’s unrelenting determination in Ship of Death: A Voyage that Changed the Atlantic World (Yale, Nov.), his account of the yellow fever pandemic of the 1790s.

In The Thought of Death and the Memory of War (Minnesota, Oct.), Marc Crépon reflects on the desensitizing, depersonalizing effect of knowing about the mass slaughters of the 20th century. With Death and the Afterlife (Oxford, Oct.), originally delivered as the Tanner Lectures for 2012, Samuel Scheffler argues that we have a deep, even unconscious need to trust in the continuation of human life on earth long after we’ve returned to dust. He’s probably right, but I would still prefer not to think about it.