Here are ten more books that I recommend. Donald Albrecht, Ellen Lupton, and Steven Skov Holt, Design Culture Now: National Design Triennial, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. This is the catalog from a survey of contemporary industrial design at the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in New York <http://www.si.edu/ndm/>. The Cooper-Hewitt exhibit caught the wave of industrial design's new and well-deserved prominence, and it serves as an introduction to the field for people who haven't been following it. As such it's a little safer than the show that the designers would have designed for themselves. Still, at least half of the items are worthy, and the accompanying text is useful -- which is not always the case, given the uneven quality of the intellectual talk that accompanies the new design movement. (Thus, for example, I do not recommend the prodigiously annoying catalog for the "Workspheres" show at the Museum of Modern Art, also in New York.) Phillip Cary, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. You needn't be immersed in Augustian philosophy to appreciate this learned study of Augustine's stepwise progress toward a momentous discovery that we take for granted -- an experience of his own self as a complex inward space whose nature is not obvious without exploration. This was a new idea, and one that was arguably lost until it was given a recognizably modern form by Shakespeare. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed, Universities in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. This huge volume is scholarship of the old school, with weighty chapters on a broad range of topics by serious European historians. The result is important for anyone who wants to understand the institutional context in which the governing ideas of the West originated, but it's also fascinating as a sustained, multi-dimensional portrait of life in a different world. William R. Everdell, The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans, University of Chicago Press, 2000. This is the best introduction to the republican tradition in the West. It is organized around such representative figures in the development of republicanism as Solon, Machiavelli, Calvin, Franklin, Gambetta, and Ervin. The author is a high-school teacher who has obviously had a long career of explaining things in plain language and striking anecdotes, and right now, when even conservative voices are accusing the country's aristocratic president of arrogating dictatorial powers in wartime, is a good moment to read his explanation of what political culture in the West was like when nobody was certain that society could manage without a monarch. Because the central political conflict of the West in recent times has been framed in terms of conservatism versus democracy, the story of republicanism versus monarchy (a logically independent distinction) has been overlooked and undertaught. I hope that Everdell's book will help change that. Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. This is nearly the last book about communications media that was published before the Internet explosion, and as such it is a precious document. All subsequent books will necessarily interpret past technologies through the prism of the hyperbole of the 1990's, but Fischer takes the telephone on its own terms. He wants to know what social changes came about through Americans' rapid adoption of the telephone. He is contemptuous of received speculations about the subject, many of which (very strikingly) are the same received speculations that we hear about the Internet, for example that it would collapse space or promote democracy, and he sets about examining the evidence in sometimes ponderous methodological detail. His conclusion, very clearly, is that Americans used the telephone to pursue their existing ends more fully. "[B]asic social patterns are not easily altered by new technologies" (page 260), which serve to "widen and deepen existing social patterns rather than to alter them". He found no proof that the telephone caused rootlessness or other lifestyle changes; indeed, the elderly people he interviewed had adopted the telephone so seamlessly into their existing way of life that they a hard time remembering anything much to say about it. The telephone, like the Internet, was supposed to pull people away from their local relationships, but in fact it intensified local and long-distance relationships alike (265). It did, however, promote what Fischer calls "privatism" -- doing things in private rather than in public. The telephone "solidified and deepened social relations" (266) and combined with face-to-face interaction rather than substituting for it. It also -- again, much like the Internet -- promoted frequent checking-in. A focus on the telephone user, he suggests, leads to an unfamiliar of technology: not as a force for "modernity", but quite the contrary as an instrument for the maintenance and amplification of existing practices. Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000. You needn't be immersed in the history of architecture to enjoy this terrific collection of essays about the history of various prominent words in architectural talk -- "form", "structure", "memory", "space", "order", "nature", "function", "design", and so on. Each of these words followed tortuous paths on their way from early modern Europe to the putative revolution of modernism in the 20th century, and it's refreshing to get such clear accounts of the different meanings that the same word acquired when it was appropriated by different intellectual tendencies in different national contexts. It's also refreshing to hear such no-nonsense opinions about a field that is, perhaps by its very nature, prone to lurching between sublimity and grandiloquence. I especially enjoyed his polemical essay on the use of scientific metaphors in architecture. In a particularly caustic passage, he denounces the term "circulation", which has become a pseudoscientific term of art for describing how people move through buildings. This term, he points out, operates by analogy to the circulation of blood in the body, and thereby (among other things) ignores a building's connections to the outside world. A great deal can be learned by reviving dead metaphors, and I found that Forty's book, despite its occasional skepticism, has done more than a stack of underwhelming tomes on architectural theory to persuade me that buildings can be designed in an intellectually serious way. My only complaint is that Forty sometimes loses track of the difference between the history of a word (that often designates different ideas at different times) and the history of an idea (that is often designated by different words). Thus he claims that 18th century architects had no conception of "function", even though that period saw the rise of the sort of rationalistic mapping from institutional form to build form that Thomas Markus talks about in his scary book, "Buildings and Power". (Markus also has a new book called "The Words Between the Spaces", with Deborah Cameron, that I haven't seen yet.) Graeme Gill, The Dynamics of Democratization: Elites, Civil Society, and the Transition Process, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. I've already mentioned in passing this ferociously analytical book arguing for the central role of civil society in democratization. The world has seen a wave of successful pro-democracy movements in the last quarter-century, first in Latin America and elsewhere and then more recently in Eastern Europe, and a scholarly industry has sought to explain why, and to help consolidate the gains of democracy and encourage democracy movements elsewhere. The scholars all have their approaches, and the space of ideas is not easily characterized. One crucial debate, however, is between the proponents of so-called elite theories, which (as you would expect) emphasize the role of social elites (not just political and military leaders but a wider range of centrally-located individuals), and the civil society theories, which emphasize the spontaneous, bottom-up associational organizing of the society as a whole. (For the elite perspective, see Eva Etzioni-Halevy, The Elite Connection: Problems and Potential of Western Democracy, Polity Press, 1993.) I am not interested to settle this dispute, since both sides obviously have a lot of truth to them. But the debate is useful, because it brings out so clearly the logic of the case on each side. Gill pays particular attention to the ability of politically interested associations throughout society to cause ruling coalitions to crack. Even authoritarian governments that project a horrible image of rock-like implacability are capable of shattering if the conditions are right, and Gill maps the space of possibilities. In some cases, for example, one faction of the ruling coalition will go over to the opposition, building a new coalition with elements of civil society. What's most appealing about his book, as I say, is the intensely analytical way in which it is written. You come away with a clear sense that you could travel to an undiscovered continent and instantly set about analyzing its prospects for democracy by mapping the structure of its politics into the space of options that he lays out. Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, translated by Sheila Gogol, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. The modern Western tradition of theorizing about politics and society first arose mainly in France and Scotland, and Heilbron paints a sweeping picture of the social context in which social theory first arose. His main emphasis is on France, and upon the strategies by which serious social philosophers operated on the margins of ancien-regime court society with its cutthroat infighting and its taste for witty conversation and elegant, vacuous essays. All of this is entertaining in its own right, but it is also important because of the ways that patterns of language and thought become routinized, giving rise to deep patterns that can persist over centuries. (If nothing else, he explains a lot about contemporary French academic life.) Michael Herr, Dispatches, New York: Knopf, 1977. With the war on, now would be a good time for those who haven't to read the best work of journalism ever written -- Michael Herr's thunderous account of his time with the Americans who fought on the front lines in Vietnam. To communicate the madness that he experienced, Herr invented a radical dialect of English that makes perfect sense despite leaving every normal rule of grammar back sunning itself at home by the pool. It's quite amazing. Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, New York: MacMillan, 1917. If you want to understand the rise and fall of American liberalism, read this book. We don't normally think of liberalism as a religious movement, not least because conservatives go around aggressively taking control of every positive symbol in society, religious symbols included. But in fact 20th century liberalism is best understood as an updated and partly secularized version of a 19th century movement called the Social Gospel. The Social Gospel said, among other things, that social ills were not just bad in themselves, but were literally sins of the individual. The faithful were called upon not simply to give alms to the poor but to take personal responsibility for economic exploitation and political injustice -- that is, to regard those ills as being one's own personal fault. This quite radical idea is still the core of the social mission of mainline Protestantism, and its excesses are largely responsible for the decline of mainline Protestant churches. The idea that we share individual responsibility for social ills is basically sound. The problem, which is already quite evident in retrospect in Rauschenbusch's immensely influential book, is that the emphasis on saving the collective soul of society largely displaces any emphasis on saving one's own soul. The fact, however, is that people go to God not simply to uplift the poor but to heal their own pain and the pain of their families. Yet fundamentalists often veer toward the opposite extreme, twisting religion into a harsh, punitive tool of social control that empties the positive meaning from individualized conceptions of right and wrong. And, substantive disagreements about economics and law aside, much of the grotesque, venomous quality of American politics derives from this fundamental conflict between half-full conceptions of religious faith. end
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