The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Book Reviews

Review of “Max Weber: A Skeleton Key,” by Randall Collins

Max WeberThis is my second review of a book by Randall Collins, the sociologist. You can read the first, on Non-Obvious Sociology, here.

Max Weber, the subject of this book, is generally considered one of the three founding fathers of the discipline of Sociology, along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim.

Early Life and Translators

Weber was raised by a father who was involved in moderate German politics and by a mother who was an extremely pious German Victorian involved in the progressive Christian politics of the time. This meant feeding the poor and an absolute abhorrence of sex.

Weber was a brilliant student, but did no interesting academic work until after he had a breakdown. He had married a woman his mother was fond of, and they had a celibate marriage, and many commenters, including Collins, think that the conflict between his mother’s progressive values (including his celibacy) and his father’s more worldly ways led to Weber’s breakdown.

Weber was to engage in an extra-marital affair and it was during his convalescence, that he first started writing the impractical work for which he is still read.

Weber’s most famous work in the English speaking world is the “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which is unfortunate, because it does a disservice to his overall corpus, it being his first book and representing only a small part of his mature thought. In general, Weber was ill-served by his early translators (such as Talcott Parson), who chose the pieces they thought would help their own academic and political persuasions. Parsons, in particular, was quite conservative and had an organic view of society in which everything had a purpose. This does violence to Weber’s analytical model, which is far more conflict prone.

Weber worked copiously, but I am going to pick out two major pieces of Collins’ precis on which to concentrate: rationality and the preconditions for rational capitalism and the industrial takeoff.

Rationality and Rationalization

Though Weber uses the term “rationality” in a number of different ways and never firmly defines it. The two most important forms of rationality appear to be: instrumental, or, mean rationality Zweckrationalitat) and value rationality (Wertrationalitat).

Instrumental rationality means calculating how to achieve an end. You have a model of the world, you have an end, you use that model to figure out how to get to the end.

Value rationality is an action that is an end in itself. Even if God does not answer prayers it may be good in itself to pray to him. Even if your protest against a government policy may not change the government’s policy it may be right to protest that policy. Going to jail to oppose an immoral war is the right thing to do–even if it won’t change the war’s outcome in the slightest.

These types of actions are different from two others: traditional action, in which we do what our ancestors have always done, and emotional action, in which we just do what feels good.

Traditional action, through the course of world history, may have been the most widespread type of action. While it’s not rational as Weber uses rational, it is rational in the sense that making changes increases risk, and when the chances for survival are razor thin, doing things how they’ve always been done makes sense; these methods may not be the best, but they obviously work.

Remember that these are what Weber called ideal types. Nobody is entirely values rational or means rational or traditional or emotionally driven, and neither is any society. I could want lots of money because that’s what people in my society do (tradition). I could want it because I believe having lots of money means I’m a “winner” (values driven). I could want to be filthy rich so I could have coke-fueled orgies every weekend (emotional) or I could want lots of money for… wait, there is no purely instrumental reason for having money—you always want money for some other reason. Money is an instrumentality to obtain other goals. Or is it?

Instrumental rationality always starts off as being for some other reason, until it forgets what it is doing.

Let’s go back to the Protestant thesis, not in the strict sense of the book, but in the broader sense Weber used it throughout his work.

In traditional religions, like Catholicism or most Buddhism or Hinduism, the highest, most ideal religious life is something only a few people live: There are monks or hermits who live that life and the role of lay-people is to support them.

Monks in monasteries pray and perform rites, priests make sure that sins are forgiven and perform the key rituals and all lay people can do is give them money, confess, and ask them for the key rituals at the right time.

Most forms of Protestantism change this: You read the Bible yourself, you don’t need priests, the monasteries are abolished, and you are called to live a Godly life. The idea of “being called” doesn’t mean anything is good, however. You should still not sin, but it emphasized that work is holy so long as it is not immoral work.

Capitalism before rational capitalism is gambling: Merchants send out their ships and convoys, they make big loans, and when the results come in and they win, they take the money and splurge. Often, indeed, they buy a patent of nobility and stop being merchants.

In the Medieval world, there is little sense that work is good, or holy, or anything but a PITA. Nobles don’t work. Monks may work the land, but their primary duties are prayer and ritual.

Protestantism changes this, or rather, it extends the late Medieval monastic revolution, because it’s not quite true that monks don’t work. The early Cluniac-style monastics certainly do some work, but the late Medieval monastics make work their thing: Monasteries improved the land, worked it hard, and became rich, because hey, they amounted to corporations which never die, never disburse funds, and are immune to taxation.

Protestantism breaks up the monasteries, transfers that attitude to hard labor (it’s holy and good, you’re not gambling, you’re making your toil an offering to God) and extends it to society.

Importantly early merchants are generally considered untrustworthy, but religiously motivated merchants are not. They want regular small profits, they don’t cheat their customers, they are fair and honest.

This is a chunk of the larger Weber religious (Protestant) thesis. He deals with this in multiple studies, including of Chinese Buddhism, Hinduism, and Ancient Egyptian religion.

Protestantism is not a radical break, it is an evolution.

The irony is that as the clerics became rich (this extends far beyond monasteries, into the Church as a whole, a huge enterprise), they were corrupted by their wealth. That corruption led to the Protestant revolution. Then Protestants became rich themselves, and were corrupted.

Meanwhile, the Catholic counter-reformation, though it did not adapt all of the Protestant reforms, adapted enough that the world changed.

Value rationality, in this case the idea that people must act holy, is one of the factors which has led to honest dealing, hard work, and a wish for a sort of business based on large volumes of low profit transactions.

That leads us to…

The Preconditions for Rational Capitalist Takeoff (Mass Industrialization)

Rational Capitalism: Capitalism in its  modern form is different from traditional capitalism. Many societies have had capitalism: the ancient people of Mesopotamia certainly did, the Romans did, the Greeks did, the Chinese, and so on.

They had markets, those markets relied on price signals, and provided goods.

Rational capitalism is bulk capitalism. Modern capitalism requires:

  1. That people buy what they need on the market
  2. That people are available to be hired by the market
  3. Rationalized capital
  4. Rational technology
  5. Calculable law

Most people, for most of history, and in most societies, have not been available for hire. They have not needed to buy their necessities on the market, nor even much of their entertainment.

The capital required for rational capitalism was not available in most places: Capital went to merchant gambling, kings, or to kin. It was not liquid, but bound up in land and chattels.

Technology was bound up in the heads of a few people and a few books, handed down through apprenticeship systems and often tightly guarded. When it was not, the principles by which it worked were not widely understood. In the beginnings, modern patent law was not an attempt to reward those who knew technology, it was an attempt to get them to share their secrets by assuring them a share of the profits (in general, they received much shorter periods of assurance than we currently provide).

And, for much of history, the law was capricious and not suited to mercantile endeavours. Law was created and enforced by people who were themselves not merchants, and because merchants were regarded as scum by almost all traditional societies- including China, Japan and Europe–they were not treated fairly.

Good mercantile law arose in Europe in the free cities, run by merchants. It arose in Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate because the Samurai didn’t want to dirty themselves by regulating such trash, so they allowed the merchants to mostly regulate themselves.

In general, modern capitalism is rational: Calculations are made of profit or loss. They are made of cost inputs and likely markets and predictions are made of the future. The larger the enterprise, the more this is the case. Merchants rely not on windfall profits due to a few large transactions or having one’s “ship come in,” but on millions to billions of small transactions at low profit.

This is, again, an ideal type. It is how rational capitalism is supposed to work, and deviations generally show pathologies (as with broadband companies getting near 100 percent returns).

The larger point here is simple: The conditions for modern capitalism and markets did not exist for most of history, and it took rather a lot of historical happenstance for them to occur.

Modern markets are rationalizing in the Weberian sense because their rules, while arbitrary (go to the highest profit), destroy those who do not obey. When markets become the predominant form of social organization, to fail to act as they dictate leads to you becoming weaker than those who do, and eventually those who make the most profits will buy you out or you will be reduced to poverty by bankruptcy.

Rational systems, in this regard, are not kind, but they are totalizing. Once these systems are put in place, they drive towards their ends relentlessly.

That does not mean they always “work” or are rational in the larger sense. Capitalism may well destroy itself by being unable to prevent climate change, for example. As noted, the wealth gained by Christians who sought the holy life in their works destroyed their faith, just as wealth destroyed the Catholic Church’s moral position and the faith that had truly made them powerful.

History is full of such ironies and catastrophes. Systems work until they don’t, but while they are working, to move against them is tantamount to moving against natural law. So long as humans believe in modeling behaviour on profit and rewarding such behaviour, those who don’t are meat for the gears. Those who tried to resist the Medieval church were cut out from the most advanced part of the Medieval economy and were often prosecuted fiercely. To be a Roman politician in the later Republic who did not believe in foreign wars was to be defeated by those who did, as the latter would have the loyal soldiers, the popularity with the mob, and the vast loot that comes from war.

Concluding Remarks

Weber tends to be misunderstood in the Anglo-American world because of an emphasis on the Protestant Ethic, and a history of partial translations calculated to support translators’ positions. His work is one of the cornerstones, however, for understanding why capitalism arose when and where it did. It is a very long answer to the old question of, “Why not in China?” and, indeed, Weber wrote a book on just that question.

The meta-theme of rationalization and how it both drives forward and dies is important to our own situation, here, near the end of one form of capitalism.

Of course, there is much, much more. I have not touched (though Collins does) on Weber’s analysis of power (class, status, political party) or many other threads. But this should give you a taste for the sort of thought Weber did engage in, far beyond the single thread of the Protestant Ethic.


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Book Review of Sociological Insight, by Randall Collins

Randall Collins has probably influenced me more than any other writer. A sociologist who concentrated on theory, with an encyclopedic knowledge of world history and in particular intellectual history, I regard him as a candidate for greatest intellectual of the 20th century whom no one outside his field knows.

Sociological Insight is a short book, subtitled “An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology”.

The dig against sociology is that it mostly discovers stuff that any idiot already knew: It is reified common sense. (A friend and I used to joke that if we ever started a consultancy we’d call it RCS, and not tell anyone what it meant.)

Collins wrote this small book to explain to students considering sociology, and to non-sociologists, why sociology was worth studying. The book is clearly written, divided into short chapters and clocks in at under 200 pages. Used copies are cheap, or you can probably still find it at your local university or college library.

If you read only one book of the books I’m going to review this year I suggest it be this one, or “An Introduction to Weberian Sociology,” also by Collins.

Enough preamble, into the meat. Each section of the book covers one subject, I will precis some of them, but not all.

The Pre-Rational Basis of Social Trust and Solidarity

Collins covers the Durkheimian argument that it is always rational at some point to betray trust and that trust is therefore non-rational. This sounds like game theory, but Durkehim made this point long before game theory. The idea is simple enough, as a game (society) accumulates assets, at some point it is better to betray and grab them all. The long term gains do not necessarily outweigh the what you’ll get from betraying.

If this is true, and it seems to be, then why do we have societies at all? The answer is that trust isn’t rational. The more interesting question is: How trust is formed? The Durkheimian answer is: “Through rituals.”

People assemble, they put their attention together on the same sacred object, they move together, and their emotions move together. There is emotional effervesence, and the symbols become charged with the feelings generated by the ritual. We feel a force larger than ourselves, we feel awe (awesome), we feel as one with the group.

These rituals can be small (the rituals of greeting, the rituals of dating) or they can be huge. You can see the sacred effect in fans of football and fans of rock bands, but also in how people become outraged when a flag is burned, or in how people thinks it makes a statement to burn a flag.

Trust is shared belief and sense of belonging. Ritual groups re-enact it regularly when they meet as groups, we re-enact it every day when we treat each other ritually, which we always do. (Just don’t say goodbye to a close friend; instead, walk away without saying a word. See how that feels for both of you.)

Collins goes into all of this in far greater detail than I can, touching on the caveats, the counter-arguments, the cult of modern individuality, and the creation of the self by the group. The entire section is worth reading because it rebuts the common idea that we are in any way self-contained, or self-created individuals.

Power

Collins then moves on to a discussion of how social power is created: through force, through money, and through solidarity. He discusses the limitations and benefits of each. Force gets you the least cooperation, but you give the least in return; money buys you cooperation, but not enthusiasm; letting people “in” and giving them power to speak and act on the part of the group generally gets you enthusiasm, but it also requires you to share actual power, which you may not wish to do.

Coercion, by the way, requires surveillance, which Collins meant in the old-fashioned sense of “someone watching you” as opposed to all-out electronic surveillance (which is still, eventually, someone watching you), and its effects on conformity, group think, and submission. High-surveillance societies are really coercion societies, and they produce people who appear dull and without any initiative.

This is something everyone should read and think on because we are moving from a low-surveillance society back to a high-surveillance society; perhaps the most high-surveillance society in history, in certain respects. Understanding what it is likely to do us is important.

Crime

Collins covers two theories here. The first is labeling theory. Most adolescents do something that would be considered a crime, but most aren’t caught doing it, let alone given a record. Those who are become criminals, because, once labeled a criminal, your options for doing anything else tend to shut down, while your options for being a criminal open up (not least because of all the contacts you make in prison.)

On top of this, most crimes are not “natural” crimes, i.e, like violence crimes, those recognized by essentially all societies. By making something a crime, we create criminals.

Collins cites the experience of Denmark in WWII, when the police were locked up for a year. What happened? Property crime increased tenfold. Violent crimes did not increase at all.

Collins thus states Crime seems to fall into three categories: (1) Victimless crimes, like drug use, which would not exist if society did not make them a crime; (2) Property crime, which would exist no matter what, and; (3) Crimes of passion which are largely unaffected by the criminal justice system at all (if someone’s so worked up they’re going to assault, murder, or rape, deterrence doesn’t work).

As part of his argument, Collins does cite “socialist” societies like Russia as having no property, but still having property. This is one place I differ with him, I think Communist countries only got rid of property in theory, not practice. Societies which really did have almost no property, like hunter-gatherer bands, also had essentially no property crime. In many such societies, if someone has something you want, you admire it and they give it to you. Of course, some time later someone admires it and you give it to them…

Collins goes on to talk about how crime is useful in a ritual context: If laws are about enforcing ritual categories of sacred and profane, society needs scapegoats, to reinforce the bad/good dichotomies upon which it rests.

Marriage, Love, and Property

Here, Collins makes a strong argument that marriage is about sexual property, or about who has the exclusive right to have sex with other people. There is a section on how dating is a negotiating process and ritual used to create strong emotions, which we regard as love.

There is a hardheaded look at power in marriages, with a note that as women gain resources outside the household, their relative power increases. In the traditional marriage, where the woman is dependent on her husband, she is essentially a servant, with the added side of official sexual duties (and remember, up until very recently in most countries, the law was that a husband could not rape a wife, she had already given consent to sex at any time or place or under any condition.)

This section is historical, moving from the Victorian household and marriage revolution through to the 60s and 70s revolution in dating and mores and is worth reading in the whole, though you may find it has disenchanted romance somewhat for you, even as Collins avers that the rituals do produce love.

Concluding Remarks

There is also a chapter covering what sociology offers to the project of making an AI (a lot, actually, and Collins suggestions are eerily prescient to what is just now happening with social robots), that I’m not going to cover.

What is important about this book is not the specific subjects covered, but that it can teach you how to think like a sociologist. Core assumptions are hammered in: Humans are almost entirely non-rational; personality and character come from the outside, not the inside. Understanding society means looking at variations: If the behaviour is thus here and now, is it different in another time and place? If so, it is not essential, it is social (for example crude studies insist breasts are sexual, but traditional Japanese society viewed them as related to child-bearing and thus disgusting and non-sexually attractive.)

You can only learn about your own society by looking at other societies, and you can only understand individuals by looking at the larger groups which created them.

Sociology is a discipline which is widely despised. Sometimes there’s good reason. But because hardly anyone outside of sociology takes it seriously (unlike, say, economics), sociologists have a higher frequency of doing astoundingly useful work than in other social sciences, save anthropology and archeology.

Reading this book, and indeed anything written by Collins, will pay back your time and open intellectual vistas most people weren’t even aware existed.


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Book Review: “Max Weber: A Skeleton Key” On Sunday August 14th

Max Weber

Max Weber

This is another small book by Randall Collins, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century, though he’s virtually unheard of outside Sociology.

Weber is known primarily for Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic, the thesis that Christian ideas and practice, and especially Protestant ideas, led to capitalism.

But the Protestant Ethic was only a small part of Weber’s huge output, and in other places he treats other parts of the equation, including raw power and material circumstances, at length.

This survey book deals with Weber as an idealist, but also with his overall theory of the conditions required for industrialization, his writings on power in general, and his wider religious writings, which included an analysis of religion in ancient Egypt, China, and Judaism. It also deals with his theme of rationalization (bureaucratization), which some take as his actual master thesis.

You will get more from this book than any other I am reviewing this year, save perhaps Collins other small book on “non-obvious sociology.”


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Book Review of Sociological Insight by Randall Collins Will Go Live Sunday, August 7th

If you want to read it before the review, you have till then do so. I’m putting below here the preamble from the review itself, since it makes the case why this book is worth reading.

Randall Collins has probably influenced me more than any other writer. A sociologist who concentrated on theory, with an encyclopedic knowledge of world history, in particular intellectual history, I regard him as a candidate for greatest intellectual of the 20th century whom no one outside his field knows.

Sociological Insight is a short book, subtitled “An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology.”

The dig against sociology is that it mostly discovers stuff that any idiot already knew; it is reified common sense. (A friend and I used to joke that if we ever started a consultancy we’d call it RCS, and not tell anyone what it meant.)

Collins wrote this small book to explain to students considering sociology, and to non-sociologists, why sociology was worth studying. The book is clearly written, divided into short chapters, and clocks in at under 200 pages.  Used copies are cheap, or you can probably still find it at your local university or college library.

If you read only one book of the books I’m going to review this year, I suggest it be this one, or “An Introduction to Weberian Sociology”, also by Collins.


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“Voltaire’s Bastards” by John Ralston Saul: The Death of Purpose at the Hands of Reason

I have re-read John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards. But because I haven’t read it since it first came out in the early 90s, it was more like reading it for the first time.

For those who haven’t read it, Saul basically says that reason (rationality) has become un-moored from common sense, democracy, and purpose.

I think purpose is probably the core of the argument. Organizations, including government, parliaments, and so on, have become rational and forgotten the purpose of their existence.

Saul eviscerates the military—slow, ponderous, capable of winning only with overwhelming force, and usually not even then. Full of rational mediocrities and controlled by staff officers who squash any field officer capable of initiative or of winning battles without vast waste of men and material.

He eviscerates the arms trade–weapons sold for less than it costs to make them, non-capital goods that make up the largest manufacturing sector in the world, and completely irrational from the point-of-view of both the economy (guns being the paradigmatic drain on the economy) and from winning wars; selling weapons to everyone and their mother means your enemies know their weaknesses, something you should be trying to avoid.

He eviscerates the take-over of of cabinets and parliaments by the bureaucracy on one hand and the Prime Minister or President’s private advisors. “He who controls the briefing books controls the decisions,” and “…perhaps Ministers’ primary responsibility should be to decide on policy, not take prime responsibility for running a department they don’t and can’t run. That job is for bureaucrats.” (paraphrased).

He goes on to eviscerate economic management by bureaucrats, and the decline of capitalism, to note that every major improvement in human welfare (like, oh, sewage control) was opposed by the majority of owners. He eviscerates the confusion of actual capitalists with managers, rentiers, financiers, and landlords (despised by traditional capitalists).

On and on it rolls.

This is a fairly old book now. The examples are drawn from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. It is interesting that Saul states even then that the western world is in a concealed depression, and notes precisely when things went wrong (68-72).

It’s also somewhat infuriating. For a number of years, I found it difficult to read contemporary books on economics and politics because they would make me angry. I had echoes of that feeling reading Voltaire’s Bastards–I am, after all, old enough to remember, say, Reagan and what a disaster he was.

But I think the prime takeaway is really about purpose. Rationalization and reason do not provide purpose. They are tools to enact purposes decided other ways. When they become masters, they become about process. So we declare that corporations exist only to make a profit, which is deranged. We forget that armies exist to win wars (and deter wars from even happening), not to fumble around. We treat military officers as bureaucrats, which they cannot be if they are to win wars, because bureaucrats are shitty field officers (yes, yes, logistics, but those people should not be in charge).

Rationalization removes purpose. The economy exists to provide for the needs of people. Corporations were created to do things that increase the public good, making a profit is necessary but is not their purpose. Parliaments exists to debate policy, which they pretty much never do and cabinets are the prime policy making instrument, exactly because they are elected.

Saul’s evisceration of rational experts runs against the grain of our age, but is convincing. He notes how well rational bureaucracy did work, but notes how it has decayed and been corrupted. The “experts” have become corrupt, incompetent, or both. Yes, the economy has been fucked since the early 70s, and no, we haven’t fixed it. Incompetent? Corrupt?

Why not both?

This is a cry for purpose, for prudence, and for real democracy where elected officials (and not just two or three ministers, plus their staff) make actual decisions. It is a scream for a change in the role of ordinary citizens, for an end to secrecy, for treating citizens like adults (as opposed to infantalizing them).

It is an evisceration of the idea that reason by itself works. Reason is a tool, only one among many. It is not useful in all places and times, and it cannot provide purpose, ethics, or morality.

Reading this book made me angry in a very personal way, because I grew up and was educated by the remains of the last generation who believed in purpose: The organization had a job and that job was to do something. This extended even to mundane crap like insurance, the old timers believed in careful actuarial work and underwriting because they believed the company had a duty to be able to pay out benefits to people who were in trouble–someone whose breadwinner had died, who would be in poverty if the company failed.

Purpose. Government should see to it that its citizens are healthy, prosperous, and ethical. Militaries exist to win wars quickly and decisively. Parliaments are to debate what society should do. Bureaucracies exist to carry out those decisions. Capitalists? Their role is to produce more capital, which is not money, but real productive capacity.

Voltaire’s Bastards isn’t a short book, and while Saul is erudite, it isn’t a very pleasant book to read.

But it’s a book worth reading.

 

 

“Voltaire’s Bastards” by John Ralston Saul, Review May 29th

Sunday May 29th, I will be publishing a review of Saul’s book. Voltaire’s Bastards is about how reason has slain purpose, sense and effective democracy. It was first published in the early 90s, but the trends he was observing have only become worse–far worse–since then.

It’s an infuriating book in many ways, despite being well-written, precisely because the idiocy and corruption he documents continues apace, but it’s a book worth reading.

If you want to read it before the review comes out, you have till the 29th.


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Book Reviews in My 2016 Series

The $6,000 tier for this year’s fundraiser was a series of book reviews. I haven’t decided which of all the books I will review yet, but I have chosen some. For those who wish to read them before the review and discussion in comments, they follow.

Justice, by Michael J. Sandel

Sandel divides the world’s ethical traditions into three. Maximizing welfare, freedom, and virtue. Utilitarianism, “the most good for the most people” is a welfare tradition. Both anarchism and libertarianism (and classic liberalism) are freedom traditions. Aristotlean ethics are virtue ethics, as are classic biblical ethics “don’t be greedy, prideful, or gluttunous,” do be kind, charitable, and brave. Victorian society was also big on virtue ethics, and schools and society were expected to make students and citizens virtuous.

This isn’t a book which creates a new system, it is a book which delineates and explains traditions which already exist and shows where they break down and conflict. It is the clearest book I have ever read on ethics.

The Economy of Cities; Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs

I consider these two works to be one book split in two. Jacobs offers a theory of how new work; new economic activity is created; places the creation of new work in cities; and offers a theory of how economically vital cities (not all cities are) are created, sustained, and affect the rest of the world, including non-economically active cities and non-city areas.

This is a compelling view of the world, and includes an essentially complete view of how trade should work. It also says something about how the world should be divided up into political and economic units and what areas should have their own currencies. It has not been properly appreciated and Jacobean principles offer a pretty complete set of rules for how the world should be set up to maximize economic activity. Combined with her other works, it adds principles for how to make this world work ethically and in the details of every day life, so that human welfare is maximized.

For all that Jacobs is a well-known writer, her work has still not been properly understood for what it is: A complete world view which could organize a global society. I read her as a far greater thinker than many who have had far more impact thus far (like Friedman), and as someone whose principles, added to a properly ecological view of the world, could be the basis for a new world.

Sociological Insight, an Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology

Max Weber, a Skeleton Key, Randall Collins

I will most likely review these two books together. Collins emphasizes a different Weber than most are familiar with. He does not consider “The Protestant Ethic” to be the most important of Weber’s works.

As for non-Obvious sociology, it includes a sociological understanding of the difference between natural and man-made law; a theory of religious belief and a sociology of power and control.

These two books together, along with Collins’s much longer “Credential Society” and “Conflict Sociology” were probably the most important books I read in the early nineties when I was at York University.

Society, contra-Thatcher, does exist, and while it doesn’t bat last, it controls most of our lives.

Confucius

I am tending towards H. G. Creel’s Confucius and the Chinese Way. It is old, published in 1948, and it may be difficult to find, but of the rather large number of English books on Confucius I have read, it is by far the best at untangling what Confucius was actually trying to accomplish, how much worked and how it was later perverted.

That it was published in ’48 is not surprising, Confucius was still taken very seriously then; his star has fallen since the Communist Party’s victory in China. But Confucius was one of the most important social philosophers in history, and the most important cultural area and empire, for most of history, ran, in large part, based on his ideas.

How he did it, how it succeed, how it went wrong; this all matters. The same pattern is repeated in many other great social philosophers, most of whom were far less successful than Confucius. Or, as Marx said, “I am not a Marxist.” I doubt Confucius would think much of most Confucians past about the fifth Emperor, and would have loathed the neo-Confucians.

Power and Prosperity, Mancur Olson

I’ve written of this book a few times, most particularly in my article on the fall of Communism. Olson looks very practically at the strengths and limits of centralized power; on how feedback works and is perverted; on how faction saps central strength, and so on.

This work is applicable both to Communism and Capitalism. It is also key to understanding the elites’ hopes for the surveillance state. The surveillance state, which includes such things as micro-monitoring of employees by enterprises such as Amazon, is about overcoming the limitations on central power and Taylorism identified by Olson.

If it succeeds, it will usher in a world of such minute control of everyday life as the world has never seen; a technological dystopia of terrifying scope and one which may be nearly impossible to overthrow.

This is an important book.

Descartes’ Error, by Antonio Damasio

We do not make rational decisions. We make emotional decisions. Many people have written a book saying so, but, of these, Descartes’ Error is my favorite. The point is vastly important if we are to understand how and why humans act. Without a model of human nature, nothing we do in the social sphere will truly stick. Every great social philosopher, including the great religious figures, has had a model of human nature, even if they didn’t call it such.

Rational animal is a fine thing to call humans as long as you write it “rational ANIMAL.” We will discuss that.

Further Reading

As I choose further books, I’ll let you know. Likely candidates include The Sovereign Individual by Rees-Mog and Davidson; something on industrialization (probably Polanyi’s Great Transformation); something on the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture (Pandora’s Seed is the current front-runner) and something on European Imperialism (possibly Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History).

A proper discussion of early money and markets is needed, including Mesopotamia, because an understanding of money is seriously lacking (and no, MMT does not cut it, it is too particular). I may use Graeber’s Debt, if I can’t find anything shorter and better, or I may put together a few papers for people to read.

Kuhn’s scientific revolutions is likely, and I may review Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Something on ecological industrialization is also needed, and I will likely use Natural Capitalism, mostly because it shows that even by the late 1990s we had most of the technology necessary to do what was needed.

Read Along

Your enjoyment of the reviews will be enhanced by actually reading the books. Of course, you may wish to read them after the reviews, using the reviews to help you decide if they are worth your time.

I am not touching here on all the vastly influential books you should have already read. You know you should read the Bible, even if you don’t believe, right? Shakespeare even if you don’t like him, and so on. Instead, these are books which have massively influenced myself and which I think are important to others. In some cases, I will use more recent books than the ones which first introduced me to important ideas (for example, Pandora’s Seed is not where I first read about the effects of going from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture, but it is shorter, clearer, and more available than the alternatives.)

The world is kludge. It is an accretion of ideas and stories and oughts which we have made real by instantiating them through our physical culture or the roles we choose to play. We have made this world by our collective choices, and we can neither understand the world nor change it consciously for the better if we do not understand this process and its unintended side-effects.

How that has happened will be sketched out in my booklet “The Construction of Reality,” but the book reviews are also related to this project. All donors will receive a free copy of the Construction of Reality, but it will also be available for purchase (and there will be a free excerpt).


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