Hey folks, just continuing the series here. I might do a more extended blog about either the Mary Douglas book or the Riley & Brenner vs Karp debate in the New Left Review. If either/both interest you, just let me know with a comment, etc.
Mary Douglas - How Institutions Think (1986)
I really loved this book. If you are interested in knowledge, organizations, or justice, check it out. Douglas is a very concise and clear writer who diligently synthesizes work that she cites, but fair warning – it might be hard to crack if you’ve never read much e.g. Weber, Durkheim, or Marx. The book takes a core observation from Durkheim (the social origins of individual thought) and develops it: “Since the mind is already colonized, we should at least try to examine the colonizing process.” One of her best arguments is that modern thought has tricked us into believing that we have escaped the thought-control of institutions (e.g. Enlightenment dismissal of Christian dogma) and become newly capable of individual rational deliberation. On the contrary, she argues, all (post)modern individual thought is institutional thinking, and the greatest trick modern institutions ever pulled was naturalizing and concealing themselves. She ends the book by tearing apart Rawls’ individualized notion of justice and rational choice theory: “Only by deliberate bias and by an extraordinarily disciplined effort has it been possible to erect a theory of human behavior whose formal account of reasoning only considers the self-regarding motives.” Really hard to summarize the book, but I couldn’t recommend it more highly!
Isaac Martin - Rich People’s Movements (2013)
This book could be read as a sort of history of the Tea Party and its predecessor movements. Under most critical political theories, it’s agreed that capitalists and their ilk have disproportionate political power, managed through backroom deals and donations. Yet there are still, mysteriously, overt social movements for policies that only benefit rich people. How do we explain those? You’d think that a transparent campaign for pro-wealthy policies would backfire. Martin’s answer: Rich people copied the left-liberal social movements of the 20th century in response to policy threats perceived by more than just one corporation (or economic sector). I really enjoyed this one, although its greatest failing is resorting to a kind of Great Man theory of history (Martin emphasizes individual “movement entrepreneurs” a bit too much). Still, it's really cool to see the social-movements lens turned towards the powerful – or, as Martin teaches us, the relatively powerful in service of the truly powerful.
Kevin Young et al. - Levers of Power (2020)
This is an intellectual successor to Poor People’s Movements and Block’s work on “business confidence,” which I’ve blurbed previously here. The main contribution of this book is providing evidence of the effect of “capital strikes” on US federal politics. This further develops the idea that politicians can’t do too much left policy lest corporations take their capital elsewhere. Block developed this idea to account for how individual corporations are primarily concerned with “narrow economic rationality” (their bottom line) and might lack class consciousness, whereas politicians see the big picture of corporate political interests. Young and coauthors argue instead that capital strikes are an explicit threat consciously made by groups of capitalists: if not enough pro-capital policies are implemented, they will continue to refuse to reinvest resources in the US (i.e. no jobs, no spending, etc). I think some parts of the book were hurt by odd case selection (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is just not that related to their theory) and they tried to make capital strikes into a more all-encompassing theory than it truly can be. Good if you read it critically though - another solid entry in the line of left-liberal books arguing for disruption as a viable political strategy.
Christopher Witko et al. - Hijacking the Agenda (2021)
This book adds to the long legacy of political scientists trying to figure out why capitalists always win in American politics. Methodologically, it’s novel in that it uses language processing methods to assess all words uttered in the Congressional Record from 1995-2016. They justify the value of this measurement strategy by saying that politicians can only say so many things in the legislative session, so what they choose to talk about is a meaningful indicator of their agenda or priorities. They look at the effect of campaign contributions on agenda-setting (i.e., do corporations or unions successfully change policy priorities with donations?) and I think it’s a reasonably convincing analysis. I think their theorization of structural power and kinetic power is super interesting – see the table below – but the measurement strategy for kinetic power is dramatically better-developed than what they do for structural power. Overall though, novel and credible analysis.
Michel Foucault - Archaeology of Knowledge (1969)
I kind of struggled with this one. It’s a methods text that Foucault was administratively obligated to write as part of his professorship, I believe. It reads like a companion to his work on psychopathology, which I presume is interesting, but haven’t read. Most of the book is dedicated to defining “discourse” and the “énoncé” (translated, poorly in my opinion, as “statement”), a sort of foundational text for discourse analysis. This gives an analytical framework for analyzing the development of scientific discourses in particular. I think if you are very interested in the sociology of knowledge or STS, you… probably already know about this. If not, hard to imagine why you would read it. It’s cited a couple times in the Douglas book I recommended above, I guess.
James Mahoney - The Logic of Social Science (2021)
This book has two main parts. First, it sets up a dauntingly comprehensive synthesis of analytic frameworks in social science. I’m pasting a table below that gestures at how big-picture this is.
Second, it is a combined advertisement and how-to manual for set theory. I think I can broadly recommend the first part for a lot of readers–it’s a deep dive into the ontology and epistemology which supports most social scientific analysis, and the list of references is extremely useful if you want to branch out in any particular direction. The second part, well, it depends. I think Mahoney overstates the uh, superiority (?) of set theory as part of his broader project of making the case for its mainstream use and comprehension. One of the most useful aspects for me personally is the discussion of necessity and sufficiency, and in particular which types of sufficiency are useful for making causal claims (INUS vs SUIN). I also really appreciated the discussion of “mind dependence”: What kinds of social-scientific objects of inquiry exist without us thinking about them? (Zero!)