Covid Reading
I’m in the midst of recovering from covid—my family and I were hit with it two weeks ago—and doing a fair amount of reading.
Just prior to getting sick, I had completed a long piece on oligarchy and the Constitution, which is actually the fourth in a series of pieces I’ve completed over the last few months that I expect to appear in print this summer. (The other three are on Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and the idea of late capitalism.)
The combination of being sick, and finishing those pieces, left me with time and energy for little more than resting in bed and reading. So that’s what I’ve been doing.
Here is what I’ve been reading or re-reading:
- Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918-1938
- Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to Keynes
- Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
- Janek Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
- Angus Bergin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression
- Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West
- Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics
- Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics
- Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism
- Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, Hayek: A Life 1899-1950
I’m reviewing the last book, the Hayek biography, which is not out yet, and thought I’d use the occasion to catch up on some books I’d never really read (the Wasserman duo, for example, and the Burgin and Stedman Jones) and to re-read some books I have read but haven’t written about or worked through to the degree that I would like.
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything on Hayek so I’m looking forward to writing about the biography, which, 100 pages in, is extremely informative and judicious though not the most arresting literary experience I’ve had. Caldwell and Klausinger admit that the biography is meant to be a kind of response to the recent neoliberalism literature, so I’m hoping to get a dialogue going between these various authors.
I’ve also been reading a fair amount of literature. I loved this new translation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, though it’s translated here as Fathers and Children. The generational conflict and unease spoke to me a lot more than it did the first time around (or at least spoke to me from the perspective of the elders, who seemed alternatively hilarious and sad.)
I got about 2/3 the way through Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. The opening chapter blew me away: That description of mother and maid, Mrs. Flanders and Rebecca, tending to a baby in a little cottage by the sea, “conspirators plotting the eternal conspiracy of hush and clean bottles,” brought me back to those first months of being a parent (my child is now 14). But nothing in the chapters afterward (except for Woolf’s account of the Reading Room in the British Museum in chapter nine) came close to recreating that thrill of the first chapter. I’m going to try and keep reading, since I’m not so far from the end, but there are a lot of oil slicks and briar patches where I just have no idea where I am and no idea where I’m going.
I also re-read The Great Gatsby, which I haven’t read since, maybe, high school? In the very first days of being sick, when I couldn’t even read, I listened to a lot of Melvyn Bragg’s radio show on BBC 4 In Our Time. There was an episode on The Great Gatsby, which piqued my interest. So I took the novel off the shelf. I tried to like it, and take it on its own terms (and the commentators on Bragg’s show make a good case for it), but the whole thing felt as slight as I had remembered it, very American. Try as I might, I couldn’t take it seriously. Gatsby’s dream still seems as silly and small as it did to me when I was younger and more embarrassed by these vision quests than I am now. The only character who seems real, and not simply the object of social observation, is, oddly enough, Tom Buchanan. Even though he is an object of social observation, there’s an equilibrium between his inner and outer life that works, at the level of character. The rest of them don’t really hold up.
That said, I did start reading Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, which Edmund Wilson thought had the potential of being Fitzgerald’s most perfectly realized novel (he died before he could finish it). You can see why Wilson thought this. With his settlement upon the dream factory as an industry and the setting of his story, Fitzgerald achieves the social vantage that he sought in Gatsby but with the eye and ear for its inner consequence that someone like Wharton or Stendhal manages consistently to produce on the page. Very un-American.