Three items that might be of interest.

First, over at Balkinization, I participated in a symposium on Rogers Smith and Desmond King’s book America’s New Racial Battle Lines, which came out earlier this year. Rogers was my adviser in graduate school who taught me a lot of what I know about the American right. So I was thrilled to be invited to participate in this discussion, even if I disagree with some of his and King’s claims about where things stand with the right and racial politics in the US. From the conclusion to my post:

While cultural battles are critical, it may be that they don’t require, on either side, new racial orders for their fighting. Existing languages, paradigms, and alliances suffice. Without an economic or material challenge—along the lines of the battle against slavery, de jure, and de facto segregation—the battle over racial politics will continue to be fought, more or less, as it has been fought for the last several decades. 

Second, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Fred Lawrence, the secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, about such issues as how I feel about being called a journalist; books I’ve been reading recently that I recommend to listeners; how my teaching is still shaped by my teachers from high school; and how my writing is influenced by my teaching in the classroom:

I do feel like the work that I do in the classroom shaped and continues to shape how I write, and the writing that I do in the public sphere shapes what I do in the classroom. I think both of those are very different spaces from what most academics are thinking of when they’re writing, and I’d like to think that it has made my writing stronger, that I’m thinking about those two spaces as opposed to others….

I think especially nowadays, when there’s more pressure on academics and there’s more receptivity from academic administrators for academics to write for a popular audience, the approach that most academics take is, well, I’ve written my academic article for this highly specialized research journal, and now what I’m going to do is dumb it down….

They end up inserting jokes and cliches and phrases that honestly really makes me cringe, and I think that’s not what this writing is supposed to be. I was talking about this with a friend of mine, that often editors will ask you fundamental foundational questions that academics will not ask you. What do you mean when you use this term? And suddenly you’re caught up short and think, oh, yes, what do I mean? It’s been so long since I had to grapple with that idea in a foundational way, and that’s what I think of writing for a public audience. Undergraduates do this to you as well. They say, “I don’t understand what that term means,” and you’re just brought up short, and I think there’s a precision, a clarity, and a specificity that public writing demands. Also, it demands that you dramatize the stakes of what it is that you’re writing about. You have to earn the attention of your reader. Most academics are always writing for an academic reviewer, an anonymous reviewer that is somebody who’s already a specialist in the field and understands the stakes. That is not who I am writing for.

Last, speaking of Phi Beta Kappa, I’ve been touring the country, delivering lectures at a variety of universities, from California to North Dakota to Ohio. Next stop, UC Santa Barbara, in January. One of the lectures I’ll be delivering there is called “Why do—or did—economists read the ancient Greeks?” Here’s a sneak preview:

Fifty years ago, the British classics scholar Moses Finley made a famous claim about the economy of ancient Greece: There was none. However strange or counterintuitive Finley’s claim may seem today, it has a long lineage in philosophy and the social sciences. Some form of it can be found in the writings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, and Hannah Arendt. It also has a long lineage among classicists. Whether Finley was right or not, the power and provocation of his thesis is undeniable. But it also raises an interesting question: If the ancient Greeks had neither an economy nor a theory of the economy, why have modern writers on economics been repeatedly drawn to the ancient Greeks? Through an examination of several writers on economics, I seek to explain what the long Greek hangover has meant for our understanding of the economy.

In other news, I’m still working on a long piece about the new translation of Marx’s Capital. Did you know that Marx disliked being called “comrade,” which was, at the time, a new usage issuing from the followers of the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle? Steeped in the memory and republican practice of the French Revolution, which shaped his conception of communism, as Bruno Leipold shows in his excellent new book, he preferred “Citizen Marx.”