Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, June 2020
Attention conservation notice: I have no taste, and no qualifications
to say anything about any kind of history.
- Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State
- These are deservedly-classic works, attempting to make sense of the
transformations that took western Europe from the Roman Empire to the
Renaissance. (There are lots of odd parallelism to Gibbon, which someone
better versed in historiography should write about.) The former book focuses
on the establishment of feudalism out of elements of the Roman system and the
institutions of the barbarian invaders, plus improvisations. The latter looks
at the formation of centralized states and their aristocracies / royal servants out
of feudalism; Anderson thus tends to pass over the feudal period proper.
- Anderson really insists on being
a historical
materialist; that's deeply important to him. But he also insists that "the
modes of production of any pre-capitalist social formation are always specified
by the politico-juridical apparatus of class rule which enforces the
extra-economic coercion peculiar to it" (Lineages, Appendix on the
Asiatic Mode of Production, sec. V). So he's really much more about the mode
of domination than a typical historical materialist...
- Petty annoyance note: I read both of these as e-books, bought
directly from the publisher. (Verso is to be commended for not DRM-ing their
e-books, and making them easy to buy directly.) The electronic texts were
obviously OCR'd from the printed books of the 1970s, but were equally clearly
never proof-read; this was especially clear, and annoying,
in Lineages. Thus in that book "Île de France" becomes "He
de France" everywhere (including in the index, where it appears between
"Ieyasu, Tokugawa" and "Incas"), and "11th century" becomes "nth century". (At
least, I can't imagine Anderson ever writing "nth century".) I don't
think there were any places where the lack of editing seriously impaired my
ability to follow, but it was an annoyance, and how would I know if it had
mangled something? §
- Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy
- This is immensely detailed, immensely readable, and immensely self-assured.
It's also so deep into intricate controversies among economic, military and
political historians that I feel quite unable to judge it. I will say that
I thought I appreciated how much more backwards the European economies
were than America in the first half of the 20th century, but even so much of
this was eye-opening. §
Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Writing for Antiquity;
The Dismal Science
Posted at June 30, 2020 23:59 | permanent link