CityReads | 12 Most-read Book Reviews of 2020 by LSE RB

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12 Most-read Book Reviews of 2020 by LSE RB

LSE Review of Books selects the 12 most-read book reviews in 2020.

Source: 

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2020/12/16/lse-rb-year-in-review-most-read-book-reviews-of-2020/

12. What is Digital Sociology? Neil Selwyn. Polity. 2019.

The rise of digital technology is transforming the world in which we live. Our digitalized societies demand new ways of thinking about the social, and this short book introduces readers to an approach that can deliver this: digital sociology. Neil Selwyn examines the concepts, tools and practices that sociologists are developing to analyze the intersections of the social and the digital.

Blending theory and empirical examples, the five chapters highlight areas of inquiry where digital approaches are taking hold and shaping the discipline of sociology today. The book explores key topics such as digital race and digital labor, as well as the fast-changing nature of digital research methods and diversifying forms of digital scholarship.

Designed for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses, this timely introduction will be an invaluable resource for all sociologists seeking to focus their craft and thinking toward the social complexities of the digital age.

11. The Anthropology of Epidemics. Ann H. Kelly, Frédéric Keck and Christos Lynteris (eds). Routledge. 2019.

As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, this collection provides timely insight about epidemics.

The semantic origin of epidemic derives from the Greek epidḗmios, meaning 'within the country, among the people, prevalent (of a disease)'. Until the nineteenth century, pandemic and epidemic were often used interchangeably. Today however, 'pandemic' is a label reserved for diseases whose scale is global and unprecedented. Epidemics can transmute into pandemics, yet they also retain a more general meaning, denoting diseases and conditions whose origin can be viral (such as Ebola or HIV/AIDS) or non-viral (such as diabetes) alike.

The Anthropology of Epidemics approaches epidemics as total social phenomena: processes and events which encompass and exercise a transformational impact on social life whilst at the same time functioning as catalysts of shifts and ruptures as regards human/non-human relations. Bearing a particular mark on subject areas and questions which have recently come to shape developments in anthropological thinking, the volume brings epidemics to the forefront of anthropological debate, as an exemplary arena for social scientific study and analysis.

Ethnographic studies of epidemics, therefore shed light onto three increasingly popular domains of anthropological thinking: interspecies entanglements; studies of infrastructure and materiality; and techniques of epidemic containment and control or counter-epidemic intervention. The chapters, traversing from twentieth-century colonial public health initiatives in Madagascar to contemporary migration patterns among Vietnamese youth, are linked by these three thematic threads.

10. Why Free Will Is Real. Christian List. Harvard University Press. 2019.

Philosophers have argued about the nature and the very existence of free will for centuries. Today, many scientists and scientifically minded commentators are skeptical that it exists, especially when it is understood to require the ability to choose between alternative possibilities. If the laws of physics govern everything that happens, they argue, then how can our choices be free? Believers in free will must be misled by habit, sentiment, or religious doctrine. Why Free Will Is Real defies scientific orthodoxy and presents a bold new defense of free will in the same naturalistic terms that are usually deployed against it.

Christian List makes the case that free will is real by responding to the three key objections typically put forward in the philosophical literature (Radical materialism, determinism and epiphenomenalism),  proposing the central insight that free will should be considered a 'higher-level' psychological phenomenon.

9. Feminist City: Claiming Space in the Man-Made World. Leslie Kern. Verso. 2020.

Anyone with an ounce of awareness probably knows, implicitly, that cities—like almost everything else in the modern world—have generally been designed by, run by, and skewed to the advantage of men. Leslie Kern, a professor of geography at Mount Allison University, delves into these inequalities and systems of oppression that take concrete shape in cities.

In Feminist City, Kern lays out the myriad ways in which men have historically dominated cities and city-building, and she explains many of the ways that women are disadvantaged, from inconveniences like curbs that don’t accommodate strollers to mortal threats like assailants who lurk around dark corners. Her account is likely to be familiar to almost every woman who lives in a city and, possibly, a revelation to many men who blithely stroll wherever and whenever they please. But while Feminist City is an alarm, it is also a celebration and a deeply personal book. Kern loves cities. She recounts many appealing anecdotes from her own adolescence and adulthood, largely in Toronto, to illustrate how exciting cities can be. But she knows that cities can be better for women and, ideally, better for everyone. Feminist City is a call for gender equity in planning (and for intersectionality), and it’s one that planners of all genders should heed.

8. Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality and Rights. Igor Shoikhedbrod. Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. 

The book begins by reconstructing Marx's conception of justice and rights through close textual interpretation and extrapolation. The central thesis of the book is, firstly, that Marx regards justice as an essential feature of any society, including the emancipated society of the future; and secondly, that standards of justice and right undergo transformation throughout history. The book then tracks the enduring legacy of Marx’s critique of liberal justice by examining how leading contemporary political theorists such as John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Nancy Fraser have responded to Marx’s critique of liberalism in the face of global financial capitalism and the hollowing out of democratically-enacted law. The Marx that emerges from this book is therefore a thoroughly modern thinker whose insights shed valuable light on some of the most pressing challenges confronting liberal democracies today.

7. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Jenny Odell. Melville House Publishing. 2019.

In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.

Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind's role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.

Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism.

6. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Robert J. Shiller. Princeton University Press. 2019.

The stories people tell—about economic confidence or panic, housing booms, the American dream, or Bitcoin—affect economic outcomes. Narrative Economics explains how we can begin to take these stories seriously.

Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events.

He takes the reader through various narrative-based enthusiasms relevant to economic behavior: stock market booms and busts; the rise and fall of Bitcoin; the rise and fall of favorite economic models; and, interestingly, the rise and fall of various contradictory penchants for particular ideas – for example, about the desirability or not of the Gold Standard, automation, artificial intelligence, real estate investment, etc. His stated goal is to 'improve people's ability to anticipate and deal with major economic events, such as depressions, recessions, or secular (that is long-term) stagnation, by encouraging them to identify and incorporate into their thinking the economic narratives that help to define these events'. As he puts it, ‘though modern economists tend to be very attentive to causality, as a general rule they do not attach any causal significance to the invention of new narratives'. His argument is not only that narrative causality exists, but also that it goes both ways: 'new contagious narratives cause economic events, and economic events cause changed narratives'.

5. The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. Martha C. Nussbaum. Harvard University Press. 2019.

The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings.

Martha Nussbaum pursues this "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the seventeenth century, Adam Smith during the eighteenth century, and various contemporary thinkers. She confronts its inherent tensions: the ideal suggests that moral personality is complete, and completely beautiful, without any external aids, while reality insists that basic material needs must be met if people are to realize fully their inherent dignity. Given the global prevalence of material want, the lesser social opportunities of people with physical and cognitive disabilities, the conflicting beliefs of a pluralistic society, and the challenge of mass migration and asylum seekers, what political principles should we endorse? Nussbaum brings her version of the Capabilities Approach to these problems, and she goes further: she takes on the challenge of recognizing the moral claims of nonhuman animals and the natural world.

4. The Force of Non-Violence: The Ethical in the Political. Judith Butler. Verso. 2020.

Judith Butler's new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilized in the service of ratifying the state's monopoly on violence.

Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how 'racial phantasms' inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

3. The Meritocracy Trap. Daniel Markovits. Penguin Press. 2019.

The term 'meritocracy', where society is governed based on achievement, was coined by Michael Young in 1958 as a warning. Since then it has become the overwhelming organizing principle of our education system and job market, leading to a proliferation of testing, a premium on college education and a fetishization of credentials. Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap is a radical critique of this logic and the institutions it has created. Meritocracy is seen by many as fair but, according to Markovits, it is more than counterproductive. Indeed, 'meritocracy has become the single greatest obstacle to equal opportunities in America today.'

The Meritocracy Trap is based on the author's long-time personal experience of meritocracy as a Professor at Yale Law School and he sees the US as an extreme example of a broader global phenomenon. He marshals extensive evidence, from both interviews and academic research from numerous disciplines, referenced in detailed endnotes, to make a polemical case.

2. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. William Dalrymple. Bloomsbury. 2019.

In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor and forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army – what we would now call an act of involuntary privatization.

The East India Company's founding charter authorized it to 'wage war' and it had always used violence to gain its ends. But the creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became something much more unusual: an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business.

In less than four decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men – twice the size of the British army – and had subdued an entire subcontinent, conquering first Bengal and finally, in 1803, the Mughal capital of Delhi itself. The Company's reach stretched until almost all of India south of the Himalayas was effectively ruled from a boardroom in London.

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world's most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders. In his most ambitious and riveting book to date, William Dalrymple tells the story of the East India Company as it has never been told before, unfolding a timely cautionary tale of the first global corporate power. The Anarchy gives a new character-driven account of the ascent to power of the East India Company following the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the resulting ‘anarchy’ that followed.

1. The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy. Stephanie Kelton. PublicAffairs. 2020.

Countries across the globe have shut down their economies in an effort to combat COVID-19.  Massive increases in government spending have offered relief to households and businesses, but according to many politicians and economists, this government spending has generated 'national debt dilemmas.'

The United States and the United Kingdom are projected to have public debt levels soar above 100 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Japan's public debt to GDP ratio is expected to grow above 250 per cent. The IMF anticipates the average debt-to-GDP ratios in advanced economies will rise above 120 per cent.

With debt-to-GDP ratios so high, mainstream economists warn there will be a debt overhang post-pandemic, which they proclaim will force a curtailment of public spending in the future and an increase in taxes. The increased taxes will lower consumption spending of households and investment spending of businesses. The result is slower GDP growth and stagnation in worker's wages and salaries.

Stephanie Kelton, in her new book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, demonstrates that concerns about public debt overhang are ill-founded. Kelton argues that government spending properly targeted and government debt need not be problematic.

Stephanie Kelton's brilliant exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country.

Kelton busts through the myths that prevent us from taking action: that the federal government should budget like a household, that deficits will harm the next generation, crowd out private investment, and undermine long-term growth, and that entitlements are propelling us toward a grave fiscal crisis.

MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society.

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