Corey Robin's Blog, page 19

Bloomsbury Bolsheviki and other topics

Long-time followers of this blog know that I’ve been promising, for several years, a piece on Smith and a piece on Keynes. I’m happy to say that they are finally out in successive issues of the New York Review of Books. The editors there were extremely generous with space, allowing me, across two consecutive issues and some 13,000 words, to write what has become a two-part article about these two economists.

Looking over my notes, I see that my first note to myself about the piece I had hoped to write was in February 2020. So it’s taken me a really long time! But it was time well spent. Not only did I love digging into these two thinkers, but I’ve come up, finally, with the next book project. I’ll have more to say about that later, but the basic idea is to re-read all the great economists as political thinkers, to understand the modern economy as the equivalent of what the polis was in ancient Greece or the church was in medieval Europe: the primary space of our collective being.

Here is the Smith piece:

It’s no accident that Adam Smith was the first great economist as well as our most acute psychologist of the enlarged form of “fellow feeling” that went, in the eighteenth century, by the name of sympathy. Once upon a time, economics and sympathy were one and the same. Yet something got lost on the way to the market. Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) opens with pleasant stories of workers cooperating in a pin factory and quick-witted boys scrambling over steam engines, inventing labor-saving devices for pistons and boilers, so they can leave the machines unattended and rush off to play with their mates. It closes with scenes of stunted and stupefied laborers, colonial slavers, premonitions of violent revolt from indigenous peoples dispossessed of their lands, and a monstrous and modern form of sovereignty called the East India Company. Sympathy is nowhere to be found; profit occludes all.

If one terminus of commercial society was the blinding of the self to the other, a second was the engulfment of the self by the other. An isolate on a desert island, Smith observes, thinks clearly about the contribution of material goods to his enjoyment and ease. Lacking the mirror of society, in which a bauble is reflected back to us as a useful good, the castaway is less likely to forsake the convenience of a toothpick or a nail clipper for the prize of wealth. Only in society do riches take on value and become an object of our labors—not because they bring us greater material satisfaction but because “they more effectually gratify that love of distinction so natural to man.”

That pendulum swing, between the pathologies of insufficient and excessive feeling for the other, haunts modern economics. Too little feeling gives rise to dispossession. Too much feeling warps the self’s relationship to material goods. Smith and John Maynard Keynes are the great theorists of this dynamic. Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Thorstein Veblen wrote about it, too. But Smith and Keynes are unique. Conscious of the pathologies of sympathy, they still retain the ideal of the market as a sphere of sociability. That lends their work a special poignancy today, when we are again asking the question that once agitated so many: What is the purpose of the economy, and to what extent does it reflect our social selves?

And here is the Keynes piece:

Much of Keynes’s economics, like Smith’s, is a sustained exercise in empathy-building, attempting to create on paper the solidarity that has failed to materialize in practice. But where Smith thought there were forms of self-interested, profit-driven action that would gradually orient the self to the other, Keynes could not take that orientation for granted. In “modern conditions,” he wrote, the individualism of the Smithian economy was at best no longer applicable and at worst a “mortal disease.” A path that works for me when I take it alone may work against me if everyone takes it, too. The modern economy is littered with examples of this, yet knowledge of the social dimension of economic action—that we do not choose alone, that our actions have effects on others—has not yet penetrated our decisions in the market. The task of the economist is to create the social knowledge of the other that Smith hoped would arise from the act of seeking profit for oneself.

…

In politics, Walter Benjamin wrote, “it is not private thinking but…the art of thinking in other people’s heads that is decisive.” The power of Keynes’s economics is that it assigns that art of public thinking not to the statesman or citizen but to the economist and to ordinary economic actors. This was increasingly true of Keynes’s work throughout the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the climactic passages in The General Theory where he addresses the relationship between saving and spending, investment and enterprise.

Last, if you’re still up for more writing, I did a lovely interview with the New Book Network, which can be found here. Some highlights:

Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?

A: None of them. With one exception, every writer whom I respect and admire that I’ve met has been a letdown. On the page, they’re curious and captivating. In person, they’re awkward, I’m awkward. It’s draining. I only want to know them through their writing.

…

Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?

A: Whenever people answer this question, they talk about the books that had a positive impact on them, that they’ve internalized and made their own. I find that answer suspicious.

The books that had the greatest impact are those we loved as students—and have spent our lives trying to get away from. At some point, we came to think that these books are in error and that we were in error for loving them. There’s something discomfiting, morally discomfiting, about our being so besotted with those books; it seems like a deficiency of character. We try to get as far away from them as we can. It’s like a relationship you had when you were younger that you’d like to think you’ve outgrown. But, of course, we haven’t outgrown those books because we spend our lives running away from them, working through our attraction to them.

For me, that book is, hands down,…

…

Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to students and why?

A: I love texts that are challenging enough to require interpretive footwork but not so abstruse that I do all that footwork for the students. I used to love teaching Marx’s Capital, but it requires so much advance layering on my part, that the energy of collective discovery, where students and I figure out the text together, is lost. If students aren’t involved in the collective work of interpretation, it’s not the classroom experience I want them to have.

Here are some books where that doesn’t happen.

Thanks for reading, and hope everyone is doing well and is healthy.

Slavery and Capitalism, Neoliberalism and Feudalism

Next semester, I’ll be teaching American Political Theory (POLS 3404), meeting 9:30-10:45 on Mondays and Wednesdays. We’ll focus on two topics only: slavery and neoliberalism. Registration is now officially open for the class.

During the first half of the course, we’ll be addressing the relationship between slavery and capitalism through a selection of primary and second readings. Our texts will include Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, Eugene Genovese’s The Political Economy of Slavery, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, and various texts and treatises from the slaveholders, including Thomas Dew, William Harper, James Henry Hammond, Josiah Nott, and John C. Calhoun.

In the second half of the course, we’ll be addressing the relationship between neoliberalism and feudalism, also through a selection of primary and secondary readings. Our texts will include readings from Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, James Buchanan, Melinda Cooper, Elizabeth Anderson, Wendy Brown, Jodi Dean, Silvia Federici, and Nancy Fraser.

The course will be framed by some introductory readings from Marx, Weber, and Ellen Meikens Wood. As the pairings of capitalism and slavery, and neoliberalism and feudalism, suggest, we’ll be using American political thought as a prism through which we examine whether and how different kinds of social and economic institutions, drawn from different moments in time, can coexist and reinforce each other at the same time.

From Aeschylus to Alison Bechdel

This fall, I’m teaching an undergraduate seminar, “Politics Through Literature,” at Brooklyn College. Space is still open.

Our syllabus runs from Aeschylus to Alison Bechdel, concentrating on the politics of the family, beauty, money, and sex. Along the way, we’ll read Vivian Gornick, Ralph Ellison, Bertolt Brecht, Plato, Marx, James Baldwin, Anton Chekhov, Barbara Fields, Euripides, Edward P. Jones, Jane Austen, Nietzsche, Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith, Franz Kafka, Toni Morrison, and more.

If you’re looking for a three-credit class on Monday and Wednesday mornings, from 11 to 12:15, feel free to reach out to me (crobin@brooklyn.cuny.edu) or sign up for POLS 3440.

Feel free to share this post with any and all CUNY students or students who want to sign up for a class at Brooklyn College.

A People’s Guide to New York City

When I was growing up in Chappaqua, a suburb north of New York City, in the 1970s, my parents would take my five sisters and me to visit our Uncle Leo and Aunt Ruth. A bachelor for a good part of his younger life, Leo married Ruth sometime after the war, and they ultimately settled in Co-Op City in the Bronx.

I vividly remember the drive there, the big dip on the Bronx River Parkway that made my stomach leap into my mouth, and then the view of Co-Op City from afar, a towering Oz of white buildings that stood out from the surrounding marshes and waterways of the Bronx. I also remember the parquet floors of their apartment, though I wouldn’t have known at the time that that’s what they were called.

All these memories, especially those floors, came flooding back to me as I read the entry on Co-Op City in A People’s Guide to New York City, a sumptuous guidebook of history, art, economics, and politics that is like no other I’ve seen. Instead of the dutiful march from one tourist trap to another, expert scholars and long-time activists take you to places like Margaret Sanger’s first birth control clinic, deep in Brownsville, Brooklyn; an evocative spread of unfinished mansions and broken-down cottages and cabins, next to the Raritan Bay in Staten Island, where Dorothy Day lived the last days of her life; the Steinway Piano Factory in Astoria, from where you can launch yourself to another musical mecca, the Louis Armstrong House, across Queens, in Corona.

Edited by Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis, and Emily Tumpson Molina—three brilliant sociologists who also happen to be close friends and colleagues of mine at CUNY—A People’s Guide to New York is a book of presence and absence. Leading you through Long Island City, the editors point out what’s there and not there—like 5Pointz graffiti, which featured the work of nearly 200 artists in the 1970s but was torn down and painted over in the decades that followed. They tell you about the labor and cultural struggles behind icons familiar, like the Brooklyn Bridge, and forgotten, like the former site of the Board of Education, in downtown Brooklyn, that witnessed the largest civil rights demonstration of the 1960s. They follow the trail from indigenous laborers in Brooklyn to the Empire State Building. And give you their version of tours you might take in New York City—a Chinatowns tour that goes from Manhattan to Brooklyn to Queens; an immigration tour along the 7 line; an alternative tour of Wall Street; and more.

The book is also versatile. When friends from Britain came to visit me, they bought it and used it jet themselves around the city for days on end. When I have fifteen minutes to spare or need a break from what I’m doing, I open up the book, which sits just to the right of me on my desk shelves, and dip into the story of the construction of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. Either way, it’s travel, of body and soul.

It’s now available. Get it, and transport yourself to another world and the world we live in.

You may not be interested in Clarence Thomas, but Clarence Thomas is interested in you

In The New Yorker, I take on Clarence Thomas’s contributions to this last term of the Supreme Court:

The most powerful Black man in America, Thomas is also our most symptomatic public intellectual, setting out a terrifying vision of race, rights, and violence that’s fast becoming a description of everyday life. It’s no longer a matter of Clarence Thomas’s Court. Increasingly, it’s Clarence Thomas’s America.

I focus on the abortion and gun rights decisions, and try to limn their meaning for our moment.

In the face of a state that won’t do anything about climate change, economic inequality, personal debt, voting rights, and women’s rights, it’s no wonder that an increasing portion of the population, across all races, genders, and beliefs, have determined that the best way to protect themselves, and their families, is by getting a gun. A society with no rights, no freedoms, except for those you claim yourself—this was always Thomas’s vision of the world. Now, for many Americans, it is the only one available. 

You can read the whole piece here.

Back to reading about Hayek, Vienna, and the Austrian School.

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, 1918-1938Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics: The Political Theory of Money from Aristotle to KeynesQuinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of NeoliberalismWendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth RevolutionJanek Wasserman, The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of IdeasAngus Bergin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the DepressionWendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the WestMichel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsDaniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal PoliticsMelinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social ConservatismBruce 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.

Talking Heads

On Sunday, I was interviewed by Kai Wright on his excellent NPR show “The United States of Anxiety.” The other guest who came on after me was some musician named David Byrne.

Wright and I talked about Biden, his State of the Union Address, and why his presidency hasn’t turned out to be an FDR-style transformational presidency.

You can catch the show here.

In other news, I’ve got some pieces in the hopper. Look for some mammoth essays on Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, both of which I’ve been working on for about two years, and a shorter take on the idea of late capitalism. Will share them when they’re out.

On the anniversary of January 6 and other matters

I had two pieces and an interview come out today.

In Politico, I address the anniversary of January 6, arguing that the events of that day have misled us about the real challenges we face. A quick taste:

While scholars warn of fascism on the one side and pundits bicker over wokeness on the other, the larger and longer view reveals how blinkered both of these assessments are. The right’s road to power does not run through street violence, mass rallies, fake news or lawless coups. The left’s weakness has nothing to do with critical race theory and cancel culture. Both claims suffer from the same shortcoming: They focus on the margins rather than the matrix.

Driving the initiatives of the Republicans and the inertia of the Democrats are two forces. The first is the right’s project, decades in the making, to legally limit the scope and reach of democracy. The second is the Constitution, which makes it difficult for the national majority to act and easy for local minorities to rule. What happened on Jan. 6 is far less significant than what happened before Jan. 6 — and what has and has not happened since then.

I also spoke with Masha Gessen on Jane Coaston’s New York Times podcast The Argument. We talked about January 6, what we’ve learned since then, and the future of democracy in America. Masha is one of the most eloquent and intelligent defenders of the thesis about Trump and authoritarianism that I have been arguing against, so it was a great opportunity to engage with their claims.

Last, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked me and a bunch of other scholars what we thought was the best scholarly book of 2021. The choice was easy:

The lifeless biography is a genre with many devoted practitioners. Frances Wilson is not one of them. Dedicated to Keats’s proposition that a “life of any worth is a continual allegory,” Wilson has found, in the owner of the Titanic, moral and psychological mysteries worthy of Joseph Conrad, and, in Dorothy Wordsworth, both the albatross and mariner of Samuel T. Coleridge’s poem.

In Burning Man: The Trials of D.H. Lawrence (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Wilson turns to D.H. Lawrence and discovers an unexpected vein of autofiction, almost religious in its intensity.

I highly recommend Wilson’s book. There is no other biographer like her out there. You can read more of what I said about the book here.

Happy New Year, all.

An Assessment of the Biden Presidency

During the Trump days, I argued that the Trump presidency signified the waning power, if not end, of the Reagan regime. To that extent, Trump bore comparison to Jimmy Carter, whose presidency also signaled the end of another political order (the New Deal).

I was wrong about that, and I explained how and why in a lengthy piece in 2019.

My argument about Trump was based on two theories: one, my own, about conservatism and the right; the other, Steve Skowronek’s theory of the presidency.

In the New York Times this weekend, I take stock of the Biden presidency, asking, essentially, this: if Trump turned out not to be Carter, how does that help us understand Biden? The Skowronek theory still applies and yields some interesting insights.

As the year ends, I should note that I haven’t written as much this year as I have in the past. Family turned out to take up a lot more of my time this year than in years past. But I did manage to write a few pieces that I am proud of.

The first was my lengthy consideration of the Trump legacy, after 1/6, and what it might mean for American politics in the coming years. You’ll see it’s in keeping with much of what I say about Biden in the Times piece.

The second was an analysis of the surprising convergence between Philip Roth and Hannah Arendt.

The last was an appreciation of the work of Janet Malcolm.

I do have a number of pieces in the hopper, however, which should be coming out early next year. One is on late capitalism. Another is on Adam Smith. And a third is on John Maynard Keynes.

Be well, everyone.

Janet Malcolm on the moral evasion of psychological language

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer:

“The book’s [Harry Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity] thesis…is that there is a kind of evildoer called a psychopath, who does not seem in any way abnormal or different from other people but in fact suffers from ‘a grave psychiatric disorder,’ whose chief symptom is the very appearance of normality by which the horror of his condition is obscured. For behind ‘the mask of sanity’ there is not a real human being but a mere simulacrum of one….

“Cleckley’s ‘grave psychiatric disorder’ is, of course, the same disorder that afflicted Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, and a host of other wonderful literary creations. The attempt to solve the problem of evil and perpetuate the Romantic myth of the innate goodness of man through the fanciful notion that the people who commit evil acts are lacking in the usual human equipment—are not ‘real’ human beings at all but soulless monsters—is a familiar topos of Victorian Romantic literature….To McGinniss, the concept of the psychopath did not so much offer a solution to his literary problem of making MacDonald a believable murderer as give him permission to evade the problem—just as the concept itself evades the problem it purports to solve. To say that people who do bad things don’t seem bad is to say something we already know: no one flaunts bad behavior everyone tries to hide it, every villain wears a mask of goodness. The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by psychiatrists, social workers, and police offers, who daily encounter its force.”