Influences of the 1980s and beyond

By MICHAEL CAINES

And finally – that is, finally as far as this dusted-down list of influential books is concerned (see this blog about a month ago for the 1940s and onwards) – we come to that lowest-of-the-low, that most dishonest of all post-war decades (discuss): the 1980s. . . .

A couple of these books belong to the 1990s, in terms of chronology of publication – so these are perhaps the most adventurous choices made by those experts in the "common market of the mind", the Trustees of the Central and East European Publishing Project (CEEPP), who produced this list as a parting jeu d’esprit before they disbanded. I wonder how that decade could be completed if a similar group compiled such a list today, and what the 2000s would look like. And as for beyond – I'm immediately stuck at one obvious example, Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. A researcher in intellectual influence in the Department of Influence Studies could do worse than attach the equivalent of a GPS tracking device to Piketty's book and follow it everywhere.

Despite the title, this Capital is, as Duncan Kelly puts it in his TLS review, "as much a story about the limits of modern democratic politics as it is about the structures of inequality", as much a story with large historical implications as a diagnosis of present discontents and possible future solutions, that could have an "electrifying" effect once its insights are "eventually fused into new histories of economic and political thinking about global competition". Its implications may interest those who, Kelly suggests, are simply interested in clearing up the "real confusion about how our current system of capitalism in the twenty-first century actually works".

See below for some further recommended reading – and a few pertinent excerpts from the TLS reviews of the time or later. As I've read only a few of these myself (Milan Kundera and Primo Levi, yes; ah, The New Palgrave . . . no), these are useful reminders for me at least that influence can touch one's own reading indirectly, just as Piketty's politico-economic predecessors acknowledged by the CEEPP may exert, through him, an intangible influence on today's many readers of Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

 

*

 

BOOKS OF THE 1980s and beyond

86. Raymond Aron: Memoirs (Memoires)

". . . it is clear that Aron was haunted by the celebrated phrase, 'better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron'. He points out, legitimately, that the idea that they were opposites is in fact stupid and first arose out of a misconceived television interview." (Douglas Johnson, 1983)

87. Peter Berger: The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty propositions about prosperity, equality and liberty

"Whereas many sociologists bury their messages in impersonal passives and a conglomerate German-American, this emigrant writes in humane literary English with a strong tincture of lived experience and humour." (David Martin, 1997, reviewing Berger's Redeeming Laughter)

88. Norberto Bobbio: The Future of Democracy (Il futuro della democrazia)

". . . the leading Italian political theorist of the post-war period . . . Bobbio’s work was as academically innovative as it was politically significant." (Richard Bellamy, 2004)

89. Karl Dietrich Bracher: The Totalitarian Experience (Die totalitaere Erfahrung)

"The experiences of the twentieth century have been so varied, its ideologies so shifting and contradictory, its prophets – Max Weber or Oswald Spengler or George Orwell, for that matter – so often both right and wrong that it is hard to write a work of synthesis which really holds together. This Professor Bracher has undoubtedly done." (James Joll, 1983, reviewing Bracher's Zeit der Ideologien)

90. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (eds): The New Palgrave: The world of economics

"At a casual but conservative guess, the world's professional economists are adding to the discipline's written record at least a yard of shelf-length every day. . . . A reference work of this kind needs every defence against creeping inundation by the economic matter that is published every day." (Paul Seabright, 1988)

91. Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism

"Gellner does . . . provide a better explanation than anyone else has yet offered of why nationalism is such a prominent principle of political legitimacy today. . . . But although it is the product of great intellectual energy and an impressive range of knowledge, it is not a complete success." (John Dunn, 1983)

92. Václav Havel: Living in Truth

"When Václav Havel's essays began to appear, they signalled a renaissance in political theory. Today, they provide essential reading as witness, prophecy, contributory cause as unrivalled explanations of the revolutions of 1989, which have so extraordinarily propelled him from a prisoner of conscience [to] Europe's only philosopher-king." (Jeremy Adler, 1990)

93. Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time

"He is a physicist whose high genius is readily acknowledged by his peers. Members of the public at large can only take this on trust, but . . . they have made his A Brief History of Time into a record-breaking best-seller. How well it has been understood is hard to say." (John D. North, 1992, reviewing Stephen Hawking: A life in science by Michael White and John Gribbin)

94. Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

"[It] has had a remarkable impact in the United States since its publication late last year. It has been widely and almost universally favourably reviewed. . . . What has made this book the phenomenon it has become is that it speaks to one of America's deepest, most troubling anxieties: the fear of national decline." (Alan Brinkley, 1988)

95. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

"Given the existence of limits, of the border, the individual has to choose to respect it or go beyond it. . . . [Kundera] is convinced that the individual is too vulnerable to hold out alone against totalitarian institutions. If one takes flight then one deprives those left behind of the support necessary for survival." Alan Bold, 1982)

96. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati)

"One is somewhat startled to find that Levi is able to leaven so grim a topic with an urbanely ironic wit – particularly evident when Levi is observing some of the less immediately homicidal Nazi lunacies. But sadly, for all the refined control of his writing, it would seem that Levi died in despair, still haunted by the nightmare that only the Lager is real." (Hugh Denman, 1987)

97. Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics

"When experts talk to experts, they are careful to err on the side of under-explaining the fundamentals. One risks insulting a fellow-expert if one spells out very basic facts. . . . So perhaps educated laypeople are only the presumptive audience for this book, hostages to whom he can seem to be addressing his remarks, so that the experts – his real target audience – can listen in, from the side, without risk of embarrassment." (Daniel C. Dennett, 1989)

98. Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

"Perhaps the crowning achievement of this immensely rich and interesting book . . . is to constitute a pragmatic self-refutation of the author's main thesis." (Charles Taylor, 1980)

99. Amartya Sen: Resources, Values and Development

"Sen is here hacking his way through a conceptual and moral undergrowth that most market economists leave severely alone." (Michael Lipton, 1985)

100. Michael Walzer: Spheres of Justice

"If he is right in his main arguments, each of these problems deserves a book – nay, a philosophical controversy – of its own." (Jeremy Waldron, 1983)