Each year, more than 15,000 academic books are published in North America. A scant few will reach beyond their core audience of disciplinary specialists. Fewer still will enter the public consciousness.
We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define “influential,” but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.
Paul Bloom | Eric Klinenberg | Peniel Joseph | Johanna Hanink | Jackson Lears | Leon Botstein | Sheena Iyengar | Noliwe M. Rooks | G. Gabrielle Starr | Amy J. Binder | Susan J. Douglas | Mari Matsuda | Steven Shapin | Mark Greif | Ashley Farmer | Nakul Krishna | Richard Delgado | Jonathan Holloway | John L. Jackson | Deborah Tannen | Amitava Kumar
The Case for a Better World
Maybe influential books of this sort don’t exist anymore. Or maybe we can identify only those books that really have had a major influence after enough time has elapsed; if you’re interested in 1998-2018, ask again in 50 years.
Maybe influential books don't exist anymore.
With those caveats in mind, a reasonable candidate that fits the criteria is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking), published in 2011. It was a best seller, discussed and praised and criticized by both scholars and public intellectuals. Better Angels defends, at great length, a controversial claim, which is that violence is declining, both in the short run and the long run — and so, in a very important way, the world is getting better. Pinker is far from the first to make this argument, but he presents the most persuasive case. Better Angels also explores, at equally great length, psychological and social theories for why this is so, and illustrates that an evolutionary-psychology approach to the mind can give us considerable insight into how societies change over time.
This book has changed how many people, including many scholars, think about progress and change and human nature (and Pinker has recently expanded on his optimistic worldview in Enlightenment Now).
Even those who are unconvinced are aware of his arguments and feel the need to respond to them. The ideas of Better Angels are now part of our intellectual landscape.
Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale University.
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How Civil Society Collapsed
Putnam’s thesis, so evocatively captured in the title, is that American democracy and society are suffering from a prodigious decline in “social capital,” which (following the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman) he defines as the connections among individuals as well as the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that derive from them. He presents the argument with an impressive array of empirical data, much of it historical. Putnam charts falling rates of participation in voluntary organizations, voter turnout, church attendance, protest activities, and several other forms of collective life. He blames generational changes and the rise of television for a culture in which ever more Americans disengage from the public sphere.
Robert Putnam draws on research across the social sciences to show that strong social networks are vital for health, happiness, education, prosperity, and democracy.
Why should declining social capital concern us? Putnam draws on research across the social sciences to show that strong social networks are vital for health, happiness, education, prosperity, and democracy. The ties we create with friends, neighbors, and co-workers help establish bonds of solidarity and mutual respect. When our informal relationships are severed or weakened, we’re more likely to grow isolated, polarized, and distrustful. It’s a story that we’ve come to know well.
Bowling Alone was, and is, controversial. Some scholars have argued that political and civic engagement has not diminished so much as transformed and shifted into new forums. Others believe that Putnam understates the effects of other changes — the increase in work hours, the rise of women in the labor force, the culture of individualism — on American community life. But nearly 20 years after its publication, Bowling Alone remains an essential reference point in debates over the state and fate of American civil society.
Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His new book is Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown).
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Transforming Our View of Prison
The New Jim Crow was not the first book to take on mass incarceration but it has proved to be the most generative, inspiring Elizabeth Hinton’s groundbreaking From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016) and James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning Locking Up Our Own (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).
The New Jim Crow was not the first book to take on mass incarceration, but it has proved to be the most generative, inspiring Elizabeth Hinton’s groundbreaking From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016) and James Forman, Jr.’s Pulitzer Prize winning Locking Up Our Own (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017).
Michelle Alexander's thesis transformed the public's understanding of structural racism.
Like all influential books, The New Jim Crow has sparked robust debate. The title metaphor has come under fire because, critics argue, the Jim Crow era remains incomparable in its sheer brutality. But perhaps the book’s most important contribution is in forcing large swaths of the public, irrespective of race, to recognize the ways in which legal segregation has been achieved. In meticulous detail, Alexander upends conventional notions of the rights of defendants, the willingness of prosecutors to incarcerate the innocent, the failure of civil- and human-rights activists to organize against the rolling catastrophe of mass incarceration, and the inability of democratic institutions to protect American citizens from a justice system in which the rich and guilty have a better chance of freedom than the poor and innocent. In 2015, Barack Obama became the first president to visit a federal prison, where he delivered a speech calling for the end of mass incarceration.
For a time, bipartisan legislation for sentence reform appeared on the horizon, only to recede in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. Despite this latest setback,The New Jim Crow is an iconic piece of scholarship as well as a moral intervention into the most important civil-rights issue of the 21st century.
Peniel Joseph is a professor of public affairs and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the University of Texas at Austin.
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The Little Book That Made the Case for Big Thinking
Microhistory has been popular for the past half-century, but its focus on the trees has partially closed our eyes to the forest. If historians are really to “speak truth to power,” they need to be mindful of their field’s Janus head: one face fixed on what’s behind, the other squinting at what lies ahead. That kind of perspective is afforded only by study and appreciation of the long term. Historians are uniquely well positioned, Guldi and Armitage argue, to offer the insight needed to counteract short-term thinking.
In sounding the alarm about history’s loss of influence, Jo Guldi and David Armitage produced a book of remarkable influence.
The History Manifesto has gained a wide and active readership, in part because of the forward-thinking decision to make it available as an open-access publication. It has been the subject of scores of reviews, blog posts, podcasts, interviews, public events, and other coverage. Translations into eight languages are complete or underway.
As all this coverage attests, however, the tract has been controversial. It has been criticized for misrepresenting recent historical scholarship, for ignoring the considerable public-outreach work by historians, and for dismissing contributions that other fields can make to shaping public policy.
Nevertheless, the fundamental thesis — that the historical big picture is useful, and necessary, and so we shouldn’t be afraid to confront it — is one that speaks to scholars. The book has prompted professors (including myself) to push their own students to get comfortable writing about big ideas. In sounding the alarm about history’s loss of influence, Guldi and Armitage produced a book of remarkable influence.
Johanna Hanink is an associate professor of classics at Brown University and author of The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Harvard University Press, 2017)
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How We Became Commodified
Most promising about this historiography is that it complicates oversimplified notions of human agency and moral choice. By showing how even people who abhor the money economy are caught up in its imperatives, how notions of selfhood and personal responsibility — of what it means to be human — are commodified (and impoverished) in such familiar phrases as “human resources” and “labor markets,” this kind of history is never reducible to good guys and bad guys.
Jon Levy's theme is the drift away from ideas of providence toward an acceptance of the role of chance in human affairs.
There are many able contributors to the emerging historiography of capitalism. But given my own research interests, I’m inclined to choose Jon Levy’s bold synthesis of 19th-century U.S. history, Freaks of Fortune: the Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2014). Levy illuminates the transformation of fundamental ideas about property, personhood, liberty, and security as an agrarian market society becomes a modern industrial state.
His central theme is the drift away from traditional ideas of providence toward a greater acceptance of the role of chance in human affairs — especially economic affairs. Showing how an omniscient God yielded authority to the emerging statistical science of probability (which often claimed equal omniscience), Levy casts unprecedented light on the culture of American — and global — capitalism.
Jackson Lears is a professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.
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Why Art Matters
A tacit rebuttal to Leo Tolstoy’s legendary 1897 diatribe “What Is Art?,” What Art Is may not be Danto’s most important book on aesthetics; that would be his 1981 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. But the six essays that make up What Art Is are a fabulous introduction, particularly for those who are not professional philosophers, to thinking about a subject that everyone seems to share and talk about. What might we mean when we discriminate objects that we deem “ordinary” from those we label “artistic”? Danto provokes his reader into probing such truisms as the idea that art is universal, or that it is an essential part of life. Why do we so often agree that art is a crucial part of the human condition but then pay little attention to it as we pursue lives marked by our obsessions with utility, novelty, efficiency, practicality, and profit?
Reading Arthur Danto reminds us that art and the critical consideration of the aesthetic ought not remain the poor stepchildren of the academy.
Both art and philosophy have become increasingly marginal in the life of the university. Reading Danto reminds us that art and the critical consideration of the aesthetic ought not remain the poor stepchildren of the academy. They are not some vague incomprehensible activities divorced from ideas, politics, and ethics. They are not marginal “elitist” conceits somehow incompatible with commitments to democracy, justice, and equality.
Danto was certain that there is in art — visual, linguistic, and musical — something beyond arbitrary personal taste or the ｅxpression of circumscribed particularistic experiences by individuals and communities. He demonstrated why art requires scrutiny, creates wonderment, alters our everyday experience, and permits each of us to cross boundaries created by history and politics.
Leon Botstein is president of Bard College.
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Authenticity in an Age of Algorithms
If algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, how do we separate the digital from the flesh?
We are in the midst of a new kind of technological revolution, one that’s different from any industrial revolution (i.e., era of automation) we’ve encountered. We’re no longer asking what a human’s job is anymore. Because of machine learning and artificial intelligence, this revolution is forcing us to instead ask what it means to be human, and if organisms are really just algorithms. In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harper, 2017), Yuval Noah Harari forces us to examine this potential future and ask ourselves if it is the future we want. If not, what choices do we make as individuals — and as a collective?
Sheena Iyengar is a professor of business at Columbia University and author of The Art of Choosing (Twelve, 2010)
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The Attack on Black Bodies
Killing the Black Body is a “how to” manual for productively crossing disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of a rigorous narrative.
Killing the Black Body is focused on issues of motherhood and reproductive rights, but Roberts’s method does more than tell that single story. She places poor women who are black at the center of a many-sided cultural conversation. The book is a “how to” manual for productively crossing disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of a rigorous narrative. By the last page, we grasp how and why social panic, cultural beliefs, and government policies led to the forced sterilization of black women in the name of public safety, and forcibly separated black children from their families in the name of national security.
If history instructs, this book contains more than a few lessons for our current moment.
Noliwe M. Rooks is a professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University.
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Why We ‘Feel’ a Certain Way
Questions about subjective experience are old, and yet the ways scholars answer them have radically shifted, especially over the past 20 years, as psychologists, philosophers, biologists, computer scientists, linguists, and even literary scholars have begun exploring consciousness in new ways. The watershed moment for this new scholarship was probably around 1999, the year Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens (Harcourt Brace & Company, 1999) was published.
As Damasio compellingly revealed, and other scientists concurrently discovered, behavioral observation was no longer the only scientifically verifiable way to study subjective experience, and scientists and humanists began increasingly rich dialogues about understanding humanity. Employing a framework often called “situated cognition,” researchers across the academy began chipping away at C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” — the idea of a fundamental split between the sciences and humanities — in favor not of E.O. Wilson’s “consilience” as an idea of unified knowledge, but rather of a diversified approach to investigating the world. Scholars began to undertake increasingly close collaborations across the disciplines to understand the physiological and behavioral underpinnings of language, aesthetics, desire, learning, and even the diversity of human experiences.
Conscious experience doesn’t just happen “in” the brain or even “in” body or mind.
Conscious experience doesn’t just happen “in” the brain or even “in” body or mind. It happens at a frontier where we constantly adapt to the world of objects, people, and other animals. When we “feel” a certain way about a book, a person, or a landscape, that feeling is a product of complex interactions: Experience is situated all around us and doesn’t arise only from within.
Thus new disciplines took hold, from design thinking (in which many solutions come from analyzing interactions of people and objects) to the field of computer/human interaction, in which designers, media theorists, and engineers think collaboratively about how human experience, from the physical to the emotional, developmental, and motivational, can shape and be shaped by technological innovation.
Damasio didn’t invent all of this, but The Feeling of What Happens marked a key point in a revolution in how researchers and the colleges where they teach and study have sparked and sustained innovative thinking about problems that drive human curiosity. We haven’t solved the “hard problem” of consciousness (“What is it like to be a bat?” to quote Thomas Nagel, or what it is like to be you or me?); but we can understand a lot more about one another and how to shape the world that shapes us. The Feeling of What Happens was written by a neuroscientist, but it helped remind the world that no single discipline can describe human experience.
G. Gabrielle Starr is president of Pomona College.
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How Universities Produce Social Immobility
Written by the sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, the book is an ethnographic account of the lives of first-year women college students living on a “party floor” at a selective public university they call Midwest U. Varied in their social-class backgrounds, the students have profoundly different pathways through college. Poor and working-class young women face formidable obstacles to completing their degrees, while the children of upper middle class professionals pursue meaningful majors and vocations. At the same time, the daughters of the wealthiest, socialite families join sororities, and party their way through easy majors, graduation, and, beyond that, socially connected jobs.
Student experiences are not simply a matter of individual choice; they are organizationally channeled social facts.
If this were a book about no more than individual-level educational inequalities, the story might end there. But this is not that book. Instead, the authors use a cultural and organizational lens to show how the university itself is complicit in shaping students’ academic pursuits, social lives, and job opportunities in socially patterned ways.
Culturally, the institutional ethos of Midwest U. is a big-sport, party school. Prospective freshmen from affluent families enroll to have the time of their lives.
Equally important, though, are the various organizational features of the campus: An entrenched Greek system — sanctified by the university — sponsors the parties. “Business-lite majors” make it possible for students to engage in recreation all the time. The university creates actual party floors in dorms and to please well-heeled students and their parents.
Indeed, it is when culture and structure reinforce each other that universities are able to produce particular student outcomes. Student experiences are not simply a matter of individual choice; they are organizationally channeled social facts. This, as Hamilton and Armstrong remind us, works to the advantage of some students but comes at the devastating detriment of others.
Amy J. Binder is a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Diego.
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The Triumph of Neoliberalism
With neoliberalism, now on steroids, currently ravaging the country, David Harvey’s book is more important than ever.
David Harvey is hardly the first to write about neoliberalism, but his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005) is the essential primer (cited more than 22,000 times), bringing together the idea’s history and evolution — how think tanks, the media, and various politicians engineered political consent to market fundamentalism and its global reach. He laid out the “draconian budgetary cutbacks,” and the resulting rise of authoritarianism and economic and political corruption, that have had “profoundly antidemocratic consequences.”
With neoliberalism, now on steroids, currently ravaging the country, Harvey’s book is more important than ever, as is his insistence that dismantling the formation must be “the main focus of political struggle.”
Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
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The Go-To Text on Race
If you study history, you will see the lies and the fault lines, and you will know what you must do next.
Why is a book of legal scholarship a go-to text on race? Most of these writers became scholars out of participation in the civil-rights movement. Getting law degrees while serving the community meant that theory was never separate from practice. Changing the material reality of poor people of color is the measure by which critical race theorists calibrate theory and strategy. By that measure, the tenets of liberalism and traditional equality theory are failures. Critical race theorists watched the prisons fill and poverty grow while the civil-rights acts granted access to a fortunate few. Influenced by critical theory and neo-Marxism generally, they unpacked the role of ideology in justifying and replicating racial subordination.
Mainstream legal thought had long treated racism as an irrational aberration deployed by a malevolent few. Critical race theory rewrote racism as foundational to law, wealth, privilege, and culture in America. This rewriting changed the requirements of reform. Reparations, affirmative action, cultural counterinsurgency, intersectionality, and redistribution were the means once true equality was the end.
The collection includes a promise and a vision: If you study history, you will see the lies and the fault lines, and you will know what you must do next to leave an abundant and joyful planet for your future beloveds.
Mari Matsuda is a professor of law at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.
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What It Means to Be Human
Consider the increasingly pertinent problem of artificial intelligence. Machines already do things that we recently thought they could never do. Not long ago, it was inconceivable that computers could ever beat a chess grandmaster, and now we take it as a matter of course that they do. Feats of heroic calculation once defined what it was to be uniquely human; they no longer do. once it was thought that only human beings could learn; now machines learn, and their ability to learn accelerates. We’re accustomed to algorithmically controlled robots making cars and picking products in warehouses; now we face a world in which machines make medical diagnoses, write passable poetry, and provide emotional support to the demented and the lonely.
Never bet against human ingenuity in making machines do what people once considered impossible.
This is a new world, yet interest in the similarities and the differences between human beings and machines goes back many centuries — and Jessica Riskin’s The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is a rich and resonant telling of that long history. Her book starts with the intricate automata that fascinated people from antiquity to the Middle Ages; it goes on to the early modern versions that inspired Descartes to conceive of human bodies as “earthen machines” — and then to the famous defecating ducks, chess-playing Turks, and mechanical female organists of the Enlightenment and early 19th century, ending with the now-familiar work of factory robots and Turing test-passing expert systems.
The Restless Clock shows that as technology changes, notions of what it is to be uniquely human also change. The nature of human intelligence has long been in conversation with machine intelligence, and human capacities are defined in part through the tools that human beings use to understand and to manipulate the world.
Riskin’s sweeping survey isn’t didactic or moralizing, but it contains two vitally important lessons for us: Never bet against human ingenuity in making machines do what people once considered impossible. And never bet against human ingenuity in redefining the uniquely human such that machine-intelligence can never match our own.
Steven Shapin is a professor of the history of science at Harvard University.
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She Got There First
Writing at the outbreak of the death of theory, Sedgwick sidestepped adversarial practices without rejecting them. She sought contemporary activist meanings in artworks, old and new, yet “not to expose residual forms of essentialism,” “nor … to unearth unconscious drives or compulsions,” “nor again … to uncover violent or oppressive historical forces masquerading under liberal aesthetic guise.”
Her goal was a method unbeholden to familiar dualisms, and she wrote explicitly as a queer theorist despite “the strategic banalization of gay and lesbian politics” and her sense of “sexuality” becoming “a less and less stimulating motive of reflection.”
Future intellectual historians will have to explain how such a self-consciously eccentric book could win the center.
Future intellectual historians will have to explain how such a self-consciously eccentric book could win the center. It helped that Sedgwick’s self-deprecation seemed a side effect of her virtuoso thinking and ruthless prose. Sheer genius freed her from false pride in intelligence. Queer theory, too, is perhaps the only subsection of English that did not turn against the fin-de-siècle “star system” in academia but still marked progress through the contributions of individual charismatic figures.
The methods of Sedgwick’s weird chapters have become standard: Unaffected sang-froid in assuming the most erotic reading of words and metaphors — not as authors’ unconscious slips, but as their out-loud performances. Psychologized readings relying on post-Freudian but not anti-Freudian psychology. Exaltation of “touch,” the tactile or haptic. Exaltation of handicrafts. Identification of the first-person, nondisabled bourgeois self with disability and neurodiversity. Readiness with demotic or erotic or pop jokes and puns, to end paragraphs of complex dialectics (“[Henry James’s] prefaces are way out there … in more than a couple of senses of out,” or “They go together like recto and rectum”), or to subtitle essays (“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You”).
True, bad punning in academic titles may be eternal. That last-named programmatic essay, the book’s most famous though far from its best chapter, has become an obligatory citation in all post-2000 discussions of new methods. Perhaps the only venture not to succeed and predominate is the last chapter’s pedagogy of Buddhism and Zen. Literary critics’ affection for animal consciousness, specifically identification with their cats and dogs, has seemed to fill its place. But in rereading Touching Feeling’s final pages, it seems that Sedgwick’s “Buddhist exploration” was framed by her relations with her cat. So perhaps Sedgwick, once again, got there first.
Mark Greif is an associate professor of English at Stanford University.
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A Guide for Activists
In Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), Barbara Ransby set the standard for this form of history. Born in Norfolk, Va. in 1903, Baker was one of the most important activists and theorists of the 20th century, shaping every major civil rights movement and moment from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many know that there would have been no Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) or 1960s sit-in campaign without Baker. Some are even aware that Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) flourished largely because of her organizing.
Ransby’s detailed biography charts the history of the 20th-century civil-rights movement through Ella Baker’s life.
Ransby’s detailed biography not only showcases Baker’s role in lesser-known aspects of civil-rights organizing, it also charts the history of the 20th-century civil-rights movement through Baker’s life. She held civil-rights activism together through her expansive democratic vision and her behind-the-scenes approach to organizing (“Strong people don’t need strong leaders”). The book is an exemplar of intellectual history, social history, women’s and gender history, and organizational history. The biography also reads as an organizing guide for current and future activists interested in grass-roots activism. Fifteen years later, one might find someone reading Ransby’s book in an activist study group, a university classroom, or a coffee shop — it has fundamentally altered how historians and activists understand past movement work and future movement strategies.
Ashley Farmer is an assistant professor of history and African and African-Diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Recommitting to Truth
The book starts with a tension that Williams found in the culture of the early 21st century, intensely committed to the exposure of untruthfulness and yet suspicious about the notion of truth itself. This was not yet the world of WikiLeaks or alternative facts, but the book has more to say about our world than any other work of philosophy published since. Williams thought there was little to say about the concept of truth in isolation. His project was rather to map its relations with other concepts: belief, meaning, knowledge, understanding, sincerity, accuracy, authenticity, and interpretation.
Nietzsche appears in the book as the inspiration for its “genealogical” method, which Williams uses to show that we can tell a credible story about human beings and their most basic interests, through which we can understand why we value the virtues of sincerity and accuracy.
Since the publication of Truth and Truthfulness, more philosophers have been willing to dissolve the traditional boundaries between the theoretical and the practical.
Since the book’s publication, more philosophers have been willing to dissolve the traditional boundaries between the theoretical and the practical. Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, for instance, takes up Williams’s genealogical methods to ask: In what way are you wronged when you tell the truth but are not believed?
Fricker’s work, like Williams’s own, does not disdain other modes of thought, but remains committed to the analytic tradition’s standards of precise statement and explicit argument. As he puts it in the book, with his usual deceptive simplicity, academics cannot scorn the ideal of truthfulness. If they have any authority at all, it is when “they take care, and they do not lie.”
Nakul Krishna is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
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When Presidents Overreach
War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution (Metropolitan Books, 2005) expands his analysis to include recent cases of presidential overreach, with implications for many urgent problems raised by the current administration in connection with immigrant children, Muslim registries, travel bans, and transgender rights in the military.
Peter Irons’s work has inspired other revisionist histories
Irons’s work has inspired other revisionist histories, such as Henry Reynolds’s Law of the Land (Penguin, 1987), which led to an Australian Supreme Court decision (Mabo v. Queensland restoring native title to much of Australia, and a similar decision (Calder) ordering the return of vast swaths of Canadian land to the natives.
Irons’s work stands out because he tackles a tradition of judicial reluctance to intervene in connection with bold, often illegal presidential action in the most powerful nation on earth.
Richard Delgado is a professor of law at the University of Alabama.
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The Dissolution of the American Ideal
Rodgers is as graceful a writer as an intellectual historian could hope to be. There simply aren’t many people who can speak with accessible clarity about phenomena that are simultaneously amorphous and obscure, influential and precious. Rodgers avoids being grandiose while making grand arguments; he is careful without being pedantic.
Then there is the substance of the book. Rodgers describes the sources driving the dissolution of an overarching American ideal, but he does so in a synoptic way. In just under 300 pages, he thinks carefully about the significance of economic crises, the emergence of conservative political think tanks, the linguistic turn in cultural studies, the rise of globalization, the collapse of Communism, the ebbs and flows of multiculturalism, and the assertion of racial essentialism as well as its declension. Browsing through the work again, I found myself wondering how he pulls it off.
Rodgers avoids being grandiose while making grand arguments; he is careful without being pedantic.
Yet Age of Fracture resonates with me for reasons beyond its technical mastery and astonishing breadth and grace. The book has stayed with me because it speaks in heart-rending ways to our current world. In its pages I can see the ligaments that connect events from my childhood and young adulthood to this contemporary, convulsive moment. It is far too early to know if Rodgers’s work of history will have explained the future, but for now I’ll lean on it as I try to make sense of the far too real absurdities that define our present age.
Let me add an addendum: Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, 2008). Just read it. And mourn.
Jonathan Holloway is provost of Northwestern University.
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A Towering Work of Urban Anthropology
Shapeshifters offers a rigorous and purposeful articulation of the ethical, epistemological, and political implications of anthropological research.
Shapeshifters has already been recognized by the Society for the Anthropology of North America as a powerful contribution to the field, and its ethnographic and theoretical impact across disciplines will only grow over time. Any serious scholar working at the intersection of race and gender, or at the nexus where theories of identity meet conceptualizations of a just and inclusive polity, will benefit from taking the time to engage with Cox’s work.
John L. Jackson Jr. is dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
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The Benefits of Pure Socializing
Even people who didn’t read the 500-plus pages of Bowling Alone are aware of its thesis.
The title Bowling Alone brilliantly captures the book’s thesis in two sonorous and memorable words that evoke a scene we can see ourselves in. It doesn’t matter that it’s not literally accurate: In fact, Putnam explains, people rarely bowl alone — but they far less often bowl in leagues, where a larger and more diverse group of people gradually form bonds that develop from joint effort over time.
Even people who didn’t read the book’s 500-plus pages through to the end — or didn’t read it at all — are aware of its thesis. That’s what influence is all about: The ideas seep in and spread because they describe, explain, and give a name to something that many people have experienced and that deeply affects their lives.
Deborah Tannen is university professor and professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.
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A Model for the Future
Perhaps Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, a book that everyone I knew not only had a copy of but appeared to have read. The date in this case would work: 2000. The book’s ambition to explain the new global order, and its optimism about the multitudes, gave hope to humanistic thinking. (I’d put Thomas Piketty’s wildly popular Capital in the same bracket.) In a more empirical mode, the titles I can think of from recent years are Evicted, by Matthew Desmond; Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water; and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Here were books that represented a particular kind of triumph: scholarship so trenchant and gripping that it not only sought to affect policy but also reached the widest public audience.
The Argonauts is going to be a model for a lot of writing. We are talking here of a collective shift, something like a revolution.
But really, the most meaningful response I can give is to suggest a title that both represents the arc of the past 20 years and is a model for the near future: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2016). The book is emblematic of a shift that has long been underway in academic writing. It represents the successful, even celebratory, search for an adequate form to mix critical theory with personal experience. Endlessly self-reflexive, Nelson returns the reader again and again to the scene of writing, and in doing this, she achieves a hybrid form that makes nearly transparent how language and mind and bodies, not to mention bodies in transition, are linked.
The Argonauts is going to be a model for a lot of writing we will see in literary studies, feminist studies, queer studies, and allied fields. I have singled Nelson out, but if one thinks of other writers, like Claudia Rankine and Fred Moten, it becomes clear that we are talking here of a collective shift, something like a revolution.
Amitava Kumar’s latest book is Immigrant, Montana (Knopf). He is a professor of English at Vassar College.
