The planned economy has long been a desired outcome by the men of system, and arrangers of the human chess pieces have long pointed to large businesses, making comparisons of their sales with the gross domestic products of small countries.  That thinking got Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski to write People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's ( Read more... )

Francis Spufford opens his Red Plenty with "This is not a novel.   It has too much to explain, to be one of those.  But it is not a history either, for it does its explaining in the form of a story ... The idea is the hero. ... Best to call this a fairytale, then - though it really happened, or something like it."  A blurb on the cover of my ( Read more... )

You get Geoffrey Hodgson's Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, which he intends as a reproach to his comrades among the Anointed, and which Book Review No. 7 notes, works well as a defense of Scottish Enlightenment concepts that at one time might have been a logic manual for pushing that Social Progress.  That pivot to the Scottish Enlightenment ( Read more... )

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Book 29: For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today by Jedediah Purdy - 214 pages

Description from bookdepository.co.uk:Jedediah Purdy calls For Common Things his "letter of love for the world's possibilities." Indeed, these pages--which garnered a flurry of attention among readers and in the media--constitute a passionate ( Read more... )

I've had M. K. Beran's Pathology of the Elites: How the Arrogant Classes Plan to Run Your Life in the stack of read but not reviewed books for some time.  His recent "Yale Law School Devours Its Own" prompted me to fish it out and get Book Review No. 27 into pixel form ( Read more... )

This year marks the bicentennials of Illinois statehood and of the birth of Karl Marx.  I'll resist the "tragedy" and "farce" temptations tempting me, and offer what I hope is a straightforward Book Review No. 12 of the bicentennial edition of Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right.
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There is a strain of social criticism that treats the good as a given, or perhaps as accident, and lays off all the ills to the "system."  Perhaps the most notorious such example is Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States, although it is not the only example.  Consider Kurt Andersen's recent Fantasyland:  How America Went Haywire: A 500 ( Read more... )