Around a month ago, we asked Jacobin’s friends and contributors for a couple sentences about what they were reading. They got a bit too excited and sent us rambling screeds on the subject. Here they are (in an unedited form, because we weren’t actually interested enough to read them ourselves):

Sarah Leonard

I’m reading two books about men struggling with the grey flannel cage of conformity and emotional death: Barbara Ehrenreich’s excellent The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment and C. Wright Mills’s White Collar. Ehrenreich’s book does some overturning of the notion that men’s desertion of the strict 1950s “breadwinner ethic” was an antifeminist reaction rather than a reaction to dissatisfactions with their own narrow roles. And apparently we’ve been writing this Atlantic article for the last six decades or so.

And speaking of terrible Atlantic articles about gender roles, please read this takedown of the genre. It’s about time someone wrote exactly this about the recurring, reactionary “Oh My God I’m Rich and Successful and Single and Female” Atlantic cover stories.

Next on the stack is Jim Livingston’s Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul, for a little economic unorthodoxy, and The Road to Serfdom for the opposite. Also because “know thy enemy” etc.

Thanks to a dear friend, and my feelings about Lauren Bacall, I just finished Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. I aspire every day to Philip Marlowe’s state at the beginning of Chapter One: “I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it.” Who among us can make such a claim?”

Mike Beggs

I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, the first massive volume in a vast trilogy of historical science fiction spanning the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. I’m only halfway through, and it’s taken along time to get there, but I am stunned  by just how good it is so far. It’s about the birth of modern science and early capitalism — quicksilver or mercury being the alchemists’ ideal metal, a scientific curiosity, the god of commerce and a toxic substance used to distill silver and gold from the earth. Stephenson calls his trilogy a footnote to Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Civilization, and I’ve been revisiting that brilliant set of highbrow coffee table books alongside.

Bhaskar Sunkara

I’ve been decidedly unhip with my reading. White Collar, The Organization Man, The Vital Center, The End of Ideology, The Culture of Narcissism, The Conservative Intellectual Movement, The Hearts of Men, The Affluent Society, The Agony of the American Left, Hofstadter, even Maslow . . . stuff written from back when we had a welfare state.

I’ll never get those hours of my youth back.

But one oldie stood out. In The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value, Edward A. Purcell Jr explores the tension between expertise and democratic values in a way that seems incredibly relevant in the context of the Occupy movement and discussions surrounding financial regulation. Liberals, especially, will have to decide what problems they deem suitable for messy popular political intervention. Their ranks may be split around that answer.

Chris Bertram

I’ve just finished David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years, on which I’m organizing a Crooked Timber book symposium at the end of January. I found it enormously impressive but also disconcerting in the way great books can be, because it is making me notice the ways in which the categories and language of my own discipline, political philosophy, are saturated with residues of debt and exchange.

Graeber was an interruption in my private reading, since I’ve been making my way through the novels of Anne Tyler. Nothing obviously political there, but a powerful and disconcerting author in her own way. The most recent was Breathing Lessons, in which a Baltimore woman on a trip to a funeral has to face up to her own history and shortcomings. Strongly recommended. And, prompted by a song played during Jez Butterworth’s excellent Jerusalem, I’ve made a start on Rob Young’s Electric Eden, a history of British folk music with Fairport Convention and similar bands at its centre. At work I’m immersed in a project on territory and justice, which currently has me engaged in a close reading of Locke’s Second Treatise.

Malcolm Harris

I’ve been reading Jose Saramago’s Seeing with some book-group friends that have brought ourselves back together by Occupy Wall Street. It’s the story from the government’s perspective of an election in a capital city that may or may not be Lisbon in which the vast majority of voters cast blank ballots. Communist novelists are even better when they’re being anarchists. Also reading John Jeremy Sullivan’s hyped new essay collection Pulphead which has some hits and misses that the book’s publicists have completely reversed.

Max Ajl

After having spent much of the last two years vagabonding around the Middle East, where, with the partial and complex exception of Egypt, the “Arab Spring” does not seem to be doing too much for the Arabs, as opposed to the raft of native informants whose careers it has launched, I’ve been reading up on the social bases for counterrevolution in the Middle East, especially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the various medieval sheikhdoms dotting the perimeter of the Arabian peninsula. Some of the books I’ve read include Adam Hanieh’s excellent and painstakingly meticulous monograph, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States, which lays out the contours of the development of capitalism in the Near East. It focuses especially on the nearly surreptitious manner in which the Gulf states have become major capitalist powers. Amongst many other useful insights, the book provides an empirical mapping of the Gulf ruling classes — what they own (a lot), where they own it (a lot of places) — explaining why they’re so eager to still the revolutionary energy moving through the Arab world.

Along with Hanieh’s book, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy is a bogglingly syncretic account of the rise of the petroleum-based energy system, in part as a reaction to the tendency of coal workers to engage in unrest. As an energetically-dense and easily controllable material, oil allowed for the construction of developmental states across the world in the post-war era, a period during which its price declined nearly linearly. Oil was also central to the post-1973 transition, as social power shifted from the Western working classes and the global South to the global North and especially finance and energy firms. Mitchell details the connivances of the oil-producing states and the oil-companies, both of whom encouraged the price of oil to rise ten-fold over a few years, in this shift. He then goes on to link recurrent alliances between the United States and Islamist movements to the need for political stability in the Gulf States, not due to the strength of the oil industry, but rather to its weakness and its inability to set up, on its own, political structures to both constrain the flow of oil and channel the flow of profits. I’ve also been reading about energy systems. Rolf Sieferle’s The Subterranean Forest details the German and English transitions from using the direct energy of the sun for power to using the buried energy of the sun for power, and grounds the transition from an organic economy to a heavy industrial economy, at least in part, on Britain’s access to cheap and accessible coal, an insight upon which Kenneth Pomeranz has expanded in his The Great Divergence.

Gavin Mueller

I’m neck-deep in Hegelian Marxism at the moment, finishing up some work on Lukács and the Frankfurt School. Currently I’m reading Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality: Adventures in a Concept — and what an adventure indeed! Jay’s most famous work is The Dialectical Imagination, still the best biography of the Frankfurt School, and I’m finding this a similarly learned and cogent summary of a wide and complex literature.

I periodically return to the Hegelians, and each time I come away with a different reaction. Currently they are leaving me pretty cold: the despair of Adorno and Horkheimer strikes exactly the wrong note for the waves of anti-capitalist rebellion we’re witnessing. The correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse on the German student movement (published in NLR 233) shows where Adorno ends up politically. Marcuse criticizes Adorno for calling the cops on student occupiers, and Adorno, ever the sensitive soul, is hurt by Marcuse’s sympathy with protestors. “I am the last to underestimate the merits of the student movement: it has interrupted the smooth transition to the totally administered world,” he admits. “But it is mixed with a dram of madness, in which the totalitarian resides teleologically, and not at all simply as a repercussion (though it is this too).” I think criticizing the irrational streak in the student movements is an important move. Practice needs theory, but I’m not sure how Hegelian that theory should be.

Rob Horning

I’m reading sociologist C. Wright Mills’s White Collar. In the introduction he writes, “What must be grasped is the picture of society as a great salesroom, an enormous file, an incorporated brain, a new universe of management and manipulation.” He’s describing the emerging corporate world of the 1950s, but he may as well be describing our own emerging network society.

I’m also usually in the middle of some novel by Victorian writer Anthony Trollope — he wrote dozens and I’m methodically working through them. He’s utterly in tune with the bourgeois spirit of his age even as he structures his plots around its various hypocrisies. He returns repeatedly to the ways intermarriage fails to resolve the social upheaval brought on by industrialization, trade, and new money, and sputters endlessly about the ineffable qualities of what makes a “gentleman” even as he can’t help but expose those traits’ arbitrarily.