In the introduction we talk a little about the great bourgeois liberal humanist Immanuel Kant. Any study of ethics must include a long initial date with Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) are arguably some of the Enlightenment’s most enlightened moments. It is easy for the new student of philosophy to be seduced by the thinker’s attempts to devise a universal way to make good decisions. It might not surprise you to learn that Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ instrument of universal ethics never quite fixed everything. Actually, it’s quite flawed. But his attempts to beat the everyday reader into a philosopher are so beautiful, it is enough to make you again believe in the possibility that we can all be reasonable. Or, at least try to be.
I was very influenced by:
• Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1972, Herder and Herder, New York)
• Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964, Beacon Press, Boston) and also Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.), which is a book that has given me a good deal of comfort. Not only does Žižek help to fill in the gaps in a less-than-classical education and let me know what might be meant by ‘Aristotelian’, or remind me what might be meant by the Hegelian dialectic view of history, he does so with a strategic passion for popular culture that keeps trashy people like myself reading.
In this chapter where we discuss the emerging idea of the modern individual, our primary text is John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1680–1690). Chapters Five and Nineteen of the Second Treatise will give you a good overview of not only what Locke had to say about the individual responsibility to accumulate property, but will show you how good he was in argument.
Here, we also look at Magna Carta, written by a bunch of Medieval barons and King John in 1215, the US Declaration of Independence written by some dudes and John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). For more on the moral justification of wealth, look into Adam Smith’s lesser-known The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). There’s also obviously some Marx here, especially The German Ideology (translated in 1932) and Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).
There is a bit of hidden Nietzsche here; it inheres in the idea that morality is largely relative to the time in which it exists. See The Genealogy of Morals (1887).
In recent years, denialism has attracted increasing scientific study and media commentary, though many of the themes in its research are decades old. Michael Specter’s Denialism: How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives, 2009 (Penguin Press, New York), for example, explains the US context. But much good work on the sociological and intellectual context of denialism is readily available online: New Scientist, for example, now has an entire section of its website devoted to the intellectual processes and methods of denialism: www.newscientist.com/special/living-in-denial.
The Reformation is one of the most examined and contested fields of historiography that has seen entire schools of historical thought rise and fall. Traditional Protestant historiography of a corrupt Catholic church and pat, determinist accounts of rising middle classes and the development of capitalism (thanks both to the Whig and Marxist schools for those) have yielded in recent decades to more nuanced accounts of important factors like popular piety and the role of urban political elites. Bear in mind, too, Anglophone historiography tends to focus on the English Reformation, which starts with Lollardy rather than Henry VIII and then segues into the lead-up to the Civil War in the seventeenth century; for some scholars, it doesn’t quite end until the Glorious Revolution in 1688. But the more important, and certainly far bloodier, events in Germany, Switzerland and France (not to mention eastern Europe) have received more attention from European historians, often in German and French. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Reformation, 2005 (Penguin Books, New York) is a recent, well-regarded introduction that will serve the lay reader. Jacques Barzun in From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western cultural life, 2001 (HarperCollins, London) has a thoughtful section on the cultural impact of Luther.
The Enlightenment has similarly been a playground for determinists. The crucial Enlightenment study for our purposes is Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the intellectual origins of modern democracy, 2010 (Princeton University Press, Princeton). The work of J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, volumes 1 and 2, 1999 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) is more for specialists who know their érudits from their philosophes, but lays out the variety of different Enlightenments of the eighteenth century. Robert Wuthnow’s Communities of Discourse: Ideology and social structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European socialism, 1989 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.) discusses common socio-economic factors in the Reformation, the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century socialism and provides a useful guide to each.
A brisk and readable guide to the western philosophical tradition, by the way, is Anthony Kenny (ed), Oxford Illustrated History of Western Philosophy, 1994 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York); the concept of nothingness is elegantly demonstrated by how much the illustrations add to the work. It’s okay to skip the more complicated bits.
A key intellectual–political history of the US is Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 1963 (Knopf, New York)—a book that plainly was strongly influenced by the Eisenhower years, but is still fresh. Three works complement Hofstadter: H.W. Brands’ The First American: The life and times of Benjamin Franklin, 2000 (Doubleday, New York) is a life of Benjamin Franklin that also works as a history of colonial and revolutionary America, including the arrival of Methodism. Two standard but excellent textbooks take the story of the infant republic forward to the mid-nineteenth century: Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A history of the early republic, 1789-1815, 2009 and Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The transformation of America, 1815-1848, 2007 (both Oxford University Press, New York).
The essential, and least inaccessible, McLuhan cultural history text is Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The making of typographic man, 1962 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto), but Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing Of My Work!, 2011 (Atlas, New York) offers a far more reader-friendly tour of both McLuhan’s key messages and why they’re still critical—as well as explaining why McLuhan’s remarkable brain worked like it did. More useful is the unheralded but quite outstanding Richard Abel, The Gutenberg Revolution: A history of print culture, 2011 (Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ), which explains the asteroid-like impact of printing and how it changed European thinking and scholarship.
This chapter is a look at the populist space currently obsessed as it is with ‘personal stories’ and the idea of a person as a narrative. I’m very much drawing on things like Oprah here and thinking less about classical texts, although there is some digression on ethics, and I again point you to Kant the deontologist and his ethical foes, the utilitarians. See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823) and John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (1863).
Notable contemporary utilitarians are Sam Harris, who gives me the absolute shits so I shan’t bother further publicising his ranting atheism, and Peter Singer, whose preference utilitarianism, also known as consequentialism, gives us Practical Ethics (1979, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York), which is a must-read, even if you, as I do, find yourself disagreeing with many of its moral claims. Singer is one of those guys, like Kant, you have to engage with in order to dismiss. He’s really important.
I also mention an autobiography that I think does serve an important purpose which is that penned by Malcolm X with Alex Haley (The Autobiography of Malcolm X., 1965, Grove Press, New York). Anyone interested in the radical good sense of true anti-racism should probably read that.
Australia is fortunate enough to be served by two excellent statistical institutions, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, both of which have websites with easily accessible time-series data on Australian health outcomes (www.abs.gov.au and www.aihw.gov.au). The ABS also has crime and social data as well as, of course, extensive economic data.
Excellent background on the London gin craze can be found in Paul Langford’s textbook on eighteenth-century England, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783, 1989 (Clarendon Press, Oxford).
The comprehensive work on falling crime rates in the West is Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, 2011 (Viking, New York).
In this chapter I am, again, virtually reference-free and more absorbed with the character of popular ‘safe’ discourse than anything written in proper books without meditation exercises and pictures of goddesses in them.
The work of John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart demolishing the myths of homeland security began with the 2011 article ‘Balancing the risks, benefits, and costs of homeland security’ (www.hsaj.org/?article=7.1.16)—read that if you can’t get their book.
Former senior US government financial officer Linda Bilmes has the best readily accessible guide to where US government spending on the Iraq War went: ‘Who Profited from the Iraq War?’, 2012: www.epsusa.org/publications/newsletter/2012/mar2012/bilmes.html.
Like denialism, conspiracy theories have attracted growing analysis by social scientists in recent years—and clearly there are significant links between the two. However, Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics (first a 1964 essay, then the title of an essay collection published in 1965 by Knopf, New York) is the seminal work on the ways in which paranoia and conspiracy theory has played a key role in US politics, particularly US conservative politics, since colonial times.
Apropos of not much, the work to read on Kubrick is Michael Herr’s remarkable August 1999 article ‘Kubrick’ in Vanity Fair (later expanded into a short book by the same name; 2001, Grove Press, New York). The only thing missing from Herr’s posthumous tribute is the famous but perhaps apocryphal anecdote about Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism: to determine where he would shoot the (ill-fated) Napoleon, Kubrick assembled the researchers who had been investigating locations around Europe at his estate, where they would each explain the merits of the locations they had investigated. To make the process completely balanced, each would have two minutes to make their pitch, at which point a bell would be rung. However, Kubrick insisted on selecting the bell himself and, unhappy at the available selection, demanded a catalogue of bells he could pick from before, ultimately, demanding a full list of bell manufacturers. He later abandoned the whole idea.
The 2012 documentary Room 237 documents the Kubrick-faked-the-moon-landing conspiracy in all its hilarious detail, among many other lurid claims about the flawed masterpiece that is The Shining.
In this chapter I make up for my lack of references in Chapter 5 with the following:
• Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1965 (Pantheon Books, New York)
• Aristotle, Problems, c. 300 BCE–c. 600 CE
• American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, Fifth edition, 2013 (American Psychiatric Association, Arlington, VA)
• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930
• David Healy,Let Them Eat Prozac:The unhealthy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and depression, 2004 (New York University Press, New York, London)
• Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield, The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder, 2007 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York).
I would also say that Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison (1997, Allen Lane, London) was quite important. Because even though this is about technologies for controlling criminals instead of the ‘mentally unwell’, it is a lot easier to read than his stuff on psychiatry. His view of ideas and how their development can be traced through our social institutions is bracing. Foucault was a radically ‘unnatural’ thinker and he continues to make my head hurt.
There’s only one book that provides a proper history of statistics and their political significance: Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: A history of statistical reasoning, 1998 (originally published in French; an English translation was published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.) although readers are advised to familiarise themselves with the basics of statistical methods before opening it.
This chapter is a postmodern soup featuring:
• Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1976 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore)
• Virginia Woolf, Orlando, 1928
• Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
• Plato, The Republic, c. 380 BCE
• William Shakespeare and George Peele, Titus Andronicus, c. 1590
• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1994 (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor)
• Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991 (Duke University Press, Durham).
Much of the history of pre-twentieth-century media is available in works previously cited: Langford on England; Brands (Franklin was one of colonial America’s most successful printers and writers), Wood and Walker Howe for the US (the last in fact ends with the first successful use of the telegraph in the US, the dawn of the new electric media). Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The rise and fall of information empires, 2010 (Alfred A. Knopf, New York), is a brilliant account of the development of US media and its regulation since the telegraph that has many parallels with Australia in the immense power of incumbents. Johnny Ryan’s A History of the Internet and the Digital Future, 2010 (Reaktion, London) recounts, in terms accessible to lay readers, the development of the internet.
Sideshow: Dumbing down democracy, 2012 (Scribe Publications, Brunswick, Vic.), by former senior Labor figure Lindsay Tanner, is an imperfect but honest account of some of the deeply unhealthy feedback loops between politicians and media practitioners in Australian public life in the last decade. At the time of writing, a number of books from veterans of the Rudd–Gillard years were being published.
This chapter gives us:
• Barbara Ehrenreich, Smile or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the world, 2009 (London, Granta)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1895
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, c. 1270
But I was very influenced by Marcuse and Adorno also, listed above.
On William James, the book to skim is Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western cultural life, 2001 (HarperCollins, London).