How are you finding this and its prequal?

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Giovanni Arrighi - The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times

How are you finding this and its prequal? — StreetlightX

Works of frustrating lucidity; books empowered with a forceful and cogent conceptual apparatus (i.e. historical materialism), packed with material that I find it simultaneously brilliant, yet aggravating. Aggregating in that there is clearly much more that can be told beyond the selected political and social philosophers. To your point "pop". Wish there was more meat to it. I love Jonathon Israel's work, and I agree with the thrust of it, but it's somewhat conceptually limited by prioritizing "ideas responding to ideas" while subordinating material and social explanans.

I got into dystopian literature at the end of 2020, which happened to include novels that I missed back in high school.

Read:

• The Road, Cormac McCarthy
• Lord of the Flies, William Golding
• Animal Farm, George Orwell
• Brave New World, Adlous Huxley
• 1984, George Orwell
• The Giver, Lois Lowry
• We, Yevgeny Zamyatin

Reading:

• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

To-read:

• The Iron Heel, Jack London
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

Suggestions for more dystopian reading is welcomed!

What happened to @180 Proof's reply to me?

Suggestions for more dystopian reading is welcomed! — darthbarracuda

Here's eleven (kinda all over the place):

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
Nevet Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Known World, Edward P. Jones
The Trial, Franz Kafka
It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
A Canticle For Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr
The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
The Chrysalids, John Wyndham

edit:

The Peace War, Vernor Vinge

:up: Thanks!

The last man by Mary Shelley

Strangely enough, I am reading the novel, by Mary Shelley, 'The Last Man,' too and I think it a very good book.

yes I come back to this from time to time. In my (subjective) opinion it is one of the greatest works of fiction.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

Ideology and Utopia by Karl Mannheim

Giovanni Arrighi - Adam Smith In Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
Nick Srnicek - Platform Capitalism
McKenzie Wark - Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse?

The Taoist Body - Kristofer Schipper
Crowds and Power - Elias Canetti
The Dispossessed - Ursula K LeGuin (so-so, making myself continue. Kind of like a left-libertarian Ayn Rand book, though the prose and characters are better, all in all.)
Shamanism - Mircea Eliade
Sabbaths Wendell Berry ( reading one poem each Sunday morning)

Finally finished 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. Almost 900 pages about 4 different versions of the same characters. Great but had to take a few breaks from it and read other books.

:up: Canetti, Le Guin & Eliade ... It's been so long, time for me to revisit them (& their other works).

I'm enjoying the mix, trying to do a chapter/section of each a day. My first time reading Crowds & Power besides a desultory flipping-through the first pages a long time ago. I like how clean and readable the prose is - it goes down really easy. Eliade's Shamanism is much denser - some technical/academic philosophy of religion discussion gluing together a shit ton of hyper-detailed anthropological case studies (much, much baggier and far-flung than The Sacred and the Profane.) Doesn't go down so easy, but it's really fascinating.

Philo of Alexandria, by Maren Niehoff

A fascinating read so far.

More dystopian literature:
Anthem by Ayn Rand
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

If you want to get the full flavor of the genre, there are pre-apocalyptic (trouble ahead), apocalyptic (it's here!), post-apocalytic (how we pick up the pieces and try to survive), dystopia (society works - but by a perversion of our current system of social codes), and anti-utopia (a flawed and maximally unpleasant world).

I had responded to whose list already includes Zamyatin & Bradbury. I prefer Le Guin's The Dispossessed or her The Left Hand of Darkness, but your other suggestions are okay (except Ayn Rand's puerile fan-fic). Anyway, thanks, and welcome to TPF.

The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey
An overlooked item from my own library. Elitist orthodox intelligentsia as a contributing factor to the Holocaust.

Kant's Transcendental Idealism (1st ed), Henry Allison

Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow

Finally finishing William Durant's The Age of Faith, which is on the Middle Ages. Durant covers the history of the West from antiquity to the death of Napoleon in his 11 volume "Story of Civilization." Although it focuses on the "West" it covers history as far afield as Persia in detail. Even at 1,200 pages, the Middle Ages get the shortest amount of detail. Greek antiquity and the Roman Empire to Constantine each get their own book.

Fantastic prose and insight. A joy to read. It covers all topics, going into art, poetry, theology, science, trade, war , and politics.

There are great aphorisms spread throughout. On the topic of decadence and societal decay: "every civilization is born a stoic, and dies an Epicurean." On the foibles of war "ever must the fertility of woman struggle to make up for the foolishness of man and the bravery of generals." Aside from Gibbon I don't know if I've ever read such keen insight and quality prose in history, and I read a lot of history. Which is not to say the long sections on architecture don't get to be a bit much.

It's taken me forever because it got me rereading the Canterbury Tales and Beowulf.

Now I'm reading Le Morte d'Arthur. It isn't on the level of the Iliad in art, nor as enjoyable as the distinct stories of The Arabian Nights, but it has a certain appeal. It's rough around the edges, which is part of what makes it really capture the feel of the high Middle Ages. It's an irony that chivalry truly peaked at just the time that gunpowder and mercenary armies would soon make it go extinct. I don't know if I'm going to read it cover to cover, most likely not. More of a cool archetypal story collection to dip into, like the Arabian Nights and Grimm's Fairy Tales, which I also pick up from time to time. The Witcher short stories (Last Wish and Sword of Destiny) are also pretty good collections for that sort of reading. I found the actual novels underwhelming though.

February-March readings

• The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars: A Neuropsychologist’s Odyssey, Paul Broks

• How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, Stanislas Dehaene

• Skepticism and Mysticism: On Mauthner's Critique of Language by Gustav Landauer 1903, David Grunwald

• New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656, David Ives

• After Capitalism (New 2nd Edition), David Scweickart

• Hitler's American Model, James Q. Whitman

Matthew McManus, The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics, Palgrave MacMillan, 2020

Halfway through... Very good, so far.

Also, read last September, three excellent papers by Victoria McGeer:

Mindshaping is Inescapable, Social Injustice is not: Reflections on Haslanger’s Critical Social Theory, Australasian Philosophical Review, 3:1, 48-59, 2020

Intelligent Capacitie, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. cxviii, Part 3, 2018

Scaffolding agency: A proleptic account of the reactive attitudes, Eur J Philos. 2018;1–23.

Mindshaping is Inescapable, Social Injustice is not: Reflections on Haslanger’s Critical Social Theory, Australasian Philosophical Review, 3:1, 48-59, 2020 — Pierre-Normand

That looks good.

Robert Brenner - The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005

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