ENCOUNTERS is a collection of essays on political economy, stimulated by reading books for review. It is also a celebration of the book as a medium of communication among scholars and with a wider public. Book reviews are occasional productions, not outflows of a specific research project. Someone assumes that somebody else might have something to say about a book deemed important enough to merit extended comment, and if author, title, blurb raise sufficient curiosity, a deal is done. Different book reviews by the same author, as collected in this volume, are therefore only loosely connected: by accident of personal acquaintance, of time believed to be free, or of the reviewer’s sense of adventure.
How to review a book that is worthy of being reviewed? For me it requires deep reading, beginning usually with the last chapter, then the introduction, then several expeditions into the interior. This takes time. During reading sessions, I highlight what I find remarkable and sketch my own emerging views in the margins, or on the last pages where the publisher advertises other, often related, books. When I am finished with a book, it looks a little deranged. Having let it sit for a while in this condition, I return to it and read my notes. Where they yield a pattern, for example by repeating themselves, is where the reading has left an impact. Then I begin writing.
Writing book reviews means taking the book seriously as a vehicle of scholarly communication; or, as in my case, even extolling it. In the social sciences, journal articles have come to predominate, which I find deplorable. One hears of university departments that consider candidates with books on their publications list ineligible for appointment – and not only in economics, where writing books brands you as a borderline sociologist (which for a proper economist is the very worst thing that you can be). In my view, article writing is easy compared to book writing. For publication in the form of articles, insights from research may be and frequently are broken down to their smallest publishable units (SPUs), with one-and-a-half pages of ‘theory’ at the beginning and an even shorter ‘discussion’ at the end if at all, and in between something on ‘method’, ‘data’ and ‘results’. Books, by comparison, are drawn-out Gedankenspiele – arrangements of long chains of ideas, evolving step by step out of each other. Or a book may develop one dominant idea and access, present and discuss it from ever-new perspectives; reconstruct at length historical sequences and turn them into extensive narratives; offer a wealth of evidence in bright colours – appealing in all of this to the curiosity of readers, their delight in well-told stories and striking, memorable examples. A good book is like a broad canvas, a large tapestry, something to feast on rather than gulp down like a piece of fast food.
Of course, those who care to read a book review want to learn what the book is about and where it belongs in the literature, and their expectations should be honoured. But a worthwhile review of a worthwhile book should also explore what a reader can do with it over and above digesting the facts it reports and the ideas it suggests – where readers-as-users might discover new problems or gain new insights into older ones. As I wrote more and more book reviews, over the years, sometimes transgressing the limits of my own specialist expertise, I began to appreciate the genre for the opportunity it afforded for far-flung, or even speculative, thinking. The necessarily limited length of a book review could provide a good excuse for remaining, in places, suggestive or aphoristic, or for asking questions that one didn’t, or couldn’t, answer.
By far the majority of the reviews in this collection are ‘positive’ reviews, meaning that they express respect for the book reviewed and the achievements of its author. I have written ‘negative’ reviews about books that I thought deserved it; a few examples are included in this volume. But slating a book leaves one with melancholic feelings and should, if only for that reason, be avoided unless necessary: in particular in order to warn potential readers not to believe what isn’t worth believing, and authors of further books not to take book-writing too easily. Of course, a book can be wrong in a productive way, or appear to be so to a reviewer, in that readers can learn from considering the book’s flaws, how the problems it raises might have been more convincingly solved; but then, a book that lends itself to this cannot really be bad. In any case, having written a few books myself, I never read one expecting perfection. There is always something missing, and even the most outstanding intellectual productions are, sub specie aeternitatis, intermediate reports from the frontiers of knowledge preparing the ground, if all goes well, for their future revision. More important and productive than pointing out the weaknesses of a book is to identify its strengths: what one could and should take away from reading it, or in any case what one can use it for if working on or thinking about similar subjects.
Given how much time it takes to complete a book review that does justice to a worthwhile scholarly book, one has to be selective, even if one likes reading books and writing about them. My main criterion is whether I can hope to learn something, either something that further clarifies views I already hold, or something that contradicts those views, planting productive doubts into my subconscious. As one cannot know what exactly is in a book before having read it, selection must rely to an important extent on intuition. A nudge from the outside may be helpful. My favourite example here is my review of Darwin’s Origin of Species, included in this book as its last chapter and conspicuous at first as strangely unrelated to the others. In fact, I would never have considered engaging with a classic of this intimidating stature had it not been for a journal, Social Research, planning a special issue, for which practitioners of the social sciences were asked to write about a book, any book, that they considered significant for their thinking. Working on institutional change I had time and again made contact with theories of evolution but had never really engaged with them in depth. Generally I despised and still despise biologistic accounts of human behaviour, individual and collective, including Spencer’s translation of the ‘survival of the fittest’ principle into a normative prescription for the government of human affairs. On the other hand, I always found evolutionary theory in principle intriguing as a theory of history – natural history – that undertakes to explain change without presuming to predict it, allowing for enough randomness, or indeterminacy, in historical processes to avoid falling into the trap of historical determinism. Hoping to find out more about the exact nature of that theory, and whether a revitalized materialistic macrosociology (which I think is what we urgently need) can learn from it, I proposed that I do Origin, and the editors agreed.
Good for me that they did. Working myself into the book, and enjoying the clarity of the writing and the integrity of the exposition of argument and counterargument, it struck me that the theory of ‘speciation’ as developed by Darwin could be productively compared to the theory of ‘specialization’ that in one way or other occupies a central position in the classical grand theories of modern society, including those of Smith, Marx, Durkheim, Spencer and Weber.* Comparing the two, having found hints on how this might be done in Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society, I felt assured that their similarities were far from trivial, indeed extremely revealing, while their differences were equally significant. Taken together, the two suggest the possibility of a humanistic rather than biologistic theory of historical change and societal development, one that is still materialistic while focusing on human society as it evolved out of natural history, a theory that incorporates agency – ‘practice’ – into its driving forces without falling into the trap of idealistic voluntarism. Allowing for a future with an open horizon, it offers a perspective in which the escape of the human species from biological speciation into social specialization can be conceived as an accelerating increase of a particularly human adaptive capacity – a perspective that may hold great potential for the long overdue rejuvenation of macrosociology.
While Darwin was special, it seems generally true that taking time to read a well-written book and write about it can teach you something that remains in your memory and shapes your subsequent thinking in one way or another. The German word for this is Bildungserlebnis, weakly translated into English as educational experience: an experience that changes the way you see the world, or at least part of it. In no particular order, and picking my examples without seeking to be exhaustive, Bruno Amable’s book on France struck me as a wonderful opportunity not just to learn about a country that
