A welcome update of Rousseau-vian ideals of duty, responsibility, and reciprocity.
An appeal to use the occasion of the pandemic to recast our view of rights and obligations.
“Moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity,” writes Shafik, the director of the London School of Economics. Challenges abound, from climate change to the economic meltdown that has followed the spread of Covid-19. The social contract of yore was a kind of social superego: In exchange for paying taxes, serving in the military, sitting on juries, and the like, the state would deliver certain services, such as defense, roads, and education. To some extent, the state thus charged is necessarily a welfare state. However, writes the author, a welfare state does not exist only to redistribute wealth, as critics of democratic socialism charge, but instead to serve as a kind of “piggy bank” that helps mitigate challenges as they arise. No one knows when they’ll get sick or how long they’ll be able to work, which leads to a system wherein the young and old pay less into it than do those in their most productive years, drawing benefits and then paying for them before drawing benefits again. Some states are better than others at all this. Ultra-capitalist Singapore, Shafik writes, is more socially equitable than “nominally communist China,” which has no mechanism for taxing the estates of the wealthy. The author also advances the important argument that a new social contract must be formally stated rather than just “moral suasion.” In such a scenario, “those who lose their jobs have an obligation, if they are physically and mentally able to do so, to retrain if necessary and return to work as soon as possible.” More than anything else, a social contract that includes provisions for equal pay for equal work, the right to health care, and other such things requires willing participation, but it is “ultimately about increasing the accountability of our political systems.”
A welcome update of Rousseau-vian ideals of duty, responsibility, and reciprocity.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-20445-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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