A welcome survey of a big-picture problem: Rajan proposes a rebalancing to be brought about by decentralized politics,...
Capitalism builds private fortunes—often at the expense of the polity.
Communities—tribes, neighborhoods, and kindred social structures—are the basis of human commerce and the marketplace. Yet, writes Rajan (I Do What I Do, 2017, etc.), former chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund, markets and the state alike have assumed many of the roles of traditional communities. By way of example, he writes that whereas in years past, we might have taken an auto-less neighbor to the grocery store, “today, she orders her groceries online.” The insistence on credentialing is one cause, with licensed professionals dominating many services that were once done within communities. While there are reasons of liability and public health at play, Rajan notes that the one-off transactions of today do not have the same network-building value as the repetitive, within-community transactions of old; “only individual interests matter, and they have to be met transaction by transaction.” This zero-sum economic scenario is especially prevalent in poor communities, but it is not inevitable—though it has a long historical basis in the replacement by modern structures of capitalism for the “reciprocal feudal obligation” of the pre-capitalist era. Strong communities, argues the author, can promote democracy and contain crony capitalism and corruption, just as healthy markets can contain the authoritarian impulses of the state. In that regard, democracy, capitalism, and community need not be mutually exclusive propositions even if the modern American emphasis on the market has produced profound inequalities that might have been tempered “by sensible government regulation.” Inequality yields radical populism, which yields authoritarianism, all, again, working against community. Rajan is sometimes repetitive, but his emphases seem well-placed, especially because we can see so much of his argument playing out in daily life, with private interests ascendant and the public good untended.
A welcome survey of a big-picture problem: Rajan proposes a rebalancing to be brought about by decentralized politics, diverse immigration, and other measures that, though controversial, certainly merit discussion.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55831-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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