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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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