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THE TYRANNY OF VIRTUE

IDENTITY, THE ACADEMY, AND THE HUNT FOR POLITICAL HERESIES

A nuanced argument of interest to those who worry that nuanced arguments are no longer possible in quad or classroom.

A rousing call for speech on college campuses that is truly free, addressing uncomfortable issues while allowing room for dissent.

The habit of thinking clearly about big-picture issues of politics, philosophy, ethics, identity, and other realms, the very stuff of liberal discourse, is “virtually impossible for a great many people in academic life.” So writes Salmagundi editor Boyers (English/Skidmore Coll.; The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, 2015, etc.) in this bracing—and, at turns, eminently arguable—defense of norms of free inquiry against aggrieved identity politics. He’s pretty woke, a student told him, for “an old white guy like you.” Old white guys have feelings, too—and histories that embrace centuries of struggle and survival that don’t often figure in the modern narrative. Boyers begins by examining the modern notion of privilege, recalling what would probably have been an actionable case today of one of his own professors who advised him to lose his Brooklyn accent lest he not be taken seriously. Privilege, as in white privilege, is a real thing, at least of a kind, he allows: That professor would be hauled up today for classism and put through sensitivity training, but the very idea of white privilege is now a “formula resistant to meaningful conversations, which fuels insupportable assumptions and resentments.” Boyers cites cases: a student who cannot believe that Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, can speak with any authority of the lives of black South Africans; the novelist Viet Tranh Nguyen, whose article on the supposed hostility of writers’ workshops to people of color rouses Boyers’ vigorous objections. Coming from a clearly liberal point of view, Boyers nonetheless courts controversy—and is bound to get it—with some of his tenets, such as the thought that identity politics as such evinces “a fear of the uncertainties and hard choices that come with modernity and the need to think.”

A nuanced argument of interest to those who worry that nuanced arguments are no longer possible in quad or classroom.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-982127-18-3

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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