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Preface

CRITICAL 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 is not easily accessible to people who do not speak the language. In addition, the book is full of generalizable insights on the state and politics under capitalism, grounded in a narrative of dramatic historical change written to extract from it continuities not just in the historical trajectory of French politics and society but in capitalist political economy generally. Joshua Freeman’s history of the factory, for its part, enabled me to see my own experience as a student of industrial sociology and industrial relations in a historical and geographical context; it also added colour to my mental image of the global context of ‘Western’ industrial development, and it opened up a perspective beyond the world of industrial societies onto that of post-industrial societies. Peter Mair’s masterful book on the decay of democratic party politics and party organization in the era of ascending neoliberal globalism, written shortly before his all-too-early death, remains an example for me of how outstanding social science can predict without making predictions: by analysing a historical configuration and the forces at work in it so well that what would later emerge out of it – here: the rise of ‘populism’ in ‘Western’ democratic politics – can be recognized as the natural consequence, even though it was not yet in evidence when the book was written.

Equally impressive was Quinn Slobodian’s book on the ‘globalists’, which synthesizes and organizes into a broad historical picture what many of us knew only in a much more fragmented way about neoliberalism as a social and political movement dating from the first half of the twentieth century. Indefatigably fighting the nation-state as a potential stronghold of democratic socialism, with the inevitable distortions it was prone to inflict on free markets, in the 1990s it finally prevailed, at least temporarily, over its last remaining opponents. Of particular interest to me was what I found there about the European Union and its ambivalent status in neoliberal politics as a regional experiment in anti-nationalism and anti-statism on the one hand and a potential breeding ground of supranationalism and multinational state-formation on the other – an ambivalence that was settled with the neoliberal turn of the EU in the 1990s. Having read the book, I was able to see the extensive specialist literature on ‘European integration’, to which I had earlier contributed, with different eyes – wondering how professional social scientists can be as forgetful as they sometimes are about the politics of what they so painstakingly analyse and ‘theorize’. Similarly eye-opening, if in a different way, I found reviewing Jürgen Habermas’s essay on ‘technovcracy’. In grappling with it I realized more clearly than ever before how thin democracy becomes, as a concept, if taken out of its historical context – here that of globalized capitalism – and in particular if the capitalist economy is conceived as an economic system governed by economic laws, rather than as a transgressive social structure of power and privilege from which society and social life need to be protected.

What I agree is controversial – and I have more than once been guilty of it – is using, or perhaps abusing, a book review as an opportunity to say something that one believes needs to be said although its connection to the book being reviewed is no more than tenuous. My article on Martin Sandbu’s fine book on ‘the future of the euro and the politics of debt’ in Europe can probably serve as a case in point. That the largest part of my review essay is about the immigration policy of the Merkel government may be justified, and is so justified in the text, as illustrating how, if push comes to shove, the domestic politics of Germany as the hegemonic member state of the European Union, driven by national political needs and interests, may hit the other member states unprepared and wreak havoc on the Union as a whole. As Sandbu’s main point is that the euro could be rescued by member states emancipating themselves from the EU centre – meaning Germany – and acting more independently on their own, I wanted to demonstrate by recounting the 2015 open borders episode how unlikely it was that this would ever be possible under the existing European Union regime.*

Another explanation, and perhaps apology, may be due for my discussion of the books on the German economy by Werner Plumpe, David Audretsch and Erik Lehmann, and Franz-Josef Meiers. Apart from the fact that I wholeheartedly disagree with some of the authors’ main points, I thought it necessary to suggest a very different approach to German economic exceptionalism: one that takes into account not just the longer-term history of Germany as a late industrializer and an over-industrialized national economy, but also as a thoroughly defeated would-be empire after 1945. The advantage I see in my approach is that it avoids blaming the sometimes admittedly strange – from an Anglo-American viewpoint – obsessions of German economic policy with avoiding debt and balancing budgets in the manner of the ‘Swabian housewife’ on a nationally specific lack of economic savvy and a deplorable inability to get one’s own interests right. (It also renders unnecessary accounting for the superior performance of German industry under the euro by ‘nationalist’ German industrial unions sacrificing the interests of their members to the national goal of a high export surplus.) To make this point, I felt I needed to venture into a longish exposition especially on the relationship between social structures and economic ‘competitiveness’, emphasizing the dramatic ‘modernization’ of the (West) German way of life as a result of the defeat, the occupation, and in particular the demographic revolution in the Western part of the country caused by the expulsion of millions of Germans from what then became parts of the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia.

I leave it to readers to decide whether and to what extent the fifteen reviews collected in this book are more than accidentally related to each other and what general themes, if any, keep the volume together. That different people might find different commonalities or, as the case may be, incompatibilities does not necessarily pose a problem for someone like me who habitually hesitates to sacrifice empirical variety for theoretical unity, preferring not to lose contact with the multiple facets of an ontologically incoherent social reality. The grouping of the book’s fifteen essays in three categories, ‘Capitalism’, ‘Democracy’ and ‘Ideas’, is not entirely systematic and nothing particular should be read into it. Other arrangements are equally conceivable but would be equally arbitrary. Whatever thematic clusters might be identified, they would always overlap. There is, for example, a sustained interest across the chapters in the political economy and the ideational foundations of neoliberalism; in the functioning of the European Union, in particular the European Monetary Union, and its effects on European societies, their states and the relations between them; in the impact of a capitalist economy on democratic politics and vice versa; and, not to forget, in the peculiar characteristics and idiosyncrasies of the German economy and the resulting politics of Germany in Europe and the European Union.

Appended to the book are six of the monthly Letters from Europe I have written for the online Spanish journal El Salto. The letters comment on current events around the European Union, small and large. Included are those from December 2019 to May 2020, the reason being that quite a few of the chapters in this book deal with the politics of ‘Europe’, which are changing at a tremendous rate. Until the book world has caught up with the EU’s extraordinary and deepening crisis, one is left with such commentary-on-the-move. Nothing about the EU response to the pandemic will come as a surprise to readers of my scholarly work and political comment on the ‘European project’. The way it came about, however, is extraordinary and deserves to be recalled so that we can measure the follies of the past against what happened later.

All things considered, then, Critical Encounters is a somewhat mixed bag and certainly not a ‘theory’ of anything. No need to read it in one piece, from cover to cover. But these sporadic explorations of not yet systematically related subjects may perhaps prepare the ground for something more ambitious in the future.

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* That there might be a parallel here would have been more difficult to observe working in German, where Spezialisierung exists for specialization but speciation is referred to as Artenbildung.

* A similar intention is behind my review, written in part tongue-in-cheek, of the book by Johannes Becker and Clemens Fuest which culminates in ‘a pragmatic proposal to solve the euro crisis’. To me the book represents a distinct category of work on the euro by mainstream German economists – a category in which it stands out for its theoretical precision and empirical perceptiveness. While its authors are fully aware of the deep institutional flaws of the euro under the Maastricht Treaty, they stop short of saying that its crisis cannot be solved as long as the euro remains a single currency for differently organized national economies politically governed by still sovereign nation-states. Rather than drawing the lessons of their analysis, however, they limit themselves to proposing ‘reforms’ which, as things stand, and as they must know, will never become reality. In part this may be due to a politically naïve optimism inherent in an economics-trained worldview, with its underlying assumption that what is ‘rational’ (as identified unambiguously by economic ‘science’) must also be possible. On a less heroic note, it may reflect a quite realistic fear of being identified and outcast by colleagues, politics, the press and relevant funding agencies as ‘anti-European’, in a country whose prosperity has increasingly come to depend on the common European currency. Being seen as ‘anti-European’ in Germany brings with it unpleasant consequences – so much so that when it comes to ‘solving the euro crisis’, advisors asked for advice may find it advisable to suggest the impossible and leave it to the politicians to discover that it cannot be done; which has the additional advantage that the refusal of the crisis to go away can be blamed by economic science on economically incompetent or electorally opportunistic politics.