The chain

Blimpish has passed the stick to me, so here goes:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451; which book do you want to be?

This is obvious, isn’t it? I need to be a book that’s short enough to be memorized; that will inspire people to overthrow totalitarianism; and that will help them build a new political order.

It can only be Mill’s On Liberty.

I wouldn’t mind if other people wanted to be MacIntyre’s After Virtue, Philippe van Parijs’ Real Freedom for All, Hayek’s Individualism and Economic Order, Shiller’s New Financial Order and Bardhan and Roemer’s Market Socialism. I reckon we could cobble together a decent state from that lot.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Nope. There are enough real women I can’t cop off with, without adding fictional ones.

What are you currently reading?

Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos and Roger Scruton’s The West and the Rest.

The last book you bought is:

Those two, and Philip Kitcher’s The Advancement of Science.

The last book you read is:

I’ve just finished James Bartholomew’s The Welfare State We’re In. He knows nothing about football.

Five books you would take to a desert island:

I’ll assume the previous occupant left the complete works of Shakespeare, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Encyclopedia Britannica. So I’ll take:

P.G. Wodehouse – The Jeeves Omnibus (vol 1 if I can’t have them all). The funniest books ever written.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Brothers Karamazov. I must have missed a lot when I first read it.

Mark Blaug – Economic Theory in Retrospect. To remind me of what’s so good about being an economist.

George Sabine and Thomas Thorsen – A History of Political Theory. Good for dipping into.

Piers Pughe-Morgan – The Insider. (I'll not link). It’ll make me grateful to be alone on a desert island rather than back in England.

Who are you going to pass this stick to, and why?

Robert Jubb, Jon Barnard and Tom Hamilton. They seem like intelligent well-read chaps, who’ll give much better answers than I have.

Comments

[Blimpish]

Good luck in building a new political order on the basis of Mill. "After Virtue" is a better place to start.

[Rob]

Thanks for this: since I first saw it (God knows where), I've wanted someone to pass it on to me - it's almost like being on Desert Island Discs.

I'm going to resist the temptation to start a rant about 'After Virtue' because a) it's unseemly b) it's complicated and so not suited to ranting and c) I like 'After Virtue', which is not the impression I will give if I start ranting.

[Blimpish]

Ooh, go on. You know you want to.

[Tom]

I like "After Virtue" too, but it didn't stop me sticking a big section into my thesis complaining about its endorsement of slavery and the oppression of women (or something... I forget). So I won't be taking that to my desert island, probably - at least, not to build a new political order with (it wouldn't last very long if the "another - and doubtless very different - St Benedict" were as celibate as the original St Benedict, anyway). Not sure what I will take, yet, but I'll work it out in the next few days.

And I should echo Rob's thanks; I was rather hoping someone would pass it to me, too.