Five books that made me

Because this is my last post before Christmas, I thought I’d write about my favourite subject – me. Or, which might be of slightly broader interest, the five books which have perhaps most shaped me. As with all my ideas, this is not original: I’m following Miles Kimball. These aren’t necessarily my favourite books, or ones I’d most recommend. But they have been influential for me. And because we are most malleable when we are young, they come disproportionately from my teenage years.

Middlemarch, by George Eliot.

There was a time when I thought about studying English at university. It was this that put me off. I found it long-winded, dreary and tediously earnest, like Polly Toynbee at her worst.

Some books, though, speak to us at different ages. Maybe Eliot is one of those: older readers appreciate her whilst teenagers are underwhelmed – a sort of reverse Ayn Rand. I tested this recently by reading Daniel Deronda. And I’m sorry, but I still agree with the teenage me.

I appreciate that many wise readers will be appalled by this. They might well be right. For me, though, Eliot is like religion or Star Wars – something other people get but I don’t.

In fairness to her, though, she saved me a bullet. I’m not sure I could have spent years reading Spenser and Saussure.

Auto da Fe, by Elias Canetti.

This is the story of an eminent but reclusive German scholar who is tricked into marriage in the vain hope of changing his illiterate housekeeper and who in doing so loses everything, including his mind. It’s an allegory of the rise of Nazism.

For me, it raises the question of the relationship between intellectuals and the world, at both a personal and social level. It shows both that it is not possible for intellectuals to live in isolation, and yet dangerous for them to hope to change people. (Yes, it has become relevant again). The purely intellectual virtues are not sufficient. We must be, in Robert Heilbroner’s nice phrase, worldly philosophers*.

And no, I never married.

A History of Political Theory, by George Sabine.

I read this whilst doing A level politics. More than any other book, it opened my mind to the fact that there are many different ways of thinking about the world, and to the excitement of discovering new things.

I’m not sure this ever left me. I still prefer learning to teaching and would much rather be a dilettante than an expert who confines himself to one narrow field. Yes, we need the latter. But we also need binmen, and I’d rather not be one of those either. One reason why I’m looking forward to retiring is that I’ll have more time to read and learn.

Selected Essays in the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, by Michal Kalecki.

I did not always intend to become an economist. I did A level economics, but skived off a lot of lessons to play snooker. I found the subject too divorced from what I saw as the economic reality in Leicester in the early 80s of soaring unemployment, poverty and factory closures. I therefore sympathize with Unlearning Economics and the authors of Econocracy.

I pitched up at Oxford to do PPE intending to drop economics in my second year. What changed was that I had the good luck to be taught economics by the great Andrew Glyn. Whereas many “economists” seem to think the subject is a way for second-rate mathematicians to pretend they are clever, he showed me that it is a way of understanding the world.

In this context, Michal Kalecki is a model economist. He uses maths only insofar as it clarifies his analysis and no further, shuns unempirical concepts (such as “natural” rates), and pays attention to the facts – even though macroeconomic data was primitive in his time. Selected Essays is, in these senses, far superior to Keynes’ General Theory.

And yet Keynes got all the acclaim whilst Kalecki was ignored, even though he said much the same as Keynes and said it better and clearer. One reason for this, I suspect, is that Keynes effaced some of the ideas that are  embarrassing for capitalism and its apologists - class, power and profits - whereas Kalecki did not. Another reason is that Keynes was part of the elite whilst Kalecki was an outsider, an immigrant. Kalecki’s genius reminds me that we must always look outside of the canon and the Establishment. (One of my all-time favourite songs is Jolie Holland’s Periphery Waltz).

When I worked in investment banking I found Kalecki far more useful than any other dead economist simply because he had ideas about short-run fluctuations in aggregate profits that Keynes and the neoclassicals did not.    

Making Sense of Marx, by Jon Elster.

The virtue of this book, and of the analytical Marxism project generally, is that it saved Marxism from the obscurantism and sectarianism to which Marxists are prone.

In retrospect, I’m not sure I now fully subscribe to all his views: I think there’s more to be said for the labour theory of value than analytical Marxists claimed, and I suspect Elster’s stress upon methodological individualism underplays the importance of complexity. Nevertheless, he showed that it is possible to be both a Marxist and an orthodox social scientist. Subsequent developments have vindicated this. Today’s world fits the Marxian perspective well.

It was through Elster that I first learnt of the work of Daniel Kahneman. He is an example of what I mean. His work on cognitive biases has massively influenced me in the day job as it was the basis for the field of behavioural finance. But we can easily treat his cognitive biases research as being evidence for – and a foundation of – Marx’s theory of ideology. In this sense, there is a unity between my day job and my Marxism. You can’t have one without the other – or at least, you won’t.

* A good economist should be like a good novelist, in that both should successfully put themselves in another’s shoes. Both should give good answers to the question: what are this character’s beliefs, preferences and constraints, and what are the consequence of him acting upon them? Some Brexiters might have forgotten this.

Comments

[Luis Enrique]

it's not what you have to read studying Eng Lit that's the problem, it's the sort of stuff they want you to write after reading it.

this may strike some as unlikely, but I got poor marks in Eng Lit when I poured myself into it, then got firsts in the third year when I started turning in what I thought were pastiches of an eng lit essay.

[Jim M.]

Hi Chris,

A brief word from a long-time lurker here ...

Unlike your good self I chose to study English at Uni and ignored both Politics and Economics until much later in life, and when I did turn my attention to Economics I was deeply troubled by what I found.

I am inclined to agree with Keynes' well-known position:

"The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician."

I'm also inclined to agree with your good self about Eliot, and also about the value of a little well-placed dilletantism. :)

A very Merry Xmas to yourself and to all who pop in here, and thanks for furthering my interest in the Economic Dark Arts.

[B.L. Zebub]

Merry Xmas, Chris.

[Tony M]

I avoided Middlemarch in school, but recently read it more than 20 years after. I loved it. It's well observed, intelligent, generous and shows deep understanding of people. You might try it again.

Whether you do or not, however, saying that you read Daniel Deronda and therefore have no need to read Middlemarch is like saying you have no need to read Capital to understand Marx because you read Theses On Feuerbach.

[J. R. Atkins]

I was anticipating retirement for the same reasons you are. And, rather surprisingly, it has turned out to be far more of an adventure in "reading and learning" than I had dared imagine. Finally freed from one of capitalism's bullshit jobs and a hair-raising commute, I have had space and time to discover (and rediscover) writers like you, David Harvey, Polyani, Tony Atkinson, Arrighi, Dickens, Mann, Marx, Hobsbawm, Anthony Powell, and so on. The guilty pleasures of age...

I am afraid Tony M. is right. Every time I reread Middlemarch it makes me wish I had studied more English literature and less history at university. I have never listened to those who try to put me off Dickens by decrying his sentimentality; Dorothea Brooke remains one of literature's great souls and I hope you will give Eliot another go.

[jan b]

Nothing to do with books, but just to say thanks for your thoughts and best hopes for some good change in the coming year.

[Paul W]

After reading Middlemarch I decided I would never again read a novel simply because it was a novel I should read. When Virginia Woolf called it the one of the first English books for grown-up people, she thought that was a good thing.

Three books that made me (okay, one essay and two/three books): Politics of the English Language; Genealogy of Morals; Blue and Brown Books.