Understand the Modern World with a Book a Month

Twelve crucial reads for next year

That teaching of modern metaphysics ... exhorts man to feel comparatively little esteem for the truly thinking portion of himself and to honour the active and willing part of himself with all his devotion.

-Julien Benda

We are, as I have repeatedly argued here, currently grappling with certain problems that are thrown up by political modernity itself - which one can think of, in a nutshell, as the disenchantment of politics that began in the 15th century and has been slowly progressing ever since. For good or ill, that process is now far advanced: we live in a secular age. And because of this we live at a time in which the authority of government must be justified through what it does in the temporal realm. Its authority cannot derive from spiritual or theological causes, nor from natural right, nor from merely having always existed. Modern government thus exerts authority on the basis precisely that it governs - it somehow improves things (or at least claims to). And it follows that it relies on a construction of those who govern as being more capable, skilled, knowledgeable, wise, competent, disciplined, decisive and virtuous than those who are ruled. It is meritocratic in the worst sense - anybody who is in charge of anything necessarily thinks of him- or herself as somehow deserving of that lofty status.

Once this is understood, a great deal of what we experience in the day-to-day rough and tumble of politics begins to make perfect sense. It is why, for instance, we find Rachel Reeves pontificating about how good she is at ‘managing the economy’ (as though it can’t manage itself, thanksverymuch); why we increasingly find ourselves, the masses, being constructed as naive and gullible fools who will be immediately transformed into frothing racists or conspiracy theorists if we are allowed to get our hands on the ‘wrong’ information; why we every aspect of the way in which we are governed nowadays seems to barely conceal condescension and contempt; why nothing, even how much porridge we choose to eat, seems to be sacrosanct when it comes to the purview of politics. Government governs because it makes things better; this means that those who are governed are, both effectively and morally, worse people than the ones who rule. And it also means that there is no aspect of life that cannot indeed be made ‘better’ - even what we have for breakfast.

Rather than just reading my absurd rants about this subject, though, regular readers may find themselves wishing to put a bit more meat on the bone. Here, then, is a list of 12 books that I would recommend reading next year - so as to average out at about one a month (some are much shorter than others). There is a mixture of non-fiction and fiction; I’m afraid I’m one of those annoying recalcitrants who believes that a great novelist can say more of importance in a single sentence than the entire collected non-fiction shelves of the average Waterstones: