The Books That Wouldn’t Die

The humanities and social sciences have become leaden under professionalisation. There is a paucity of vision and imagination, a reluctance to look beyond the horizon of one's own subdiscipline, and a failure to ask big and novel questions. Yet those are everyone's favourite books, that mean most to them, and change not just their arguments but their worldview.

Some of the books he holds up as examples of intellectual (rather than academic) engagement are Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities, William Whyte's Organization Man, C. Wright Mills' White Collar, Murray Bookchin's The Limits of the City, and Lewis Mumford's The City in History. I think most of these would be good candidates for "undead" status.

A few years ago there was an interesting symposium revisiting the argument in light of changes in the public sphere: https://www.chronicle.com/specialreport/After-The-Last/16

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/tag/imagined-communities/

> Non-Europeans have no agency or originality in creating their own national identities. They were blank slates upon which European colonials drew something.

> Luckily for me, I don’t come into reading Imagined Communities totally ignorant of other viewpoints. I’ve read Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, which makes the case that mainland Southeast Asia resembled Europe in the coalescence of distinct proto-national identities one to two thousand years ago.

> The same is true to the north. China was arguably a nation-empire long before Europeans arrived. Though the Chinese peasantry spoke different dialects, it was united by a ruling class with a sense of coherency. The modern Japanese nation-state state is modeled on Western nation-states, in particular, Prussia. It strikes as bizarre to hold that this unique and isolated nation didn’t exist in the imagination of Japanese when the Europeans first arrived.

http://bactra.org/reviews/nations-and-nationalism/

> Because industrial economies continually make and put into practice technical and organizational innovations, they continually change how they employ resources, especially human resources. Their occupational structures change significantly in a generation at most, and often more quickly, so no one can expect to follow in the family profession. (A hundred years ago, there were no system administrators, but there were carriage-drivers.) In Agraria, training could be left to families or guilds, be largely tacit and physical and tied up with the rituals and social context of the trade, and different parts of the same society could be almost unintelligible to each other, provided only they could go through the customary haggling or tithing. None of this will do in an industrial, changing society, in which training must be much more explicit, be couched in a far more universal idiom, and emphasize understanding and manipulating nearly context-free symbols (even manual work increasingly becomes controlling a machine, which must be, as we say, read); it must in short take on the characteristics formerly associated with the literate High Cultures of Agraria, and moreover this training must be received by the entire economically effective population. (A rough definition of an industrial society might be: one where you can learn a trade from books, a society of reference manuals.) So far, such training, on such a scale, has always needed at least elementary literacy, and it hasn't been reliably provided by any institutions weaker and smaller than states. Moreover, the teachers employed by this system must themselves be trained in the same High Culture, and so on, quickly escalating to the point where the culture needs an entire university system, at the least, to be self-sustaining. States become the protectors of High Cultures, of "idioms"; nationalism is the demand that each state succor and contain one and only one nation, one idiom.