On analyzing market, bureaucracy, democracy, ideology, ethnicity, and all the other fictions and systems we East African Plains Apes have imagined into reality to assist us in coordinating our lives.
Successfully coordinating our lives, so far, we have a great many systems that together transform us from scattered jumped-up monkeys into the real ASI, the real Anthology Super-Intelligence that runs the world, the East African Plains Ape, coordinated in production and cognition. But we need metacognition as well: not just to think and do as a group, but to think as a group about how we think and do as a group. And of all the giants whose shoulders we find ourselves standing on, I do believe the tallest is Karl Polanyi, author of The Great Transformation.
Over on the really bad neofascist racist social-media website, Averroes writes:
Averroes: @delong thanks for introducing me to Polanyi.
I paid my respects to him today in Pickering, Ontario, by leaving him 20 Bulgarian lev…
Karl Polanyi is the social theorist I would give the highest odds on with respect to their relevance to the world 50 years from now, the world of 2076.
If you asked me to name a number two, it would be John Maynard Keynes. But Polanyi definitely above Keynes.
And if you ask me to name a third, to try for a trifecta?
That is very very hard for me.
Let me give you a list. Why do these people make the list? Because each is, like Polanyi and Keynes, a master of one of the modes of large-scale coordination of the East African Plains Ape. For Keynes it is the market as a system. For Polanyi it is also the market as a system—but where the market as a system is always trying to destructively overreach, rather than how it works. But there are many more such systems pulling us together into the real ASI, not the Artificial but the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the East African Plains Ape. In rough descending order of the odds I would give each of still being genuinely useful for understanding the human world of 2076. :
Max Weber. The master-understander of bureaucracy. Plu: “charisma”, “legitimate domination”, and “the disenchantment of the world” are not going anywhere. As long as human beings organize themselves into large routinized and hierarchical structures and then argue about whose authority is rightful, Weber will be indispensable. He is my strongest third.
Alexis de Tocqueville. The master-understander of democracy. The great diagnostician of democratic society—of how equality of condition reshapes the soul, breeds both mass conformity and voluntary association, and lives in permanent tension with liberty. If the twenty-first century is about whether democracies can hold themselves together, he is the man to read.
Joseph Schumpeter. Technology meets market. Creative destruction is the closest thing economics has to a law of motion for a technological civilization. In a world about to be turned over by machine intelligence, the theorist of how innovation dissolves and reconstitutes whole social orders only gets more relevant.
Friedrich Hayek. Market, again. The problem of how dispersed knowledge gets coordinated without a central planner is a real and permanent problem, and it becomes sharper, not duller, in a world of algorithms. You cannot think clearly about markets without arguing with Hayek.
Hannah Arendt. Ideology. On totalitarianism, on the banality of evil, on the fragility of the space of public action—she wrote the field guide for how decent political orders decompose. I fear her century is not over.
Karl Marx. Political economy. Wrong about the coming revolution, wrong about the labor theory of value, wrong about a great deal—and yet nobody has ever been better on how the forces of production reshape everything else, or on capital’s restless compulsion to remake the world in its image. For thinking about the mode-of-production shift the machines are bringing, he remains a live wire.
Alexander Gerschenkron. Globalization. The theorists of how the periphery catches up—of the advantages of backwardness, and of how globalization unbundles and then re-bundles production across the planet. As economic gravity keeps shifting east and south, this is the frame for the world’s actual growth story.
W.E.B. Du Bois. Ethnicity. The color line was the problem of the twentieth century, and I see no evidence that hierarchy sorted by ascriptive identity is finished with us. Du Bois understood, better than almost anyone, how domination hides inside the categories a society treats as natural.
Michel Foucault. Algorithmic classification. I resist him, and I distrust the prose, but on how power works through knowledge, classification, and self-surveillance he anticipated the world of the database and the score. In an age of algorithmic sorting, the theorist of discipline and the panopticon has an uncomfortable claim on us.
Émile Durkheim. Imagination. Anomie, solidarity, the sacred, and the question of what holds a society together once the old bonds dissolve—these are exactly the questions a hyper-wealthy, hyper-connected, spiritually unmoored civilization keeps failing to answer. He is my dark-horse tenth: least fashionable, quietly essential.
But you ask, how about Smith, Machiavelli, Douglass—or Engels, Freud, Luxemburg, de Beauvoir, Gellner, Lewis or any of many, many others? Just below the cutoff.
Thank you so very much both for reminder of Karl Polanyi and subsequent list.
As trained scientist my readings do not include about half of those on your list. For the neophytes, may I ask you to include one essential book to read from each of the 10.
What a List! This is one reason I read BDL, for insight into what I could better be doing with my time. And, of course, my list would be different. But there is not a wasted name on the list.