● The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History
Ben Cobley
Summary via publisher (Polity)
The idea of progress, one of the animating ideas of Western civilization, has now gone global. From Marxism and neoliberalism to today’s mutant identity politics, it offers a framework of knowledge and confidence: an assurance that things will get better and that history is on our side. However, in doing this it creates a form of authority that is simultaneously imaginary and dishonest, resting on confidence in a future that is really contingent and unknowable.In The Progress Trap, Ben Cobley looks at this progressive mindset as a form of power, conferring a right to act and control others. ‘Change’, ‘transformation’ and the ‘new’ are the superior values, meaning destruction of the old: people, cultures and nature. It is a trap into which nearly all of us fall at times, so attractive are its stories and familiar its techniques.
● Artificial Democracy: The Impact of Big Data on Politics, Policy, and Polity
Edited by Cecilia Biancalana and Eric Montigny
Summary via publisher (U. of British Columbia Press)
Democracy and data have a complicated relationship. Under the influence of big data and artificial intelligence, some democracies are being transformed, for better or worse, as relations between citizens, political parties, governments, and corporations are redrawn. As the pace of technological change accelerates, suffusing how we govern and are governed, there is an urgent need to assess these transformations. Artificial Democracy explores the ways in which data collection, analytics, and application are changing political practices, government policies, and democratic polities themselves.
● How to Change 21st-Century Minds
Sarah Stein Lubrano
Summary via publisher (Bloomsbury)
Democracy is dying because we are clinging to a dangerous and outdated myth: talking about politics can change people’s minds. It doesn’t. Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. From friendship to community organizing and social infrastructure, she explores the actions that actually do change minds. In a world where politics keeps getting more irrational, dishonest, violent and chaotic, it’s getting much harder to reach people with words alone. So people who really care about democracy must ask: how can we stop arguing and do the deep work to build stronger foundations for political life, and a better world for us all?
● The West: The History of an Idea
Georgios Varouxakis
Summary via publisher (Princeton U. Press)
How did “the West” come to be used as a collective self-designation signaling political and cultural commonality? When did “Westerners” begin to refer to themselves in this way? Was the idea handed down from the ancient Greeks, or coined by nineteenth-century imperialists? Neither, writes Georgios Varouxakis in The West, his ambitious and fascinating genealogy of the idea. “The West” was not used by Plato, Cicero, Locke, Mill, or other canonized figures of what we today call the Western tradition. It was not first wielded by empire-builders. It gradually emerged as of the 1820s and was then, Varouxakis shows, decisively promoted in the 1840s by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (whose political project, incidentally, was passionately anti-imperialist). The need for the use of the term “the West” emerged to avoid the confusing or unwanted consequences of the use of “Europe.” The two overlapped, but were not identical, with the West used to differentiate from certain “others” within Europe as well as to include the Americas.
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