The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

This book has been published by Harvard University Press in February 2007. Despite its brevity it is the most comprehensive statement of my present views. We cannot find ready to hand the ideas we need to reform society and to reorient our lives. A host of prejudices, of illusions, and of silent acts of spiritual and practical surrender weaken our experimentalist impulses and check our democratic commitments. In combating them, we do more than deepen our insights and strengthen our hopes; we come to see the potential of an individual life in a different way. To this end, I offer a radicalization of pragmatism -- the ruling philosophy of the age. I place here a selection from the book as well as a more complete version of the thematic index than the version that has been published.

To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

Nature in its Place

This little piece, which will appear as an appendix to "The Self Awakened," restates and develops one of my central concerns -- the idea that we are something infinite imprisoned within something finite -- from the vantage point of a question unaddressed in my earlier work: our relation to nature. In asking what we should do with nature, we ask what we should do with ourselves.

The Universal Grid of Philosophy

This brief text, also to appear as an appendix to "The Self Awakened," discusses what is and is not constant in the world history of philosophy. Metaphysics remains imprisoned in a labyrinth from which it cannot escape, not even through its attempted partnership with natural science. The moral and political ideas of humanity have, however, undergone a revolution. As a result of this revolution we discover that although we are not God we can become more godlike.

Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics

This book will be published by Princeton University Press in October 2007. It works out the economic implications, as well as the implications for economics, of the social theory developed in my Politics books and of the philosophical program advanced in "The Self Awakened." It represents the counterpart in political economy to the arguments of "What Should Legal Analysis Become?" about law. I see it as one more move in a campaign to free social thought from its embrace of superstition and its subservience to fate.

The book takes as its point of departure a discussion of the doctrine of free trade on the basis of comparative advantage -- the most characteristic teaching of economics. A substantive theme in the work is the way in which the activities we have learned how to repeat (and thus to express in formulas, embodied in machines) are best related to the activities we do not yet know how to repeat. Here is a form of the division of labor -- in the workplace or in the world as a whole -- contrasting to Adam Smith's pin factory and to Henry Ford's assembly line. A methodological theme is the development of a practice of economics supporting a more intimate bond among analysis, explanation, and proposal than the economics inaugurated by the marginalism of the late nineteenth century allows.

What Should the Left Propose?

The world suffers under a dictatorship of no alternatives. Ideas are not enough to overthrow that dictatorship. We cannot, however, overthrow it without ideas.

I was commissioned to write a piece that within the compass of a few pages would suggest the core of a progressive or leftist program for contemporary societies. I tried to define a direction, rather than a blueprint, to suggest a range of next steps, and to identify the interests and aspirations, the agents and opportunities, on which such a project might rely. A proposal like this one can have force only insofar as it seizes on ideas and tendencies that are all around us.

A central feature of the way of thinking I defend is the thesis that we can advance only by broadening the very restricted repertory of institutional arrangements now on offer in the world for the organization of different areas of social life. Our interests and ideals remain nailed to the cross of our practices and institutions.

No feature of my argument may seem stranger than the generality of its scope: the insistence that any democratic and experimentalist program worth considering today must speak to the circumstances of both richer and poorer countries and to the reform of "globalization" as well as to the reconstruction of national societies. Purely local proposals cannot do justice to either the constraints or the possibilities in our situation. The great ideological programs of the last two centuries were tainted by their dogmatism about alternatives as well as by their determinism about change. They were not, however, mistaken to address all humanity.

"What Should the Left Propose?" has been published by Verso in February 2006.

To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.

The Future of the Left: Miliband Lecture at the London School of Economics

Here is the unedited transcript of the Miliband lecture given at the London School of Economics on February 8, 2006 under the same title as the interview below to Renewal.

The Future of the Left: an Interview

An interview with James Crabtree, published in the Summer of 2005 in Renewal, vol. 13, no. 2/3. Renewal is the ideas journal of the British Labor Party.

The Hidden Difference

"The Hidden Difference" is a note on conjectures relating to a project on which Charles Sabel and I are now working. Why do some contemporary societies succeed at both market-oriented and "dirigiste" approaches to economic organization whereas other countries make a mess of market-oriented and "dirigiste" approaches alike? This question serves as the starting point for a reconsideration of certain dominant assumptions about the institutional and cultural bases of worldly success. The revision of these premises provides the programmatic imagination with a more secure basis.

The Boutwood Lectures: The Second Way

I gave the Boutwood Lectures in January 2002 at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. You can access below the recorded typescript of these two lectures.

The first lecture presents a criticism of European social democracy and offers a program for the reformation of the North Atlantic societies that would continue where contemporary social democracy has stopped. The second lecture explores the stakes in this undertaking, the obstacles it must confront, and the sources from it can derive energy and authority. This second lecture addresses the arrangements of a world order -- a different globalization -- friendly to the development of the powers of humanity in contrasting directions. It discusses the practice of a style of social, political, and analysis untainted by the rationalization of present reality. It proposes an ethic neither heroic nor antiheroic, recognizing and nurturing the frustrated intensity of ordinary men and women.

The opening up of the second way provides an occasion for us to reimagine and to remake ourselves, piece by piece and step by step. By advancing along this path we diminish the dependence of transformation on calamity. The direct appeal of the second way is the promise of moving forward in the zone in which the institutional conditions of material progress intersect the institutional requirements for the weakening of entrenched social divisions and hierarchies. The proximate aim of the program of the second way is the further cracking open of society to democracy and experimentalism. Its ulterior objective is the further divinization of humanity.

Introduction to the new edition of False Necessity

In this long introduction to the new edition of "False Necessity" (Verso 2002), I connect the ideas of the book to present intellectual and political debates. I also reinterpret these ideas as a special case of a broader family of intellectual and political possibilities. We do have the elements for a fundamental reconstruction of our ways of thinking about society. Such a reconstruction can liberate us from the illusions of fatalism while advancing the cause of democracy.

You can find the full text of "False Necessity" in "the reorientation of social thought" section of this website.

To order this book go to the "my books" section of this website.