It wouldn't let me write a comment so long

C'est pour toi, David:

Full disclosure: I had never heard even the tip of a tit about this book until you wrote about it, Dave. My research into it has gone no further than the summary on Amazon.com and a couple paragraphs on Wikipedia, because these are the things that come up first on Google. I am so poorly informed on the whole subject of contemporary radical thought that I might as well be discoursing on particle physics.

All of this having been said, here we go:

First, I admit that my hackles are uppened by the fact that the political tradition from which this springs is French post-modernism and deconstructionism. This response, however, represents nothing more than blanket prejudice. 'Deconstructionism', by being so unnatural on the tongue, is an automatically heinous word, and I don't intend to impune the intellectual credentials of the authors of 'The Coming Insurrection'. Before I do any such thing, I should of course read the book. Still, I am suspicious that the whole thing might be as far away from the ground as the clouds in the sky, as unfortunately so much in this genre tends to be.

This reaction is tempered by both the book's sales record on Amazon, and this summary of it, which gets me not a little hot and bothered:

"Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms."

The book, by the way, is priced at $7.77, a reference that the above passage allows us to shoot a knowing wink at, though I suspect that, given floating exchange rates, the joke is somewhat obscure for non-Americans.

Yet what a marvelous thought, that theory, politics and life might be understood to be married together (I'm guessing that we're all probably less sanguine about theory, but Bob's your uncle)! It is absolutely the case that nothing these days--not to my demonstrably spotty knowledge--has joined such a level of popular exposure with 'disproven' ideas. The fact that this is a French book is of course immediately telling, even if the publisher is American; there's barely anyone in the States these days who would agree that capitalism itself has some fundamental flaw. With everyone's values so transformed to meet the expectations of the status quo, nobody with a noteworthy launching pad for their rhetoric would dare make any such radical pronouncements. That I call them radical at all is proof itself that these ideas have passed far beyond the realm of 'relevant'--single quotes intended--and should automatically inspire no small amount of interest.

Dave, if I were you, I would buy this book. On the strength of your recommendation, I know I will. I think things have reached a point at which any non-totalitarian radicalism is worth paying attention to, so starved are we of departures from the common wisdom. Whether or not its specific prescriptions for social change, including schematics for the organization of revolutionary cells, are particularly utile, I can't say. It is absolutely the truth that, as Obama, the Democrats in the US, and centre-left parties everywhere demonstrate, something far beyond institutional methods of social change are necessary to overcome our global cultural malaise.

(If you do buy it, I would be careful under what name, and how. Whatever merits the book's content might have, it's very clearly been singled out as a threat by national security agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. I've read in several places that its authors have been arrested in France. I don't, naturally, mean to imply that any of us would be threatened in such a direct way, but I wouldn't be surprised if purchasing data from such a large site as Amazon wasn't going directly on some kind of watch list.)

In allying theory with politics and life, the trick is not to become mired in any one area. Each is attractive, depending on one's preconceptions; pragmatists lap up empiricism and the realities of dealing with established political conduits, tending therefore to shun the abstraction of the larger picture and to focus instead on the quotidian workings of government, and how their technical improvement; while the more academic are assuaged by the thought that for institutions into which they are not allowed, and are therefore opaque to them, the black box problem can be overcome by a solid edifice of ideas that tie all realms of social activity together by a common critique of the values which underlie them. Neither realm is less important than the other, I think. It takes real skill, though, to show why they are ultimately reflections of one another. Thus my skepticism of the intellectual tradition from which this springs: I don't know if this book demonstrates the kind of finesse capable of sitting unoperationalizable social analysis alongside the hard data while demonstrating where and how the two realms intersect, and, if possible, why they are not conflicting interpretations of our shared experience.

That having been said, a failed attempt is better than what we've got, which is no attempt at all. I'm going to give the book a go. It should be readily clear to anyone with the heart to worry that something is very, desperately wrong with us at this moment in time. If the very definition of a social aspiration is to effect outcomes that have a plural positivity--if, in other words, we get together to make sure we're all at least somehow better off--then we are looking at a serious human catastrophe on the horizon. It wouldn't be the first time that this happened, and I doubt that it will be the last. We could rest on those time-honored laurels and leave all up to fate, but then we'd be implicitly endorsing the inutility of knowledge, and eschewing our thusfar magnificent efforts in pursuit of it. If we can't learn from history then we might as well all go to work for Goldman, because we're guaranteed that no action we take will result in a better human society. That is a depressing thought, and is no help to any of us in this, the genesis of our aspirational years.

To summarize: at this point, it's either this or 'The Lexus and the Olive Branch', and, judging by the size of Friedman's pool, that's a no-brainer.