I am an award-winning historian and philosopher of the human sciences. But I got here by means of an unusually varied path: working for a private investigator, practicing in a Buddhist monastery, being shot at, hiking a volcano off the coast of Africa, being jumped by a gang in Amsterdam, snowboarding in the Pyrenees, piloting a boat down the canals of Bourgogne, playing bass guitar in a punk band, and once I almost died from scarlet fever. Throughout my journey, I have lived and studied in five countries, acquired ten languages, and attended renowned universities (Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford), all while seeking ways to make the world a better place.
I wrote
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
This is the most important single work of Frankfurt School critical theory.
It starts from the question: What went wrong with modernity such that modernization produced not utopia, but the horrors of authoritarianism, genocide, and mass annihilation? When I first read this book in graduate school, it blew my mind.
It is a wonderfully seductive, complicated, dialectical, critique of the project of enlightenment and its relationship with myth, instrumental rationality, and the domination of nature. Basically, it provides a fascinating account of the discontents and contradictions within modernity itself.
While I think a lot of its argument that is right, I ultimately disagree with it in significant ways too, and I spent much of my book critically shadowboxing with it in one way or another.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is undoubtedly the most influential publication of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."
Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle…
In this book, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor challenges the notion that modernization automatically leads to secularization.
Instead of viewing modernity as either the decline of religion or subtraction of religion from public life, Taylor presents the idea that modernity brings about the expansion and variety of religious beliefs. In Taylor’s view Christianity has been relativized insofar as it has been rendered but one kind of belief among others.
He also argues that many transcendent values have been replaced by immanent concerns. But in certain important ways the book is still hopeful. It is a very long text, but it is definitely important reading for anyone navigating faith, spirituality, and the search for meaning in today’s world.
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we--in the West, at least--largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean--of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.
I couldn't resist recommending one of my favorite novels.
The period following the French Revolution has often been described in terms of the birth of the modern nation-state and the globalization of the domination of nature, but Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, despite being a work of fiction, does a better job than many works of history in undermining these myths and portraying popular attitudes toward fairies and magic in the early 19th century.
When many people think of fairies, they imagine Tinker Bell and little winged creatures, but cutesy fairies were a Victorian invention, and Clarke preserves the ambiguities of early fairy lore. Magic, too, was understood by many of its practitioners as a practical craft, similar to how Clarke depicts it.
All that is to say, this novel explores fascinating themes and is also a cracking good read.
Two magicians shall appear in England. The first shall fear me; the second shall long to behold me The year is 1806. England is beleaguered by the long war with Napoleon, and centuries have passed since practical magicians faded into the nation's past. But scholars of this glorious history discover that one remains: the reclusive Mr Norrell whose displays of magic send a thrill through the country. Proceeding to London, he raises a beautiful woman from the dead and summons an army of ghostly ships to terrify the French. Yet the cautious, fussy Norrell is challenged by the emergence of…
Chakrabarty’s monograph is a classic work of postcolonial theory.
Basically, it shows that despite their pretensions to universality, a lot of the humanities and social sciences have been founded on unexamined Eurocentric perspectives on world history. While modernity is often held up as a universal standard, Chakrabarty unmasks the widely held assumptions about “sovereignty,” “disenchanted space,” and “secular time,” as European constructs.
Famously, he also shows how the transition to capitalism was an act of translation that changed the way people saw the world and their relationship to each other. This book can be hard going, but it is very much crucial reading as it really undercuts some of the most widely held myths of modernity.
First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as…
The late French philosopher Bruno Latour was infamous for his iconoclastic work in the history and sociology of science and technology.
If you read only one of his books, I’d say go for We Have Never Been Modern because it cuts to the heart of things by disrupting the conventional understanding of modernity as a clear separation between nature and culture. Latour argues that even as “moderns” have been rhetorically invested in this particular bifurcation of the world, nature-culture hybrids are continually proliferating.
So if you’ve ever asked yourself, why are cities not considered natural landscapes? Or why are animals always presumed to be without culture? Or what does it even mean to be modern? Then this is the book for you.
With the rise of science, we moderns believe, the world changed irrevocably, separating us forever from our primitive, premodern ancestors. But if we were to let go of this fond conviction, Bruno Latour asks, what would the world look like? His book, an anthropology of science, shows us how much of modernity is actually a matter of faith.
What does it mean to be modern? What difference does the scientific method make? The difference, Latour explains, is in our careful distinctions between nature and society, between human and thing, distinctions that our benighted ancestors, in their world of alchemy, astrology,…
Many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. I argue that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? I answer this question by tracing the history of the humanities and social sciences and their founding figures and demonstrating that these disciplines alongside the myth of mythless modernity actually formed in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. In so doing, I aim to dispatch widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
From the time I was a girl, I’ve loved stories that put a lump in my throat even as I’m laughing. As a fiction writer, that funny-sad tone is the one I go for in my own work. I gravitate toward female protagonists of all ages who break the mold—women who are intelligent and strong but who also have unconventional, quirky personalities. Women who can be hilarious, infuriating, and heartbreaking—sometimes all at once. Because they are complex and unique, these women tend to struggle with life’s challenges more than their contemporaries. That’s what makes their stories so interesting, and why I have chosen the books on this list.
When Mar’s husband divorces her, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy starting over, she’s ready for new adventures—as long as she can keep things casual. Each month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical consultant. . . and a handsome novelist who wants more than she can give. Mar learns from each encounter. But can she open herself up to true connection?
Surrounded by quirky, endearing characters, Mar navigates her…
"A fun, entertaining novel! I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't enjoy this book as much as I did." -Leslie A. Rasmussen, award-winning author
When Mar Meyer's husband divorces her for another woman, she reacts by abandoning everything in her past: her home, her friends, even her name. Though it's not easy to start over, Mar is young-looking, fit, and ready for new adventures-as long as she can keep things casual.
With each passing month, Mar goes from one acquaintance to the next. Among them: a fellow gym member down on her luck, a flirty hip-hop instructor, a bossy but comical…
