72 books like Human, All Too Human

I read this book after I spent a year living and volunteering with the Zapatista revolutionary movement in Chiapas Mexico.

John based a lot of the ideas in this book on the Zapatistas mainly because they help us rethink what the revolution means – as an open, joyful, and everyday process. What I learned from this book is that If we really want to change society, or indeed crack capitalism, we have to build examples in the here and now that show a different world is possible.

It is a reminder that the state cannot and will not use on its own so we have to build self-managing autonomous structures in our communities that can create hope, dignity, resilience, and joy.

For this book, the critique of political economy is a thoroughly subversive business. It rejects the appearance of economic reality as a natural thing, argues that the economy has no independent existence. Subversion focuses on human conditions. Its critical subject is society unaware of itself. This book develops Marx's critique of political economy as a negative theory of society. It does not conform to the patterns of the world and demands that society rids itself of all the muck of ages and founds itself anew.

The Zapatista movement and the series of demonstrations since Seattle are fighting for radical social change in terms that have nothing to do with the taking of state power. This is in clear opposition to the traditional Marxist theory of revolution which centres on taking state power. In this book, John Holloway asks how we can reformulate our understanding of revolution as the struggle against power, not for power. After a century of failed attempts by revolutionary and reformist movements to bring about radical social change, the concept of revolution itself is in crisis. John Holloway opens up the theoretical debate, reposing some of the basic concepts of Marxism and grounded in a rethinking of Marx's concept of 'fetishisation'—how doing is transformed into being. 

According to the Debord, concepts are fluid and open since they express alienation, class struggle, and the unavoidable contradictions inherent in capitalism. Therefore, his theory has a strong anarchic character and does not ignore the economy or the social conflicts confronted in everyday life, as some readers of his theory may believe. The spectacle, as used by the Situationists and Debord, does not take place on a different plane to that of commodity fetishism or alienation in everyday living, as sadly some scholars hold. His theory casts light on the idea of the inverted topsy-turvy world and the negativity that defetishises the apparent, closed, and reified forms, such as the bourgeois form of democracy and the state, that constitute a closed and fetishized social totality.

Nietzsche said; “Only those with very large lungs have the right to write long sentences.” Montaigne was of the same opinion. He pre-dated Nietzsche in couching his philosophy simply and clearly in short, sharp aphorisms. Like Nietzsche’s aphorisms, they are often very funny.

Someone once said that novels were for light summer reading by bourgeois ladies. W.G. Sebald may have shared this opinion. The latter preferred letters, notes, fragments and diaries. Similarly, Elias Canetti, Bulgarian-born, of Sephardi ancestry, German-speaking and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for literature, only ever wrote one novel. But his aphorisms, both long and short, are remarkable. He unearths forgotten writers, important ones that he had met, and he meditates on literary gossip and the remaining time in his life. Here’s an example: Klaus Mann’s last proposal: a mass suicide of writers (of the great names).

This book is a wonderful practical guide to grieving that is accompanied by charming illustrations from the author. This might make it sound child-like or cutsie, but it’s not at all.

It’s an honest and fierce guide that doesn’t use any cheesy aphorisms or simplistic clichés about grief. It tells it like it is, but with kindness and hope. It helped me feel not so alone.

Academic institutions are competitive environments governed not only by the zest to enrich and transmit knowledge, but also by politics, vanity, and caprices. In many respects, they resemble life at a royal court as described by the seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit philosopher Baltasar Gracián. His Pocket Oracle is chock-full of advice, in the form of maximally compact yet hauntingly beautifully written maxims, on how to penetrate through the appearance of things. Imbued in the art of discernment of St. Ignatius of Loyola, he repeatedly singles out the essential qualities that make possible successful choices in academic life as well, such as taste, judgment, and an eye for talent. One of his aphorisms (no. 4) is particularly dear to me: scholarship and courage make immortal, because that is what they themselves are.

Joubert (1754-1824), was not published until 114 years after his death. These notebooks are neither diaries nor memoirs, neither essays nor aphorisms, but enigmas worthy of much ponder. He was uncompromisingly seeking an afterlife for the source of his writing and language, and he pretty much discovered that in the cracks of insight. For example: those who make laws can’t plant crops. One has to apply names to things: I have many forms for ideas, but not enough forms for phrases.

He is a writer’s writer, since he insists on close and silent and above all, slow reading. 

I have had my copy since about 1972, when I was a penurious post-grad, and it lacks an ISBN, but it is based on a famous phrase that may or may not have been written by Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, and it is an uproarious and undisciplined history of that phrase. Merton calls it a Shandean postscript, because there are parallels with the style of Tristram Shandy.

I am afraid (or so two of my more literate editors have assured me), Merton infected my own style to an extent, but you can just tell that he enjoyed telling a story, almost as though it came from Falstaff himself. Any would-be understander of science needs to read it, but if you cite it, don’t make the mistake of Charlesworth et al., who, in Life Among the Scientists,… show more.