NBN Book of the Day

A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (Verso, 2021) offers a critical look at policing and the power of the state, examining the relationship between our ideas of order and wider social and political issues.First published in 2000, this new edition of Mark Neocleous' influential book features a new introduction which helpfully situates this ever-relevant text in the context of contemporary struggles over police and policing.Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.Content warning: the last 2 minutes of the interview include a brief discussion of Mark's current work on suicide.Listeners who enjoyed this interview may enjoy my recent interviews with Mark on his most recent book The Politics of Immunity, with undercover police ("Spycop") victims Helen Steel and Alison about Deep Deception, and with counterterrorism scholar Rizwaan Sabir about The Suspect.Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University in London, and is well-known for his work on police power and security. His recent books include The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind' (2016); War Power, Police Power (2014); and the newly-reissued A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of Social Order (2021).Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London. She is currently researching the US Passport Office's role in governing Cold War travel, and broadly interested in questions of security, surveillance and mobility. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Games are a unique art form. Games work in the medium of agency. Game designers tell us who to be and what to care about during the game. Game designers sculpt alternate agencies, and game players submerge themselves in those alternate agencies. Thus, the fact that we play games demonstrates the fluidity of our own agency. We can throw ourselves, for a little while, into a different and temporary motivations.This volume presents a new theory of games which insists on their unique value. In Games: Agency as Art (Oxford UP, 2020), C. Thi Nguyen argues that games are an integral part our systems of communication and our art. Games sculpt our practical activities, allowing us to experience the beauty of our own actions and reasoning. Bridging aesthetics and practical reasoning, he gives an account of the special motivational structure involved in playing games. When we play games, we can pursue a goal, not for its own value, but for the value of the struggle. Thus, playing games involves a motivational inversion from normal life. We adopt an interest in winning temporarily, so we can experience the beauty of the struggle. Games offer us a temporary experience of life under utterly clear values, in a world engineered to fit to our abilities and goals.Games also let us to experience forms of agency we might never have developed on our own. Games, it turns out, are a special technique for communication. They are a technology that lets us record and transmit forms of agency. Our games form a "library of agency" and we can explore that library to develop our autonomy. Games use temporary restrictions to force us into new postures of agency.Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The Vietnamese victory over the French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which ended almost a century of French colonial rule in Indochina, is one of the most famous events in the history of anticolonialism. How were the Vietnamese communists able to achieve this remarkable victory over a much more powerful colonial force? This is the question Chris Goscha seeks to answer in his new book, The Road to Dien Bien Phu: A History of the First War for Vietnam (Princeton UP, 2022). In doing so, Goscha re-enters the vexed debate about the relative importance of nationalism and communism in Vietnam’s struggle against foreign powers. And he puts forward a compelling argument about the importance of “war communism” to the Vietnamese victory over the French.Chris Goscha is Professor of History and International Relations at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada, and a prize-winning author of works on the modern history of Vietnam.Patrick Jory teaches Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. He can be reached at: p.jory@uq.edu.au. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Although much has changed in the United States since the eighteenth century, our framework for gun laws still largely relies on the Second Amendment and the patterns that emerged in the colonial era. America has long been a heavily armed, and racially divided, society, yet few citizens understand either why militias appealed to the Founding Fathers or the role that militias played in North American rebellions, in which they often functioned as repressive--and racist--domestic forces. Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment (U Virginia Press, 2020) begins and ends with the statement that the Second Amendment no longer makes sense. Noah Shusterman then sets about proving this point with a chronological journey to the Second Amendment. While that might seem a clear and straight-froward path, it starts in an unexpected place and time: Italy over 2,000 years ago with stops in France and England, but it gets to what will become the United States of America. In many ways this is an Atlantic history of the Second Amendment. Armed Citizens works in several different genres of history, including intellectual and political. The book also engages the history of race, racism, and white supremacy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Given their cultural, intellectual, and scientific achievements, surely the Greeks were able to approach their economic affairs in a rational manner like modern individuals? Since the nineteenth century, many scholars have argued that premodern people did not behave like modern businesspeople, and that the "stagnation" that characterized the economy prior to the Industrial Revolution can be explained by a prevailing noneconomic mentality throughout premodern (and nonwestern) societies. This view, which simultaneously extols the "sophistication" of the modern West, relegates all other civilizations to the status of economic backwardness.But the evidence from ancient Athens, which is one of the best-documented societies in the premodern world, tells a very different story: one of progress, innovation, and rational economic strategies. Making Money in Ancient Athens (U Michigan Press, 2021) examines in the most comprehensive manner possible the voluminous source material that has survived from Athens in inscriptions, private lawsuit speeches, and the works of philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. Inheritance cases that detail estate composition and investment choices, and maritime trade deals gone wrong, provide unparalleled glimpses into the specific factors that influenced Athenians at the level of the economic decision-making process itself, and the motivations that guided the specific economic transactions attested in the source material. Armed with some of the most thoroughly documented case studies and the richest variety of source material from the ancient Greek world, Michael Leese argues that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that ancient Athenians achieved the type of long-term profit and wealth maximization and continuous reinvestment of profits into additional productive enterprise that have been argued as unique to (and therefore responsible for) the modern industrial-capitalist system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Steve Jobs called Jony Ive his "spiritual partner at Apple." The London-born genius was the second-most powerful person at Apple and the creative force who most embodies Jobs's spirit, the man who designed the products adopted by hundreds of millions the world over: the iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, the iMac G3, and the iPhone. In the wake of his close collaborator's death, the chief designer wrestled with grief and initially threw himself into his work designing the new Apple headquarters and the Watch before losing his motivation in a company increasingly devoted more to margins than to inspiration.In many ways, Cook was Ive's opposite. The product of a small Alabama town, he had risen through the ranks from the supply side of the company. His gift was not the creation of new products. Instead, he had invented countless ways to maximize a margin, squeezing some suppliers, persuading others to build factories the size of cities to churn out more units. He considered inventory evil. He knew how to make subordinates sweat with withering questions.Jobs selected Cook as his successor, and Cook oversaw a period of tremendous revenue growth that has lifted Apple's valuation to $2 trillion. He built a commanding business in China and rapidly distinguished himself as a master politician who could forge global alliances and send the world's stock market into freefall with a single sentence.Author Tripp Mickle spoke with more than 200 current and former Apple executives, as well as figures key to this period of Apple's history, including Trump administration officials and fashion luminaries such as Anna Wintour while writing After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul (William Morrow, 2022). His research shows the company's success came at a cost. Apple lost its innovative spirit and has not designed a new category of device in years. Ive's departure in 2019 marked a culmination in Apple's shift from a company of innovation to one of operational excellence, and the price is a company that has lost its soul.Tripp Mickle is a technology and corporate reporter for the Wall Street Journal.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Franz Boas is remembered today as one of the most important figures in the history of anthropology. In the United States, he is widely created with creating the modern field of anthropology or at least being one of the key people involved in its creation. And yet despite this fact, no biography of the life of Franz Boas has ever been written -- until now. In the first volume of what will be a two-volume work, Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt tracks Boas's life from his birth in 1858 to his permanent appointment at Columbia University at the close of the nineteenth century.In this interview, channel host Alex Golub talks with Rosemary about the young man behind the legend, including Boas's romance with his wife Marie Krackowizer, the years he spent in the academic wilderness trying to find a permanent position, and his remarkable ability to balance life and family work. Along the way Rosemary and Alex discuss her writing project more broadly: How can we reconcile the image of Boas as a social justice activist with the fact that he trafficked in human remains? Would Boas have been a success if he did not have rich relatives to support him in what we would today call his 'adjunct years'? How do you successfully spend twenty years writing a two-volume biography of a prolific scholar who lived to be 82? For answers to these questions and more, please give a listen to this interview about Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt's Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).Alex Golub is associate professor of anthropology, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University of California, San Diego, explores this question using a case study of British academia. The book combines a rich array of quantitative and qualitative analysis, demonstrating the transformation of working conditions, institutional contexts, and research areas since the introduction of a metrics and quantification regime during the 1980s. Highlighting the complexity and ambivalences of metrics and quantification, as well as the uneven distribution of positive and negative impacts, the book offers essential reading for every academic, irrespective of the nation or institution in which they work. It also will be important for those seeing to better understand the role of metrics and markets in contemporary life.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’. In Against Decolonization: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst, 2022), Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò speaks to Pierre d’Alancaisez about the project of ‘decolonisation’ as intellectually unsound and unrealistic. Táíwò rejects decolonisation’s conflation of modernity with coloniality and takes to task the decolonisers’ confused attempts at undoing of global society’s foundations.He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.This much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University. His writings have been translated into French, Italian, German and Portuguese. His book How Colonialism Preempted Modernity in Africa won the Frantz Fanon Award in 2015.NBN interview with Olúfẹ́mi on Africa Must Be ModernPierre d’Alancaisez is a contemporary art curator, cultural strategist, researcher. Sometime scientist, financial services professional. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

As we emerge from a period of government-mandated lockdowns and as threats to free speech multiply, we would be wise to re-engage with the work of a seminal thinker on the subjects of liberty, freedom and nondomination. We can do so most effectively by reading Completely Free: The Moral and Political Vision of John Stuart Mill (Princeton UP, 2022) by John Peter DiIulio.Mill (1806–73), for all his influence on fields such as philosophy and political theory, has detractors aplenty. Conservatives consider him lukewarm on religious liberty and even slightly hostile to religion generally and a proto-hippy in his partiality for ideas about experiments in living. For their part, progressives aren’t wild about Mill’s emphasis on virtue and personal character. Libertarians distrust Mill’s embrace of the state when employment of it, in Mill’s view, fosters social harmony and a feeling of security among the populace.Crucially for our discussion today, all of Mill’s critics seem to agree that much of his thinking is hard to follow and that he will say something in an essay or book that very much conflicts with what he says elsewhere.DiIulio’s book dissects the many critiques of Mill’s social and political thought and argues that Mill believed that society should aim for zero-tolerance of arbitrary power and strive for the promotion and preservation of individual freedom. Given recent debates over personal freedom and bodily sovereignty issues (such as mandatory mask wearing and vaccination and the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade), there could hardly be a more opportune moment to drill down into Mill’s writings on the various forms that domination can take (e.g., domination as infantilization, domination as uncertainty, domination as diminution).Does Mill speak to us today or is he a relic of the Victorian age in all his earnestness and lofty thinking? DiIulio’s book is a strong argument for Mill’s relevance and continuing appeal. DiIulio writes: "Mill is dedicated above all to the idea that the chief and most significant solution to any of the ills that we face as human beings is the general cultivation of deep feeling and high aspiration."We learn how Mill managed to free himself of the mechanistic aspects of Benthamite Utilitarianism in favor of a richer vision of human happiness that was friendlier to intellectual autonomy and love of the arts while simultaneously demanding of the individual the pursuit of virtue and good character.Let’s hear what John Peter DiIulio has to say about the multifaceted Mr. Mill.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day