David Auerbach’s Books of the Year 2022: History and Social Science
Waggish 2023-01-15
I have the least to say about these books. The decline of any assumed consensus has led to an increase in polemicism when it comes to historical and political writing in particular, and it almost takes psychological and sociological (and financial) luxury to write with the kind of anti-presentist detachment required for lasting work. These books below mostly display that quality, to me, though not always consistently. (The Elkins book is frustrating for exactly this reason.) I enjoyed Geuss’s quasi-memoir precisely because he permits himself the sort of doubt and irony that seemingly spell career suicide for junior faculty.
Imaginary Languages: Myths, Utopias, Fantasies, Illusions, and Linguistic Fictions Yaguello, Marina (Author), Butler, Erik (Translator) The MIT Press
The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives Reed Jr., Adolph L. (Author) Verso
The Populist Century: History, Theory, Critique Rosanvallon, Pierre (Author), Porter, Catherine (Translator) Polity
Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism Claeys, Gregory (Author) Princeton University Press
Diagnosing Social Pathology: Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim Neuhouser, Frederick (Author) Cambridge University Press
War: A Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices Heuser, Beatrice (Author) Oxford University Press
Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance Levy, Karen (Author) Princeton University Press
Not Thinking like a Liberal Geuss, Raymond (Author) Belknap Press
The Age of Interconnection: A Global History of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century Sperber, Jonathan (Author) Oxford University Press
Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of an Empire: 1811-1821 Broers, Michael (Author) Pegasus Books
Ideological Fixation: From the Stone Age to Today's Culture Wars Gat, Azar (Author) Oxford University Press
China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower Dikötter, Frank (Author) Bloomsbury Publishing
Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past Bartov, Omer (Author) Yale University Press
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire Elkins, Caroline (Author) Knopf