Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

“I hope readers see this as a serious book.” Mission accomplished. It is the most serious book I have read among the abundant crop of recent books on political economy. But if the original manuscript was twice as long, as the author claims, my thanks to the editor. As happy as I am that I read the book, I was ultimately satisfied to put it down. Goldberg is a conservative Enlightenment-liberal capitalist. Neither an admirer of Trump and the alt-right or the progressive left, some will think of him as a traditional conservative and, as such, a rather devout constitutionalist. He rejects both tribal populism and progressive identity politics, although he sees tribalism and the need for identity as hard-wired into our DNA. It is always dangerous to summarize another person’s thoughts, but that’s what a book review is. Goldberg argues that true human progress only began with the Enlightenment and that it flowed from the adoption of considered thought that runs contrary to all of our natural instincts. It began, organically, with John Locke and the Glorious English Revolution of 1688, and continued, by choice, with the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the founding of the US. The challenge facing every student of life, but particularly acute among historians, is the fact that reality is complex. It can be sliced into a large number—some believe infinite—number of dimensions and interconnected variables. (Historians, as Goldberg points out, fall prey to only connecting the dots they expect to see.) Science and empiricism both help and hinder the process. They help because they provide an objective methodology for isolating variables. They hinder because they require the successful isolation of variables that are causal and not superficially contributory or coincidental. The key to understanding anything, therefore, is context. Is it truly knowable? Or are we destined to scratch away at the surface? And the answer, of course, depends on whom you ask what. I don’t refute Goldberg arguments but I do refute some of his conclusions. And the difference in our two views is, in my words, one of context. Ultimately, Goldberg’s arguments, while powerful, strike me as unnecessarily binary. He divides the world of political economy into Locke and Rousseau and, as a result, you are either an empiricist (him) or a romantic (admittedly, me). And he doesn’t mince his words on how he feels about each. That’s a bit unfair and I am falling into the same trap, although to no more degree than he does, created by the limitations of language. Language is a human convention, after all, and tends, in the interest of efficiency, toward binary expression. Something to always keep in mind when reading any book. Goldberg makes several key points that seem unassailable, including the importance of “earned success” to human fulfillment. It is also indisputable that we have witnessed a decline in what he calls “mediating institutions” (e.g. family), those formal and informal institutions that have historically provided a buffer between the individual and the state, and that this has contributed to our political and social decay. And his repeated contention that maintaining the benefits of liberal democracy takes constant care and attention. (He uses the gardener metaphor frequently.) I would also agree with Goldberg that neither political party has defined a productive way forward. I must take exception, however, perhaps out of wishful thinking, with his conclusion: “Because when you are at the top of a mountain, any direction you turn—be it left toward socialism or right toward nationalism or in some other clever direction—the result is the same: You must go down, back whence you came.” I’d like to believe that there is a third way other than the conservative bare-knuckle Locke-ism that he seems to favor or the progressive politics of identity alone. To me the problem is not the celebration of the individual as much as it is the current emphasis on “me.” Me-ism is much more selfish than individualism and flows, as Goldberg points out, from the ignorance of data overload served up through closed loops and a certain ingratitude, or “forgetfulness”, for what we do have. One of the omissions that I believe contributes to Goldberg’s ultimately binary way forward is his perceived lack of the impact of the rise of the corpocracy. He fully acknowledges that capitalism is impartially disruptive, but he never really takes exception with the asymmetric power currently assigned to the elite multi-national banks, hedge funds, and corporations that have taken over the political process due to the latter’s reliance on funding for its power. He devotes an entire chapter to lamenting the lack of accountability in “The Administrative State”, the so-called shadow state, but gives virtually no space to demanding the same accountability among our corporate nobles who have gone to far as to give our private information away, let the Russians reach into the electoral process, and incentivize their employees to forge fake accounts without our consent, much less to collapse the global economy (2008), all without anyone ever being held accountable. It is not that capitalism or free markets are bad, but they are perverse when power is applied asymmetrically because of a lack of regulation or an over concentration of monopoly powers. There has to be a way forward the draws the best from both Locke and Rousseau—and Marx and Smith, among others. And to me it has more to do with overcoming the ultimately irrational lust of “me” with some acceptance of the value of “we.” Having said that, yes, this is a very serious book, superbly written. And it deserves to be read by all.