My summer reading list
This summer — maybe more than any summer recently — reading can help clear the mind, understand today’s problems, get a grip around what we can, each one of us, do about them. Just as important, this summer, our minds need to find breathing space, escape, discover new landscapes.
As Covid-19 continues to hit all of us — and those most vulnerable of us even more so, reading is for me a way of finding a new way to restock for the autumn. I have not in the past shared a reading list; I do so today because I hope it inspires some readers and helps to find a way to enjoy this summer break.
Philosophie du réchauffement climatique, Philosphie Magazine
Une fois n’est pas coutume, I will start this reading list with recommending the special issue summer-autumn 2020 of Philosophie Magazine, devoted to philosophical questions related to climate change and global warming. With Covid-19 hitting us and much of the economy having to slow down, some economic sectors were hit which had major negative impact on the climate, especially in view of their CO2 emissions.
A study recently published in Nature found that “city lockdowns led to a sizeable improvement in air quality”. In Europe, many studies and data collected by the European Environmental Agency indicate what the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe called a “sharp decline in air pollutant concentrations in many European cities where lockdown measures have been implemented”.
This obviously raises a philosophical question. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in his recently published Ce Virus qui rend fou (Paris, Grasset, 2020) rejects the link between global warming and Covid-19 but also rejects that we should learn from Covid-19 anything in relation to global warming. He rejects the ideas of those (Jean-Luc Mélanchon, François Ruffin, Philippe Martinez, and philosopher Bruno Latour) who believe that Covid-19 provides with an occasion formidable such as Latour in his article published in the midst of the Covid-19 outbreak. Lévy rejects that this interruption catastrophique should be the motor of change and instead calls for a great debate to know how we change society.
In an interview published in Philosophie Magazine, Bruno Latour explains how the acceleration of the changes to the environment, due to human activity, are creating a new class warfare. The lasting alteration to the environment is affecting those humans on the globe least responsible of the pollution. He ends his interview by speaking about the “opportunity” it is for the new generations to reinvent “new ways of living”, which certainly somewhat constitutes why he believes Covid-19 is an “occasion formidable” to accelerate the definition of new lifestyles and address the new class warfare.
This special issue of Philosophie Magazine provides an insight that is often forgotten; the only way we can address climate change is by changing the way we all live. With a link to inequalities within countries and amongst humans around the globe, because we need to build a new “community of fate” as Pablo Servigne writes. With a link to the protection of human rights and individual freedoms, amongst which the right to a healthy environment. With a question around technology as an answer.
An easy way to start changing the way we live is to cycle… To know more about the history of the cyclist movement — and its contribution to political ecology — read Benoît Lambert’s Cyclopolis, ville nouvelle : Contribution à lhistoire de lécologie politique (Geneva, Georg, 2014).
L’écologie pour sauver nos vies, by Noël Mamère
Noël Mamère is one of France’s best-known Green politician. Yet, L’écologie pour sauver nos vies (Paris, Les petits matins, 2020) is not about partisan politics. Mamère first invites us to his region, la Gironde. Well known for its beautiful wines from the Bordeaux area, la Gironde is also the birthplace of the School of Bordeaux.
The two thinkers Mamère takes us back to are Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) and Franz Schrader (1844–1924). Philosophie Magazinechooses other thinkers to go back to, and reading Mamère will require accepting his subjective choice clearly influenced by his geographic proximity to those thinkers, respectively born in Bordeaux and in the village Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, which is on the Dordogne river about 70 kilometres from Mamère’s own city, Bègles.
Reengaging with those thinkers is Mamère’s way to re-establish a criticism of progress, as a mean to gain security, comfort and shelter in a bourgeois way, through the struggle for profit instead of a struggle for life. Mamère hence anchors the development of the political ecology in a profound criticism of capitalism and the development of technology that threatens the existence of humans on the planet. This vision though is far from socialism or communism and anchored in individual freedoms and liberties.
Hence Mamère’s book is grounded in the Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste, written in 1935 by Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul, two other pioneers of the environmental movement (both born in Bordeaux…). They wrote about the liberties in view of a risk that societies become dominated by technology that humans do not control anymore. Trough limitations to such technologies humans can exercise true freedoms and invent their modes d’être ensemble:
La revolution ne se fera pas contre le fascisme ou le communisme, mais contre l’État totalitaire, quel qu’il soit. La révolution n’est pas une lutte des classes, mais elle est une lutte pour les libertés de l’homme.
Marseille. Une biographie, by François Thomazeau
Bordeaux is France’s 9th largest city. The city was since the second World War essentially governed by two emblematic mayors, both conservative; Jacques Chaban-Delmas, from 1947 to 1995 (!), and Alain Juppé, from 1995 to 2004 and from 2006 to 2019. On 3 July 2020, the city elected Pierre Hurmic as Mayor, a long-time Green politician in Bordeaux.
The second largest city of France, Marseille, has a different history to Bordeaux, albeit it also recently elected a Green Mayor, Michèle Rubirola. The elections of Hurmic and Rubirola symbolise the change in cities around Europe, and in France at the latest municipal elections. High expectations are now on the shoulders of Green and progressive coalitions to deliver and use the urban agglomerations they control as leverage against international and national inaction in fighting climate change and global warming, as the youth protests inspired by Greta Thunberg highlighted.
What better in this context than reading about the “spirit of Marseille”. The narrator in François Thomazeau’s Marseille (Paris, Stock, 2013) believes he can feel a spirit right at the start of the novel. He takes us through the research of this “spirit of Marseille”, looking at the city’s history as it was built by the Greeks and conquered by the Gauls. In the novel, we read about Marseille’s history and diverse populations, as the narrator walks through the city’s neighbourhoods, some of the most beautiful ones around the Vieux Port and others too often causing Marseille’s reputation today.
Marseille’s history starts with a murder. In the famous Cosquer cave in the Calanque de Morgiou, the oldest representation of human presence starts with engraving of the slain man. And our narrator to think: “Voilà tout de même qui lance l’histoire de Marseille sur de solides fondations !”
Creating criminals, by Vivien Stern
Marseille’s story starts with a murder. I started working at Penal Reform International in 2018 and one of the books I can only recommend, as more and more voices speak about the need to reform criminal justice, is Creating Criminals. Prisons and people in a market society (London, Zed Books Ltd, 2006) by one of the co-founders of PRI, Baroness Vivien Stern.
Stern does not limit herself to describe the problems, injustice in prisons and the for-profit business made out of prisoners, she also describes the better way. The way it should be done still resonates, 14 years after the publication of the book. A principle outlined by Stern should in fact be guiding us — but it is not:
There is a minority for whom imprisonment can easily be justified, people who have committed terrible deeds or transgressed so far from society’s norms in their action that their place has to be behind locked doors. But … locking up such people is not the main work of prisons anymore. Prisons are being used in most countries to sweep up the unwanted, mainly urban, poor, the resented minorities, the sick for whom medical care is deemed too expensive, the uneducated for whom proper education is not deemed worthwhile, the unemployed for whom work is not available.
Vivien Stern should definitively be on your reading list this summer, if you wish to grasp the scope of the debate around criminal justice in the United States of America and elsewhere.
The Philosopher Abolitionist, by Timothy Pifer
We have seen that it is not only prisons and imprisonment, mass incarceration, that we need to challenge in the USA, we also need to transform policing. As we wrote at PRI, following the killing of George Floyd, “law enforcement officers, or police, are a central actor in the criminal justice chain and the actors which people are often the most familiar with as they come into contact with them and can see them regularly in daily life; much more familiar than a prosecutor, a judge, or a parole /probation officer for example. Typically, the respect of procedural rights for suspects starts upon arrest. In this sense, police are essential in building a fair and effective criminal justice and in creating trust in the system. The presumption of innocence starts with the police.”
Reforming criminal justice systems should not stop with police, though. Covid-19 indeed showed how people in places of detention are forgotten or ignored, as I wrote in a recent foreword to PRI’s new publication on Covid-19; William Garrison is one of the many people who passed away from COVID-19 in 2020 while in detention. He died aged 60 on 13 April 2020 in a prison in Wayne County, Michigan, in the United States of America. He had been watching the Black Lives Matter protests unfolding on the prison’s television, having spent 44 years in detention for involvement in a crime when he was 16 years old. After initially refusing parole, preferring to wait for unconditional release in September, Garrison took up the offer given the outbreaks of coronavirus. However, his liberation came too late — five days after he accepted the parole offer but before the mandatory 28-day waiting period for his release, he died. His name will be remembered, not least because of his namesake, the abolitionist and suffragist, William Lloyd Garrison, founder of The Liberator and the American Anti-Slavery Society.
It is hence worth to read Timothy Pifer’s short book The Philosopher Abolitionist. William L. Garrison’s Life in Ideas (self-published, 2015). Some will have more time — will want to have a less dry reading than Pifer’s — and will hence look out for All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, by Henry Mayer.
Our Constitution, by Shad Saleem Faruqi
William L. Garrison was one of those voices that was heard. He did indeed become a listened to Republic commentator during the Civil War. Similarly, to Garrison, professor Shad Saleem Faruqi is one of the most needed voices of today’s Malaysia.
When travelling to any country, I always intend to buy the country’s constitution. When in Malaysia earlier this year, I discovered Faruqi’s editorials in The Star and was caught by his recently published book. Our Constitution (Selangor, 2019) could appear to be a boring constitutional commentary — only individuals like me, having contributed to drafting the constitution of the Republic and Canton of Geneva, could be interested.
The opposite is true. Through his dense book and detailed commentary of the federal constitution of the country spread in the Malay Peninsula and the island of Borneo, Faruqi offers us a journey through Malaysia’s history, its founding values, its complex relationship to religion, and its commitment to the separation of powers, rule of law and fundamental freedoms at the founding of its independence. In 1957, Faruqi writes, “the monumental challenge was to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable conflict of interest between the major races, religions and linguistic groups through a Constitution and a legal system that would encourage unity in diversity”.
In Faruqi’s book, we learn about a legal system at the federal and state levels that confers absolute, subjective and unconstitutional powers to the those holding power. We further learn that the “‘Islamic state’ sentiment is widespread and though it has no basis in the constitution”. But most importantly, we learn how the constitution’s foundations are based on compassion.
LBJ’s Neglected Legacy, edited by Robert H. Wilson, Norman J. Glickman, Laurence E. Lynn Jr
It would certainly be difficult to find a political commentator using “compassion” as a description of President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Might that be because of LBJ’s “neglected legacies”? A legacy that expanded largely on simply carrying forward John F. Kennedy’s civil rights legislation and New Frontiere initiatives, expanding the space programme, pursuing substantial antipoverty initiatives and increasing aid to cities, as described by Norman J. Glickman et al. in their contribution published in LBJ’s Neglected Legacy. How Lyndon Johnson Reshaped Domestic Policy and Government (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2015). “After winning an overwhelming victory in the 1964 election, he used his mastery of legislative politics, revenues from a rapidly growing economy, and large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress to win passage of a breathtaking array of domestic policies and program”, further write Glickman et al.
When visiting the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, earlier this year, one of LBJ’s speeches stayed with me. “Johnson’s reputation is so tied to the failure in Vietnam that it relegates to the background the legacy of his Great Society achievements”, writes Presidential historian Robert Dallek in his contribution in LBJ’s Neglected Legacy. That is so true that LBJ’s speech on 31 March 1968, reporting his decision not to seek reelection is incredibly strong, asking the American people “to guard against divisiveness and all its ugly consequences”. Was that not a speech full of compassion?
To truly understand LBJ, one would of course need to read Robert Caro’s 4-book series Years of Lyndon Johnson. Yet, to understand LBJ, reading The Texas Right edited by David O’Donald Cullen and Kyle G. Wilkison (College Station, Texas A&M University Press, 2014) appears just as important. LBJ promotes the Great Society, albeit he spent years seeing the Texan Radical Right not only decry the New Deal brought by President Franklin Roosevelt but equating Roosevelt’s initiative to communism, with a “paranoid suspicion of communist subversion of the government”, writes Keith Volanto in The Texas Right. He further underlines that “the Democratic Party and the New Deal were accused of communism, Judaism, and undermining the supremacy of the white race”.
Does this remind you of a President trying to associate progressive policies with anarchism or “antifa”?
Published at the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the birth of LBJ, LBJ’s Neglected Legacy is definitively a book to read before entering the final months of the Presidential election in the USA. Joe Biden might indeed find himself in a similar context as LBJ, with a similar appetite for truly progressive policies in the public and a similar Radical Right as the one Johnson knew so well from his home state, Texas. Biden’s slogan, Build Back Better, might suggest that Barack Obama’s former Vice-President is ready to embody truly progressive policies, even if the legacy of Biden’s presidency might then be neglected, overshadowed by Obama’s apparent legacy and Biden’s successor, possibly the first women President of the USA…
