What I’m reading this week, January 15–19, 2024
Some long-form articles, books, and mental puzzles to solve on my docket for this week
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It’s election season 2024 in Iowa as the Caucuses launch the formal voting period for America’s presidential election. But that isn’t even top of mind for me. Here are a few of the top items on my queue this week. I plan on writing a follow-up on Friday to check in with what I learned, what I didn’t, and what new questions are carrying me into the weekend.
Books and long-form essays for the week
Martin Luther King, Jr., “I Have a Dream Speech.”
We all know the anaphora of “I have a dream…” but the speech in its entirety brings King’s Christianity to the forefront of how to think about democracy and justice.
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering.
Whenever I teach my intro course in the spring term, I always assign his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.
Bill McClay, “The Burden of the Humanities”
I’ve had this piece queued for a few weeks. McClay takes up a serious problem in American society, namely the collapse of the humanities as field of study and education in our universities. I have my own views on the cause about which I intend to write about, but McClay is one of the best on this topic.
Lucas Morel, “Of Justice and Mercy in Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address”
My department at Arizona State is hosting Morel this week to speak on the patriotism of Fredrick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. (If you’re in the Phoenix area, you can register to attend here.) I have read some his work earlier in my education, but haven’t had a chance to revisit his work. This essay from 2015 argues that Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address attempted to create a shared understanding of the Civil War so that both North and South could move beyond the animosities which led to, and were sharpened by, the war and toward a political and cultural reconciliation.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I’m participating in Simon Haisell’s slow read of War and Peace on Substack. The aim is to read one chapter per day (with a handful of off-days) and finish the book on New Year’s Eve. We’re only two weeks in, and the conversation has been very good. It is not too late to jump in, read the first two weeks of reading quickly and then settle into the daily read. This week, we’ll be focusing on chapters 15–21 of Book One, Part One.
Here’s Simon on this week’s update.
This was a week of contrasts. We exchanged the Petersburg parties for the reception rooms of Moscow. Two houses: one full of youthful promise and children growing up. The other: a vulturous vigil around the bed of a dying man.
If the thought of War and Peace seemed daunting to you, let me encourage you to join this reading challenge. It is only a few pages per day. I often get it done on my Kindle just before I leave my office for the day, or right after the kids are asleep.
John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat
I started this during some quiet time on New Year’s Day and got through about half of it before classes started last week. This week I want to finish it while the first part of the story is fresh in my mind.
In the classroom
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
I’m teaching a graduate class on strategic thought during the American Founding. We’re spending the first month or so reading some works that shaped the Founders' view of statecraft. Because today is a holiday we don’t have class. So when we meet next week, we’re covering the first half of the long war between Athens and Sparta; the war that tore apart the Athenian empire and as well the Athenian democracy. I likely wouldn’t be in this job if I hadn’t stumbled on Thucydides in Brisbane, Australia in 2003, just as the American war in Iraq was about to commence.
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 2
War is a serious means to serious ends.
More than the often quoted, more often misunderstood “war is policy with other means,” Clausewitz’s assertion that war is a means not an end is perhaps his greatest contribution to the study of strategy. Every time I teach my department’s course on American grand strategy, I assign Clausewitz. Book II begins a shift in his study from the idea of war in general toward a “theory” of war. But he doesn’t think of theory the way that we do. Students usually struggle here because they bring notions either of political theory or scientific theory. Clausewitz asserts that theory in the latter understanding is useless, and he suggests it is impossible to think of war in the mode of the former.
Puzzles and thinking
I’m still revising my book manuscript. This week I’m thinking a lot about the shapers of public opinion, especially as they pertain to US foreign policy. Do citizens have them ex ante, or are their views shaped by their interaction with the world and by others? And if they are shaped by others, what role do elites play in signaling to voters what they should think about an issue? More on this later.