My 2024 in books
This year, I was in the process of finishing my first book ever. As a newbie to book-writing, I learned a valuable lesson – a finished manuscript is just a first step. Several additional and burdensome steps lurk on the path to the final publication. As the more seasoned among you can vividly imagine, my 2024 was full of multiple rounds of editing and proofing. I also decided to to create the index myself. As a devout book lover and inspired by the wonderful Index, A History of the, I just had to. However, I will gladly hire a professional indexer the next time.
In addition to my book-writing duties, I devoted the latter half of summer to prepare two courses for my autumn teaching duties. Sadly enough, the Faculty of Arts at Charles University does not offer its first-time lecturers paid time so that they can prepare in advance. Precarity, here I come! The rumour has it that at least at certain faculties of Masaryk University in Brno, you get paid several months before your teaching begins just to prepare your courses. Nice to know that Brno is ahead of the third oldest university (north of the Alps).
Anyway, this exceptional burden meant that I did not have that much time to read. I finished 36 books this year. Two books I started reading in 2023 and one was a re-read. A small consolation is that, compared to my previous years’ average, I read more fiction (4 books). I hope I will have more time to read even more fiction next year.
I bet you are wondering which of the books I would recommend. So, here is final a selection of seven books in philosophy, social science and history that I would say are worth the mental stretch:
1. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History (1953)
I first encountered the author’s name in 2008 in a book called Black Mass published the same year. Its author, John Gray (not the relationship counselor, but a former LSE professor) discusses Strauss as the intellectual progenitor of US Neocons. Thanks to Gray and a documentary series by Adam Curtis, I had Strauss securely pigeonholed as a conservative-reactionary-neocon. Then in 2023, I felt like "let’s read some conservatives to better understand their thought". Having read Natural Right and History, I see why Strauss might be viewed as a conservative thinker, but the connection between the erstwhile student of Ernst Cassirer, the policies of Team B and the invasion of Iraq eludes me. Grounded in Strauss's rereading of classical philosophy and early modern political philosophy, Natural Right and History is an elaborate and critical take on modernity that in some key respects (especially in its attitude to human nature, history and freedom) differs from more prevalent, Marxist-inspired critiques.
2. Han Vermeulen: Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (2015)
This is the kind of book that appears voluminous, but when you are nearing the conclusion, you wish it were longer. It is a superb account of the beginnings of European ethnography/ethnology. Vermeulen suggests Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German polymath, to be considered ethnology’s originator, and traces the development of his ideas between Germany and Russia in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is captivating to watch early modern German ethnologists trying to grapple with very similar issues as ethnologists and anthropologists do today.
3. Lawrence P. King & Iván Szelényi: Theories of the New Class: Intellectuals and Power (2004)
Do you believe that philosophy will uplift your spirit, or worse, set you free? Do you recall the chilling sensation when munching through Hegel for the last time – the feeling of finally having all the answers? Was it not the first time you succumbed to philosophers’ lofty ideas? Don’t worry, King and Szelény’s book will cure you of your delusions. Philosophers are like everybody else. They crave for power, though they are skilled in masking their appetite more than their fellow countrymen. Or did not the economist Radoslav Selucký and the philosopher Karel Kosík share their dining table with Gustáv Husák and Ota Šik, two prominent Czechoslovak communist politicians in 1968? Surely, this is a reductive way of reading any philosophy (as well as King and Szelényi’s book), but both authors offer more than a valuable lesson in helping you realise that intellectuals in general are not interested just in ideas.
4. Kimberly Elman Zarecor: Manufacturing a Socialist Modernity: Housing in Czechoslovakia, 1945–1960 (2011)
Imagine you are an American. For some reason, you decide to suffer the torments of learning Czech only to undergo research in Czechoslovak history. Then you deliver an amazing book on architecture and urbanism in postwar Czechoslovakia from which even the Czechs can learn a lot. I can’t shake off the nagging feeling that American historians can generally produce better books than their Czech counterparts. It does not mean their books are blunder-free (which Czech history books are?) or that there are no good Czech books in history (I have a few favourites), but the intelligent way the Americans write – that is something unread of in our publishing latitudes. I read the Czech translation by Alena Všetečková published by Academia in 2015.
5. Robert Parkin: Louis Dumont and Hierarchical Opposition (2003)
Unless you are interested in the recesses of French anthropological structuralism, the works of Louis Dumont, Robert Hertz, Rodney Needham, cosmologies, social hierarchies, or the caste system in India, you will probably find this book useless. But if you HAPPEN to be interested, then Bob Parkin's book makes a great companion to a couple of perennial anthropological issues and authors. Not much is better than a piece of thoroughgoing secondary literature.
6. James Laidlaw: The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom (2013)
7. Piotr Majewski: (2019)
This book is about to be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. I read the 2022 Czech translation from the Polish by Markéta Páralová Tardy. I imbibed a way too much social science, and that is why I am not much of a fan of the unimaginative history of events based on a careful reconstruction without much explanatory ambition, but the Polish historian Piotr Majewski gives this who-did-what-and-when genre a second life. His account of the Munich crisis of 1938 reads as a political thriller, except that it is based on the meticulous work with primary sources and makes do without any artistic license.
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