My Distinguished Summer Reading List
Gone vacationing!
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World will celebrating recent good fortune by taking a family vacation until early next week in an undisclosed location where the beaches are nice and the ice cream is even nicer. Posting will therefore be rather light while my reading will be somewhat heavier.
What books am I bringing on my early summer vacation? I’m glad you asked! Just because I am on vacation does not mean I will only be reading fiction! The following is a brief sampling of the non-fiction books I am hoping to crack open in the coming days:
Dale Copeland, A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China. Copeland has spent much of his career analyzing the role that trade expectations play in the prevention or exacerbation of conflict. His latest examines the history of American foreign policy and “how, since the nation’s founding, the United States has consistently moved from peace to conflict when the commerce needed for national security is under threat.” As someone with a growing interest in the role that temporal expectations play in great power politics, this is the kind of book I am interested in noodling over this year.
Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, The Ordinal Society. I have been a longtime fan of Healy since he was at the Crooked Timber blog back in the day; Fourcade’s work on the imperial tendencies of economists within the university system helped inform my thinking on The Ideas Industry. So I am delighted to read their collaboration on one of the most fascinating social trends of this century: the ways in which we as consumers have voluntarily traded our personal data for loads of daily conveniences. As a result, they suggest, society has embraced ranking and measurement in our daily lives. They warn that this leads new forms of social competition and moral judgment: “Familiar structures of social advantage are recycled into measures of merit that produce insidious kinds of social inequality.”
Elizabeth Saunders, The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace. At a moment when there has been a populist backlash against American foreign policy elites, Saunders writes the book about how those elites think about the use of force. The Insiders’ Game is an important work of scholarship that breaks new ground on the politics of democratic elites during choices involving war. Saunders highlights the asymmetries that presidents from different parties face, and the way that affects their management of elite politics as they makes choices about war and peace. Her argument offers a novel way of looking backwards at twentieth century U.S. foreign policy and forwards into the rest of this century. Full disclosure: I was one of the referees for Princeton University Press when Saunders submitted her book manuscript. So I am pretty sure this book will cement Saunders’ status as the unofficial dean of U.S. foreign policy analysis. But I am very eager to see the final product!
Enjoy the weekend everyone!
What!! No fiction???
Happy vacation!