What we've been up to

From the new issue: John Maynard Keynes has been the subject of many biographies over the years, including an extensive three-volume opus published not too long ago. So, what does Zachary D. Carter's new treatment of the twentieth-century economist have to offer? In his review, "The Man Who Saved Capitalism from Itself," Charlie Tyson says The Price of Peace reveals Keynes as a guide to a robust vision of what a liberal political economy could look like within our "present political and economic dilemmas."

"In studying Keynes, we watch radical ideas emerge filtered through a conservative sensibility," writes Tyson, a PhD candidate in English at Harvard. "His work in economics is rightly called revolutionary. He broke with the classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by arguing that humanity's overriding economic problem was not scarcity but mismanagement. He imagined a new, enlarged role for the state as an active investor."

Also from the latest issue: Progress isn't what it used to be. For one thing, few people have much faith in the version that nineteenth century intellectuals like August Comte articulated: an iron law of human progress that could be traced through all societies. Even the Steven Pinkers of the world have a more chastened view of things. As Stuart Whatley and Nicholas Agar point out in their essay, "The Perishable Problem of Progress," progress is always in need of upkeep—partly because as things get better, our expectations are raised. What was a surprising breakthrough two generations ago is now considered normal, if not a necessity.

Whatley and Agar have a name for this process: "Hedonic normalization is the 'propensity for human beings to form goals that are appropriate to the environments they experience as they come to maturity.' Among other things, this feature of conscious existence perpetually limits our capacity to appreciate the benefits of new technologies over time, because it operates at the generational rather than the individual level."

Want to read more from the new issue?

Shamus Khan on the limits and burdens of cultural capital.

"Is There a Place for Utopia?" by S.D. Chrostowska.

Mark Dunbar takes on the problem of identity tethering in our symbolic politics.

"Democracy's Thorn: The Mob and the Voice of the People" by Nancy Isenberg.

Becca Rothfeld reviews The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretsky.

"The Endless Pursuit of Better" by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.

Philip S. Gorski on the transformation of culture wars into culture clashes.

Jackson Arn reviews The Free World by Louis Menand.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Scientists tended to think about what they were doing in terms of architectural metaphors: building on the old and replacing what was rotted or unfit. Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, writes about how the experience of modernity changed the way scientists perceived their own work, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As Daston wrote in her essay, "When Science Went Modern," for the fall 2016 issue, the discovery of x-rays and radioactivity and the rise of quantum theory were "experienced by the scientists themselves as dizzying symptoms of malaise—or even of violence."

"The modernism that overtook the scientists circa 1900 was of a melancholy, less triumphal cast," Daston writes. "Their imagination was possessed not by visions of new cities built upon indestructible foundations but by visions of ruins. The scientists did not annihilate time; rather, time annihilated them. Their experience of the modernist predicament was one of evanescence and futility."

From further afield:

At Harper's, Rebecca Panovka argues that Hannah Arendt's ideas were misapplied to Donald Trump's political style and behavior.

At Commonweal, Matt Mazewski reviews a recent book on markets, Polanyi, and what freedom really means.

At Dissent, Sam Adler-Bell writes about contemporary videogames and how they blur the lines between work and play.