What we've been up to

From the new issue: When David Graeber, anthropology professor at the London School of Economics, died unexpectedly and prematurely in 2020, he left behind a remarkable and eclectic body of work that includes popular essays and searching academic scholarship. The thread tying much of that work together—the thing that he tended to write about whenever he was writing about anything—was anarchism. And it was the ancient pedigree of anarchic, self-organizing social relations that Graeber wrote about with his co-author David Wengrow in a book left unfinished at his death, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. In "There Are Thousands of Other Ways," critic Jackson Arn reviews the book and his life, arguing that it was Graeber's distinctive resistance to pat answers and glib cynicism that set him apart.

"The question, as always with Graeber, is not 'How could this be the case?' but rather, 'Why does this strike us as mysterious?' His final book is fascinating, if still difficult to keep straight, although I suspect that the difficulty is somewhat intentional. Nothing unites the dozens of dazzling case studies other than the fact that they're exceptions—which makes The Dawn of Everything a welcome alternative to the pompous oversimplifications one finds in most histories of our species."

Also from the new issue: Two hundred years ago this spring, Frederick Law Olmsted was born. Olmsted is principally remembered as an accomplished landscape architect whose lasting contributions to American cities, universities, and landscapes are still enjoyed today: the campuses of Stanford University and the University of Chicago, parkways in Louisville, Kentucky, and Buffalo, New York, and, most notably, Prospect Park and Central Park in New York City. In "The Man Who Built Forward Better," architect and writer Witold Rybczynski argues that it was Olmsted's long and winding career as a public administrator, critic, and journalist that made him uniquely suited to the vocation of landscape architect—a career that he took on relatively late in life.

"Olmsted's varied experiences produced a uniquely qualified individual: one able to think on a large scale, to digest vast amounts of information, and to organize large and complicated projects. Not least, thanks to his firsthand study of diverse landscapes, Olmsted developed an artistic eye alert to the details of scenery, not only its overall effect. He was both ahead of his time and intimately immersed in it, able to undertake innovations precisely because he had the rare ability—and the fortitude—to project unconventional ideas into the future."

Also from the new issue: Liberal democracy is on the defense. It suffers not only from widespread disenchantment with its accomplishments—and a widening gap between what it seems to promise and what it delivers. But today liberalism also suffers from a growing, rivalrous enchantment with the authoritarian personalities of powerful and dangerous leaders like Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Jair Bolsonaro, or Vladimir Putin. In "The Return of the King," Philip S. Gorski, professor of sociology and religious studies at Yale University, argues that the roots of these modern movements can be traced back to pre-modern forms of sacred and political authority.

"With the insights of [these historical contexts], we are able to see the peculiar features of this authoritarianism as quite real modern-day reincarnations—or possibly recrudescences—of the ancient tradition of divine kingship. Moreover, they help us understand the cultural precondition for the return of this tradition: namely, the rise of neoimmanentist worldviews, which hold that the world is imbued with the mystery and power of the sacred, and the concomitant decline of transcendent worldviews, which hold the sacred to be wholly other and beyond. In our postliberal era, the disenchanting principles of modern liberalism—including trust in science, reason, and objective fact—have themselves been disenchanted."

Web Features: The consumer economy has been moving toward a subscriber-based model over the last decade or so. Instead of buying Blu-Rays, CDs, or books, you can stream movies and music for a monthly fee—or buy e-books. Instead of going to the store to buy groceries or shaving products, you can subscribe to services that send you a box of "curated" goods. These trends verge on a form of consumption without ownership. In "To Have and Have Not," Alan Jacobs, Baylor University honors professor and Institute senior fellow, argues that the rise of NFTs—non-fungible tokens—is a shift toward an antithesis of this subscriber model: ownership without consumption.

"People buy NFTs because they want a Precious—my own, my Precious— and the whole point of a Precious is that no one else can have it. The great thing about the NFT, from the Gollumesque point of view, is that no Baggins can wander in and steal it. It is yours, securely, forever. But that is all it is or even can be."

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Russia's continued invasion of Ukraine, besides causing a humanitarian crisis and now massive destruction in the country itself, has injected alarming uncertainty in global politics and the financial system. But it has also returned us to a question many observers have been asking repeatedly since Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 and its annexation of Crimea in 2014: What does Vladimir Putin want?

In "Putin, Ukraine, and the Question of Realism" for the Spring 2015 Issue, John M. Owen, professor of politics at the University of Virginia and Institute senior fellow, and William Inboden, professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, compare influential realists like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt with early twentieth-century theorists Carl Schmitt and E.H Carr. What they find is a school of thought that is unable to assess what Putin is doing without resorting to an anti-humanistic account of reality.

"The point of comparing the academic realists of the 1930s with those of 2014 is…to show that the thinking of both groups suffers from the same error: reducing international politics to nothing but a power struggle. Use of the term realism is significant here. For Carr, realists are the ones who see things as they are; ideas about justice or welfare are really just contrivances of self-interest, signifying nothing. Utopians are those who mistakenly think that justice and welfare are more than words covering self-interest. Power is real, and all else is illusion."