Book Club: Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

https://boffosocko.com/2026/03/08/book-club-yuval-noah-hararis-nexus-a-brief-history-of-information-networks-from-the-stone-age-to-ai/

👉🎯"Intellectual history has long suffered from a materialist deficit. The discipline, as Samuel Moyn argues, is in sore need of “a theory of ideology” that conceptualizes ideas as not merely intellectual but also material forces. Absent an awareness of the social dimension of ideas, Moyn contends, intellectual history risks sliding into idealism, substituting a theory of discursive context for what should be one of social relations.

In Moyn’s work, intellectual history stands accused of operating on an “implausible” theory of historical agency and change. It imagines ideas to arise at the point where historical context meets writerly intention but, in doing so, fails to acknowledge that both history and intention are themselves socially and materially conditioned. This leaves it generally ill equipped to confront the role ideas play in perpetuating and justifying material inequalities or relations of dominance.

We are seeing the effects of this analytical deficit today. As we bear witness to far-reaching shifts in not only the political economy but the intellectual life of advanced capitalist societies, our capacity to interpret how we got here appears pallid and incomplete." 🎯👈

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/02/02/stuart-hall-ideology-and-neoliberalisms-reactionary-drift/

#Neoliberalism #Ideology #Idealism #Materialism #PoliticalEconomy #IntellectualHistory

Book Club: Steven Pinker’s When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows

https://boffosocko.com/2026/01/04/book-club-steven-pinkers-when-everyone-knows-that-everyone-knows/

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/susan-sontag-a-critic-at-the-crossroads-of-culture

I haven't read enough Sontag, and that reading took place years ago, so perhaps I should return and make my own evaluation. I suspect that I will think of her being more than the "transitional' figure described in this piece from twenty years ago.

That suspicion might arise from my not sharing the author's esteem for Derrida and Lacan, an esteem which in its turn now seems to belong to a fashion now faded.

#Criticism #SusanSontag #IntellectualHistory #USHistory

You might have the impression from the thread I've just posted on Emily Herring's "Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People" that I neither enjoyed nor profited from the book.

That impression would be mistaken, because I both learned from it and thoroughly enjoyed it as a well written work of history, even if I do not share Herring's esteem for Bergson as a philosopher.

She is especially strong on showing how the Belle Epoque acclaim for Bergson represented a yearning for the re-enchantment of a world now mechanized and soulless. She is also acute in her observation of the split between Bergson the solitary philosopher and Bergson the academic networker, the misogyny in his contemporaries' accounts of his popularity, and the gap that opened between Bergson the man and Bergsonism the movement.

So I would recommend "Herald of a Restless World", not for what it might provide for the future of philosophy, but for what it tells us of the past of modernity.

#Philosophy #IntellectualHistory #History #HenriBergson #EmilyHerring #HeraldOfARestlessWorld #Modernity #France #Books