The New Canon:
What's the most influential book of the past 20 years?
Each year, more than 15,000 academic books are published in North America. A scant few will reach beyond their core audience of disciplinary specialists. Fewer still will enter the public consciousness.
We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define “influential,” but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.
Paul Bloom | Eric Klinenberg | Peniel Joseph | Johanna Hanink | Jackson Lears| Leon Botstein | Sheena Iyengar | Noliwe M. Rooks | G. Gabrielle Starr | Amy J. Binder | Susan J. Douglas | Mari Matsuda | Steven Shapin | Mark Greif | Ashley Farmer | Nakul Krishna | Richard Delgado | Jonathan Holloway | John L. Jackson | Deborah Tannen | Amitava Kumar
The Case for a Better World
PAUL BLOOM
To be taken seriously as the “most influential book” written by an academic, a work has to transform the way many of us make sense of the world, and so has to have influence beyond a narrow circle of scholars. If the average reader of The Chronicle Review has never heard of a book, it shouldn’t be a contender. Ideally, then, the candidates would be like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams. But those books were written more than 100 years ago, and none by an academic. Moving down a tier, there is Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene.Superb and influential books, but written many decades ago.
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How Civil Society Collapsed
ERIC KLINENBERG
Robert Putnam’s magisterial and sharply written account of civic life and social cohesion in postwar America, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000), sparked debates across the academy and shaped the agenda of countless community organizations. Its influence over public-policy makers in the United States and beyond extends to this day.
Putnam’s thesis, so evocatively captured in the title, is that American democracy and society are suffering from a prodigious decline in “social capital,” which (following the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman) he defines as the connections among individuals as well as the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that derive from them. He presents the argument with an impressive array of empirical data, much of it historical. Putnam charts falling rates of participation in voluntary organizations, voter turnout, church attendance, protest activities, and several other forms of collective life. He blames generational changes and the rise of television for a culture in which ever more Americans disengage from the public sphere.
Robert Putnam draws on research across the social sciences to show that strong social networks are vital for health, happiness, education, prosperity, and democracy.
Why should declining social capital concern us? Putnam draws on research across the social sciences to show that strong social networks are vital for health, happiness, education, prosperity, and democracy. The ties we create with friends, neighbors, and co-workers help establish bonds of solidarity and mutual respect. When our informal relationships are severed or weakened, we’re more likely to grow isolated, polarized, and distrustful. It’s a story that we’ve come to know well.
Bowling Alone was, and is, controversial. Some scholars have argued that political and civic engagement has not diminished so much as transformed and shifted into new forums. Others believe that Putnam understates the effects of other changes — the increase in work hours, the rise of women in the labor force, the culture of individualism — on American community life. But nearly 20 years after its publication, Bowling Alone remains an essential reference point in debates over the state and fate of American civil society.
Eric Klinenberg is a professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His new book is Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life (Crown).
Transforming Our View of Prison
PENIEL JOSEPH
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness(The New Press, 2010) placed the issue of mass incarceration at the center of American policy debates. Michelle Alexander, a legal scholar, activist, and now a columnist for The New York Times, argues that the “war on drugs,” beginning with the Nixon administration and flourishing under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, shifted antipoverty resources into an infinite war on crime that disproportionately targets black communities and robs the majority of black men in urban areas of their full citizenship. Fusing legal studies and history, Alexander demonstrates how America’s prison-industrial complex is the latest chapter in the nation’s tragic racial history. Her thesis not only touched scholars but also transformed the public’s understanding of structural racism in the American justice system.
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The Little Book That Made the Case for Big Thinking
JOHANNA HANINK
Critics of academic research love to indict our obsession with tiny, obscure topics. Lately the criticism has come from inside the house. In 2014, Jo Guldi and David Armitage published The History Manifesto,, a plea for historians to zoom out and place a new premium on the longue durée. It is a little book that makes the case for big thinking.
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Andrea Ucini for The Chronicle
How We Became Commodified
JACKSON LEARS
The most important development in the past 20 years of historiography, from my perspective, is the recognition that capitalism has a history, and that historians can write it. This poses a major challenge to the assumption that capitalism is the consequence of an inevitable, universal, and beneficent technological process. On the contrary, new scholarship is revealing historically contingent and culturally specific economic systems.
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Why Art Matters
LEON BOTSTEIN
Arthur C. Danto, who died in 2013, was, for decades, a distinguished senior member of the philosophy faculty at Columbia University. What Art Is (Yale University Press, 2013) was his last book. Readers will be delighted when they encounter Danto’s disarming clarity, his avoidance of ugly and impenetrable jargon, and his skill in unraveling complex matters without skirting or trivializing ambiguities.
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Authenticity in an Age of Algorithms
SHEENA IYENGAR
How do we live an authentic life in a world that thrives on imitation? Is manipulating a person as simple as changing a line of code? If algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, how do we separate the digital from the flesh? In a posthuman world that values science over religion and productivity over life, is individuality even possible?
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The Attack on Black Bodies
NOLIWE M. ROOKS
Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997) is an interdisciplinary tour de force that continues to offer clues for unraveling the peculiar American tensions between freedom and liberty, individual choice and collective governance. Roberts, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, takes readers through the ways that seemingly simple terms like “choice” and “reproduction” have larger societal meaning; they are the result of social policies, economic realities, legislative priorities, and historical understandings as much as the product of free will. These are topics, terms, and issues that have produced barely scabbed cultural wounds in constant danger of reopening. The book picks at those scabs, and what it finds contextualizes our present and illuminates our past.
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Why We ‘Feel’ a Certain Way
G. GABRIELLE STARR
As you type, the feeling of your hands on a keyboard may be deeply familiar, so much so that, as the philosopher Frederique de Vignemont points out, you barely notice the sensation of touch as you translate thoughts onto a screen. Every aspect of this experience, however, might rightly amaze. How do you remember where your fingers should go? Why might you notice intently the expansion of type across the screen, but barely register the clicks of keys? How do you extract “experience” — what seems like the whole of conscious life — out of such moments?
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Gwenda Kaczor for The Chronicle
How Universities Produce Social Immobility
AMY J. BINDER
Although published just five years ago, Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2013), already has had a major influence on how we think about higher education and its complicated relationship to social mobility and a bleaker cousin, social reproduction. Beautifully written, knitting together themes of social class, gender, sexuality, organizations, and education, the book is destined to be a classic. Indeed, it has won several awards, and its authors have cemented their status as experts on higher education.
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The Triumph of Neoliberalism
SUSAN J. DOUGLAS
“Historically nothing is dismantled without also attempting to put something new in its place,” wrote Stuart Hall in The Hard Road to Renewal, , his brilliant 1988 analysis of Thatcherism. This “new political project on the right” was determined “to displace” the postwar social-welfare state by minimizing the government’s role in redistributing wealth and services, and by attacking the values that had justified such efforts. Thatcherism (and Reaganism) crafted a new “common sense” about individual responsibility, flattering in its appeal to meritocracy and “deserving” individuals. As Hall wrote ruefully, there’s “a tiny bit of all of us … somewhere inside the Thatcherite project.” This political and ideological formation came to be known as neoliberalism (despite its bedrock conservative doctrines). Its triumph, and the tenacity of its grip — even in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown that should have sealed its demise — is simultaneously dispiriting and impressive.
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The Go-To Text on Race
MARI MATSUDA
White supremacy is both a central fact of American life and the center of an American ideology of denial. So argues Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed The Movement(W.W. Norton, 1995), a book that influenced a generation of scholars’ understanding of how race distributes wealth and power. No other body of work has had this level of influence, not just in reframing a wide range of academic disciplines but also in shaping our politics and language. As I write, some sister, somewhere, is using the language of intersectionality on social media to call out some fool for a less than acutely critical understanding of what’s up next in the unending struggle to end racist patriarchy. That is influence.
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What It Means to Be Human
STEVEN SHAPIN
Historians can annoy people when they announce that there’s nothing new under the sun — that wherever we are, we’ve been there before. But some version of that sensibility is among the more useful contributions that history offers. There is a basic palette of predicaments that cultures confront, and a basic set of resources available to make sense of them and to do whatever can be done about them. Our current predicaments are indeed unique, but the cultural materials that make them up and that we may use to respond to them have recurrent features.
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She Got There First
MARK GREIF
Fifteen years after publication, and nine years after the death of its author, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Duke University Press, 2003) stands out. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s book defined subjects, keywords, and literary-critical ambitions that dominated discussion in English departments thereafter. Whether she set the future on this path or was superbly in tune with the contemporary mood is unclear.
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Klaas Verplancke for The Chronicle
A Guide for Activists
ASHLEY FARMER
Historians of black activism often have two goals: identifying indispensable movement organizers and uncovering the ethos or ideology that held these and other activists, groups, and protests together. The best histories do both while modeling the very approach or ethos of the actors they study.
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Recommitting to Truth
NAKUL KRISHNA
Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy(Princeton University Press, 2002) is a work of what he once called “postanalytic” philosophy. His last book, it brought together the themes of a lifetime’s work into an essay of great elegance, concision, and depth. Williams could not have written it without an acquaintance with the methods of the 20th-century analytic tradition. But the book had a much wider range of reference, its subtitle hinting at its debt to that deeply unanalytic thinker, Nietzsche.
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When Presidents Overreach
RICHARD DELGADO
In his earlier work Justice at War (Oxford University Press, 1983), Peter Irons showed that the case for Japanese internment during World War II was almost entirely fabricated. The book resulted in federal-court opinions vacating both Korematsu v. United States (1944) and a second case (Hirabayashi) that had found internment a valid exercise of the president’s wartime authority.
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The Dissolution of the American Ideal
JONATHAN HOLLOWAY
Age of Fracture (Belknap Press, 2011) is an evocative meditation on the last 25 years of the 20th century. Daniel T. Rodgers, one of our greatest intellectual historians, asks how we think about judging history in the first place.
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Lincoln Agnew for The Chronicle
A Towering Work of Urban Anthropology
JOHN L. JACKSON
Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship(Duke University Press, 2015) is a challenge to many taken-for-granted academic and popular assumptions about what civic engagement and democratic participation look like in the 21st century.
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The Benefits of Pure Socializing
DEBORAH TANNEN
Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000) explores a social crisis that is now taken for granted: Americans participate less in group activities that entail coordination and cooperation toward a common purpose. Instead they engage more in activities that take place less regularly, in smaller groups or in isolation. They are less likely to play sports on teams, more likely to watch sports or to exercise at home. The book identifies trends that scholars and journalists continue to analyze and dissect 18 years later, culminating in the recent avalanche of books and essays describing how handheld devices now contribute to the breakdown of community.
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A Model for the Future
AMITAVA KUMAR
Edward Said’s Orientalism. That was what came to mind first. A book that many would say inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies. But that was 1978, 40 years ago. I was thinking nostalgically. Well, what about Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble? Everyone was reading it when I was in grad school. No, still too early: 1990. The Chronicle Review’s query puts the cutoff date at 1998. I don’t think books loom as large as they did when I was in my youth. (Does every generation think like that?)
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The New Canon: What's the most influential book of the past 20 years?
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/influential-books?essay=Bloom
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