FUTURE TUTORIALS

Michael asks whether I might do a tutorial on Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. That got me thinking. Perhaps I could a series of mini-tutorials on books I have found especially interesting, suggestive, or important. I am not talking about works like Kant's First Critique and Hume's Treatise, which I have done, each of which took me a very long time. I have in mind books I might be able to talk about in no more than five or six posts each, and probably fewer..

Here are a few titles that have occurred to me: One-Dimensional Man, of course. Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, or perhaps his Asylums. Max Weber;s classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which raises very interesting questions for those of us whose thinking about capitalism is shaped by the work of Karl Marx. Maybe a very brief tutorial on Emile Durkheim's classic, Suicide, which in effect gave birth to the field of Sociology. Perhaps even David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, if anyone really wants to understand the intellectual world-view of the classical Political Economists. And it might be interesting to do just a day or two on a little book by James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, which has interesting applications to our present situation.

What do people think about this idea? In most cases, I would have to take a few days to re-read the book before starting to write. These are not like the Kant and the Hume, with which I have been living for almost sixty years.