A Holiday Reading, Watching, and Listening List

Well, I’m finally taking off a few weeks so that I can focus my energy on making sure the squirrels don’t eat all of the seed out of the bird feeders.

I also plan to read from the stack of books I’ve assembled over the past few months — not to mention working through my mountain of LRBs.

Book Stack


What you don’t see on the stack above is the book that I’m currently reading: E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters, which he published in 1975. I had never read it before and, for some reason, hadn’t realized that it was a companion to Albion’s Fatal Tree (1976) by Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, E.P. Thompson, and Cal Winslow.

At the core of Whigs and Hunters (and Albion’s Fatal Tree, for that matter) is the tension between law and justice — and the recognition that these are not necessarily the same thing.

As Thompson tells us of eighteenth-century England, “The oligarchs and the great gentry were content to be subject to the rule of law only because this law was serviceable and afforded to their hegemony the rhetoric of legitimacy.” The average eighteenth-century Briton understood that below the veneer of universal values and justice, supposedly embodied in the rule of law, was an insidious system that damned the masses to poverty and death. Moreover, this system was planned: “the victims of the gallows are exemplars of a conscious and elaborated code, justified in the name of a universal human value.”

I’m not suggesting that all of you go out and read Whigs and Hunters (though, I would certainly be thrilled if some of you did). Instead, I’ve put together a little end-of-the-year reading (and watching and listening) list for you.

For those of you in Indianapolis, you probably know a lot of these names. For those of you outside Indianapolis, these are names you need to know.

READ

WATCH

LISTEN

Looks like the squirrel is back on the feeder, so I have to run. I wish that all of you continue to have a happy and healthy holiday season.