Theoria

There have a been a few posts recently on “intellectual biography” and “influential books” (here and here), as well as expressions that this trend continue. I don’t see why I shouldn’t jump on the bandwagon as well.

For myself, unlike some of the others pursuing these sorts of posts, I wouldn’t say that there have been particular texts that have been especially influential for me in the sense of either being “life changing” or which pervasively influence my work. As I see it, much of my education came through something comparable unfashionable in post-secondary education these days–the slow and careful reading of important texts. During the first year of my PhD, I read (in chronological order of first publication) Spinoza’s Ethics, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Foucault’s The Order of Things. During my M.A. I read all three volumes of Marx’s Capital. Lastly, during the final year of my undergraduate degree, I read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit rather closely (supplemented by the commentaries of Alexandre Kojeve,  Jean Hyppolite and H.S. Harris). While I cannot claim that they were read with any particular method in mind, Althusser’s comments in Reading Capital are appropriate: “But some day it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text itself, complete, all four volumes, line by line.” Since then, I have read (for my dissertation) among other works, Thomas Hobbes’s Elemenents of Natural Law, De Cive, and Leviathan and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Essay Concerning Human Understanding in this fashion. I suspect this is how I’ll continue to read well into the future.

Given my interest in the history of social and political thought as well as my interest in writing such a history, it goes without saying that I’ve found a number of texts to be particularly important in this genre: both volumes of Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, Sheldon Wolin’s Politics and Vision, and Foucault’s lectures from the late seventies. I have also found great value in more idiosyncratic works, such as Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History, and, perhaps more obscurely, Marc Bloch’s The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France.

Given that I am a sociologist by training, I should mention that many works of classical sociology have been important for me, especially Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life and Marcel Mauss’s Essay on the Gift. The sociological and anthropological tradition that has come out of this has likewise been important: Claude Levi-Strauss, Pierre Clastres, and Marshall Sahlins. More recently, I have found Bruno Latour’s work quite compelling (his pseudonymous “Sociology of a Door-Closer” paper remains a classic).

Those who have made it this far have no doubt noticed a complete lack of texts falling in the genre of “animal studies.” While it is an exciting field, I am not sure that any “classic” texts have emerged outside of applied ethics (e.g., Peter Singer, Tom Regan and Gary Francione). For instance, Derrida’s book is sufficiently obscure that it will not be as generally read as the applied ethics texts. Given the lack of a coherent theoretical position underlying animal studies, I can’t really name any particularly important works. However, there are a number of historical studies that are well worth reading: Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Reviel Netz’s Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity, and Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility.