HOISTED From My Archives: "My Reading Difficult Books" Lecture
From the time I taught the "Smith, Marx, & Keynes" History of Economic Thought course designed by Ravi Bhandari...
From the time I taught the "Smith, Marx, & Keynes" History of Economic Thought course designed by Ravi Bhandari...
LECTURE NOTES: On Reading Big, Difficult Books...
Knowledge system and cognitive science guru Andy Matuschak writes a rant called Why Books Don’t Work <https://andymatuschak.org/books/>, about big, difficult books that take him six to nine hours each to read:
Have you ever had a book… come up… [and] discover[ed] that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?… It happens to me regularly…. Someone asks a basic probing question… [and] I simply can’t recall the relevant details… [or] I’ll realize I had never really understood the idea… though I’d certainly thought I understood…. I’ll realize that I had barely noticed how little I’d absorbed until that very moment…
However, he goes on to say:
Some people do absorb knowledge from books… the people who really do think about what they’re reading.… These readers’ inner monologues have sounds like: “This idea reminds me of…,” “This point conflicts with…,” “I don’t really understand how…,” etc. If they take some notes, they’re not simply transcribing the author’s words: they’re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing…
But:
Unfortunately, these tactics don’t come easily. Readers must learn specific reflective strategies… run their own feedback loops… understand their own cognition… [what] learning science calls “metacognition”…. It’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them…
These points have strong relevance for you students in U.C. Berkeley’s “Econ 105: History of Economic Thought: Do We Live in a Smithian, Marxian or a Keynesian World?” For the core of the course is an assisted reading of three very big books that are damnably difficult to digest: Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx’s Capital, and John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. For it is a principal task of a successful modern university to teach people how to read such things.
These are all big, difficult, flawed, incredibly insightful, genius books. They each have a lot in them that is right. They also each have a lot in them that is wrong. Marx, especially, is wrong, often. But even where he is wrong, he is wrong in ways that are productive—reading him makes you smarter even and perhaps especially where you must disagree, and where history since he wrote has proven that he had little clue as to what was really going on in the world around him.
Indeed, it might be said that one of the few truly important key competencies we here at the university have to teach—our counterpart or the mediæval triad of rhetoric, logic, grammar and then quadriad of arithmetic, geometry, music and astrology—is how to read and absorb a theoretical argument made by a hard, worthwhile, flawed book.
People need to understand what an argument is, and the only way to do that is actually go through an argument—to read the argument and try to make sense of it.
People need to be able to tell the difference between an argument and an assertion.
People need to be able to do more than just say whether they liked the conclusion or not: they need to be able to specify whether the argument hangs together given the premises, and where it is the premises, and where it is the premises themselves that need to be challenged.
People need to learn that while you can disagree, you need to be able to specify why and how you disagree.
The consequences of shallow reading are not academic. When we lose the habit of deep reading, we lose:
The ability to follow long chains of argument.
The cognitive humility that comes from inhabiting another worldview.
The emotional intelligence that emerges from empathizing with another voice.
The skill of holding ideas in tension—of managing ambiguity and contradiction.
Without these, public discourse suffers. Policy suffers. Democracy suffers. Because the space in which we think together—across time, tradition, and perspective—is narrowed to whatever fits into a hot take about the current thing.
So the first-order task here is to teach people how to read difficult books.
Teaching people five facts about some thinker's theoretical perspective is subordinate: those five facts will not stick with them over the years. Teaching them how to read difficult books will stick with them over the years. Knowing what to do with a book that makes an important, an interesting, but also a flawed argument—that is a key skill. You can watch a lecture. You can read a summary. But unless you sit with the whole book, you don’t learn how that thinker thinks—only what they said. Yet it is not the bullet-point summaries of the content of The Wealth of Nations that matters, but the tuning of your inner voice to converse with your summoned sub-Turing instantiation of the mind of Adam Smith that you run on your wetware.
The key skill we are trying to teach you—and it will be the key skill as much in the 21st century as in any previous one—is not some “multitasking”. It is, instead, the ability to undertake the sustained summoning of a different worldview that you can then test against your own.
This is a profoundly synthetic activity. It goes beyond absorbing “content.” It requires empathy, logic, and creativity. Reading is a discipline, and one that generates insights not just about the book but about yourself and your own unexamined assumptions. This process requires time, patience, and attention. And none of these are favored by contemporary digital culture. We live in a world designed for distraction—one that trains us to click, swipe, skim, and scroll. In that environment, reading a 600-page book by Adam Smith is not just hard. It is an act of resistance. But it is an act of necessary resistance if you are to become the master of the ideas that find you, rather than their slave.
Therefore, at the start of this course, people need to read the Wealth of Nations, and in order to do that well they need to learn how to read the Wealth of Nations. They need to read Books III, IV, and V, to see how Smith uses and qualifies the theoretical system he has built. But most of all people need to read the Books I and II that build Smith’s core theoretical system, both as an example of a powerful analytical argument, and because unless you understand Books I and II you do not understand the most powerful ideology in the world today.
The argument: it's dazzling. With Adam Smith, you can see how he starts from some premises, and then builds it up to his conclusions. Starting with his premises about human nature, he derives his theory of the market as a system that has its own logic: it makes people do things they would not otherwise do, and so makes them act, collectively, to achieve outcomes that nobody intended. Since 1800 almost all other major positions in social theory have either drawn us or been trying to undermine Smith.
But in order for reading The Wealth of Nations to do its work for you, you need to read the book well. That means that you ned to summon up a sub-Turing instantiation of the author’s mind in your own mind, and then argue with it.
Then, after Smith’s Wealth of Nations, we go on to Marx’s Capital, and Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money. And we urge you to focus on the "meta" to the extent that you can: it is not so much the ability to answer the question "what does Marx think about X?" that we want you to grasp, but rather "how do I figure out what Marx thinks about X?" that is the big goal here. One does not read Capital or The General Theory for answers; one reads to enter a conversation with Marx or Keynes, one that is conducted largely in your own head. And you are not supposed to agree with these books. You are supposed to wrestle with them.
We will stay with each author for five weeks. You sit with an author, a set of ideas, their analytical method, their worldview for weeks. That’s cognitive endurance. Big difficult books are not “content”. They are workouts. They stretch the mind.
We have our recommended ten-stage process for reading such big books:
Figure out beforehand what the author is trying to accomplish in the book.
Orient yourself by becoming the kind of reader the book is directed at—the kind of person with whom the arguments would resonate.
Read through the book actively, taking notes. Read with sympathy first. Understanding before judgment,
“Steelman” the argument, reworking it so that you find it as convincing and clear as you can possibly make it. Trust the author for 200 pages. If you cannot reconstruct an author's argument as they would recognize it, you are not yet ready to critique it.
"I tell my students:
Find someone else—usually a roommate—and bore them to death by making them listen to you set out your “steelmanned” version of the argument. You need to test their arguments as if they were your own.
Go back over the book again, giving it another sympathetic but not credulous reading
Then you will be in a good position to figure out what the weak points of this strongest-possible argument version might be.
Test the major assertions and interpretations against reality: do they actually make sense of and in the context of the world as it truly is?
Decide what you think of the whole.
Then comes the task of cementing your interpretation, your reading, into your mind so that it becomes part of your intellectual panoply for the future.
Follow this process, and your reading becomes active.
Then you have the greatest possible chance of learning the books—of thereafter being able to summon up sub-Turing instantiations of the thinkers Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes and then running them on your wetware.
If you can do that, you can be closer to being as smart as they were.
And at the same time you will be aware enough of their weak points and blindnesses that you can be wiser than they were.
To assist you in this process, we compiled 150 questions-and-answers—50 about Smith, 50 about Marx, and 50 about Keynes—that we think you should review and learn as part of your active-learning incorporation of the thought of these three authors into your own minds.
“But”, you may well say, “simply learning these questions-and-answers merely gets me the ability to parrot verbal formulas. We want more: we want a least knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts; and we ideally want deep understanding”.
It is certainly true that there are many who can parrot verbal formulas yet lack knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts. It is certainly true that there are many who have knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts and yet lack deep understanding. But I am not aware of anyone who has deep understanding of a discipline and yet lacks knowledge of facts, terms, and concepts. And those who know the facts, terms, and concepts cold are the absolute best at parroting verbal formulas.
As our Economics Department Vice Chair Jon Steinnson says: “You sit there listening, and it makes no sense”—you are at best parroting verbal formulas—“until one day you find that it does”. One day the network of interlocking verbal formulas has become at least the beginning of knowledge, and hopefully some day deep understanding.
These questions-and-answers are a way of getting you to ask your own questions of the text, and to hear it answer—to do your own active reading. If you do it well, than big, difficult books will come to be to you what they came to be to Renaissance diplomat and political scientist Machiavelli, who wrote <http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/Vettori.html> that his books were:
ancient men… [who] receive… [me] with affection…. I… speak with them and… ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death…
And so before he began reading them in the evening, he dressed up: “[took] off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly…” And then he summoned the authors in his library to converse with him. Summoning the ghost of John Maynard Keynes as a form of necromancy—a very powerful intellectual technique. Training yourself to read actively is training yourself to become a skilled interlocutor with the dead. That is what real scholarship is.
Ultimately, reading old, big, difficult books is not an act of nostalgia. It is about becoming. Who you are is shaped by what you attend to. If you never sustain attention, you never sustain identity. And if you cannot argue with others—living or dead—you cannot refine yourself.
(Machiavelli’s “not frightened by death” part? When Machiavelli wrote this letter the Republic of Florence he had been worked for had been overthrown by the Medici dynasty, and he was rightly fearful that they might decide to arrest, torture, and execute him.)
<https://delong.typepad.com/--2025-files/2025-04-14-cement-your-knowledge.pdf>
References:
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1513 [2008]. Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513. In The Prince, transl. & ed. Peter Bondanella, 109–113. Oxford: Oxford University Press. <https://archive.org/details/historicalpoliti02machuoft>.
Matuschak, Andy. 2019. “Why Books Don’t Work”. <https://andymatuschak.org/books>.
I've taught poetry, fiction, & drama. I've included the Constitution & the Declaration of Independence in my lit courses. I've also taught basic reading comprehension. I read French & German besides English. I've watched my children grow up to be multilingual & read effectively in their STEM careers. And I'm here to tell you that in my experience reading is something which happens inside a black box: I don't know what goes on when we read, how or why we learn to read, or how to teach someone to read. For people who subscribe to "Grasping Reality" & take econ history courses, your advice makes perfect sense: they know how to read & providing them with a bit of structure helps them read more effectively. But the majority of my students in more than 30 years in higher ed couldn't do this.
As I was reading the first paragraphs, Machiavelli, of course, popped into my peabrain. Of course it was the 20 some years of engaging with Delong's wetware on screens that made that happen.
Thanks for the free university.