HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Big Serious Books Can Really Be Your Intellectual Friends
Platon's Sokrates was wrong: to someone who really knows how to read, a book is not at all like a painting, for while a painting looks alive but cannot answer you if you question it, your books can...
Platon's Sokrates was wrong: to someone who really knows how to read, a book is not at all like a painting, for while a painting looks alive but cannot answer you if you question it, your books can and do answer you—if you have trained yourself to read, and so have created for yourself the ability to create at will the right kind of hallucinatory literary-academic fantasies inside your own brain…
There are urgent, human voices behind the books on your shelf. Let Niccolò Machiavelli remind you: the best intellectual company is always within arm’s reach. Don’t ask “what if your library could talk back?” Recognize that it can and does, if you have the right kind of mind to engage in deep, close, active reading. Shift from thinking of yourself as engaged in an academic ratrace. Instead take the black squiggles on the page that is the information code, and from them spin-up a SubTuring instantiation of the mind of the author of the book, and run it on your wetware. And argue with it.
Thus books transform from dry texts into lively interlocutors—and being able to see that shift might just save your sanity. Treat your books as people, not objects.
Then step into the ancient courts of ancient thinkers, and find yourself among true friends.
And afterwards, you feel like Dante claimed he had felt:
I saw the Master of the Men who Know,
seated in philosophic family….There all look up to him, all do him honor:
there I beheld both Socrates and Plato,
closest to him, in front of all the rest;Democritus, who ascribes the world to chance,
Diogenes, Empedocles, and Zeno,
and Thales, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus;I saw the good collector of medicinals,
I mean Dioscorides; and I saw Orpheus,
and Tully, Linus, moral Seneca;and Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy,
Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna,
Averroés, of the great Commentary.I cannot here describe them all in full;
my ample theme impels me onward so:
what’s told is often less than the event…
But as Bob Reich and I were lamenting at breakfast at Saul’s Deli (which, now that he as emeritus has lost his Goldman Public-Policy School office he appears to be using as his office) a couple of weeks ago, fewer and fewer of our students have had an education that has given them the boot camp-experience needed to make them find this spinning-up of hallucinatory literary-intellectual fantasy interaction second nature. John Zysman says that this really clicked for him his sophomore year, with Barrington Moore playing the role of Louis Gossett, Jr.: “This year, you are going to learn three things: how to read, how to write, and how to think!'“
In my clippings file for twenty years ago there is a Dark Night of the Academic Soul rant-lament from A Humanist:
Now, I'm trying to figure out some way to squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published. I have the game of academia down, in its basic points; at this point, it's a matter of building up a sufficient resume that people will believe I am good at it…. [But] dissecting yet another text in order to produce a text of my own that will conform with the canons of professionality within certain circles of 'philosophical' and 'theological' discourse doesn't seem like any kind of answer—it doesn't seem like it would help anything, anything at all, even a little bit. Not when I'm trying to figure out some way to walk down the street, to be with people, to do right by them, to experience some kind of peace…. Even when I'd 'arrived,' I would still feel like I constantly need to prove myself…. Because I wouldn't feel like I deserve it, because there is no deserving—there is no available way to determine deserving. And so, prove yourself—for nothing, to no one, to no end...
And back then I wrote up an answer:
Sounds like A Humanist is undergoing one of those dark cloudy midafternoons of the soul that happens when you keep your nose to the grindstone.
So let me be an annoying Dutch uncle, and tell him what he already knows:
Step back. You see, when you think of what you are doing as "dissecting yet another text in order to produce a text of my own that will conform with the canons of professionality within certain circles of 'philosophical' and 'theological' discourse," you have fallen victim to the letter that killeth, while the spirit giveth life.
Let me pull the first four "texts" off my nearest bookshelf: Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes (an incredibly dense, incredibly thoughtful book that I badly need to reread, for whenever I have read it I have thought that wonderful insights are eluding me); Laurence Meyer, A Term at the Fed (his memoirs of his days as a Federal Reserve Governor; we chose him for the job as someone who could be a bridge between the High Policymakers and the forecasters and model-builders; I think--and the book says--that he did this job very well); Liza Featherstone's excellent Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart; and Adam Jaffe and Josh Lerner's Innovation and Its Discontents (I can't believe I still haven't read this! I really need to!).
As long as I think of these as "texts," they are dry and boring.
But there is a key to making them exciting: to remember that they are not texts: they are people—people urgently trying to talk to me, to tell me something very important that they think I desperately need to know.
Liza Featherstone thinks that I very much need to know about Wal-Mart's battling to keep its workers down—and their resistance—if I am going to be a good economist, a good citizen. She grabs me and lectures me at length, with excited and animated gestures. Never mind that I have never met her (I do know her husband, Doug Henwood, slightly). She is there, in front of me on the page, and it would be rude to cut her off—not to turn to the next one.
Niccolo Machiavelli, I think, puts it best. Let me quote from his letter to his friend and hoped-for patron Francesco Vettori, written in the days when he was rusticating in rural exile outside Florence.
I am living on my farm.... I get up in the morning with the sun and go into a grove I am having cut down, where I remain two hours to look over the work of the past day and kill some time with the cutters.... Leaving the grove, I go to a spring, and thence to my aviary. I have a book in my pocket, either Dante or Petrarch, or one of the lesser poets, such as Tibullus, Ovid, and the like. I read of their tender passions and their loves, remember mine, enjoy myself a while in that sort of dreaming. Then I move along the road to the inn; I speak with those who pass, ask news of their villages, learn various things, and note the various tastes and different fancies of men. In the course of these things comes the hour for dinner, where with my family I eat such food as this poor farm of mine and my tiny property allow. Having eaten, I go back to the inn.... I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach.... So, involved in these trifles, I keep my brain from growing mouldy, and satisfy the malice of this fate of mine, being glad to have her drive me along this road, to see if she will be ashamed of it.
On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to 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; entirely I give myself over to them.
When evening comes Niccolo Machiavelli enters his personal library. There he talks to his friends--his books, or rather those who wrote the books in his library, or rather those components of their minds that are instantiated in the hardware-and-software combinations of linen, ink, and symbols of Gutenberg Information Technology. They are 'ancient men' who receive him 'with affection,' and for four hours he 'ask[s] them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and... I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death...'
Remember: Machiavelli lives only two generations after Gutenberg. He is thus one of the very first people in the world to have had a personal library. Before printing, libraries were the exclusive possession of kings, sovereign princes, abbots, masters of the Roman Empire (like Caesar and Cicero). The idea that a mere mortal—a semi-disgraced ex-Special Assistant for Confidential Affairs to the Republic of Florence—might have a personal library would have been absurd even half a century earlier. To him, therefore, his personal library is not something he takes for granted, but something new, something he has that his predecessors did not.
And so he can see clearly—more clearly than we can—what his personal library does for him, what his books are.
In disgraced semi-exile—when many he would talk to are afraid to be seen in his company, and where he is afraid to be seen in the company of almost all the rest—the ability to read (and reread) his personal copies of Publius Ovidius Naso, Petrarch, Dante Alighieri, Titus Livius, Plutarch, and the rest makes them his friends: people who will receive him with affection, and honestly answer his questions about politics and history. It is important to have such friends, and to pay them proper respect. Hence Machiavelli will not go to them in his clothes-of-the-day—those in which he had managed his farm, haggled over the price of firewood, gambled, and on which he had spilled beer. He will, instead, enter his library only in 'garments regal and courtly.'
Moreover, people's rough edges are filed off in their books. Adam Smith found Jean-Jacques Rousseau impossible in person, but that chunk of Rousseau's mind that is instantiated in the hardware-and-software combination of Gutenberg Information Technology is very pleasant company.
Nobody outside his family (save Friedrich Engels) could ever stand Karl Marx for any length of time. But that part of Marx's mind that is instantiated in his books doesn't fly into irrational rages, doesn't accuse one of being a police spy, doesn't beg for money, doesn't demand that one accept that he is very much the smartest one in the room. Marx-in-the-book speaks passionately of his hopes and fears for the future—hope coming from the progressive destiny of humanity and the extraordinary progress of technology, and fear coming from our constant tendency to f*** up our social engineering problems—and (save when he starts raving Hegelian gibberish, or when you see that huge, huge chunks of his argument fall away because he has confused the physical capital-output ratio with the value capital-output ratio) can be good company.
And then there are those whom one really wishes one could know in person.
For who would not like to be good friends with (if one were quick and witty enough to avoid becoming one of his targets) John Maynard Keynes, or David Hume, or John Stuart Mill, or Adam Smith?
I know Larry Meyer—but it is an extra gift to have a piece of him on my bookshelf that I can talk to anytime, in the form of A Term at the Fed. (It would be better to be able to call him up to appear to talk at will, but A Term at the Fed is a pretty close substitute).
I wish I knew Garry Wills in person, but you can't have everything, and pieces of his literary persona haunt at least four rooms in our house plus my office.
I'm going to try to meet and talk to Liza Featherstone the next time I'm in New York with time to spare, but meanwhile I have her book.
And Adam Jaffe is (justifiably) angry with me for an episode of writer's block which meant that I failed to revise a paper he was editing--but his book isn't angry at me.
So I think that as long as a humanist views himself as turning the crank on a machine ("squeeze out a paper on Zizek's use of Kierkegaard, so that I can send it off and people will publish it, so that I can write down on a piece of paper that it has been published") he is damned.
But when he shifts his mental frames, and remember what is really going on—that Kierkegaard is desperately trying to communicate something difficult and important that he only half-grasps, and that Zizek is mulling this over and answering back—he may yet be saved.
It's when the moment comes when you get so excited by watching Zizek argue with Kierkegaard that he thinks, "I have something to add to this; I have something important to say too"—then is the moment to write down what you have to say, not in order to build your c.v. but because you have something to say.
In fact, the only effective way to build your c.v. is to let it happen as a byproduct of your having something to say.
I remember... it must have been 1984, some evening, when I was sitting in one of the cushy chairs in the middle of the NBER's third-floor offices. Larry Summers was coming in while Paul Krugman was going out. And they stopped each other.
"Paul," said Larry.
"Yes?" said Paul.
"In our basic model, the U.S. is running a trade deficit because demand is greater than production, and especially because demand for non-tradeables is high, and so workers are pulled out of jobs making tradeables into jobs making non-tradeables, and so domestic production of tradeables is insufficient to satisfy demand, and so we import," said Larry.
"So?" said Paul.
"Why, then, are workers in tradeable-goods industries in the Midwest experiencing this not as being pulled into higher-wage jobs in the non-tradeables sector, but as being pushed by foreign competition into lower-wage jobs in the non-tradeables sector?" said Larry.
And they were off.
For a good half hour or so they argued the issues back and forth. More graduate students gathered to watch what was a fascinating pickup debate and discussion about just why there were so many losers from the trade deficits of the 1980s, when the first-cut full-employment model suggested that it should have been win-win.
You have to be in the right place at the right time to get the peak intellectual experience of watching two minds of such extraordinary caliber together wrestle with each other and with important problems.
Actually, you don't.
You just have to pick up the right book.
References:
Alighieri, Dante. 1320 [2003]. Inferno. Translated by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor Books. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/82822/inferno-by-dante-alighieri-translated-by-robert-hollander-and-jean-hollander/ ↗
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “Standing Up a New Version of SubTuringBradBot.” Grasping Reality, May 1. https://braddelong.substack.com/p/standing-up-a-new-version-of-subturingbradbot↗
Featherstone, Liza. 2004. Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart. New York: Basic Books. https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/liza-featherstone/selling-women-short/9780465007530/ ↗
Friedman, Milton. 1953. “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” In Essays in Positive Economics, 3-43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://www.sfu.ca/~wainwrig/Econ400/friedman.pdf ↗
Hackford, Taylor, dir. 1982. An Officer & a Gentleman. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084434/ ↗
Jaffe, Adam B., & Josh Lerner. 2004. Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation & Progress, and What to Do About It. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691127941/innovation-and-its-discontents ↗
Keynes, John Maynard. 1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. London: Macmillan. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ ↗
Krugman, Paul. 1994. Peddling Prosperity: Economic Sense and Nonsense in the Age of Diminished Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393312926 ↗
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1531 [1998]. Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3644032.html ↗
Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1513 [1996]. The Prince. Translated by Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-prince-9780199535699 ↗
Marx, Karl. 1867 [1990]. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ ↗
Meyer, Laurence H. 2004. A Term at the Fed: An Insider’s View. New York: HarperBusiness. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/a-term-at-the-fed-laurence-h-meyer ↗
Mill, John Stuart. 1848 [2008]. Principles of Political Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/principles-of-political-economy-9780192836724 ↗
Platon. ca. 370 BCE [2002]. Phaidros. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/phaedrus-9780192802774 ↗
Ploutarchos Loukianos. ca. 100 CE 2001]. Parallel Lives. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Classical Library). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674990187 ↗
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1762 [1979]. The Social Contract. Translated by Maurice Cranston. London: Penguin Books. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/292957/the-social-contract-by-jean-jacques-rousseau/ ↗
Smith, Adam. 1776 [1976]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo3644032.html ↗
Wills, Garry. 1970. Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/Nixon-Agonistes/9780618381887 ↗
Yglesias, Matthew. 2020. One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. New York: Portfolio. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/605670/one-billion-americans-by-matthew-yglesias/ ↗
Zizek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262740258/the-puppet-and-the-dwarf/ ↗
Wow this is great. Required reading of all students ... it's not a book, but like an appetizer they must eat before digging into the main course, the books themselves. Couldn't have been written better.
Leaving aside questions of quality, this strikes me as a compelling explanation for why simulations generated by LLMs are unlikely to ever replace books written by humans.