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Through stories, conversations, and essays, this book pursues interwoven critical and philosophical inquiries into the nature of the contemporary in the North Atlantic, asking how are we to live as intellectuals, individually and in community?
Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party is the product of informal discussion and academic work done over the last two decades among an international group of social scientists. An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking, this book interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence. Reflecting that the United States, indeed the North Atlantic countries, seem to have entered autumn, David A. Westbrook asks what spring might be. Will the critical social sciences have anything to offer the exercise of power, or are we doomed to incessant and ineffectual critique? Can bureaucracy be made at least more accountable, if not democratic? Conversely, can we feel less alienated from the structures of power that rule us, or that fail to govern at all? Can we feel at home? |
Kind Words
"As a theater maker, and curator of spaces and people, I found Westbrook's insights and theories about constructing and deconstructing institutions useful, in the highest sense of the word."
-Matthew Gasda, Playwright and Founder, Brooklyn Center for Theater Research
“Westbrook wrote a book like no other. Provocative and original, it feels like an engaged conversation with a well-read and well-traveled friend. You will be curious, puzzled, perplexed, challenged, shaken, rattled and eager to start again.”
– Vitor Gaspar, former Minister of Finance of Portugal
“This is Westbrook at his best: sparkling insights, surprising connections, dashes of humor, and thought-provoking reflections.”
– Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law School, and former US Ambassador to the Holy See
“A deeply thoughtful, genre-blurring meditation on the collapse of meaning in our data-saturated age.”
– Erik J Larson, computer scientist and author of The Myth of AI
“Westbrook is a Renaissance man, whose breadth of knowledge makes him an icon in dialogues between the law and other disciplines: anthropology, sociology, history, literature, art, economics and international relations, dialogues that wrestle with the key issues of our times. Echoing Quixote’s shift in the twilight of his life from the idealism of the bygone cavalry of the Middle Ages towards the realism of the age that Sancho Panza exemplified, Westbrook shakes the narrative to explain contemporary challenges in the search for a new spring.”
– Rosa M. Lastra, Queen Mary University of London, Law
“The reader will be at once thrilled and puzzled, charmed and stunned, inspired and challenged—and much more. This is a book written by a serious academic like non-other I know of. . . . But what I do know is that his mastery of English and its literatures allows him to write as a poet. Poetry becomes what the poet means it to be—sometimes sad, often beautiful. It makes sense only after the reader ponders, goes back, thinks, and feels what its words captured and broadcast.”
– Charles Lemert, from the Foreword
“Returning with passion to several key themes in his past writing, Bert Westbrook, navigator of the contemporary and quixotic dinner companion extraordinaire, evokes a structure of feeling that is acutely uncomfortable for those of us caught within bureaucratic universities, persecuted by their patron state.”
– George E. Marcus, UC Irvine, co-author of Anthropology as Cultural Critique
“This fascinating book ends by inviting readers to begin again. To do what? To be engaged in imaging a second spring, no less. Via a set of erudite, quirky, and controversial reflections on the erosion of meaning in key institutions, from the polity to the university, Westbrook invites readers to partake in conversations about freedom and security as well as knowledge and intellectuals. . . . I found myself deeply engaged and so will you. Perhaps we will even dare to begin again.
– Francisco O. Ramirez, Stanford University, Education
-Matthew Gasda, Playwright and Founder, Brooklyn Center for Theater Research
“Westbrook wrote a book like no other. Provocative and original, it feels like an engaged conversation with a well-read and well-traveled friend. You will be curious, puzzled, perplexed, challenged, shaken, rattled and eager to start again.”
– Vitor Gaspar, former Minister of Finance of Portugal
“This is Westbrook at his best: sparkling insights, surprising connections, dashes of humor, and thought-provoking reflections.”
– Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law School, and former US Ambassador to the Holy See
“A deeply thoughtful, genre-blurring meditation on the collapse of meaning in our data-saturated age.”
– Erik J Larson, computer scientist and author of The Myth of AI
“Westbrook is a Renaissance man, whose breadth of knowledge makes him an icon in dialogues between the law and other disciplines: anthropology, sociology, history, literature, art, economics and international relations, dialogues that wrestle with the key issues of our times. Echoing Quixote’s shift in the twilight of his life from the idealism of the bygone cavalry of the Middle Ages towards the realism of the age that Sancho Panza exemplified, Westbrook shakes the narrative to explain contemporary challenges in the search for a new spring.”
– Rosa M. Lastra, Queen Mary University of London, Law
“The reader will be at once thrilled and puzzled, charmed and stunned, inspired and challenged—and much more. This is a book written by a serious academic like non-other I know of. . . . But what I do know is that his mastery of English and its literatures allows him to write as a poet. Poetry becomes what the poet means it to be—sometimes sad, often beautiful. It makes sense only after the reader ponders, goes back, thinks, and feels what its words captured and broadcast.”
– Charles Lemert, from the Foreword
“Returning with passion to several key themes in his past writing, Bert Westbrook, navigator of the contemporary and quixotic dinner companion extraordinaire, evokes a structure of feeling that is acutely uncomfortable for those of us caught within bureaucratic universities, persecuted by their patron state.”
– George E. Marcus, UC Irvine, co-author of Anthropology as Cultural Critique
“This fascinating book ends by inviting readers to begin again. To do what? To be engaged in imaging a second spring, no less. Via a set of erudite, quirky, and controversial reflections on the erosion of meaning in key institutions, from the polity to the university, Westbrook invites readers to partake in conversations about freedom and security as well as knowledge and intellectuals. . . . I found myself deeply engaged and so will you. Perhaps we will even dare to begin again.
– Francisco O. Ramirez, Stanford University, Education
Reviews and Podcasts
In Waiting for the Homecoming Dinner Party of Meanings, Korean writer and translator Hyun Woo Kim reads Social Thought From the Ruins through the Russian philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin, and a little Plato. Conversation, polyphony, and eros.
Wessie du Toit has a great review essay in Unherd, What is the Point of the University? Modern Society Needs Mandarins. He has a follow up review essay, Do We Need the University?, at Pathos of Things, his thoughtful substack.
University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Press Release.
The Telos Paul-Piccone Institute, which publishes Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary, has a nice compendium of blurbs, reviews, and other press at Telos on Quixote's Dinner Party
Udith Dematagoda in Metropolitan Review on Social Thought From the Ruins.
Oliver Bateman, with his sparkling series of interviews cum podcasts, Oliver Bateman Does the Work, did the work of Social Thought From the Ruins.
More to come!