NBN Newsletter #6: Crypto
Featuring two curated playlists, an episode spotlight, and a Q+A with Professor Kei Hiruta
Money Mania
Manias, Panics, and Crashes, A Short History of Financial Euphoria, and Narrative Economics all detail some of the most memorable financial fiascos in human history. Every now and then, a critical mass of people gets swept up in a beautiful illusion of fabulous riches. Be it tulip bulbs, real estate, trading cards, technology stocks, beanie babies, or internet money, some shiny new thing always comes along, promises to change everything, and implodes. Excitement and greed quickly sour to pessimism and fear, sending shockwaves through other markets, real economies, and ordinary people’s lives. In this week’s playlists, we feature episodes about cryptocurrency, historical financial panics, and tech optimism gone wrong.
Scholarly Sources
Kei Hiruta is currently Lecturer in Philosophy at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: Karen Stohr’s Choosing Freedom: A Kantian Guide to Life.
Q: What is your favorite book or essay to assign to students and why?
A: Hanna Pitkin’s essay, “Are Freedom and Liberty Twins?” When I teach theories of freedom, students always ask me whether “liberty” and “freedom” mean exactly the same thing or if they have somewhat different connotations. Pitkin’s essay answers this question, but it does more than that: it shows how reflecting on this seemingly simple question can yield a profoundly sophisticated analysis of liberty and freedom. In my opinion, it’s one of the best political theory essays of the past fifty years.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
Michael Freeden’s Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. This is a landmark study that inaugurated Ideology Studies as an academic discipline. I read it as a first-year graduate student when I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue an academic career. The book had a profound impact on me because it taught me that one doesn’t have to choose between normative political theory and intellectual history. One can combine tools taken from both to devise innovative ways of studying political ideas. Although I’m not exactly a scholar of Ideology Studies in Freeden’s sense, I’d like to think I’ve been exploring the intellectual space opened up by his pioneering work.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: Yukio Mishima. He has been an aesthetic hero of mine for a very long time. His political ideas are bad and his views on ethics are questionable. And yet, his genius as an artist is incontestable. I also think he must have been a fun person to hang out with.
Q: What’s the best book you’ve read in the past year?
A: Stephen R. Platt’s Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: The Karen Blixen Museum in Rungsted, Denmark. I am a big fan of Blixen’s short stories. I’m inclined to see her as a kind of magician, who knew how to reenchant the world with her creative work. The museum, which used to be the writer’s home, shows where the magic happened.
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. I also look forward to reading Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900–1960, which is scheduled to be out in early 2023.
Episode Spotlight
In this interview, host Daniel Moran speaks with journalist Ted Conover about his book, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge. Conover describes the wild world of rural Colorado and the modern-day homesteaders who live there. In some areas, $5,000 can get you five acres of land. Cheap Land Colorado features a series of portraits of the people who take this bargain.
Understanding Modern Civil Wars
My Ph.D. was on how to negotiate, write, and implement peace treaties to end civil wars, with a particular focus on security provisions. This playlist offers a variety of viewpoints on the topic, including generalist overviews, new conceptualizations of civil wars, investigations of practices and dynamics within conflicts, practical engagement with these interdisciplinary methodologies, understandings of the role of external actors and organizations, discussions on the tricky transition from war to peace, and more.
New Books, Links, and Other Things
Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, Second Edition (Princeton UP, 2022)
Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America (UNC Press, 2023)
(If you’ve just finished an exceptionally engrossing book, listened to a great NBN episode, discovered a new podcast, or stumbled across an interesting website, please email caleb@newbooksnetwork.com)
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