John Patrick Leary is Assistant Professor of English at Wayne State University. I write about literature, history, and politics in the United States and Latin America. On this blog you can find "Keywords for the Age of Austerity" and some of my past writing. Suggest an austerity keyword via the "Ask me anything" link or via twitter @johnpatleary. “Keywords for the Age of Austerity” is an occasional series on the vocabulary of inequality. Certain words, as Raymond Williams wrote in his classic Keywords, bind together ways of seeing culture and society. These shared meanings change over time, shaping and reflecting the society in which they are made. Some of the words I will consider here are old, seemingly innocent terms that have acquired a particular fashion or developed a particular new meaning in recent years; others are recent coinages. All of them relate to affinity for hierarchy and a celebration of the virtues of competition, "the marketplace," and the virtual technologies of our time. This series will explore the historical meanings embedded in these words as well as the new meanings that our age has given them.
If you have been a Serious Political Commentator over the last four years or so, you have been worried and anxious about the rising tide of “illiberalism.” The word has always annoyed me because it sounds so pompous–something about the -il prefix, so rare in spoken English other than in the word “illiterate”–and is so nondescriptive. As a negation of an already poorly defined concept…
As I work through the new material for the new edition of Keywords, I’m going to occasionally post here some excerpts, outtakes, and other material that comes up.
Liberalism, writes Raymond Williams, is a “doctrine of possessive individualism.”
“Possessive individualism” was coined in 1964 by C.B. Macpherson, a Canadian socialist and political theorist who described it as a “unifying idea”…
Just published in the New Republic and written in anger and disappointment on Wednesday, the day after Joe Biden won Michigan’s primary. In the days that followed, we’ve been treated to a round-the-clock advertisement for the urgency of Medicare for all and the dysfunction of a social and economic system built for endless competition and consumption.
Most of what you ever wanted to know about Airbnb Magazine, in Jacobin: “I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To:”
“Because a lot of Airbnb’s workers are actually property owners, whether professional landlords or owners of real-estate portfolios, Airbnb labors very hard to do what comes more easily to services like Uber: putting a human face on twenty-first-century labor exploitation. On…
New posts on terrible words may appear here from time to time, but for now, they’re in my new language column at The New Republic, called “Loose Talk.” Here they are, so far:
I was very excited to get to talk to two of the most excellent podcast hosts on the left recently: Katie Halper & Gabe Pacheco and Dan Denvir. Listen to my discussion with Katie and Gabe here:
Bernie Sanders’ proposals for medicare-for-all and universal student debt relief have fired up the wonky political class. Here’s an example. Charles Lane argues in the Washington Post informs American socialists that actually, Nordic social democracy isn’t socialism. And he has a JP Morgan Chase report to prove it.
These countries are generous; but they are not stupid.…
I was a guest on WNYC’s On the Media, direct from a recording studio in Lisbon (thanks Dizplay Soundlab!), to talk about the scandal of meritocracy. Meritocracy is a particularly strange keyword, because it was originally coined by Michael Young as a satirical mockery of a fantasy it has now come to earnestly represent: social mobility through education and innate talent. Instead of gaining…
More of me talking! Thanks to Sam Seder and Majority Report for letting me gas on about Keywords. We focused mostly on horrors of grit and meritocracy. Listen here:
Thanks to Oliver Eagleton and Counterfire for this insightful review of Keywords.
I appreciated Eagleton’s serious engagement with the book, and for this critique in particular:
While Williams chose to analyse words which could be reclaimed for the left, his inheritor seem to think that ‘the new language of capitalism’ must be rejected wholesale. His introduction urges us to argue ‘for…
"On the Media" and the myth of the myth of "meritocracy"
“On the Media” and the myth of the myth of “meritocracy”
I was back on WNYC’s “On the Media” direct from Lisbon, talking about the college admissions scandal and the weird history of “meritocracy”: a word coined to mock the celebration of a oligarchic elite shaped not by high birth, but by access to academic institutions access to which is actually shaped by high birth. Listen below!
People! The start-up incubators are incubating people! When your business metaphors and your biological metaphors get a little too close for comfort: from Lisbon.
Here I am on Seoul’s English-language morning news show, This Morning with Alex Jensen, talking about Keywords, General Motors, and my Twitter prediction, since revised, that the publication of my book would do away with the popularity of #innovation by 2019.
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