aspects of the old right-wing ordinarism

Bridget Read’s Little Bosses Everywhere, from Crown Books in May, and Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Job, January from Harvard UP, cover an awful lot of shared ground. I’ve read neither. I’ll hazard a guess that they are pretty different reads. There is at any rate under present circumstances more than room, it’s fair to say, for two on this turf.

In the usual way, I’m getting to know the material through author interviews. Absent from the promo-tour media rounds, as far as I can tell, is anything bringing Read and Baker together to discuss their common subject with each other. Can’t help wondering how such a conversation might go! Anyway, down below is a little collection of their podcast chats I’ve benefited from time with, two with Read and two with Baker. (Many more out there to be found, of course.)

Added to these four is one interview with another author, Cara Wallis, about recent work of entirely distinct focus through which, interestingly, you can get a glimpse of Read’s and Baker’s shared subject from alternative angle — less historical in outline and decidedly less bound up with the U.S. culturally.

Also below, last, is video of a scholarly talk Baker delivered at Columbia U. in spring 2023, while his book was still in the works.

But first, an excerpt not from that 2023 lecture but from Baker’s visit with Know Your Enemy guys Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell this January (first of the podcast episodes I list at end of the post):

EB:The way that I stage it is to kind of try to show the way that these very eminent social scientists are kind of having this similar debate among themselves about the kind of predominance of material reality or intellectual ideational reality that these sort of New Thought charlatans are having, but you know of course in a much more elevated register. So one thing to note is that, even though this is a peculiarly American story in some ways, the underlying forces at work in capitalism are of course replicated in all kinds of national contexts, including in Germany — which at the time is undergoing its own experience of industrialization, the formation of a mass working class — and so, just as there are in the United States, there are social scientists who are trying to figure out the best way to deal with the social problems that result from these processes. So there’s a similar kind of debate — you know, if we want to understand what is driving history in the biggest sense, but more particularly sort of driving the emergence of, of labor movements, making workers unhappy: Should we, sort of, focus on their material circumstances, or you know should we kind of focus on their cultural or intellectual world? And the social scientists who are, who are interested in subjective experience, they’re really into this figure of, in German, the Unternehmer, which is, is translated to English via French as entrepreneur . . . and you know there’s this, of course, you know a lot of these guys are readers of, of Nietzsche, and you know they have this vision of this strong, charismatic leader who’s able to kind of go above material circumstances, you know, create a new reality and sort of conjure up this kind of environment of passionate commitment to a shared project.

MS:Erik, is this foreshadowing anything? [ laughter ]

EB:In Germany?! In early twentieth-century Germany? No I, there, there’s nothing that really comes to mind!

SAB:I have no idea what you’re talking about.

EB:You definitely do not want to look up what political party Werner Sombart supported in the 1930s at the end of his life. [ laughter ] No, right, so I mean the, it’s kind of stereotypical, but you know, at the time, people don’t fully know where this story is going. And, and so this vision is taken up in American business schools — and, you know, often by people who actually are quite frankly sympathetic with these political projects of the, the European far right. And this becomes an opportunity — again, there are other figures in management theory who are focused on, on the material reality, whether that’s compensation, or some of the sort of physical details of the conditions that people work under — but, uh, this vision of the entrepreneur gets taken up as a way to say, you know, If we have the right kinds of people in, in management — again, it’s all about kinds of people — you know if we have the right kinds of people with the right sorts of virtues and, and capacities, you know, then it’s possible to sort of spiritually transform the workplace — to sort of turn it into a place that’s kind of energized, again, by this sort of shared commitment, you know: We’re creating something new here. And so again, that’s sort of where it links up with this broader popular culture of, of success.

SAB:And the important thing obviously is to get people invested — via their, say, dedication to a charismatic leader — in a corporate project which is not, you know, horizontally solidaristic, right?

The greater narrative Read and Baker complement each other in, here, is complex, subject naturally in many ways to varied interpretation. Both tend to talk about the New Thought phenomenon, say, in terms I’m not so sure are satisfactory. (Something maybe to return to in a longer post sometime.) Crowded and diverse though their story is, in any event, we might observe that among characters taking the stage in it, in demonstrations of real personal virtue it would seem to prove, not surprisingly from present vantage, rather thin.

A thought you may find recurring, should you give these discussions some time: What if American labor at its strength in the 1930s and ’40s had transcended trade-unionism and pressed the fight for all workers — had really dug in, had insisted that none is protected until all are?