Glossolalia - Manmade or God-given?

This book, which unfortunately I am unable to provide any link for as it remains an unpublished and thus publicly unavailable work, is the undergraduate dissertation of Andrew Stovell - my father. It's a dispassionate and rigorous study of the phenomenon of glossolalia, more commonly known as "speaking in tongues", from both a biblically-considered and linguistic pair of angles. I've just read the whole thing in one sitting as I stumbled upon a chapter in another book about this and my mum mentioned "oh, dad wrote his thesis on that!" so I gave it an appropriate detour.

   It's a really interesting read. The first part lays out a groundwork for what glossolalia is, how it is portrayed and discussed in the Bible to start with, then briefly looking at how it has manifested throughout history, leading up to contemporary practices in charismatic churches. The second part is a literature review of other linguists' studies into the phenomenon, which deftly summarises the scant but deep insights of other academic perspectives, most of which this thesis's author largely supports in his argumentation. The third and final part comprises an in-depth phonetical and phonological analysis of ten recorded (and meticulously transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet in the lengthy appendix) examples of actual purported glossolalia, with some reflections as to the nature of these and what that implies as to whether they can be understood as language at all.

   Ultimately my dad concludes that the biblical accounts of "speaking in tongues" are quite clearly talking about "xenoglossia" (speaking a different real language) rather than "glossolalia" (speaking incomprehensible *possibly angelic* languages) and all scholarly analysis of modern such speakers drives to the point where we cannot confirm these instances to be of any real human language; indeed he goes further to point out that examples of glossolalia are very often characterised by frequent repetition of simple phonemes with no clear syntactical or grammatical logics at play, and thus even if we are to understand these utterances as divinely-inspired language of some form, it is odd to note that those divine languages must be overwhelmingly composed of the sounds babbling toddlers are wont to make. Which is to say, the actual spiritual gift of speaking in tongues is biblically historical and useful, whereas given the evidence we probably have to admit that the modern phenomenon of it is conversely essentially gobbledegook.

   If your curiosity is so piqued by this post that you actually want to read this, and if you do have a linguistic interest in the veracity of speaking in tongues I would recommend this as a resource certainly, but as I mentioned it's not published anywhere so if you find yourself desperate drop me a comment and I'll ask my dad whether we can scan it into a more easily distributable .pdf or something.

Easy Esperanto Reader

This book by Myrtis Smith and Thomas Alexander is a collection of five* short stories with Esperanto and Spanish translations included alongside. The stories themselves are of a shockingly diverse range in genre and tone, and were mildly entertaining, though I can't say I would have ever been prone to read them had they not been offering the opportunities to deepen my grasp on a pair of languages I'm trying to learn. Their uses of vocabulary and grammar are simple enough that a halfway competent student of Spanish or Esperanto can dig up a fair amount of new intuitions as to words and rules through reading these closely with regular comparison to the English translation, for which purpose I did find this a useful little book. And it's very cheap on Kindle, which is what prompted my buying of it. I do think though that I'm going to try to finish the Duolingo Esperanto course before I try to read any more actual fiction written in the language as then my confidence and comprehension will be greater. But as a halfway testing point for learners this was pretty solid.

* There is a sixth story included though this lacks translation, and was thus of much lesser utility in learning any new vocabulary.

the Politics of Newspeak

This book, or rather an appendix to the novel 1984 by George Orwell (not one in any edition I've ever seen - available as a free .pdf on the link above) is a pretty apt corollary to his essay Politics and the English Language, as it details his application of his political thinking as regards language to the fictionalized totalitarian mode of English, or IngSoc, that is used in aforementioned novel. He walks us through a rough overview of the vocabulary amputations that are made to English in order to achieve the mental effectiveness of Big Brother's totalitarian regime, explaining as he goes the thinking between the removal of certain words and the curtailing of others' meanings to the absolute minimum. The overall effect of which, by distorting language, is to reduce the capacity for abstract thought among a population to only modes which are conducive to the continuance of the regime. It's a powerful and insightful reflection on both the power of language to shape thought and the power of politics to shape language - and IngSoc is a perfect example, if admittedly fictional, of this taken to deliberate extremes. Following the discussions of vocabulary and grammars permitted or disallowed there is a fairly extensive dictionary of IngSoc terms used in 1984 with explanations as to their meanings under Big Brother - with their actual meanings to us living under liberal democracy arguable. Overall this is a really interesting take on how to fictionalise language, as Orwell here isn't making up a new interpretation of dialect or inventing a new language, but butchering an existing one for political purposes. Anyone interested in how politics and linguistics intersect would get a kick out of reading this, and it will certainly add a new layer of intrigue to the novel it derives from.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

This book is both the first publication and enduring masterwork of eminent logical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein; and it took me a very long time to read it, even while making diligent notes. This is a relatively short book about the relationship between language, logic, ideas and truth. And I would like to think that I understood at least most of it. But not wanting to embarrass myself in front of any potentially-superior philosophy-readers who may be perusing this blog, I will sum up my final thoughts on the book thus - yes, it makes perfect sense! "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" - especially once one has climbed up and thrown away the ladder.

Seriously though, this book is mental torture. It makes so much sense that it makes none. And yet it makes all. Wittgenstein famously said upon completing this work that he had solved the essential problems of all philosophy. Bit humble, right. And then he turned his back on that less than two decades later and started playing around with pragmatic linguistic theories, which if anything seems a step down from Solving Everything... but no, reading this book does feel like everything is being slowly solved; the axiomatic arrangement of its arguments, the dense interconnections of its lexicon... I was genuinely sad when I finished reading it that I couldn't see into a new dimension or something. Don't read this book ever - unless you really really REALLY enjoy problematic logical philosophy, and are happy to have your brain mangled for several weeks or months. Or years, if you try to devote serious study time to it instead of just reading it recreationally - in which case, WHY WOULD YOU DO - not even Bertrand Russell completely understood this steaming diamond of nonsense. Don't bother. Read it for its beauty, and if it illuminates very little, take that as the meaning it is - that really, philosophy illuminates very little, given that the sun exists and we all have eyes regardless of what the clever people are thinking today or tomorrow.

Politics and the English Language

This book - well, rather a long essay - by George Orwell, has become something of a talking-point across the political spectrum in recent years, for interesting reasons. The right seem to think that it upholds their stance against "politically correct" speech policing, while the left seem to feel it upholds their idea that all too often vague populistic and non-committal speech is supplanting public honesty. Exactly where Orwell himself would have lain in this argument we will never know, as he's been dead for seventy years, but still people on all sides of all political spectrums love to claim this man who fought for an anarchist army against Spanish fascists is on their side.

   I'll quit rambling. This is an essay about vagueness; the ways in which the English language can be made flimsy, indeterminate, in order to couch the political ambitions and goals of the speaker - regardless of their ideology. Some of the most insidious ways in which this happens are dying metaphors, operators or verbal false limbs, pretentious diction, and meaningless words. If these terms mean nothing to you then I suggest you click on the link at the very start of this post and read the free-online .pdf of this very essay so that Orwell himself can elucidate you. After explicating the ways in which these linguistic tactics can be used to obfuscate and befuddle, Orwell goes on to retranslate a passage he had quoted "in political language" earlier into normal, honest English - and the differences are quite startling. Even as someone who was a keen student of linguistics at college, I was startled at how much of a difference can be made pragmatically to the same semantic statement through a handful of minor tweaks. But all of this is moot. The world has moved on a great deal since Orwell passed on; we have been living in the "post-truth" era for about eight years now, and I dread to think what George would make of the political-linguistic landscape if he could see it today.

   Read this if you want for historical curiosity. It's a somewhat interesting insight into the past evolution of populist propaganda-speech. But it won't help you all that much in navigating the shitshow that is how politicians use language today. Unless, that is, you trust them, in which case, God help you.

the Lord of the Rings: Appendices

This book is the seventh, and the only non-novel-component, of J.R.R. Tolkien's masterwork. It comprises the appendix to the series proper - the reason for which I have done this as seven separate posts is that the books I own actually are seven separate books, which is the way the text was cut up in the original publications, a similar version of which I have linked above. But you know, these books are so famous that you'll probably easily find a version that suits you best - be it single-volume, triple, quadruple, seven[tuple]?

   Anyway. My six previous posts about this incredible trilogy are viewable below and devote themselves largely to summarising the plot - whereas in this final post I will give some more personal ruminations on the series itself and what it means to me. I will not be nitpicking changes between the books and movies, as Jess of the Shire is already doing that more than well enough; nor will I be relying on Tolkien's own philosophies of story, fantasy, language and interpretation to give any kind of exact statement of how one should read and imagine these characters in this world to be, as TolkienTrash already has a brilliant video covering that in-depth using queer readings as a launchpad. 

   A brief word on the appendices themselves: comprising timelines, family trees, pronunciation guides to the several languages Tolkien invented for/before this series, and historical overviews of events only alluded to in the main trilogy, as well as a bunch of other stuff - this is quite dry reading, but I love it because it shows how much depth and care Tolkien had for the imaginative consistency of this world he spent so long developing as a home for the languages he so lovingly created. I just think it's absolutely brilliant.

   That said though - ruminations on the whole series. I'll try to break these down into three main chunks:

1. Applicability of all the characters for a coherent moral framework: as is well-known among Tolkien nerds, he "cordially disliked allegory" and never meant for his stories to be taken as any sort of coherent real-world set of metaphors, instead preferring readers to simply enjoy the story on the merit of its linguistic beauties alone, and if deriving any lessons from what is told or done in the tales, to make these meanings themselves, knowing that there is a complex web of applicability built into the story so that many varying readings are possible and none completely wrong. That's a bold move from such an influential author - declaring his own death in the interpretative realm in the very prologue to his work, and saying "whatever this means to you, fine, let it mean that". But one aspect of this that I want to dive more deeply into is the non-allegorical but morally-consistent sense of Catholic virtue baked into the characters in the narrative, each with a universal lesson to teach a reader. Let me give a few examples:
• Frodo. We are all Frodo; sometimes called from the comforts of our known lives to undertake acts of bravery that scare and bewilder us, and we have to face those knowing we may fail.
• Sam.* We are all Sam; sometimes called by duty to support and uphold the struggles of our compatriots who are dealing with more than us, or even more than they can manage.
• Merry & Pippin. We are all "the spare hobbits"; free to attach ourselves, even ignorantly, to what seems like adventure or intrigue in the lives of our friends; and commendable when we achieve more in doing so than we could have ever expected.
• Gandalf. We are all Gandalf; expected to use our wisdom and experience to guide and protect those who are under our care.
• Aragorn. We are all Aragorn; expected to use our skill, strength and integrity to lead, inspire and fight for those who depend on us, also knowing that only by doing so can we become the men we are meant to be. (Sorry, there really aren't many female characters in these books. But my point stands.)
• Legolas & Gimli. We are all these dudes; worthy of utmost respect when we put aside our grudges to work together to repair generations-old wounds for the good of the world around us (especially when we're good at killing into the bargain).
• Boromir. We are all Boromir; capable of succumbing to temptation no matter how impenetrable we had thought our honour.
• Faramir. We are all Faramir; capable of overcoming temptation when not only our honour but the fate of the people we must defend is at stake.
• Eowyn. We are all Eowyn; to some degree boxed in by the norms and traditional expectations surrounding us, but capable of accomplishing incredible things when we throw off these shackles to carve our own path.
• Eomer. We are all Eomer; often thrust into geopolitical struggles that threaten our homes and families to extents that make us focus our anger outwards in ways we're not wholly safe in.
• Theoden. We are all Theoden; as devoted to our own realms as we may be, called to push past that factionalism and commit to international justice for the good of all.
• Treebeard. We are all Treebeard; often too stuck in our own little worlds, hoping that the troubles of the world will pass us by, even though we are strong enough to face those troubles decisively when we choose.
• Denethor. We are all Denethor; blinkered and thus prone to paranoia, and capable of abandoning our essential duties by giving up our hope.
• Saruman. We are all Saruman; far too susceptible to the lure of power even when we think ourselves too clever to become a victim of this trap, and so blind to the wretch we become when we fall into this.
• Galadriel. We aren't all Galadriel. Don't even try.
• Tom Bombadil. See Galadriel. Being as happy as him is worth a shot though.
• Gollum. We are all Gollum; there are things, vices or habits, in our life that can become so destructive that we become something unrecognisable even to ourselves, though we do not notice until those things are taken from us - and then we tend to lose our shit, and get into nasty patterns of untrustworthy neuroticism.
2. Richness of a lived-in world: Tolkien's worldbuilding is meticulous to the point of almost anal. Places' names have their own specific linguistic histories - they probably have numerous different names in different languages relating to when different people knew those places at different times. Same with people - Gandalf alone has at least four names I can think of off the top of my head. There are ruins that nobody remembers; there are scars on the landscape from battles millennia hence; there is a tangible sense of the shift shape of geopolitics between the lesser races watched over by the longevity and weariness of the elves; there is even, though religion is virtually unmentioned in the series itself, a strong sense of faith present in all the free folk - faith that the goodness with which Middle-Earth was created will ultimately always reassert itself, despite the temporal struggles it may be facing. The sheer depth to the massive history he made for this world is staggering - I mean, look at the dozen-or-so volumes The History of Middle-Earth that his son Christopher Tolkien has been painstakingly editing together out of his father's leftover notes. Frequent comparisons to George R.R. Martin are often made, but I haven't read Martin's works yet - so I'm reserving judgment on that particular for now.
3. You can tell how much fun he was having: though I'm sure it wasn't always an easy ride, Tolkien's love of language, and fantasy storytelling in particular, shines through on every page. Whether he's allowing Legolas to spend several paragraphs describing why the vibe of the trees in Fangorn Forest is so exciting only to be rebutted by Gimli spending several further paragraphs expounding the natural wonders of Helm's Deep's glittering caves; or whether it's writing entire stanzas of poetry in Elvish that a random character spits out and never bothers to even translate; or the bubbling undercurrent of good-humouredness and spirit - you really can just tell this was a labour of love. And that makes it all the lovelier to read.

   So there you have it. I read this whole series, excluding the appendix, when I was nine, and again when I was fifteen, so revisiting it with so much other reading and life-experience under my belt now truly was a delight. And I can't wait until I've finished reading enough other stuff to justify going back to it again. If you like reading for pleasure and beauty, these books are for you, even if you typically shun fantasy like the snob you are. If you love the movies but have never read these - oh man, there is so much extra depth you're missing out on.

* If you know the lore to even a halfway-accurate level, you will also approve of the fact that Sam is literally the only working-class character (other than maybe Gollum) in this whole list of main characters. All the rest of the major characters in this trilogy are royalty, aristocrats, or supernatural beings. Which - wtf, JRR?

Edit - obviously thematic interpretations of what Tolkien is saying these books are incredibly diverse, given the author's "cordial dislike of allegory in all its forms", and obviously a core thematic backbone throughout the trilogy is the Catholic ethic (expressed not allegorically but demonstratively), but I've just stumbled across a new YouTuber who summed up LotR's core theme in a profoundly succinct way: the conflict between "our desire to control the world against our need to control ourselves." Rich.

Pistache

This book, by Sebastian Faulks, is a brilliantly inventive and meta-Faustian anthology of spoofed imitation samples writing like other writers. A voice-skipping task with Faulks pulls off with great aplomb and good humour - the Dan Brown, T. S. Eliot and Noel Coward ones are particularly funny I thought - but in the sense of remaining spoiler free I won't give away too many of the names in there but they're all at least pretty funny. Worth keeping on the coffee table or it's the kind of book you could read on the Tube or something, pretty broad appeal to bibliophiles and literary-buffs all across the table I'd reckon for this one.

Know yourself through your Handwriting

This book, appropriately enough for an anonymous sheaflet from the 1970s that came for free with a box of breakfast cereal probably, would be an invaluable tool to anyone looking into psychology, criminal theory or practical forgery tips; and that's about all as I'll say on't.

How to Speak Emoji

This book is quite literally the least entertaining book I think I've ever reviewed for this blog. Do with that information what you please. One for the white elephant game bag...

Poetic Diction

This book by Owen Barfield (see this about his Christological work expanded upon); and it is immediately up there with my top twelve books of all time for sheer nonfictional grandeur of scope, efficacy and implication.

   It's a study in meaning, which is pretty complicated from the off - but I reckon with a bit of effort getting into his philological boots and throwing your imaginary Poeting Hat into the air a few times so you can really practice catching it on the way back down - this book does for poetry what the Necronomicon presumably does for necromancers. I don't touch that stuff personally. Or this for vegans. You get my gist? I hope you do, because I think I've got Owen's but it's hard to tell, because he will just lump a Latin or Greek or French or Aramaic quote at you like "OOF" with no subtitle translation. Editors take note.

   But still, I feel loath to even write a blogpost about it in case my fellow poets read it and surpass me in my dark powers of understanding. Jokes. Great book.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue

This book* by John McWhorter is a scintillating romp across the history of Albion, and the surprisingly wide array of people who've arrived, lived, died, fucked, killed, spoken and written there. The central premise is delightfully simple and is consistently paid off more and more with each chapter - ENGLISH IS WEIRD AS FUCK. Generally most Anglophones are, I think, aware of this basic reality, but prefer not to think about it, as attempting to untangle the logic of some of our most commonplace grammatical quirks can be as totally disorienting as if one had just been presented with an ancient unsolveable riddle. Who's to blame? Nobody really - it's just a shambles, with Celts, Jutes, Angles & Saxons, Danish vikings and those bloody French all getting variably involved, twisting shared syntactical formats almost-but-not-quite to breaking point Over & Over Again, the regular speakers of this malshapen mongrel language child basically just keeping calm and carrying on. And here we are. Fascinating stuff. Also poignant ground for that strange phenomenon that as one ponders the natural histories of language it is difficult to not also toy with a smallish variety of anarchistic axioms. Whatever they are.

* Confession time - I didn't read this book. I got it for free on an Audible trial (and then uninstalled it forever because fuck you Jeff Bezos) and listened to the whole thing while on a walk across northwestern Sheffield's outskirts. Given the nature of the book I'd 100% recommend listening to it rather than reading it because McWhorter himself narrates it & as you'd expect from an archaeo-philologist he genuinely knows how to pronounce all the stuff in Middle English, Old English, Old Norse and whatever else, and so you really get a feel for how the sloppages of evolution went down.

A Secret History of Christianity

This book by Mark Vernon is a fascinatingly erudite, mindblowingly holistically-applicable and thoroughly thought-provoking exploration of the work of Owen Barfield - probably the least well-known of the main Oxford literary threesome of the inklings, though the other two better known members of this club both cited him as of key inspiration early on in their artistic and intellectual careers.* In it, we're taken on an invigorating mystical romp across the history of an element absolutely central to the metaphysical efficacy of this predominant world religion: that all good, true and proper parts of one's life have their root and essence in the shared life of God - something as bafflingly simple as endlessly complex, a perennial truism that lies at the heart-core of all religions, if not in doctrine then I believe in pragmatic reality; yet it's a notion the sincere realisation of doesn't seem to have been very far up the pastoral or otherwise priority lists of most Christian leaders across the history of the Church and its faith.

   Barfield's work is incredibly potent, drawing on language, psychology, social and historical and cultural considerations, philosophy and poetry in its purest sense - Vernon re-examines the person and teachings of Christ through the lens of Barfield's analysis of said mystical truth; and the theological and practical out-worked upshots herein are massive. World-shaking. The raw powers of inner reflectivity and the human imagination, when enthralled to True Goodness & Beauty, as given in the gospels, is incredible - but to see the scope of such raging paradoxes in their fullness one must accept the mystical element for what it is: once discovered and thusly inhabited, it is not something, I don't think, one can easily then just step back from, if at all, as it is of a profundity, breadth, joy, seriousness, playfulness, creativity and noisy silence that to enter the psychospiritual headspace, the lived consciousness talked about by Christ and Barfield and Vernon, utterly transforms everything about who you think you are and how you think you can be in the world. Which shouldn't sound like much of a surprise, as this is the core promise of Christianity as a faith: but I hope it doesn't sound like a callous barb to say that my gradual apprehension of my lived experience of this fact, the secret hiding in plain sight in Christ's apostolic succession, has been far more like the 'second birth' of a transformative, actual conversion than the course of personally walking with God that led to my being baptised as a pre-teen. Can you become a Christian twice? I'm not even sure the answer to that matters. I've been very lucky to have grown up with such exposure to the faith, but in all the honesty of my heart and mind - I feel luckier to have meandered to the extents I have on that walk so that Jesus found me all the more truly and powerfully somewhere on the border-lands.

   I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in consciousness and the human experience, regardless of what credence you may or may not lend to the Christian faith. Vernon's writing is accessible, entertaining and illuminating, and while readers who come at this book from within a church may find it opens up some strange wondrous new doors, it may also be for you very hard going because the perspective of gospel reality in here is so wild: and for that reason I think readers who remain skeptical of most organized forms of Christian community and faith will find this a refreshingly original, and starkly eye-opening take on the whole matter. I'm going to add some of Owen Barfield's stuff onto my reading pile, then probably read this again relatively soon...

* These being of course J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis - and it shows.

the Etymologicon

This book by Mark Forsyth is, as its subtitle concisely proclaims, something of a circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language. It's been my go-to toilet book for the past six months or so, and honestly it's far more interesting than you'd maybe expect and certainly far more entertaining than I did. Everything from farts to frankfurts to Milton to nutshells to China to organs to testicles to cynicism to the fascinating story of the somewhat arguably insane self-made eunuch murderer who did an astonishing bulk of the legwork on proofing definitions for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary... having finished this book I don't think I'll ever look at my own language the same way again, to say nothing of the truly bizarre island culture that spawned it. A must-have for Werd Nerds, and if you're anything like me in terms of reading habits - it works brilliantly as a toilet book as the chunks are pretty much exactly poo sized. You know what I mean.

the Economy of the Word

This book, by Keith Tribe, explores themes and topics in the linguistic history of economics. I'm barely gonna write anything here as I already wrote a full review of it for the Rethinking Economics opinion blog (link below). It was a pretty sloggish read, but interesting in an academic sort of way; if you like economics, historical methodology, and the complexities of changeable language use in century-spanning contexts, then this book is right up your street.

HERE'S THE FULL REVIEW I DID

[Edit November 2016: it appears that during a recent re-vamp of Rethinking Economics' website, the entire blog has been lost into the Error 404 ether - so pasted below is my review's text.]

History is the art of constructing causal narratives between past events and holding them up for analysis. The history of economics – how it has been gradually built up and developed as a field of study over centuries – follows the same rule: historians studying the history of economics have to throw themselves fully into the heads of long-dead economists to try to perceive who or what influenced them, how, why, and to what effect on other deceased thinkers.

   Unfortunately, since both normal historical events and the economists studied by one studying the history of economics are, by definition, history – we run into the usual gamut of difficulties ascertaining exactly how a particular event happened, or exactly what a particular economist thought and why. The historiographical issues of correctly sourcing and interpreting texts are predictably smaller for tracing the history of an academic discipline than they are for tracing actual history, but by no means has this seen historians of economics refrain entirely from making unwarranted leaps of assertion.

   Keith Tribe’s book has this complex criticism running throughout. He takes a philological approach; closely scrutinising the language used in canonical texts of economic history to determine exactly what they originally meant. With immensely wide scholarship, he lays out the academic biographies, cultural contexts, and influencing factors on each writer he tackles, to lay the outputs of his philological analysis in an intelligible framework.

   The book’s content is in three parts. Firstly, a discussion of the word ‘economy’. It does not mean the same thing to us as it would have meant to an Ancient Greek or Adam Smith, and thus any historian of economics peering at older uses must revise what they understand the writer to mean. In this opening chapter, he draws out the evolution of the word’s definition from Aristotle to the 20th century, followed by an overview of how rough measures for this final concept of ‘economy’ (i.e. national income, or GDP) came to be numerically constructed. Secondly, he turns to Adam Smith, dissecting with indefatigable precision the historical influences and writings of the Scottish original economist, to show an internal consistency in Smithian arguments about trade in The Wealth of Nations; he also tackles ‘das Adam Smith problem’, the disjoint between selfishness-driven markets apparently espoused by Smith in his economic work, and the altruism-driven social harmonies at the heart of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, his prior treatise in moral philosophy. In the third section, he analyses the work of Karl Marx and Léon Walras, economists whose ideas seem almost wildly opposing given that aspects of their influence have led on the one hand to Communism and on the other to neoclassical apologists for free-market capitalism; but under close historical scrutiny, both of them derive their core understanding of society in a very similar way, from French political economists in an emergent industrial context.

   This content, separated from the main motor of the book which is the philological approach discussed above, would be exceedingly dry and there probably wouldn’t be much point reading it. But because Tribe has so effectively cracked open our awareness of how texts, economists, and language, are situated in historical circumstance, each section proves thoroughly insightful. As a book more about the historiography of economics than about its history, it serves as a refreshing and probably-much-needed rebuke to lazy modern historians who might see the word ‘labour’ in an 1848 article and read into it all their own 2015 assumptions and connotations about what that word implies and derives from. We need instead, when reading old texts, to make the effort of learning historical contexts, following linguistic usage roots back far enough to see where they split, understanding the processes of individual thought enough to recognise and respect them in a figure who we can only access by reading their writings. Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Léon Walras, and the dozens of other significant economists discussed in this book, did not produce their ideas in a vacuum alone with only a rough sketch of modern economic theories. That’s not how intellectual progress works. Thinkers’ contemporary settings, things that they read and people they spoke to and socio-political events that befell them, are of enormous importance and it is crucial that we have an acute sensitivity to these when attempting to do history of any kind, including economics. Likewise, the ability to properly grapple with words as historical entities is vital; and this entails sometimes making the imaginative leap into obsolete definitions so that we and whoever we’re reading are on the same page. Language is not constant, nor is economic theory, and the failure to appreciate this pair of stark facts will make a bad historian embarrass himself. Keith Tribe has done great work here in showing how essential to understanding the history of economics a philological approach is. He sheds small patches of light on several topics, but more importantly, demonstrates how hard it actually is to pin down definite knowledge if one is being sloppy. It is truly masterful scholarship.

   The book’s point is also, I think, an important one for the Rethinking Economics movement. Philological analysis of texts yields dense crossovers of influence and discipline – if there is solid historical evidence that Marxian and Walrasian economics derive from the same set of sources, then no conflicting theories should be beyond critical discussion of where they may both be overlappingly right. Also, the methodological approach to language and texts would be a useful one for economics students to learn; admittedly, it’s one that ends up with us being less easily able to know things, but much surer that we’re right when we do. Economics degrees seldom encourage strong verbal reasoning or perceptive reading, but these are skills we do need.

   For any reader interested in the history of economics, I would recommend this; compared to most other texts in the field it treats less of theoretical developments and individual economists’ projects, but for its overall point, widening the scope of how we do (or should do) history, it is an indispensable addition.