[{"id":310358,"date":"2026-09-06T04:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T08:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310358"},"modified":"2026-08-31T04:03:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T08:03:43","slug":"domination-subordination-dynamics-five-foundational-books-challenging-illegitimate-authority","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/domination-subordination-dynamics-five-foundational-books-challenging-illegitimate-authority.html","title":{"rendered":"Domination\/Subordination Dynamics: Five Foundational Books Challenging Illegitimate Authority"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Robert Jensen<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Many of the books that shaped my work as a professor, author, and activist came into my life during my first two years of graduate school (1988-90), the most exciting period of concentrated learning I\u2019ve ever experienced. As I write in my new book, This I Don\u2019t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>I got to grad school and quickly realized that I was \u201can undereducated person getting a second chance to learn\u201d:<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t really start thinking\u2014in the sense of a disciplined process of trying to understand how the physical and social worlds work\u2014until I showed up for a Ph.D. program in mass communication at the University of Minnesota in 1988 when I was thirty years old. I had graduated from a perfectly respectable public high school and public college, and I had earned a professional MA at a perfectly respectable private university. I had spent a decade working at perfectly respectable newspapers, exposed to a wide range of public officials and ordinary people. In all those endeavors, I learned a lot about the world. But I had yet to think systematically about how the world works.<\/p>\n

Here are some of the things I\u2019ve learned and the books that were important to me at the beginning of that education.<\/p>\n

What I learned about being male<\/strong><\/p>\n

Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987<\/em> by Andrea Dworkin (1988)<\/p>\n

In graduate school I studied freedom of expression, and at the time one of the key debates was over the radical feminist critique of pornography. Like many men, I assumed that the critique had to be crazy, because radical feminists were crazy, because \u2026 why? Because I had been socialized to be afraid of feminists. Reading Andrea Dworkin and other radical feminists made me realize that their movement was not a threat to men but a gift<\/a>, offering us a way to resist the traps set for men by institutionalized male dominance (that is, patriarchy). \u201cI Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape\u201d<\/a> in this volume may be the most influential essay I have ever read.<\/p>\n

(For details, see my 2017 book, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men<\/em><\/a>, and my 2007 book, Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity<\/a><\/em>.)<\/p>\n

What I learned about being white<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Fire Next Time<\/em> by James Baldwin (1963)<\/p>\n

I was born in 1958 in North Dakota. It\u2019s hard to get any whiter, not just in ancestry but socialization. I gave no thought to power dynamics until I went to college, but even then it was easy to ignore racial realities. That started to change when I dropped out of college for a year in the late 1970s and took a low-level clerk job in a government office in Washington, DC. For the first time, I was in a multi-racial setting and worked with black people, which forced me to re-evaluate the stereotypes I had unconsciously internalized. But it was James Baldwin who finally knocked (rhetorically) some sense into me a decade later. Baldwin\u2019s writings from the early 1960s not only opened my eyes to black experience but also to how racism distorts white people\u2019s perceptions of ourselves.<\/p>\n

(For details, see my 2005 book, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

What I learned about living in an imperial state<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Chomsky Reader<\/em> by Noam Chomsky, edited by James Peck (1987)<\/p>\n

When I got to my graduate program, everyone was discussing the propaganda model<\/a> developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, which changed the way I understood mass media and my own short career in newspaper journalism. I picked up The Chomsky Reader<\/em> and realized that I had much more to learn from him. I took his essay \u201cThe Responsibilities of Intellectuals\u201d<\/a> to heart, and his critique of U.S. foreign policy and militarism shaped my decisions about how to engage politically for two decades.<\/p>\n

(For details, see my 2004 book, Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

What I learned about living in a capitalist society<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Great Transformation <\/em>by Karl Polanyi (1944)<\/p>\n

I had only a vague understanding of the Marxist critique of capitalism and knew I had to get up to speed. Unfortunately, a lot of Marxist literature was, and still is, didactic and\/or boring. But I found a groove with Karl Polanyi, a critic of capitalism but not a dogmatic Marxist. I started to grasp the implications of the commodification of land and labor, and after reading his work I would never again use the term free market without scare quotes around \u201cfree.\u201d<\/p>\n

(For details, see my 2013 book, Arguing for Our Lives: A User\u2019s Guide to Constructive Dialog<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n

What I learned about ecological crises<\/strong><\/p>\n

New Roots for Agriculture<\/em> by Wes Jackson (1980)<\/p>\n

I always thought of myself as an environmentalist, but Wes Jackson\u2019s book on \u201cthe problem of <\/em>agriculture\u201d<\/a> deepened my ecological understanding. Going back 10,000 years to the destruction unleashed by annual grain agriculture, Jackson showed how our ecological crises started long before the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels. His analysis of how well-meaning people have abetted that destruction expanded my analysis of culprits\u2014no longer could I blame it all on greedy CEOs and corrupt politicians. Jackson<\/a> brought intellectual depth to the famous line from Pogo, \u201cWe have met the enemy and he is us.\u201d<\/p>\n

(For details, see my 2022 book written with Jackson, An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

For almost four decades, my work has focused on these five topics. How does human nature play out in today\u2019s social structures to produce domination\/subordination dynamics in sex\/gender<\/a>, race<\/a>, global affairs<\/a>, economics<\/a>, and the human exploitation of the larger living world<\/a>? These books didn\u2019t offer neat, tidy, paint-by-number answers but laid out analytic frameworks that guided my choices about how to teach, what to write, and where to direct my activist energy.<\/p>\n

One last important aspect of this reading: All these books were recommended to me by my late friend Jim Koplin<\/a>, whom I met in the first month of my graduate program. He had been a psychology professor until he retired early and dedicated his life to political resistance, community organizing, and urban gardening. From 1988 to his death in 2012 at age 79, Jim was my best friend and intellectual partner<\/a>. He was 25 years older, and I benefited from his wisdom and experience. Jim shows up by name in several sections of This I Don\u2019t Believe<\/em>, but his influence is in every sentence.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve said many times, I don\u2019t know who I would be if I hadn\u2019t met Jim Koplin, but I am pretty sure I wouldn\u2019t be the person I am today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Robert Jensen Many of the books that shaped my work as a professor, author, and activist came into my life during my first two years of graduate school (1988-90), the most exciting period of concentrated learning I\u2019ve ever experienced. As I write in my new book, This I Don\u2019t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1743,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1743"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310358"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310644,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310358\/revisions\/310644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310877,"date":"2026-09-04T14:45:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T18:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310877"},"modified":"2026-09-04T09:50:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:50:14","slug":"jeff-jarvis-on-mark-twain-americas-first-celebrity-author-and-publisher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/jeff-jarvis-on-mark-twain-americas-first-celebrity-author-and-publisher.html","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Jarvis on Mark Twain, America\u2019s First Celebrity Author and Publisher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jeff Jarvis at Literary Hub<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother\u2019s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted investor in the failed Paige Compositor, a competitor to the successful Linotype; as an early best-selling author and cultural celebrity; and as a publisher trying to invent a business model for books as an industry.<\/p>\n

Now that their machinery could produce volume, publishers needed ways to sell at scale, to build the modern phenomenon of the best-seller. The problem: In 1859, only 1,090 bookstores dotted America. By 1914, there were still only 3,501. So if readers couldn\u2019t find books, books had to find their readers. For certain authors and publishers, including Twain, that was accomplished through subscription publishing, with door-to-door canvassers taking orders for books before they were printed. Until the end of the nineteenth century, three quarters of books in the U.S. were sold this way.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Jarvis at Literary Hub: In the history of the invention of the typesetting machine and the consequent birth of mass media, Mark Twain is the Zelig of our tale, returning frequently as a typesetter in his brother\u2019s ratty newspaper; as a tramp printer witnessing an explosion of progress in printing technology; as the bankrupted…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310877"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310880,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310877\/revisions\/310880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310873,"date":"2026-09-04T13:45:52","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T17:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310873"},"modified":"2026-09-04T09:43:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T13:43:59","slug":"mits-ad-hoc-committee-on-ai-use-in-teaching-learning-and-research-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/mits-ad-hoc-committee-on-ai-use-in-teaching-learning-and-research-training.html","title":{"rendered":"MIT\u2019s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the MIT<\/em> website:<\/p>\n

\"\"This report is a call to action.<\/p>\n

Through five intense months of meetings, research, and outreach across the MIT community, the Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training sought to understand the role of generative AI in the life and educational mission of the Institute and recommend how to navigate its challenges and opportunities.<\/p>\n

In January 2026, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Roger Levy charged us1<\/a><\/sup>\u00a0specifically to:<\/p>\n