The Itch to Write

2024 was my year of playing pundit. In addition to twenty short columns for this newsletter, I published twenty-two more, chronicling the presidential election, for the European web magazine Le grand continent (they also appeared on the Tocqueville 21 website). I published several articles in the British web magazine Unherd (mostly on French politics) a few book reviews, and four longer, more serious articles for a variety of academic and non-academic publications. Too much? Undoubtedly (see here for a list). I suffer from what the French call, not kindly, the démangeaison d’écrire—literally, the itch to write. I suppose it’s a relatively harmless affliction, but it distracts from more serious things. I could justify it to myself while I was directing Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies, and didn’t have the bandwidth or energy to concentrate on a book project. But now that I have completed that service, and am on leave, and the election is over, it’s time for restraint. One of my resolutions for 2025 is to write less, and to concentrate on the new book, which I am very excited about. Its tentative title: The Opening of the Western Mind: A New History of the Enlightenment. But here, blatantly contradicting the resolution, are some brief thoughts about my 2024 publications, and some self-criticism.

Looking back over the campaign writings, it’s depressing to see how hard it was for me to move beyond the liberal conventional wisdom. For what it is worth, I generally maintained a tone of cautious skepticism: never assumed Trump was finished, always warned how little we could trust the polls. But, like most liberals, I still found it almost inconceivable that Americans could re-elect a twice-impeached, multiply indicted, massively corrupt and dangerously unhinged insurrectionist to the most powerful job in the world. Like so many others, I grasped onto whatever thin reeds of hope for the Democrats I could find, notably after the Harris-Trump debate. The progressive left saw much more clearly than liberals like me how deeply economic pain and resentment (due, in part, to neoliberal policies that mainstream Democrats supported) was pushing voters to Trump. Conservatives saw much more clearly the impact of the border issue, and also of Joe Biden’s woeful incapacity. One of my better columns, published in mid-October, focused precisely on the economic divisions (prompted by a revealing Jacobin magazine survey that my colleague Matt Karp had tweeted about), and worried that Kamala Harris wouldn’t be able to overcome them. My own attempt at a post-election post-mortem also acknowledged them, while insisting that they were not the only reason for Trump’s narrow victory. The new media environment also mattered—massively. In the end, the piece of my election punditry that I like the best was done for this newsletter during the summer and was more an exercise in amateur sociology than a horse race story: A Beach House Divided Against Itself (I owe the title, like so much else, to my brilliant spouse).

As for my longer writings, it is probably too early to say how they will hold up in the long run. My essay “Bourgeois Enlightenment Revivified,” for the journal French History, was essentially a think piece as I looked ahead to the Enlightenment book. It combined a friendly critique of existing social histories of eighteenth-century intellectual life with an argument about the connection between Enlightenment writing and the consumer revolution. It was also an homage to my brilliant friend Colin Jones, to whom the entire journal issue was dedicated (Colin once wrote a brilliant article entitled “Bourgeois Revolution Revivified”). Speaking of Colin, it was a privilege to work with him on our co-edited book French Revolutionary Lives, which came out this fall, and has wonderful contributions on a wide range of individuals, some well-known and some not, from the revolutionary era. My own essay for it was on the not exactly obscure Napoleon Bonaparte, and how Tocqueville’s views of him illuminate the changing art of biography. Among other long pieces, my survey of Samuel Moyn’s career, “The Anti-Liberal,” got a fair amount of attention, including a long and courteous reply from Moyn himself on Twitter/X. But we’ll see how much it ends up contributing to interpretations of this key contemporary intellectual.

I also published a couple of more personal pieces of writing this year. One was for this newsletter: a set of reflections prompted by the Jewish “days of awe” that I had great fun writing. And then, most importantly for me, was my long essay about my mother, Pearl Kazin Bell, which came out in The New York Review in February. It was a terribly difficult piece to write, dealing as it did with her romantic life, her personal struggles, and my own relationship with her. I was enormously fortunate in my editors at the NYR, whose advice improved it to no end. My campaign writings, like most punditry, have already vanished into the dim recesses of the Cloud. But if any of my essays from 2024 still attract readers after we wish this disastrous year good riddance, I hope it is “In My Mother’s Archive.”

So: Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy New Year, and I hope you will be hearing from me a little less in 2025.