I recently spoke with legal scholar David A. Westbrook about his new book Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party from Routledge. Westbrook, who teaches at the University at Buffalo, has spent decades writing about global finance, security, and power. But this latest book is far from a dry academic treatise, instead consisting of a collection of conversations among disenchanted intellectuals trying to figure out what comes after the ruins of the 20th-century postwar settlement.
Read on (or listen) to learn more!
A Book Born from Disenchantment
Westbrook and his circle of intellectual pals started having these conversations around 2012, in the wake of the financial crisis. “Many of us were not sure, thinking about our own intellectual lives, that we would do it again,” he told me. “The university that we found ourselves in was not the university we thought we had joined.”
The book went through multiple incarnations, including a photo essay, a platonic dialogue, and a more conventional academic work, before settling into its final form: a memoir that protects the identity of Westbrook’s various interlocutors through pseudonyms while capturing what these conversations actually felt like. “We’d sort of fallen out of love,” he said about academic life, even while admittedly speaking from a place of considerable privilege.
I pressed him on this: why would someone who had succeeded by every conceivable metric — prestigious CV, successful children, all the boxes checked — could feel such misgivings? His answer was generational. “I think it goes without question,” he said, that his generation and the one above it had overseen a kind of managed (or, perhaps more accurately, mismanaged) decline. In the wake of the protests of 1968, those generations experienced “levels of hyper-individualism” that merged hippie self-expression with Chicago School economics: “Do whatever you want to do, and then along comes the Chicago school, and they say, do whatever you want to do while making money.”
The result was a cultural hollowing out. “We thought that sort of elite credentialing, I’m thinking of the Clinton-Obama years, could replace” older forms of social cohesion, “and that was an idiotic idea.” Obama was a year ahead of him at Harvard Law, and while Westbrook doesn’t claim his classmates who assumed power are evil, the book wrestles with how “our talk about power in the abstract keeps us from thinking about power in the particular.” The disenchantment has less to do with any sort of personal disappointment than with watching institutional forms fail to deliver on their promises.
What Does Leviathan Want for His Children?
For me, the book’s most evocative passage1 comes in Chapter 17, where Westbrook grapples with teaching “the rest,” i.e., the majority of students at non-elite institutions. “For the rest, that is, the majority of the students whom we teach rather than beget, devil take the hindmost. And that’s cruel,” he writes. “I often leave class sad, knowing I’m too late. I personally could have done more.”
I certainly could have. When my wife got a job at Carnegie Mellon in 2016 and we could move home to Pittsburgh, I left my tenure-track position at UT Arlington knowing I’d likely never be able to return to academia. Westbrook captures exactly what haunted me: “We teach them that they’re weak, and their world is shit. But they’re entitled to a choice of pronouns, and twice as long to take a test... Your feelings are correct, you’re doing fine. We lie, and then on the way home, listening to NPR or the like, we wonder about the sorry state of our political discourse.”
When I told him that this was a banger of a paragraph, he laughed. The whole section interrogates what he calls the “People’s University,” the mass institution that sorts millions into jobs while housing the occasional intellectual as ornamentation.
Basketball and Housing Markets
Westbrook also discussed his approach to capitalism. Instead of the usual left-right shadowboxing, he gave the example of basketball as a metaphor for market design. “If you add a three-point line to basketball, you change the game,”2 he explained. “So by analogy, what kind of housing market did we want to see in the 1990s and 2000s?”
This leads to his analysis of the 2008 financial crisis: securitization of mortgages wasn’t inherently evil but an attempt to expand homeownership by making lending easier. “There’s a lot to be said for the long-term U.S. policy to try to get people from modest backgrounds into homes. It’s ultimately a very conservative policy: we want people invested in their communities.”
The problem isn’t markets or bureaucracy per se, but our inability to think clearly about what we want these systems to do, much less their potential consequences. “We remain stuck in that rut” of simplistic left-right talk that’s “become meaningless.”
The Starlink Question
Another point of Westbrook’s has lingered with me: “We seem to have wandered into the notion that a company, Starlink, should control a huge chunk of our satellite communications. When did we cross that line?”
When I noted that they’d met whatever standards existed, bought access fairly, Westbrook agreed, explaining that’s exactly the problem. The point isn’t that Musk or Starlink broke rules. They followed them insofar as necessary to get those satellites up and running. But suddenly we have a world where private companies can turn communications on and off in war zones, affecting national security and sovereignty, and we as a polity never really decided that’s what we wanted.
This connects to his larger argument about well-intentioned people in positions of power. “I actually think that in a world in which people are mostly good-willed, we would like things to work properly,” he said. We want “the Republic to work properly, or better.” But we lack the conversational infrastructure to figure out what “properly” means when it comes to these massive technological and economic shifts. The Starlink example crystallizes how major decisions about power and infrastructure happen through accumulation rather than deliberation (true deliberation being a tall order indeed!).
Humanizing Bureaucracy Through Conversation
One of the book’s core proposals sounds modest enough on the surface, but is in fact rather daunting: if we’re stuck with rule by large organizations, we should humanize them through what Westbrook calls “para-ethnographic conversation.” Get bureaucrats talking to thoughtful outsiders who can reflect their work back to them, help them see the meaning in what they do.
“A lot of people will tell you a lot of things, if you ask them,” he said. The challenge is getting people to talk honestly about how they exercise power, “as opposed to simply speaking truth to power.”
This consists of making bureaucracy intelligent and somewhat accountable rather than purely democratic (which would be a rather terrifying notion, to the extent it could be implemented at all). Better conversations can’t fix everything, but they might help powerful actors understand what they’re actually doing.
The University as Ornament
When discussing the state of academia, Westbrook invoked an old joke about Eisenhower at Columbia. After being supreme commander of Allied Forces, Eisenhower addressed the faculty as “you employees of the university.” A senior scholar corrected him: “You are an employee of the university. We are the university.”
“That’s not what’s happening here,” Westbrook said. “We are managing huge numbers of people, millions of people.” The modern university serves multiple functions — social sorting, cultural cohesion through costly and seemingly superfluous add-ons like football — with intellectual life as merely an “ornament.”
He’s made peace with this reality while still believing education matters. “For the three months of the semester, I’m going to try to make you better,” he tells students. “The question isn’t, what do you know in terms of earning a high grade? The question is, how much better are you now than you were three months earlier?”
Europe’s Energy Crisis vs. American Dynamism
Despite everything, Westbrook sees reasons for hope in American culture. “One of the things that distresses me about Europe is they don’t start businesses,” he said, noting the insanely low startup numbers there compared to the U.S.
“There’s this sort of lack of energy there that I don’t get when I’m in Texas.” Even with our myriad political problems, “as a culture, I think that we’re, in some ways, doing better than a lot of people may think.”
The difference is palpable: Europe has giant firms but little entrepreneurial enthusiasm. America, for all its dysfunction, maintains what he calls “cultural energy, mojo.”
AI and the Motorcycle Problem
When teaching, Westbrook tells students who might use AI to write their essays: “I’m not reading your essays because I want to read your essays. Why would I [the subject-matter expert] want to read your essays for pleasure? I’m reading your essays as part of teaching ou.”
He compared it to “paying somebody else to run your laps or lift your weights.” His broader point about AI: “A motorcycle is not a better bicycle. It’s a different thing.”
This extends to his whole philosophy of technology. “The point of the basketball game is not to get as many balls in the basket as possible. We could design a conveyor belt.” Nobody would care to watch such a boring assembly-line process. But that insight, he admits, is “very different than the mindset of productive capitalism, which is all about outputs.”
Substack and the Search for New Venues
“I don’t want to shill for Substack, but it’s been huge for me,” Westbrook admitted. He’s met numerous people through the platform who’ve become actual friends and intellectual companions. “I’ve met a number of people that I respect and find interesting, and some are becoming friends, I think.”
The platform represents something broader he discusses in the book, which is the need for what he calls “university-adjacent” scenes where adult intellectual life can happen. Not as a replacement for degraded institutions, but as parallel spaces for serious thought.
Though he worries about platforms’ tendency toward “enshittification” as copying becomes costless, for now Substack offers a degree of genuine intellectual community.
Free Access and Conversation as Method
Westbrook made the digital version of Social Thought from the Ruins freely available (”I had to buy off the publisher”) because at this stage, he’s “really trying to get thinking out there.” He wants people “who may not have 50 bucks to put down on a paperback to read it.”
The book itself should be approached as “an invitation to converse, to think about some of these things, to think about how you would have participated in that conversation had you been in the room.” It’s “a little bit hopeful, and it’s a little bit regretful. And you know, there’s a fair amount of jokes and irony and some sadness... that’s life. It’s also intellectual life.”
When I joked that the short chapters made it good toilet reading3, he took it as a compliment. The book is “better understood as a literary book” than a standard academic monograph published in a minuscule font, which is precisely what makes it worth reading.
Read David A. Westbrook’s Social Thought From the Ruins (free digital access, as noted previously!), follow him on Substack, check out his faculty profile, read this essay on his genesis as a thinker, and see thoughtful reviews by Wessie du Toit at UnHerd and The Pathos of Things.
There are many; it’s a book written in such a way as to contain multitudes of those.
Thanks in no small part to the “quants” who began working in front offices in the mid-2000s, James Naismith’s peach-basket game is certainly over-optimized for this 1980s-era innovation, as I wrote here.
Hemorrhoids allowing, much of my own Deep Work occurs in that quiet, enclosed setting.
