I have been reading Bert Westbrook for a long time. Provocative but in a way that invites the reader in, his writing has always provided a critically important space for taking up the invitation ot rethink what had, until that moment, been unconsciously assumed to be so ordinary and natural that it defied the value of thought.
So I was delighted to see news of the publication of Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party, his long term book and self-described passion project, based upon conversations across nations, disciplines, and decades. The e-book is open access, that is, free to the reader. You can download the free digital text, or buy a paperback or a hardback book, at the link above, or at Social Thought From the Ruins on Amazon.
For those interested, and one ought to be, ere is the official blurb:
New book by UB Law professor David A. Westbrook asks ‘How do we make peace with our modernity’
The book, “Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party,” is based on conversations among international social scientists between the 2008 financial crisis and Covid
BUFFALO, N.Y. – We are, says legal scholar David A. Westbrook, living in a transitional moment in history – a time when long-held assumptions about the world order and liberal democracy seem to be upended every day.
“Our history [seems] to have entered its autumn,” he writes. “How do we start building anew? What do we build, with what we still have?”
A new book by the University at Buffalo School of Law professor, “Social Thought from the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party” (Routledge, 2025), offers a deeply reasoned and ultimately hopeful set of answers.
Westbrook holds the Louis A. Del Cotto Professorship at UB and directs the school’s New York City Program in Business and Law. He brings to his latest project insights from an international group of social scientists with whom he has been in conversation for the past two decades. Drawing on the best in interdisciplinary scholarship and thought, he proposes a way forward for both academics and policymakers.
“QDP is a long-term passion project, a collaborative effort to grapple with where we are as academics confronting the problems of the university, bureaucracy and power, and having an intellectual life today,” Westbrook says. “Maybe rethinking the humanities and critical social sciences, law included. That’s all!
“It’s very much a book about the intellectual zeitgeist, our anxieties and hopes and sensibilities, which are not entirely or even mostly rational topics. Therefore, in lieu of academic explication or argument, QDP is sort of polyphonic literary meta-scholarship, couched as a memoir of conversations among international social scientists between the financial crisis and Covid. As my interlocutor Vitor Gaspar, a senior official at the International Monetary Fund and formerly finance minister of Portugal said, ‘a book like no other.’”
Social Thought from the Ruins is built in five sections: Crises of Meaning; Curiosity; Powerful Subjects; New Buildings from Old Stones; and Hopes. Chapters address such topics as the role of curiosity inside and outside the university; the role of teaching in social change; and how it might be possible to humanize the bureaucracies that hold increasing sway over our lives.
“An extended critique of academic life today and the context of our own thinking,” Routledge says, “this book interrogates aspects of our modernity, with its pervasive sense of crisis and uncertainty, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about things like the state and power, data and violence.
“Will the critical social sciences have anything to offer the exercise of power, or are we doomed to incessant and ineffectual critique? Can bureaucracy be made at least more accountable, if not democratic? Conversely, can we feel less alienated from the structures of power that rule us, or that fail to govern at all? Can we feel at home?”
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