David A. Westbrook’s “Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party”
How do we start building anew?
David A. Westbrook, longtime friend of TPPI and editor at the journal Telos, has just published his new book, Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote’s Dinner Party, which many in our circle will undoubtedly be interested in reading. The book is based on conversations among international social scientists between the 2008 financial crisis and Covid.
The e-book version is open access and can be downloaded for free here, or purchase the print version at either Routledge or Amazon. You can also read more of Westbrook’s writings at his Substack, Intermittent Signal.
More from the book’s press release:
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 [Quixote’s Dinner Party] 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?”
Colleagues in the wider academic community have lauded the value of the author’s critique.
“This is Westbrook at his best: sparkling insights, surprising connections, dashes of humor and thought-provoking reflections,” says Mary Ann Glendon, Learned Hand Professor of Law, emerita, at Harvard University, and a former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.
Adds Francisco O. Ramirez, Vida Jacks Professor of Education at Stanford University: “This fascinating book ends by inviting readers to begin again. To do what? To be engaged in imaging a second spring, no less. Via a set of erudite, quirky and controversial reflections on the erosion of meaning in key institutions, from the polity to the university, Westbrook invites readers to partake in conversations about freedom and security as well as knowledge and intellectuals.”
Starting today, and in effort to keep with Westbrook’s ambition to shift this conversation beyond the walls of the university as well as reach an international audience, Routledge is making Social Thought From the Ruins available without cost in both e-book and audiobook formats.
What Readers Are Saying about Social Thought From the Ruins
“As a theater maker, and curator of spaces and people, I found Westbrook’s insights and theories about constructing and deconstructing institutions useful, in the highest sense of the word.”
—Matthew Gasda, Playwright and Founder, Brooklyn Center for Theater Research
“Westbrook wrote a book like no other. Provocative and original, it feels like an engaged conversation with a well-read and well-traveled friend. You will be curious, puzzled, perplexed, challenged, shaken, rattled and eager to start again.”
—Vitor Gaspar, former Minister of Finance of Portugal
“A deeply thoughtful, genre-blurring meditation on the collapse of meaning in our data-saturated age.”
—Erik J. Larson, computer scientist and author of The Myth of AI
“Westbrook is a Renaissance man, whose breadth of knowledge makes him an icon in dialogues between the law and other disciplines: anthropology, sociology, history, literature, art, economics and international relations, dialogues that wrestle with the key issues of our times. Echoing Quixote’s shift in the twilight of his life from the idealism of the bygone cavalry of the Middle Ages towards the realism of the age that Sancho Panza exemplified, Westbrook shakes the narrative to explain contemporary challenges in the search for a new spring.”
—Rosa M. Lastra, Queen Mary University of London, Law
“The reader will be at once thrilled and puzzled, charmed and stunned, inspired and challenged—and much more. This is a book written by a serious academic like non-other I know of….[Westbrook’s] mastery of English and its literatures allows him to write as a poet. Poetry becomes what the poet means it to be—sometimes sad, often beautiful. It makes sense only after the reader ponders, goes back, thinks, and feels what its words captured and broadcast.”
—Charles Lemert, from the foreword
“Returning with passion to several key themes in his past writing, Bert Westbrook, navigator of the contemporary and quixotic dinner companion extraordinaire, evokes a structure of feeling that is acutely uncomfortable for those of us caught within bureaucratic universities, persecuted by their patron state.”
—George E. Marcus, UC Irvine, co-author of Anthropology as Cultural Critique
“How can those of us with intellectual inclinations lead secure and fulfilling lives today? And if neither the University nor the world beyond it can sustain intellectual activity—aside from research for medicine and technology, that is—then what is the point in nurturing such aspirations anyway? These questions are explored with wit and imagination in a new book by David A. Westbrook, Social Thought From the Ruins….The ‘ruins’ in the book’s title are those of the humanities and social sciences, in particular—disciplines which seem increasingly unable to foster original thought, to engage constructively with modern society, or to convince the public that they deserve to exist at all.
“Westbrook argues that the crisis of the University is bad not just for committed professors—a group he likens to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, who longs to be a gallant knight after the age of chivalry has already passed—but for all of us. The contemporary world is full of complex structures, from banks and corporations to armies and government bureaucracies, which need competent people to lead them and competent critics to save them from their own worst tendencies. Only a University-like institution can fill these roles, even if it is not doing a very good job at the moment. As Westbrook puts it, ‘sickness in the University is sickness in the gonads of the polity,’ a cancer in society’s reproductive organs.”
—Wessie du Toit, UnHerd
Topics: Reflections & Dialogues