A venture into satire

In which I share:

A Decolonized Review of Peasants into Frenchmen

   A cheeky homage to my years of graduate school

First off, I'd like to give Mr. Weber credit for managing to get this book published. I don't think I could have convinced an editor to accept this manuscript, but it helps that he has blue eyes, is male, and especially that he has the privilege of being a literate human being.

I take issue with the premise of this book. Prof. Weber would like to examine the incorporation of rural peasants in France into the French imagined community. Even an undergraduate can see how Eurocentric a book on French people in France is. Prof. Weber also used mainly French primary sources, which raises accessibility and justice issue for readers who do not speak French.

On the subject of sources, I was more than a little upset than Weber only cites Das Kapital once. I know that Marx was German, that DK was written 30 years before this book begins, and that this is a social and cultural history not about the nineteenth-century intellectual milieu, but as Weber says in the introduction, there were socialists in France, so I am shocked that he did not include a thorough analysis of the one socialist text I know (unless it was in chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, or 27, because I admit I didn't read those).

Finally, I don't understand why Weber did not complement his analysis with comparisons to 1970s America, which would have been useful and more interesting to me. I kept thinking he would go there, but he never quite did. To be sure, this would have added another 200 pages and the book is already too long, at 500 pages. Perhaps he could have cut out some of that stuff on France to save space.