1400889545
9781400889549
B076ZY2HC3
3.67
293
unknown
Feb 27, 2018
liked it
Ibn Khaldun (1132 - 1406) doesn’t get first billing as the most popular medieval, Arabic-speaking philosopher-polymath of his day; that honor usually
Ibn Khaldun (1132 - 1406) doesn’t get first billing as the most popular medieval, Arabic-speaking philosopher-polymath of his day; that honor usually goes to either Ibn Rushd, anglicized as Averroes (1126 – 1198) or the earlier Ibn Sina, anglicized as Avicenna (980 – 1037). However, Ibn Khaldun is often considered one of the greatest social scientists to work in Africa during the Middle Ages – so great, in fact, that his Muqaddimah (roughly, “prolegomena” or “introduction”) is still considered one of the first attempts at a comprehensive sociology. Robert Irwin is a historian and novelist who became fascinated with Arabic-language thought early in life, including Ibn Khaldun himself, who is the subject of “Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography” (Princeton University Press, 2019).
Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis under the Hafsid Sultanate and lived a highly peripatetic life traveling between Nasrid Granada and Mamluk Cairo. He travelled all over north Africa looking for a regular job as a scholar, secretary, or scribe, but never found anything permanent; many scholars interpret his pessimism regarding history through this failure. Those familiar with the Muqaddimah will know that it lays out a cyclical philosophy of history with eras of alternating bourgeoning and decay. Irwin incorporates this idea throughout the book, suggesting that Ibn Khaldun drew carefully from his own experiences in formulating it. This isn’t surprising considering the state of northern Africa at the time, which was comprised of several fractured mini-states. In fact, there’s quite a bit about the internecine tribal politics of many of these groups, especially in the first half of the book, which will probably only be of interest to a specialist.
One of the most enduring theses of the Muqaddimah is that society is composed of tribal, itinerant groups (think of the Bedouins) and more settled, urban groups. Ibn Khaldun thinks ‘asabiyya (roughly, “group cohesion” but also with connotations of “tribalism”) is the impetus which allows the smaller tribes to conquer the larger populations where this solidarity has dissipated. Once they have gained power, their sense of ‘asabiyya will in turn start to decline, making way for the next rural group – and so the cycle continues, repeating itself about once every four generations in Ibn Khaldun’s reckoning. Other historiographers like Giambattista Vico and Arnold Toynbee took Ibn Khaldun’s idea of a cyclical history and ran with it, adding to and eliding from as they felt necessary.
One of Irwin’s points is that, for better or worse, Ibn Khaldun has been co-opted by many other thinkers as well. In just a few pages, he compares him with Thomas Mann, Confucius, Polybius, and Oswald Spengler – without providing much comparative insight. Because Ibn Khaldun’s analysis includes some economics, some Marxists have glommed onto him as an Ur-Marxist. Because of his skepticism toward received myths, he’s been called a rationalist – despite making overt references to magic and sorcery. Someone even suggested, not long after the election of Ronald Reagan, that Ibn Khaldun’s ideas prefigured the Laffer Curve. In short, he’s the Rorschach test of medieval, Arabic-speaking polymaths. He has a history of being whoever you want him to be.
If you want a one-book resource that summarizes Ibn Khaldun’s major ideas, you’ll get that here – but you’ll also get a lot of extra information, like the aforementioned politicking, speculations regarding whether he may have been a Sufi, and other topics that may seem only marginally relevant. This is a great resource if you’re already moderately knowledgeable about Ibn Khaldun’s body of work, especially if you’ve already read the Muqaddimah and Kitab al-Ibar (“Book of Lessons,” something akin to an historical encyclopedia). If you want a broader or more general introduction, Irwin may give too much detail about African politics or secondary analysis about the historical reception of the Muqaddimah instead of looking at just Ibn Khaldun’s ideas themselves. Read alongside the Muqaddimah itself as ancillary material or under the tutelage of a course that helped contextualize the information, this would have been a better reading experience. I just don’t have the background in medieval African or Islamic history to get as much out of it as I possible could have. ...more
Ibn Khaldun was born in Tunis under the Hafsid Sultanate and lived a highly peripatetic life traveling between Nasrid Granada and Mamluk Cairo. He travelled all over north Africa looking for a regular job as a scholar, secretary, or scribe, but never found anything permanent; many scholars interpret his pessimism regarding history through this failure. Those familiar with the Muqaddimah will know that it lays out a cyclical philosophy of history with eras of alternating bourgeoning and decay. Irwin incorporates this idea throughout the book, suggesting that Ibn Khaldun drew carefully from his own experiences in formulating it. This isn’t surprising considering the state of northern Africa at the time, which was comprised of several fractured mini-states. In fact, there’s quite a bit about the internecine tribal politics of many of these groups, especially in the first half of the book, which will probably only be of interest to a specialist.
One of the most enduring theses of the Muqaddimah is that society is composed of tribal, itinerant groups (think of the Bedouins) and more settled, urban groups. Ibn Khaldun thinks ‘asabiyya (roughly, “group cohesion” but also with connotations of “tribalism”) is the impetus which allows the smaller tribes to conquer the larger populations where this solidarity has dissipated. Once they have gained power, their sense of ‘asabiyya will in turn start to decline, making way for the next rural group – and so the cycle continues, repeating itself about once every four generations in Ibn Khaldun’s reckoning. Other historiographers like Giambattista Vico and Arnold Toynbee took Ibn Khaldun’s idea of a cyclical history and ran with it, adding to and eliding from as they felt necessary.
One of Irwin’s points is that, for better or worse, Ibn Khaldun has been co-opted by many other thinkers as well. In just a few pages, he compares him with Thomas Mann, Confucius, Polybius, and Oswald Spengler – without providing much comparative insight. Because Ibn Khaldun’s analysis includes some economics, some Marxists have glommed onto him as an Ur-Marxist. Because of his skepticism toward received myths, he’s been called a rationalist – despite making overt references to magic and sorcery. Someone even suggested, not long after the election of Ronald Reagan, that Ibn Khaldun’s ideas prefigured the Laffer Curve. In short, he’s the Rorschach test of medieval, Arabic-speaking polymaths. He has a history of being whoever you want him to be.
If you want a one-book resource that summarizes Ibn Khaldun’s major ideas, you’ll get that here – but you’ll also get a lot of extra information, like the aforementioned politicking, speculations regarding whether he may have been a Sufi, and other topics that may seem only marginally relevant. This is a great resource if you’re already moderately knowledgeable about Ibn Khaldun’s body of work, especially if you’ve already read the Muqaddimah and Kitab al-Ibar (“Book of Lessons,” something akin to an historical encyclopedia). If you want a broader or more general introduction, Irwin may give too much detail about African politics or secondary analysis about the historical reception of the Muqaddimah instead of looking at just Ibn Khaldun’s ideas themselves. Read alongside the Muqaddimah itself as ancillary material or under the tutelage of a course that helped contextualize the information, this would have been a better reading experience. I just don’t have the background in medieval African or Islamic history to get as much out of it as I possible could have. ...more
Notes are private!
0
1
not set
May 28, 2024
Jun 08, 2024
Kindle Edition
0060517603
9780060517601
0060517603
4.42
625
Feb 2018
Feb 27, 2018
None
Notes are private!
1
not set
Sep 23, 2023
Sep 22, 2023
Hardcover
0691194343
9780691194349
0691194343
3.56
187
unknown
Mar 05, 2019
None
Notes are private!
1
not set
Sep 04, 2023
Sep 04, 2023
Paperback
1594204969
9781594204968
1594204969
4.05
686
Oct 27, 2015
Oct 27, 2015
it was amazing
Long, unwieldy subtitles are par for the course these days, so I won’t blame the author for “Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Tow
Long, unwieldy subtitles are par for the course these days, so I won’t blame the author for “Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe – and Started the Protestant Revolution” (Penguin Press, 2016) when the first two words alone would have sufficed. “Brand Luther” was meant to mark the five-hundredth anniversary of Luther posting his infamous ninety-five theses onto the church door in Wittenberg and thereby turning his sleepy university town in northwestern Germany into a center of a controversy the size of which he could barely imagine. Author Andrew Pettegree is a professor at St. Andrews University and has written several books on the intersection of early modern history (especially the Reformation), communication, and early print culture.
The thesis of Pettegree’s book is that Luther and Wittenberg University had a special synergistic relationship. Without Luther’s acerbic, unrelenting wit, Wittenberg would have remained as obscure as it was before Luther arrived; equally, without the special tools and scholarship that the university provided him, Luther would have lived out his life as a quiet, unassuming monk. Luther’s theology grew increasingly popular but reached an even larger audience being written in Luther’s vernacular German (as opposed to the lingua franca of Latin). Together with the artwork of Lucas Cranach, he helped not only change the theological Overton window on ideas about the role of the pope, free will, and indulgences, but did so in a way that turned Luther into a household name.
Luther was meticulous in ensuring his short Flugschriften (acerbic, short pamphlets on various theological topics) would appeal to a broader public, publishing them in small, portable editions that were both inexpensive and easy to read. When he translated the Old Testament, he published it in installments spread out over a long period so people would have the money to afford to read it in its entirety. One of the centerpieces of the book is the relationship between Luther and Lucas Cranach, with whom he had a robust friendly relationship. Both realized that the work they did together amplified the reputation of the other. Cranach’s talents were so valued because he was able to visually represent Luther’s ideas and arrange his images on the page so that they were better suited for the new literary forms of the pamphlet and the book.
Publishers were quick to notice the popularity of Luther’s ideas. His publications almost single-handedly kept many of the printers in and around Wittenberg in business, thereby publicizing the often-recondite subjects of theological debate. Luther railed against the idea that churchgoers needed priests to interpret the Bible for them. He urged his followers to read the Bible for themselves – in their own language, not the language of the Church – and let their own conscience be the arbiter of how it moved and affected them.
This is a fantastic book that serves to highlight the major points of Luther’s life while also describing how he went on to not only fundamentally change the Church but also deeply thought about the ways in which he marketed his ideas to a broad readership. Words like “brand” and “marketing” are now tied up with a kind of corporatism and capitalism that didn’t exist half a millennium ago. However, Pettegree makes an outstanding argument that Luther created something ineffably “Lutheran” in his writing – in his aesthetic, his typography, in his unrelenting vituperation against anything about the Church that irritated him even a bit - and the editorial decisions he made upon publishing. In doing so, he created an enduring reputation for himself, his ideas, and launched Wittenberg into being one of the greatest centers of book publication in Europe. “Brand Luther” combined with another book I read for Historathon2023 – Michael Massing’s brilliant “Fatal Discord” – is a wonderful mini-education on the first few decades of the Reformation and Martin Luther’s sui generis role in it. ...more
The thesis of Pettegree’s book is that Luther and Wittenberg University had a special synergistic relationship. Without Luther’s acerbic, unrelenting wit, Wittenberg would have remained as obscure as it was before Luther arrived; equally, without the special tools and scholarship that the university provided him, Luther would have lived out his life as a quiet, unassuming monk. Luther’s theology grew increasingly popular but reached an even larger audience being written in Luther’s vernacular German (as opposed to the lingua franca of Latin). Together with the artwork of Lucas Cranach, he helped not only change the theological Overton window on ideas about the role of the pope, free will, and indulgences, but did so in a way that turned Luther into a household name.
Luther was meticulous in ensuring his short Flugschriften (acerbic, short pamphlets on various theological topics) would appeal to a broader public, publishing them in small, portable editions that were both inexpensive and easy to read. When he translated the Old Testament, he published it in installments spread out over a long period so people would have the money to afford to read it in its entirety. One of the centerpieces of the book is the relationship between Luther and Lucas Cranach, with whom he had a robust friendly relationship. Both realized that the work they did together amplified the reputation of the other. Cranach’s talents were so valued because he was able to visually represent Luther’s ideas and arrange his images on the page so that they were better suited for the new literary forms of the pamphlet and the book.
Publishers were quick to notice the popularity of Luther’s ideas. His publications almost single-handedly kept many of the printers in and around Wittenberg in business, thereby publicizing the often-recondite subjects of theological debate. Luther railed against the idea that churchgoers needed priests to interpret the Bible for them. He urged his followers to read the Bible for themselves – in their own language, not the language of the Church – and let their own conscience be the arbiter of how it moved and affected them.
This is a fantastic book that serves to highlight the major points of Luther’s life while also describing how he went on to not only fundamentally change the Church but also deeply thought about the ways in which he marketed his ideas to a broad readership. Words like “brand” and “marketing” are now tied up with a kind of corporatism and capitalism that didn’t exist half a millennium ago. However, Pettegree makes an outstanding argument that Luther created something ineffably “Lutheran” in his writing – in his aesthetic, his typography, in his unrelenting vituperation against anything about the Church that irritated him even a bit - and the editorial decisions he made upon publishing. In doing so, he created an enduring reputation for himself, his ideas, and launched Wittenberg into being one of the greatest centers of book publication in Europe. “Brand Luther” combined with another book I read for Historathon2023 – Michael Massing’s brilliant “Fatal Discord” – is a wonderful mini-education on the first few decades of the Reformation and Martin Luther’s sui generis role in it. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Sep 2023
Sep 01, 2023
Hardcover
0691211140
9780691211145
0691211140
3.75
4
unknown
Jun 15, 2021
liked it
Over the summer of 2021, a new museum called the Humboldt Forum opened in Berlin, which combined the acquisitions of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin
Over the summer of 2021, a new museum called the Humboldt Forum opened in Berlin, which combined the acquisitions of the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the Museum of Asian Art. H. Glenn Penny’s book is one of the newest additions to the vast range of books that comment on the role of museums (especially ethnological museums) whose collections were largely the result of imperialism and other coercive practices. Questions about imperialism, artifact repatriation, and how both relate to the building of contemporary museums has been one of my interests since I read my first book on the subject, James Cuno’s thought-provoking “Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage” in 2013, which I also reviewed on Goodreads.
Despite the title, the role of Alexander von Humboldt remains very much in the background of the book. Humboldt, often regarded as one of the founding figures of ethnological studies, wanted to engage in a vast study of the world’s people with the goal of creating a kind of key to the fundamentals of all human culture. A long quote about Humboldt’s beliefs from Penny’s book will give some insight into what Humboldt’s goal ultimately was. “While traveling the world, Bastian [one of the ethnologists discussed below] had seen patterns among people’s actions and their creations. He saw, for example, the emergence of priestly classes worldwide, similar uses of fetishes in religion in different parts of the world, similar needs among vastly different peoples to erect monuments to gods, to ancestors, or as expressions of self. He believed that the consistencies and differences in such patterns offered him ways to get at fundamental modes of thought: basic, elementary ideas shared by all people across space and time. There was, he continually argued, a number of ‘psychological original elements’ that coursed through ‘the heads of all peoples, in all times and history’” (p. 24 of the hardback edition).
To put the matter in Bastian’s own words from one of his own books published in 1860, “If the incidental features of narration in nursery tales and proverbs, sayings and modes of speed, we encounter the same idea, be it in England or Abyssinia, in India or Scandinavia, in Spain or on Tahiti, in Mexico as well as in Greece. If we look carefully enough, it will be the same idea which emerges from the hiding place of ethnic peculiarities and manifests itself in the thoughts of mankind in a fashion that, unless perceived as being part of a cosmic harmony, appears to be incomprehensible.” In scouring the world for priceless cultural artifacts, Bastian believed museumgoers would produce a kind of Gedankenstatistik (“statistic of ideas”) which would allow them to make observations and draw their own conclusions about the nature of those fundamental facts that undergird all of human culture.
Penny spends the vast majority of the book’s short 200 pages detailing the lives and academic pursuits of a small group of ethnographers, describing the trips during which they gained the objects to take back to German museums. Because the narrative is so steeped in several episodes where questionable behavior is exposed and discussed, the topics of nationalism, globalism, and imperialism don’t come right out and hit you in the face as ready-made suspects for attack. Instead, Penny tells the stories and the subjects arise organically out his ethnologists’ lives and academic work. The first chapter introduces the work of Adolf Bastian through the acquisition of a Hawaiian feather cloak, a Haida totem pole, and a series of Mayan sculptures. Bastian was torn between Humboldt’s ideal of creating a totalizing picture of human culture into which all human ethnography could fit, but also creating a gigantic collection of artifacts which he both gathered himself and enlisted others to collect for him. Subsequent chapters look at the work of Felix von Luschan and the American director of the Hamburgisches Museum fur Volkerkunde, Franz Termer. Penny looks at their correspondence, the goals behind building the museums they are responsible for, and the various accoutrements of the global networks that supported them in their ventures as they faced obstacles like bureaucracies and budgetary constraints.
Penny’s ideal audience is the general reader, though I don’t know of many casual readers who are going to pick up a book on German ethnology in the half century leading up to World War I. In all fairness, I was one of those very non-academic readers so perhaps there is a wider audience out there. Because Penny takes his time to immerse the reader in the history of ethnographers and their travel, he doesn’t just dive head-first into the topics some readers might want to learn more about (nationalism, imperialism, etc.) and how they affect the ongoing nature of ethnographic acquisition. Penny writes highly sympathetic portraits that also never fail to criticize the practices of the people in question if necessary.
In the end, though, I wanted a book dealing more with the issues around Humboldt’s ethnology, museology, and how the two were influenced by an increasingly acquisition-driven culture. That aspect of the discussion is certainly present, but Penny’s narrative is couched much more in the lives and journeys the ethnographers he discusses used to collect their artifacts. Since I’m more invested in the ideas, the ethnography, and the lasting influence of imperialism more than the people themselves, I thought the title of the book was somewhat misleading and aligned less with my interests than I would have preferred. For those who are interested in the individual lives of the ethnologists themselves instead of the broader, more theoretical questions their work directly contributed to, this book might hold more value for you than it did for me. ...more
Despite the title, the role of Alexander von Humboldt remains very much in the background of the book. Humboldt, often regarded as one of the founding figures of ethnological studies, wanted to engage in a vast study of the world’s people with the goal of creating a kind of key to the fundamentals of all human culture. A long quote about Humboldt’s beliefs from Penny’s book will give some insight into what Humboldt’s goal ultimately was. “While traveling the world, Bastian [one of the ethnologists discussed below] had seen patterns among people’s actions and their creations. He saw, for example, the emergence of priestly classes worldwide, similar uses of fetishes in religion in different parts of the world, similar needs among vastly different peoples to erect monuments to gods, to ancestors, or as expressions of self. He believed that the consistencies and differences in such patterns offered him ways to get at fundamental modes of thought: basic, elementary ideas shared by all people across space and time. There was, he continually argued, a number of ‘psychological original elements’ that coursed through ‘the heads of all peoples, in all times and history’” (p. 24 of the hardback edition).
To put the matter in Bastian’s own words from one of his own books published in 1860, “If the incidental features of narration in nursery tales and proverbs, sayings and modes of speed, we encounter the same idea, be it in England or Abyssinia, in India or Scandinavia, in Spain or on Tahiti, in Mexico as well as in Greece. If we look carefully enough, it will be the same idea which emerges from the hiding place of ethnic peculiarities and manifests itself in the thoughts of mankind in a fashion that, unless perceived as being part of a cosmic harmony, appears to be incomprehensible.” In scouring the world for priceless cultural artifacts, Bastian believed museumgoers would produce a kind of Gedankenstatistik (“statistic of ideas”) which would allow them to make observations and draw their own conclusions about the nature of those fundamental facts that undergird all of human culture.
Penny spends the vast majority of the book’s short 200 pages detailing the lives and academic pursuits of a small group of ethnographers, describing the trips during which they gained the objects to take back to German museums. Because the narrative is so steeped in several episodes where questionable behavior is exposed and discussed, the topics of nationalism, globalism, and imperialism don’t come right out and hit you in the face as ready-made suspects for attack. Instead, Penny tells the stories and the subjects arise organically out his ethnologists’ lives and academic work. The first chapter introduces the work of Adolf Bastian through the acquisition of a Hawaiian feather cloak, a Haida totem pole, and a series of Mayan sculptures. Bastian was torn between Humboldt’s ideal of creating a totalizing picture of human culture into which all human ethnography could fit, but also creating a gigantic collection of artifacts which he both gathered himself and enlisted others to collect for him. Subsequent chapters look at the work of Felix von Luschan and the American director of the Hamburgisches Museum fur Volkerkunde, Franz Termer. Penny looks at their correspondence, the goals behind building the museums they are responsible for, and the various accoutrements of the global networks that supported them in their ventures as they faced obstacles like bureaucracies and budgetary constraints.
Penny’s ideal audience is the general reader, though I don’t know of many casual readers who are going to pick up a book on German ethnology in the half century leading up to World War I. In all fairness, I was one of those very non-academic readers so perhaps there is a wider audience out there. Because Penny takes his time to immerse the reader in the history of ethnographers and their travel, he doesn’t just dive head-first into the topics some readers might want to learn more about (nationalism, imperialism, etc.) and how they affect the ongoing nature of ethnographic acquisition. Penny writes highly sympathetic portraits that also never fail to criticize the practices of the people in question if necessary.
In the end, though, I wanted a book dealing more with the issues around Humboldt’s ethnology, museology, and how the two were influenced by an increasingly acquisition-driven culture. That aspect of the discussion is certainly present, but Penny’s narrative is couched much more in the lives and journeys the ethnographers he discusses used to collect their artifacts. Since I’m more invested in the ideas, the ethnography, and the lasting influence of imperialism more than the people themselves, I thought the title of the book was somewhat misleading and aligned less with my interests than I would have preferred. For those who are interested in the individual lives of the ethnologists themselves instead of the broader, more theoretical questions their work directly contributed to, this book might hold more value for you than it did for me. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Aug 09, 2023
Aug 09, 2023
Hardcover
0062997459
9780062997456
0062997459
4.08
3,392
Nov 10, 2020
Nov 10, 2020
it was ok
Thomas Ricks is best known for the books he wrote in the capacity of a national security and military journalist, including “Fiasco: The American Mili
Thomas Ricks is best known for the books he wrote in the capacity of a national security and military journalist, including “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq” (2006). In “First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country” (2020), he turns his attention to the excavation of the ideas that were central to the founding of the United States. He explains in the Introduction that the election of Donald Trump sent him into a fit of existential angst which made him even more curious about how the founders drew from the ancients in their collective crafting of our shared cultural patrimony.
Even before I started to read, I suspected there were a couple of directions this could go. It could be spectacular, picking out ancient historians, poets, and philosophers and carefully drawing lines between their thought to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. It could also be (and, let’s be honest, I had the sneaking suspicion it was) a fluffy multi-part biographical cut-and-paste job with the occasional Aristotle, Euripides, or Terence thrown in for good measure just to bear out the promise made in the subtitle. While I can’t say the book fails completely flat on its face, it does come across much more like the latter than the former.
It looks at the first four U.S. presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, their early educations (Washington was the only one who didn’t attend a university) and influences. These topics sometimes hit on classical authors, but there are vast swaths of the book that don’t have anything to do with them at all, as when Ricks rather inexplicably discusses – at length – Washington’s participation in the French and Indian War and then the early days of his generalship during the Revolutionary War. More often, Ricks draws comparisons that lack any kind of historical robustness. Because Washington put the republican cause above his own interests and declined running for a third term in office for fear it might create an appearance of tyranny, he gets likened to Cato. For returning to Mount Vernon after his presidency was up to pick up farming, he is “a Cincinnatus.” This is adorable and probably passes for history for most readers who have no idea who Cato and Cincinnatus are, but this just doesn’t cut the mustard for rich, rewarding, or insightful history. It is thin, diaphanous, and weak.
We are told that Jefferson was largely influenced by thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. For those readers who don’t know how the Scottish Enlightenment differs from the German, French or American Enlightenments, he offers next to no clarification. He says that Jefferson tends towards Epicureanism, but for a modern readership that thinks “epicurean” is a synonym for a libertine or a hedonist, he does nothing to tell us what Epicurus said. This would have been a perfect opportunity to mention Stoic cosmology (stoic being another word whose contemporary English usage completely belies the complex ideas Stoic philosophers taught), which stated that the universe operated under an internal order or logic called the Logos. This could have dovetailed very nicely into a discussion of the founders’ deism and a comparison with Epicurean cosmology (derived from earlier versions of Democritean atomism), which introduced indeterminacy and randomness into the world’s order. Neither were mentioned even in passing.
Ricks closes the book with a simpering list of ten regrets brought about by our increasing lack of familiarity with classical traditions, which not only have just a tenuous connection to the book’s main argument (to the degree that it has one at all) but are sometimes also wild non sequiturs. #3 suggests that we “re-focus on the public good.” I don’t think this is a lesson exclusive to the Greeks or Romans. #2 tells us to “curtail campaign finance” and that “we should drop the bizarre American legal fiction that corporations are people” and that “corporations possess greater rights than people do.” For the record, I agree wholeheartedly on both fronts. What it has to do with the ideas presented in the rest of the book, I haven’t the faintest idea.
I think one of Ricks’ fundamental claims is that by immersing ourselves more fully in the classics, we can simultaneously get intellectually closer to the Founders than we are now. These are people who would have never been able to conceptualize a university education where learning Latin and Greek wasn’t compulsory or a world in which Homer was someone you wince your way through in high school and hope you never encounter again. Picking up some Polybius or Herodotus can help us better understand the mindset and mental framework the Founders were able to reference. Unfortunately, Ricks doesn’t harness his sources in a way that makes those connections explicit. Instead, he draws thin, facile comparisons between the figures he looks at (like Washington’s resemblance to Cato or Cincinnatus or John Adams to Cicero) and hopes that will pass for showing readers “what America’s founders learned from the Greeks and Romans and how that shaped our country.” It doesn’t.
One of the highlights of reading this was getting a chance to do so with two lovely, bright, engaging, and insightful people. Stephanie Cohen, Vin (from the YouTube channel Revenant Reads), and I exchanged ideas while we read this over the first few weeks of August. I wanted to take the opportunity to thank them here for the time and effort they put into our Discord server discussions. ...more
Even before I started to read, I suspected there were a couple of directions this could go. It could be spectacular, picking out ancient historians, poets, and philosophers and carefully drawing lines between their thought to the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. It could also be (and, let’s be honest, I had the sneaking suspicion it was) a fluffy multi-part biographical cut-and-paste job with the occasional Aristotle, Euripides, or Terence thrown in for good measure just to bear out the promise made in the subtitle. While I can’t say the book fails completely flat on its face, it does come across much more like the latter than the former.
It looks at the first four U.S. presidents: George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, their early educations (Washington was the only one who didn’t attend a university) and influences. These topics sometimes hit on classical authors, but there are vast swaths of the book that don’t have anything to do with them at all, as when Ricks rather inexplicably discusses – at length – Washington’s participation in the French and Indian War and then the early days of his generalship during the Revolutionary War. More often, Ricks draws comparisons that lack any kind of historical robustness. Because Washington put the republican cause above his own interests and declined running for a third term in office for fear it might create an appearance of tyranny, he gets likened to Cato. For returning to Mount Vernon after his presidency was up to pick up farming, he is “a Cincinnatus.” This is adorable and probably passes for history for most readers who have no idea who Cato and Cincinnatus are, but this just doesn’t cut the mustard for rich, rewarding, or insightful history. It is thin, diaphanous, and weak.
We are told that Jefferson was largely influenced by thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. For those readers who don’t know how the Scottish Enlightenment differs from the German, French or American Enlightenments, he offers next to no clarification. He says that Jefferson tends towards Epicureanism, but for a modern readership that thinks “epicurean” is a synonym for a libertine or a hedonist, he does nothing to tell us what Epicurus said. This would have been a perfect opportunity to mention Stoic cosmology (stoic being another word whose contemporary English usage completely belies the complex ideas Stoic philosophers taught), which stated that the universe operated under an internal order or logic called the Logos. This could have dovetailed very nicely into a discussion of the founders’ deism and a comparison with Epicurean cosmology (derived from earlier versions of Democritean atomism), which introduced indeterminacy and randomness into the world’s order. Neither were mentioned even in passing.
Ricks closes the book with a simpering list of ten regrets brought about by our increasing lack of familiarity with classical traditions, which not only have just a tenuous connection to the book’s main argument (to the degree that it has one at all) but are sometimes also wild non sequiturs. #3 suggests that we “re-focus on the public good.” I don’t think this is a lesson exclusive to the Greeks or Romans. #2 tells us to “curtail campaign finance” and that “we should drop the bizarre American legal fiction that corporations are people” and that “corporations possess greater rights than people do.” For the record, I agree wholeheartedly on both fronts. What it has to do with the ideas presented in the rest of the book, I haven’t the faintest idea.
I think one of Ricks’ fundamental claims is that by immersing ourselves more fully in the classics, we can simultaneously get intellectually closer to the Founders than we are now. These are people who would have never been able to conceptualize a university education where learning Latin and Greek wasn’t compulsory or a world in which Homer was someone you wince your way through in high school and hope you never encounter again. Picking up some Polybius or Herodotus can help us better understand the mindset and mental framework the Founders were able to reference. Unfortunately, Ricks doesn’t harness his sources in a way that makes those connections explicit. Instead, he draws thin, facile comparisons between the figures he looks at (like Washington’s resemblance to Cato or Cincinnatus or John Adams to Cicero) and hopes that will pass for showing readers “what America’s founders learned from the Greeks and Romans and how that shaped our country.” It doesn’t.
One of the highlights of reading this was getting a chance to do so with two lovely, bright, engaging, and insightful people. Stephanie Cohen, Vin (from the YouTube channel Revenant Reads), and I exchanged ideas while we read this over the first few weeks of August. I wanted to take the opportunity to thank them here for the time and effort they put into our Discord server discussions. ...more
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[image]
Christine de Pizan Educating a Bunch of Troglodyte Simps
“One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for i [image]
Christine de Pizan Educating a Bunch of Troglodyte Simps
“One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge. My mind had grown weary as I had spent the day struggling with the weighty tomes of various authors when I had been studying for some time. I looked up from my book and decided that, for once, I would put aside these difficult texts and find instead something amusing and easy to read from the works of the poets. As I searched around for some little book, I happened to chance upon a work which did not belong to me but was amongst a pile of others that had been placed in my safekeeping. I opened it up and saw from the title that it was by Matheolus. With a smile, I made my choice. Although I had never read it, I knew that, unlike many other works, this one was said to be written in praise of women. Yet I had scarcely begun to read it when my dear mother called me down to supper, for it was time to eat. I put the book to one side, resolving to go back to it the following day.”
Thus begins Christine de Pizan’s (1364-1431) “Book of the City of Ladies,” as she gives solid textual evidence that the phenomenon of needing something light and airy to read after a heavy period of study is much older than Goodreads or BookTube. Christine was one of the first European women to make her living as a professional writer, a privilege largely afforded to her by her father’s position as the court astrologer to Charles V. After the death of her father and brother in 1388 and 1389 respectively, she quickly needed to find a way to support herself. She started writing virelays and rondeaux (two popular forms of medieval French poetry) that quickly drew the admiration of the royal court. After attaining an established place at court, she wrote her first defense of women, “The Tale of the Rose” (1402), an attack on Jean de Meun’s extraordinarily popular “Romance of the Rose,” which portrayed women as little more than lustful and deceptive. The reason we remember her today, however, is her righteous defense of women in a time when nearly every major literary voice dripped with rampant misogyny. That defense gave birth to this book, one of the foundational books of early Christian humanism.
The text is presented as a dream allegory, a very common literary technique in medieval literature (a much earlier exemplar being Boethius’s “Consolation”). Most of the text is given over to biographies of the women who make Pizan’s case, so she clearly draws some influence from Boccaccio’s “De Mulieribus Claris” (“On Famous Women”) which was composed about forty years before Christine was writing. Once Christine has expressed her discontent with the prevailing attitudes about women, she is visited by three visages: Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice (note the echoes here with the Christian trinity). Each figure in turn helps her build her allegorical city. In Part I, Lady Reason lays the intellectual foundations, convincing her that her male contemporaries have effectively gaslit women into believing that they are merely defective men (an idea that gained popularity with the rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus a few centuries earlier). Lady Reason tells Christine that she needs to look on women from her own perspective and to trust her own ability to formulate good arguments. In Part 2, Lady Rectitude helps Christine build the houses and walls of the city and regales her with stories of women who have displayed propriety, virtue, honor, chastity, and the other “feminine virtues.” In Part 3, Lady Justice helps Christine attend to the final details of the city, including choosing a queen to rule over it. Christine ends up exhorting all women to attend to their cities well, a fifteen-century equivalent to Voltaire’s advice that we should cultivate our own gardens.
While Pizan’s place and the history of her text is fascinating, the book as a reading experience is much less so, to put it gently. The disquisitions between Christine and Ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice are the highlights of the book because they do a brilliant job at illustrating how baseless and absurd the prevailing misogyny of Pizan’s male contemporaries are. The problem is with the execution, which can only be described as violently and maliciously beating an already-dead horse. When a few examples would suffice to make her point (about the chastity of women, their virtue, their intelligence), she never fails to make a few dozen. In Book 1 alone she discusses the lives of 36 women, almost exclusively in the form of potted biographies; in Book 2, 92 women; in Book 3, 37. I understand that she’s trying to drive home some very important points to her contemporary readers, but for someone reading this in the early 21st century who is (hopefully) already fully convinced that women are not malformed men or little more than horny dissemblers devoid of all virtue, the reiteration of the same argument over and over again gets tiresome. Another minor quibble: I think she undermines her own argument by resorting to so many fictional women. I haven’t run the numbers, but easily most of the women she discusses throughout the book are figures for which we have no historical evidence. Many of them, like Cassandra, Andromache, Jocasta, Juno, Medea, Helen of Troy, Thisbe (I could go on just like Pizan does) are pulled directly from mythology. It seems like choosing real, historical women would have made a much stronger case. And in Pizan’s defense, she does present a few, but those examples would have been ample enough to prove her point without having to import the mythological ones. On the upside, this makes an excellent primer for anyone interested in brushing up on their Old Testament and Greco-Roman mythology.
The three-star review is the best I could come up with that expresses the fine balance between the fascinating idea behind the book, Pizan’s boldness in writing it so publicly when it easily could have gotten her in trouble and the reading experience which was, at least for me, a slog. That said, I wish she could be here to see the world she helped contribute to. We’re far from the gender equity and parity we deserve, but we have made more progress than she could have ever imagined and in part we have her to thank for it. ...more
Christine de Pizan Educating a Bunch of Troglodyte Simps
“One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for i [image]
Christine de Pizan Educating a Bunch of Troglodyte Simps
“One day, I was sitting in my study surrounded by many books of different kinds, for it has long been my habit to engage in the pursuit of knowledge. My mind had grown weary as I had spent the day struggling with the weighty tomes of various authors when I had been studying for some time. I looked up from my book and decided that, for once, I would put aside these difficult texts and find instead something amusing and easy to read from the works of the poets. As I searched around for some little book, I happened to chance upon a work which did not belong to me but was amongst a pile of others that had been placed in my safekeeping. I opened it up and saw from the title that it was by Matheolus. With a smile, I made my choice. Although I had never read it, I knew that, unlike many other works, this one was said to be written in praise of women. Yet I had scarcely begun to read it when my dear mother called me down to supper, for it was time to eat. I put the book to one side, resolving to go back to it the following day.”
Thus begins Christine de Pizan’s (1364-1431) “Book of the City of Ladies,” as she gives solid textual evidence that the phenomenon of needing something light and airy to read after a heavy period of study is much older than Goodreads or BookTube. Christine was one of the first European women to make her living as a professional writer, a privilege largely afforded to her by her father’s position as the court astrologer to Charles V. After the death of her father and brother in 1388 and 1389 respectively, she quickly needed to find a way to support herself. She started writing virelays and rondeaux (two popular forms of medieval French poetry) that quickly drew the admiration of the royal court. After attaining an established place at court, she wrote her first defense of women, “The Tale of the Rose” (1402), an attack on Jean de Meun’s extraordinarily popular “Romance of the Rose,” which portrayed women as little more than lustful and deceptive. The reason we remember her today, however, is her righteous defense of women in a time when nearly every major literary voice dripped with rampant misogyny. That defense gave birth to this book, one of the foundational books of early Christian humanism.
The text is presented as a dream allegory, a very common literary technique in medieval literature (a much earlier exemplar being Boethius’s “Consolation”). Most of the text is given over to biographies of the women who make Pizan’s case, so she clearly draws some influence from Boccaccio’s “De Mulieribus Claris” (“On Famous Women”) which was composed about forty years before Christine was writing. Once Christine has expressed her discontent with the prevailing attitudes about women, she is visited by three visages: Lady Reason, Lady Rectitude, and Lady Justice (note the echoes here with the Christian trinity). Each figure in turn helps her build her allegorical city. In Part I, Lady Reason lays the intellectual foundations, convincing her that her male contemporaries have effectively gaslit women into believing that they are merely defective men (an idea that gained popularity with the rediscovery of the Aristotelian corpus a few centuries earlier). Lady Reason tells Christine that she needs to look on women from her own perspective and to trust her own ability to formulate good arguments. In Part 2, Lady Rectitude helps Christine build the houses and walls of the city and regales her with stories of women who have displayed propriety, virtue, honor, chastity, and the other “feminine virtues.” In Part 3, Lady Justice helps Christine attend to the final details of the city, including choosing a queen to rule over it. Christine ends up exhorting all women to attend to their cities well, a fifteen-century equivalent to Voltaire’s advice that we should cultivate our own gardens.
While Pizan’s place and the history of her text is fascinating, the book as a reading experience is much less so, to put it gently. The disquisitions between Christine and Ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice are the highlights of the book because they do a brilliant job at illustrating how baseless and absurd the prevailing misogyny of Pizan’s male contemporaries are. The problem is with the execution, which can only be described as violently and maliciously beating an already-dead horse. When a few examples would suffice to make her point (about the chastity of women, their virtue, their intelligence), she never fails to make a few dozen. In Book 1 alone she discusses the lives of 36 women, almost exclusively in the form of potted biographies; in Book 2, 92 women; in Book 3, 37. I understand that she’s trying to drive home some very important points to her contemporary readers, but for someone reading this in the early 21st century who is (hopefully) already fully convinced that women are not malformed men or little more than horny dissemblers devoid of all virtue, the reiteration of the same argument over and over again gets tiresome. Another minor quibble: I think she undermines her own argument by resorting to so many fictional women. I haven’t run the numbers, but easily most of the women she discusses throughout the book are figures for which we have no historical evidence. Many of them, like Cassandra, Andromache, Jocasta, Juno, Medea, Helen of Troy, Thisbe (I could go on just like Pizan does) are pulled directly from mythology. It seems like choosing real, historical women would have made a much stronger case. And in Pizan’s defense, she does present a few, but those examples would have been ample enough to prove her point without having to import the mythological ones. On the upside, this makes an excellent primer for anyone interested in brushing up on their Old Testament and Greco-Roman mythology.
The three-star review is the best I could come up with that expresses the fine balance between the fascinating idea behind the book, Pizan’s boldness in writing it so publicly when it easily could have gotten her in trouble and the reading experience which was, at least for me, a slog. That said, I wish she could be here to see the world she helped contribute to. We’re far from the gender equity and parity we deserve, but we have made more progress than she could have ever imagined and in part we have her to thank for it. ...more
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Apr 02, 2019
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In fifth-century B.C. Greece (or so the legend goes), the philosopher Hippasus was drowned by his Pythagorean brethren for divulging a critically impo
In fifth-century B.C. Greece (or so the legend goes), the philosopher Hippasus was drowned by his Pythagorean brethren for divulging a critically important secret. A key tenet of Pythagorean philosophy was that all numbers were rational (that is, could be expressed as a fraction of two integers). Hippasus was credited (rightly or wrongly) for the discovery of irrationality when he found that the hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle with its legs measuring 1 had a length of the square root of two … which is certainly not a rational number. This understandably upended some of the corollaries of Pythagorean mathematical rationalism, like that the rest of the universe was just as orderly as all the numbers were. Hippasus chose to divulge this publicly and lost his life as a consequence. With this story of how our notions of rationality and irrationality are so closely tied together Justin E. H. Smith, a professor of history and the philosophy of science at the University of Paris, opens his book.
This theme – that reason and unreason chase after one another as in an infinite ouroboros – isn’t unique to the Greeks. The “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Horkheimer and Adorno, one of the most influential pieces of philosophy to come out of World War II, describes how “Enlightenment reverts to mythology” – in other words, how thinking based on the rigorous application of reason can become sclerotic and devolve into fascism. Throughout the book each chapter focuses on a topic ranging from dreams and oneiromancy, pseudoscience, and the seething underbelly of Internet culture, Smith discusses how rationality and irrationality each appear to bring about its polar opposite.
Chapter 1 is devoted to logic, a term that sounds like it needs little clarification. But notice how innocent inquiry can quickly devolve into the rhetorically loaded questions of sophistry, as in “When did you stop beating your wife?” The line can be just as blurred in science and the millennia-old issue philosophers of science call the “demarcation problem.” Why were divination and oneiromancy once considered valid ways of arriving at the truth while they are now considered pseudoscience? How exactly does one differentiate between science and pseudoscience, anyway? We can invoke many different criteria to answer this question, like Karl Popper’s desideratum of falsifiability, but sometimes these are only narrowly applicable.
What’s more interesting is when pseudoscience self-consciously tries to take on the trappings of science, as when flat-earthers try their best (bless their hearts) to use evidence to show the earth isn’t round. Smith gets at a real nugget of truth when he suggests the patina of science serves as a cover for a more fundamental issue: that the whole idea is merely a protest against perceived “elite authorities telling us what we must believe,” and is indicative of a breakdown in public trust that results when a substantial portion of the population no longer believes in the value of expertise. Note how whenever you try to scratch the surface in conversation with a flat-earther, you quickly get to the heart of the matter when they aver the all-powerful influence of their bete noire (whether it’s Jews, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergs, or the “deep state.”) The Internet, once vaunted as the great democratizer of knowledge, is now used by social media sites that pay for the programming of complex algorithms that create echo chambers by feeding users’ opinions back to them. This balkanization of knowledge and opinion is likely one of the “logical” ends in a world that displays such thoroughgoing distrust in science and expertise.
I can appreciate the book for what it tries to do in being a broad-based consideration of the topic, but Smith casts his net far too widely. He connects the dots in several convincing ways, like when he convincingly argues for the connection between the dissolution of public trust in institutions with the rise in pseudoscience. The other chapters seem to hang there but are unincorporated into the larger argument. It’s just too discursive and lacks any overarching coherence. Smith has written another book devoted to his criticisms of the Internet called “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning” (forthcoming as of this writing, also from Princeton University Press) that presumably fleshes out some of his arguments more completely. I would love to read other standalone books where he takes a deeper dive into individual subjects. While Smith is a philosopher by training, I hope he takes a closer look at the social sciences relevant to his concerns (there is a daunting amount of research on thanatology, the psychology of conspiracy theories, et cetera), little to none of which he touched upon in this book.
On a superficial level, it makes sense to recognize the tension between reason and irrationality as something uniquely human. We can try to order, inquire, categorize, and hopefully make better sense of the world for it. On the other hand, none of these things stop us from being human and all the messiness that has, does, and always will entail. Smith’s quiet contention seems that our only recourse is to let the two live side by side, doing our best to advocate for reason responsibly (whatever that might mean) without being dogmatic about it (whatever that might mean). Put simply, Smith thinks a kind of fascism rests in rationality and irrationality while humanity, occupying an ambiguous place between the two, relentlessly transforms one into the other while rarely reflecting on the lessons they have for us. ...more
This theme – that reason and unreason chase after one another as in an infinite ouroboros – isn’t unique to the Greeks. The “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Horkheimer and Adorno, one of the most influential pieces of philosophy to come out of World War II, describes how “Enlightenment reverts to mythology” – in other words, how thinking based on the rigorous application of reason can become sclerotic and devolve into fascism. Throughout the book each chapter focuses on a topic ranging from dreams and oneiromancy, pseudoscience, and the seething underbelly of Internet culture, Smith discusses how rationality and irrationality each appear to bring about its polar opposite.
Chapter 1 is devoted to logic, a term that sounds like it needs little clarification. But notice how innocent inquiry can quickly devolve into the rhetorically loaded questions of sophistry, as in “When did you stop beating your wife?” The line can be just as blurred in science and the millennia-old issue philosophers of science call the “demarcation problem.” Why were divination and oneiromancy once considered valid ways of arriving at the truth while they are now considered pseudoscience? How exactly does one differentiate between science and pseudoscience, anyway? We can invoke many different criteria to answer this question, like Karl Popper’s desideratum of falsifiability, but sometimes these are only narrowly applicable.
What’s more interesting is when pseudoscience self-consciously tries to take on the trappings of science, as when flat-earthers try their best (bless their hearts) to use evidence to show the earth isn’t round. Smith gets at a real nugget of truth when he suggests the patina of science serves as a cover for a more fundamental issue: that the whole idea is merely a protest against perceived “elite authorities telling us what we must believe,” and is indicative of a breakdown in public trust that results when a substantial portion of the population no longer believes in the value of expertise. Note how whenever you try to scratch the surface in conversation with a flat-earther, you quickly get to the heart of the matter when they aver the all-powerful influence of their bete noire (whether it’s Jews, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergs, or the “deep state.”) The Internet, once vaunted as the great democratizer of knowledge, is now used by social media sites that pay for the programming of complex algorithms that create echo chambers by feeding users’ opinions back to them. This balkanization of knowledge and opinion is likely one of the “logical” ends in a world that displays such thoroughgoing distrust in science and expertise.
I can appreciate the book for what it tries to do in being a broad-based consideration of the topic, but Smith casts his net far too widely. He connects the dots in several convincing ways, like when he convincingly argues for the connection between the dissolution of public trust in institutions with the rise in pseudoscience. The other chapters seem to hang there but are unincorporated into the larger argument. It’s just too discursive and lacks any overarching coherence. Smith has written another book devoted to his criticisms of the Internet called “The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning” (forthcoming as of this writing, also from Princeton University Press) that presumably fleshes out some of his arguments more completely. I would love to read other standalone books where he takes a deeper dive into individual subjects. While Smith is a philosopher by training, I hope he takes a closer look at the social sciences relevant to his concerns (there is a daunting amount of research on thanatology, the psychology of conspiracy theories, et cetera), little to none of which he touched upon in this book.
On a superficial level, it makes sense to recognize the tension between reason and irrationality as something uniquely human. We can try to order, inquire, categorize, and hopefully make better sense of the world for it. On the other hand, none of these things stop us from being human and all the messiness that has, does, and always will entail. Smith’s quiet contention seems that our only recourse is to let the two live side by side, doing our best to advocate for reason responsibly (whatever that might mean) without being dogmatic about it (whatever that might mean). Put simply, Smith thinks a kind of fascism rests in rationality and irrationality while humanity, occupying an ambiguous place between the two, relentlessly transforms one into the other while rarely reflecting on the lessons they have for us. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
May 02, 2023
May 02, 2023
Kindle Edition
0691015988
9780691015989
0691015988
4.13
730
1977
Jan 06, 1997
it was amazing
“Et il est heureux pour les hommes d’être dans une situation, où, pendant que leurs passions leur inspirent la pensée d’être méchans, ils ont pourtant
“Et il est heureux pour les hommes d’être dans une situation, où, pendant que leurs passions leur inspirent la pensée d’être méchans, ils ont pourtant intérêt de ne pas l’être” - Montesquieu, De l’esprit des Lois
Philosophers have known about the passions of man and the ill effects they can have on both private and public life for centuries. The question of how to rein in the various human passions (or as we would call them today, emotions) has occupied the time of countless thinkers. Could there possibly be any way to “weaponize” one passion to combat and subordinate the others? St. Augustine spoke out against the lust for money, sex, and power. Interestingly, however, he noted seeking out power is the least odious of these three as it can suppress the desire for the other two passions. This is a question that Albert O. Hirschman takes up in his highly interdisciplinary contribution to economics and the appearance of the incipient capitalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this book, first published in 1977.
Capitalism wasn’t always the dominant economic ideology. In the Middle Ages, usury – the act of using money to make more money – was thought to be a sin. An equally important problem was how to address the looming body of human passions writ large. Methods like the use of state suppression or “civilizing processes” tend to elide the problem and deny the reality of human nature. Eventually, opinion seemed to converge around an approach highly antithetical to the medieval take on usury. To quote Hirschman, “one set of passions, hitherto known as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust.” John Maynard Keynes summed up this idea nicely: “Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunity for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement. It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens: and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.”
Is there any possible advantage in prioritizing greed and accumulation over the other passions? Many Enlightenment thinkers, especially in Scotland, seemed to think so. First, the desire for accumulation appeared to be universal, which introduced a kind of predictability to an otherwise complex, multifaceted human nature. Secondly, its presence made the motives of moral actors more transparent. When combined with a favored acquisitiveness, this gives rise to one of the most influential liberal principles of the Enlightenment: doux commerce (roughly translated as sweet, calm, gentle, or soft trade or commercial activity). Doux commerce holds that through the coming together of different people in the pursuit of commercial activity and cooperation, human passions can be lulled, and the interests of society and culture can be furthered. Thinkers from diverse backgrounds gradually arrived at this conclusion, including Dr. Johnson (who refers in Rasselas to the Arab who “ranged the country merely to get riches”) to David Hume who wrote in his essay “Of Interest” that “it is an infallible consequence of all industrious professions, to … make the love of gain prevail over the love of pleasure” and that commercial activity would “activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones – because of the expectation that, in this way, it would repress and perhaps atrophy the more destructive and disastrous components of human nature.”
In the second part of the book, “Improving the Political Order,” Hirschman analyzes how the idea of doux commerce was thought to affect society on a larger scale. Montesquieu’s economic thought relied on the importance of bills of exchange and arbitrage as safeguards against les grand coups d’autorite. For James Steuart, a contemporary of Adam Smith and an influential member of the Scottish Enlightenment, the benefit afforded by doux commerce resides in the complexity and vulnerability of the modern economy that will make arbitrary decisions and inferences on the part of the prince unthinkable. Steuart compares the commercial economy to “the delicacy of a watch,” likening the movements of “mercantile people” to the uniformity of a machine. Tocqueville and Adam Ferguson (still another important member of the Scottish Enlightenment) were much more willing to admit the occasionally negative consequence of a mercantile economy. They both accepted that economic expansion is “basically and simultaneously ambivalent in its political effects.” The violence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars opened even more space for this ambiguity. This is, of course, an insight Karl Marx took to its logical conclusion in his political analysis of the revolutions of 1848 in which he theorized a slow declination of social conditions culminating in the eventual overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Marx’s contempt for the assumed civilizing tendencies of trade can be seen in Das Kapital in which he writes “Das ist der doux commerce!”
While Hirschman is clearly interested in delineating a particular set of ideas that eventually allow for the flourishing of an increasingly commercial economy, he never fails to present them in a clear, succinct way and with lucid language. While a prior knowledge of topics like psychology, philosophy and especially economics might further enrich an in-depth reading of the book, none of these are essential for understanding the book’s overarching theme. This is intellectual history the way it should be written: tightly, cogently, convincingly, and by a scholar whose broad and catholic grasp of the pertinent subject matters shines through on every page. Are human beings willing and able to utilize one passion to tamp down others? If so, what are the greater consequences for society if that occurs? In giving his answer Hirschman refuses to interject or cheerlead for any ideological approach, instead favoring an analytical archaeology of ideas that rewards careful reading and rereading. ...more
Philosophers have known about the passions of man and the ill effects they can have on both private and public life for centuries. The question of how to rein in the various human passions (or as we would call them today, emotions) has occupied the time of countless thinkers. Could there possibly be any way to “weaponize” one passion to combat and subordinate the others? St. Augustine spoke out against the lust for money, sex, and power. Interestingly, however, he noted seeking out power is the least odious of these three as it can suppress the desire for the other two passions. This is a question that Albert O. Hirschman takes up in his highly interdisciplinary contribution to economics and the appearance of the incipient capitalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in this book, first published in 1977.
Capitalism wasn’t always the dominant economic ideology. In the Middle Ages, usury – the act of using money to make more money – was thought to be a sin. An equally important problem was how to address the looming body of human passions writ large. Methods like the use of state suppression or “civilizing processes” tend to elide the problem and deny the reality of human nature. Eventually, opinion seemed to converge around an approach highly antithetical to the medieval take on usury. To quote Hirschman, “one set of passions, hitherto known as greed, avarice, or love of lucre, could be usefully employed to oppose and bridle such other passions as ambition, lust for power, or sexual lust.” John Maynard Keynes summed up this idea nicely: “Dangerous human proclivities can be canalized into comparatively harmless channels by the existence of opportunity for money-making and private wealth, which, if they cannot be satisfied in this way, may find their outlet in cruelty, the reckless pursuit of personal power and authority, and other forms of self-aggrandizement. It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow-citizens: and whilst the former is sometimes denounced as being but a means to the latter, sometimes at least it is an alternative.”
Is there any possible advantage in prioritizing greed and accumulation over the other passions? Many Enlightenment thinkers, especially in Scotland, seemed to think so. First, the desire for accumulation appeared to be universal, which introduced a kind of predictability to an otherwise complex, multifaceted human nature. Secondly, its presence made the motives of moral actors more transparent. When combined with a favored acquisitiveness, this gives rise to one of the most influential liberal principles of the Enlightenment: doux commerce (roughly translated as sweet, calm, gentle, or soft trade or commercial activity). Doux commerce holds that through the coming together of different people in the pursuit of commercial activity and cooperation, human passions can be lulled, and the interests of society and culture can be furthered. Thinkers from diverse backgrounds gradually arrived at this conclusion, including Dr. Johnson (who refers in Rasselas to the Arab who “ranged the country merely to get riches”) to David Hume who wrote in his essay “Of Interest” that “it is an infallible consequence of all industrious professions, to … make the love of gain prevail over the love of pleasure” and that commercial activity would “activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones – because of the expectation that, in this way, it would repress and perhaps atrophy the more destructive and disastrous components of human nature.”
In the second part of the book, “Improving the Political Order,” Hirschman analyzes how the idea of doux commerce was thought to affect society on a larger scale. Montesquieu’s economic thought relied on the importance of bills of exchange and arbitrage as safeguards against les grand coups d’autorite. For James Steuart, a contemporary of Adam Smith and an influential member of the Scottish Enlightenment, the benefit afforded by doux commerce resides in the complexity and vulnerability of the modern economy that will make arbitrary decisions and inferences on the part of the prince unthinkable. Steuart compares the commercial economy to “the delicacy of a watch,” likening the movements of “mercantile people” to the uniformity of a machine. Tocqueville and Adam Ferguson (still another important member of the Scottish Enlightenment) were much more willing to admit the occasionally negative consequence of a mercantile economy. They both accepted that economic expansion is “basically and simultaneously ambivalent in its political effects.” The violence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars opened even more space for this ambiguity. This is, of course, an insight Karl Marx took to its logical conclusion in his political analysis of the revolutions of 1848 in which he theorized a slow declination of social conditions culminating in the eventual overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Marx’s contempt for the assumed civilizing tendencies of trade can be seen in Das Kapital in which he writes “Das ist der doux commerce!”
While Hirschman is clearly interested in delineating a particular set of ideas that eventually allow for the flourishing of an increasingly commercial economy, he never fails to present them in a clear, succinct way and with lucid language. While a prior knowledge of topics like psychology, philosophy and especially economics might further enrich an in-depth reading of the book, none of these are essential for understanding the book’s overarching theme. This is intellectual history the way it should be written: tightly, cogently, convincingly, and by a scholar whose broad and catholic grasp of the pertinent subject matters shines through on every page. Are human beings willing and able to utilize one passion to tamp down others? If so, what are the greater consequences for society if that occurs? In giving his answer Hirschman refuses to interject or cheerlead for any ideological approach, instead favoring an analytical archaeology of ideas that rewards careful reading and rereading. ...more
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Apr 16, 2019
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Anthony Grafton is one of the greatest living scholars of early modern Europe. Several of his books, including his work on figures like Joseph Scalige
Anthony Grafton is one of the greatest living scholars of early modern Europe. Several of his books, including his work on figures like Joseph Scaliger, Girolamo Cardano and Leon Battista Alberti, have shed a tremendous amount of light on the cultural world of the Renaissance. While the book purports to be a “wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship,” it provides a narrow look at four examples leaving the reader with no “bigger picture” in sight.
At its heart, this book is about our obsession with authority and “originality,” which sounds like it might be easy to define but gets hard to pin down when the subjects of the discussion are texts with centuries-long histories. Not only does this obsession exist on the part of forgers who are trying to impart some a sense of authenticity where none exists, but also on the “true scholars” who come out of the various schools of textual criticism. Forgery and pseudepigraphy (Grafton distinguishes between the two) not only led scholars astray, but directly contributed to the rise of criticism. In fact, Grafton thinks textual criticism as we know it today wasn’t the result of some independent need for it but instead the result of a slow accretion of practices and methodologies which arose because of fabricators in the first place. “Forger and critics have been entangled through time like Laocoon and his serpents,” he writes.
The basic idea is that both critics and forgers formed a kind of mutualistic relationship, slowly refining both of their crafts after familiarizing themselves with the work of the other. Along the way, Grafton occasionally traces historical motifs like the one of the “found object” Acusilaus of Argos likely first perpetrated when he claimed to have found some bronze tablets in his garden; this lie would eventually become the strategy du jour for forgeries in the nineteenth century as the Romantics found themselves increasingly enchanted with the old, decrepit, and fragmentary. Grafton contends that the very ruse of forgery can only be believed for so long. In trying to get a text to look like it is from a different time and place, the forger inevitably leaves behind tell-tale signs of her handiwork: “Any forger, however deft, imprints the pattern and text of his own period’s life, thought, and language on the past he hopes to make seem real and vivid,” he writes.
Chapter Three looks at the work of three critics – Porphyry, Isaac Casaubon (who very well may have been the inspiration for George Eliot’s character Edward Casaubon), and Richard Reitzenstein – all of whom suffered from vitiated critical powers when they were working with texts that undergirded their own biases and assumptions. One can guess that the pitfall of confirmation bias will always be a bete noire of literary studies.
The seed of this book was originally a small set of lectures Grafton delivered which someone later suggested he expand into book form. While providing the occasional insight, this is very much a book that gives a look at the individual trees but misses the view from the forest canopy. This is a shame. Because of the unfinished, not-quite-effective lecture-into-book aura the book exudes, it ultimately feels, ironically, like a bit of a fabrication itself, perhaps too quickly rushed to press. Hopefully sometime in the future, he’ll be able to revisit it, fill in some of the interstices of his argument, and make the book twice as long. If that book ever comes, I’ll gladly re-read it with relish. ...more
At its heart, this book is about our obsession with authority and “originality,” which sounds like it might be easy to define but gets hard to pin down when the subjects of the discussion are texts with centuries-long histories. Not only does this obsession exist on the part of forgers who are trying to impart some a sense of authenticity where none exists, but also on the “true scholars” who come out of the various schools of textual criticism. Forgery and pseudepigraphy (Grafton distinguishes between the two) not only led scholars astray, but directly contributed to the rise of criticism. In fact, Grafton thinks textual criticism as we know it today wasn’t the result of some independent need for it but instead the result of a slow accretion of practices and methodologies which arose because of fabricators in the first place. “Forger and critics have been entangled through time like Laocoon and his serpents,” he writes.
The basic idea is that both critics and forgers formed a kind of mutualistic relationship, slowly refining both of their crafts after familiarizing themselves with the work of the other. Along the way, Grafton occasionally traces historical motifs like the one of the “found object” Acusilaus of Argos likely first perpetrated when he claimed to have found some bronze tablets in his garden; this lie would eventually become the strategy du jour for forgeries in the nineteenth century as the Romantics found themselves increasingly enchanted with the old, decrepit, and fragmentary. Grafton contends that the very ruse of forgery can only be believed for so long. In trying to get a text to look like it is from a different time and place, the forger inevitably leaves behind tell-tale signs of her handiwork: “Any forger, however deft, imprints the pattern and text of his own period’s life, thought, and language on the past he hopes to make seem real and vivid,” he writes.
Chapter Three looks at the work of three critics – Porphyry, Isaac Casaubon (who very well may have been the inspiration for George Eliot’s character Edward Casaubon), and Richard Reitzenstein – all of whom suffered from vitiated critical powers when they were working with texts that undergirded their own biases and assumptions. One can guess that the pitfall of confirmation bias will always be a bete noire of literary studies.
The seed of this book was originally a small set of lectures Grafton delivered which someone later suggested he expand into book form. While providing the occasional insight, this is very much a book that gives a look at the individual trees but misses the view from the forest canopy. This is a shame. Because of the unfinished, not-quite-effective lecture-into-book aura the book exudes, it ultimately feels, ironically, like a bit of a fabrication itself, perhaps too quickly rushed to press. Hopefully sometime in the future, he’ll be able to revisit it, fill in some of the interstices of his argument, and make the book twice as long. If that book ever comes, I’ll gladly re-read it with relish. ...more
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Jan 03, 2023
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069111479X
9780691114798
069111479X
3.61
96
2001
Mar 02, 2003
liked it
Richard Wolin has been actively pointing to what he perceives to be the academic and moral shortcomings of intellectuals throughout the twentieth cent
Richard Wolin has been actively pointing to what he perceives to be the academic and moral shortcomings of intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. With titles like “The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism” to “The Wind from the East: From Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s,” he has mostly focused on what some critics have called “left-fascism” (not a term I’d ever be accused of using) in books that usually tell the story of a controversial thinker, and then how that figure went on to influence writers in the same field. Mark Lilla’s “The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics” largely follows this same pattern and presentation. “Heidegger’s Children” looks at four of Heidegger’s students who themselves went on to become highly regarded and who were all Jewish: Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Karl Lowith, and Herbert Marcuse.
However carefully scholars wanted to walk on eggshells around Heidegger, today there is absolutely no doubt that during his 1933 rectorship at the University of Freiburg was held under the auspices and in close collaboration with the National Socialist party. Above and beyond this, his sympathies with the party continued such that his students – some more than others, clearly – felt the need to distance themselves from him. His persistent metaphysical antisemitism is apparent to anyone who cares to read the Black Notebooks written over a period of nearly three decades from 1931 to 1959 but only published within the last decade. In any case, even his dimmest of students have realized the affinities between his special brand of obscurantist thought and the Volkisch that rested behind Nazi “thought.” Despite his opinions, Heidegger gained a reputation as a fascinating and charismatic teacher whose ideas offered the respite of hope from the failed project that was a democratic Weimar Germany.
The book proceeds in a predictable way. Wolin gives a brief biographical sketch of each of Heidegger’s four students, then discusses their work and why it was important. This is the strength of the book, oddly enough, as Hans Jonas and Karl Lowith get little to no attention of their own. Wolin then goes on to criticize and pick nits at each of the four for not having separated themselves from the Black Forest Sage. This is where a lot of the problematic whitewashing happens, and it’s unfortunate that it detracts from what would otherwise be such a useful introduction to Heidegger and his influence on four of his most popular students.
The one glaring problem with Wolin’s thesis is, of course, that not all his students’ work was equally haunted by Heidegger’s errors. We can see this mistake coming a mile away with the awkwardly inaccurate title of “Heidegger’s Children,” somehow denoting a thoroughgoing reliance on Heidegger’s thought, which simply isn’t the case. Perhaps the most disappointing behavior on display by any of Heidegger’s students is the excuse-making that Arendt engages in on the part of her former teacher for decades after the war. In the case of Hans Jonas and Karl Lowith, the connections with Heidegger’s thought are so tenuous they don’t even really need mention, but Wolin still insists on referring to the two as Heidegger’s “children.”
Hitching some of Heidegger’s most famous students onto his wagon of bad intellectual habits and a lifetime of regrettable political decisions and then artlessly declaiming “Biography is history!” falls short of the level of analysis that Heidegger’s students, and dare I say even Heidegger himself, deserve. ...more
However carefully scholars wanted to walk on eggshells around Heidegger, today there is absolutely no doubt that during his 1933 rectorship at the University of Freiburg was held under the auspices and in close collaboration with the National Socialist party. Above and beyond this, his sympathies with the party continued such that his students – some more than others, clearly – felt the need to distance themselves from him. His persistent metaphysical antisemitism is apparent to anyone who cares to read the Black Notebooks written over a period of nearly three decades from 1931 to 1959 but only published within the last decade. In any case, even his dimmest of students have realized the affinities between his special brand of obscurantist thought and the Volkisch that rested behind Nazi “thought.” Despite his opinions, Heidegger gained a reputation as a fascinating and charismatic teacher whose ideas offered the respite of hope from the failed project that was a democratic Weimar Germany.
The book proceeds in a predictable way. Wolin gives a brief biographical sketch of each of Heidegger’s four students, then discusses their work and why it was important. This is the strength of the book, oddly enough, as Hans Jonas and Karl Lowith get little to no attention of their own. Wolin then goes on to criticize and pick nits at each of the four for not having separated themselves from the Black Forest Sage. This is where a lot of the problematic whitewashing happens, and it’s unfortunate that it detracts from what would otherwise be such a useful introduction to Heidegger and his influence on four of his most popular students.
The one glaring problem with Wolin’s thesis is, of course, that not all his students’ work was equally haunted by Heidegger’s errors. We can see this mistake coming a mile away with the awkwardly inaccurate title of “Heidegger’s Children,” somehow denoting a thoroughgoing reliance on Heidegger’s thought, which simply isn’t the case. Perhaps the most disappointing behavior on display by any of Heidegger’s students is the excuse-making that Arendt engages in on the part of her former teacher for decades after the war. In the case of Hans Jonas and Karl Lowith, the connections with Heidegger’s thought are so tenuous they don’t even really need mention, but Wolin still insists on referring to the two as Heidegger’s “children.”
Hitching some of Heidegger’s most famous students onto his wagon of bad intellectual habits and a lifetime of regrettable political decisions and then artlessly declaiming “Biography is history!” falls short of the level of analysis that Heidegger’s students, and dare I say even Heidegger himself, deserve. ...more
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Jun 27, 2017
Jun 27, 2017
really liked it
In the eighteenth century, the rapidly increasing rates of printing, paper production, and literacy all came together to create a society that was dom
In the eighteenth century, the rapidly increasing rates of printing, paper production, and literacy all came together to create a society that was dominated by the presence of the book. “The Social Life of Reading” serves as an interdisciplinary peek into sociology, a history of domesticity, and the social purposes of the book and reading during this period. In a book almost wholly driven by vignettes taken from diaries and commonplace books of the time, Abigail Williams explores how people read, lived with, and curated their libraries. In doing so, she overturns the casual assumption many twenty-first century readers hold that reading has always been a solitary activity divorced from the social sphere.
The word “social” in the title may strike the reader as overly academic, but it really is what makes the book fascinating. In a time when candles were expensive and daylight was at a premium, reminiscences of gathering around a family hearth to tell each other stories (or re-enact a play, or read poetry) was often at the heart of family life. A young woman went out of her way to display that she was reading a book on good manners or the moral virtues, but would often hide her copy of Shakespeare (whose bawdy language and occasionally indiscreet themes were thought to make a proper lady blush).
Young girls often experienced their first instances of socialization through what they saw and read in books. Not only were books enjoyed in social settings, but they also served to reinforce the strictly coded behavioral and gender norms of the time, including showing how young women should act in order to be considered ladylike. Two of the things all young middle class readers had to master was speech and elocution. Wiliams looks at several of these books and draws interesting and distinct lines from the written sermons of churchmen to how one respectable people should speak. This brought not only the morals of the church into the household, but also the refined, confident speech of the person giving the sermon.
It was a time in which books permeated everyday life in ways that they rarely do today. Women would sew utilitarian epigrams in samplers and cushions. The libraries of servants and young girls instilled “moral graces.” The atlas served as a cynosure of the library, ideal for reference when reading adventure stories in far-off places. Family members would keep commonplace books to carefully document their favorite sayings, poems, quips, and maxims. People of all classes and backgrounds used almanacs to consult information about the weather or astrology.
In just about 270 pages, Williams manages to say something about nearly every social and cultural aspect of reading in the eighteenth century that most people could think to ask. It’s admittedly a dry read in places and can sometimes feel repetitive. But for someone interested in a well-researched book about the intersections between the world of books and reading and the culture of domesticity, this is a book that rewards close reading. ...more
The word “social” in the title may strike the reader as overly academic, but it really is what makes the book fascinating. In a time when candles were expensive and daylight was at a premium, reminiscences of gathering around a family hearth to tell each other stories (or re-enact a play, or read poetry) was often at the heart of family life. A young woman went out of her way to display that she was reading a book on good manners or the moral virtues, but would often hide her copy of Shakespeare (whose bawdy language and occasionally indiscreet themes were thought to make a proper lady blush).
Young girls often experienced their first instances of socialization through what they saw and read in books. Not only were books enjoyed in social settings, but they also served to reinforce the strictly coded behavioral and gender norms of the time, including showing how young women should act in order to be considered ladylike. Two of the things all young middle class readers had to master was speech and elocution. Wiliams looks at several of these books and draws interesting and distinct lines from the written sermons of churchmen to how one respectable people should speak. This brought not only the morals of the church into the household, but also the refined, confident speech of the person giving the sermon.
It was a time in which books permeated everyday life in ways that they rarely do today. Women would sew utilitarian epigrams in samplers and cushions. The libraries of servants and young girls instilled “moral graces.” The atlas served as a cynosure of the library, ideal for reference when reading adventure stories in far-off places. Family members would keep commonplace books to carefully document their favorite sayings, poems, quips, and maxims. People of all classes and backgrounds used almanacs to consult information about the weather or astrology.
In just about 270 pages, Williams manages to say something about nearly every social and cultural aspect of reading in the eighteenth century that most people could think to ask. It’s admittedly a dry read in places and can sometimes feel repetitive. But for someone interested in a well-researched book about the intersections between the world of books and reading and the culture of domesticity, this is a book that rewards close reading. ...more
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Dec 30, 2021
Hardcover
0141990503
9780141990507
0141990503
4.12
1,309
1972
May 02, 2019
really liked it
The life’s work of Christopher Hill (1912-2003) was taken up almost entirely by a reevaluation of England in the seventeenth century. By 1972, the yea
The life’s work of Christopher Hill (1912-2003) was taken up almost entirely by a reevaluation of England in the seventeenth century. By 1972, the year this book was published, he had already written nearly a dozen books, with more than half of them about the culture, society, and intellectual life of England of that time. “The World Turned Upside Down” mostly examines the new and radically sectarian Protestant ideas that contributed to the revolutionary atmosphere.
If you want a good description of the basic revolutionary groups mostly mentioned this period, this does the job, but it’s not exactly what most people would consider an introduction (see below). For those completely new to the subject, sometimes his explanations run together a bit more than they should. He first introduces the Diggers, the Christian communitarian sect that first got its name by taking control of some commons abutting the Thames and planting their crops there. Before long, dozens of other sites had been similarly commandeered – an idea that might be shocking if a full third of all English land hadn’t been commons that were laying about similarly unused. He then moves on to describe the beliefs of the Ranters, the Seekers, the Quakers, and the Muggletonians, the whole time emphasizing their radical ideas about sex and private property.
Being a Marxist and having more than a revisionist tint, Hill freely uses the word “communist” to describe many of their beliefs, but this may very well be ex post facto confirmation bias. Whatever it is, it was at least a very heterodox form of religious practice that sometimes disposed of the most fundamental of Christian assumptions. This is definitely one of the big takeaways of the book: that the radicals of the time were beginning to question what used to be thought of as their preordained hierarchies and roles in society, and slowly but surely figured out that institutions of law, government, and private property are really nothing more than what people themselves are willing to defend.
“The World Turned Upside Down” is often passed off as an “introduction to the English Revolution” and the ideas that pushed it forward. But without some previous grounding in the history of the time, readers are going to be left far afield. It’s not an entry point. Nor is it so scholarly to be called a monograph. It’s an approachable book for the informed reader. I’m guessing the reason why it has the reputation as an “introduction” comes from the sheer number of people it has influenced in the fifty years since it has been published.
For anyone interested in thick, hearty histories of England in the seventeenth century, the good people over at Verso Press have done the world a tremendous favor by republishing much of Hill’s work, including “Experience and Defeat: Milton and His Contemporaries,” “Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies,” “Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England,” “Reformation to Industrial Revolution,” “A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People” (Hill’s book on John Bunyan) and “Milton and the English Revolution.” In and of themselves, they look like nearly a complete education in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the time. Over the next several years, I plan to work through them with the care and appreciation they deserve. ...more
If you want a good description of the basic revolutionary groups mostly mentioned this period, this does the job, but it’s not exactly what most people would consider an introduction (see below). For those completely new to the subject, sometimes his explanations run together a bit more than they should. He first introduces the Diggers, the Christian communitarian sect that first got its name by taking control of some commons abutting the Thames and planting their crops there. Before long, dozens of other sites had been similarly commandeered – an idea that might be shocking if a full third of all English land hadn’t been commons that were laying about similarly unused. He then moves on to describe the beliefs of the Ranters, the Seekers, the Quakers, and the Muggletonians, the whole time emphasizing their radical ideas about sex and private property.
Being a Marxist and having more than a revisionist tint, Hill freely uses the word “communist” to describe many of their beliefs, but this may very well be ex post facto confirmation bias. Whatever it is, it was at least a very heterodox form of religious practice that sometimes disposed of the most fundamental of Christian assumptions. This is definitely one of the big takeaways of the book: that the radicals of the time were beginning to question what used to be thought of as their preordained hierarchies and roles in society, and slowly but surely figured out that institutions of law, government, and private property are really nothing more than what people themselves are willing to defend.
“The World Turned Upside Down” is often passed off as an “introduction to the English Revolution” and the ideas that pushed it forward. But without some previous grounding in the history of the time, readers are going to be left far afield. It’s not an entry point. Nor is it so scholarly to be called a monograph. It’s an approachable book for the informed reader. I’m guessing the reason why it has the reputation as an “introduction” comes from the sheer number of people it has influenced in the fifty years since it has been published.
For anyone interested in thick, hearty histories of England in the seventeenth century, the good people over at Verso Press have done the world a tremendous favor by republishing much of Hill’s work, including “Experience and Defeat: Milton and His Contemporaries,” “Liberty Against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies,” “Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England,” “Reformation to Industrial Revolution,” “A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People” (Hill’s book on John Bunyan) and “Milton and the English Revolution.” In and of themselves, they look like nearly a complete education in the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the time. Over the next several years, I plan to work through them with the care and appreciation they deserve. ...more
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Dec 29, 2021
Paperback
0801827418
9780801827419
0801827418
3.94
153
1978
Mar 01, 1986
really liked it
In lieu of a formal review, I’ll leave links to the series of conversations between Daniel Rose, Davood Gozli and me. We discussed the introduction an
In lieu of a formal review, I’ll leave links to the series of conversations between Daniel Rose, Davood Gozli and me. We discussed the introduction and each of White’s twelve essays separately, with most discussions running around 45 minutes each.
Introduction – Tropology, Discourse, and the Modes of Human Consciousness – https://youtu.be/HOSC-r86PjE (Only Davood and I participated in this conversation.)
Chapter 1 – The Burden of History - https://youtu.be/gmCsTQDfc3k (Only Davood and Daniel participated in this conversation.)
Chapter 2 – Interpretation in History - https://youtu.be/Num4TYgVdv8
Chapter 3 – The Historical Text as Literary Artifact - https://youtu.be/7-gXjjFyc-o
Chapter 4 – Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination - https://youtu.be/SJ_IWA10Cww
Chapter 5 – The Fictions of Factual Representation - https://youtu.be/A1Lhvt7b4Bs
Chapter 6 – The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment - https://youtu.be/cYAjt0dUeIY
Chapter 7 – The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea - https://youtu.be/Cah4OB_Vw-8
Chapter 8 – The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish - https://youtu.be/ne8PQVHMPEo
Chapter 9 – The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science - https://youtu.be/VUXKJdZQc-E
Chapter 10 – What is Living and What is Dead in Croce’s Criticism of Vico - https://youtu.be/3RZmuAnwWeo
Chapter 11 – Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground - https://youtu.be/TKriU6AFcBI
Chapter 12 – The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory - https://youtu.be/zHjAunvv5xc
...more
Introduction – Tropology, Discourse, and the Modes of Human Consciousness – https://youtu.be/HOSC-r86PjE (Only Davood and I participated in this conversation.)
Chapter 1 – The Burden of History - https://youtu.be/gmCsTQDfc3k (Only Davood and Daniel participated in this conversation.)
Chapter 2 – Interpretation in History - https://youtu.be/Num4TYgVdv8
Chapter 3 – The Historical Text as Literary Artifact - https://youtu.be/7-gXjjFyc-o
Chapter 4 – Historicism, History, and the Figurative Imagination - https://youtu.be/SJ_IWA10Cww
Chapter 5 – The Fictions of Factual Representation - https://youtu.be/A1Lhvt7b4Bs
Chapter 6 – The Irrational and the Problem of Historical Knowledge in the Enlightenment - https://youtu.be/cYAjt0dUeIY
Chapter 7 – The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea - https://youtu.be/Cah4OB_Vw-8
Chapter 8 – The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish - https://youtu.be/ne8PQVHMPEo
Chapter 9 – The Tropics of History: The Deep Structure of the New Science - https://youtu.be/VUXKJdZQc-E
Chapter 10 – What is Living and What is Dead in Croce’s Criticism of Vico - https://youtu.be/3RZmuAnwWeo
Chapter 11 – Foucault Decoded: Notes from Underground - https://youtu.be/TKriU6AFcBI
Chapter 12 – The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory - https://youtu.be/zHjAunvv5xc
...more
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Dec 12, 2021
Dec 12, 2021
Paperback
0913966061
9780913966068
0913966061
3.78
23
1969
Mar 01, 1977
liked it
“Adam Smith: The Man and His Works” was first published in 1976 for the bicentennial of the publication of Smith’s most widely known scholarly effort,
“Adam Smith: The Man and His Works” was first published in 1976 for the bicentennial of the publication of Smith’s most widely known scholarly effort, “The Wealth of Nations”. But since my interest in economics and free trade is marginal at best, I was happy to find that West touches on all aspects of Smith’s life, not just the publication of that one book.
While this is a serviceable book whose prose can be described as a bit professorial and dry, it nevertheless does a very good job at introducing Adam Smith to a general audience of readers who were previously unfamiliar with his body of work. One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed the most is that West draws widely and broadly from contemporary letters, diary entries, and other books in a way that builds up a picture of Smith as a warm, companionable if slightly eccentric man. If you don’t like anything else about West’s effort, it would be hard to say that his admiration for Smith isn’t infectious.
This isn’t for anyone who wants a thorough exposition of the major points of “Wealth of Nations.” There is one longer chapter toward the end of the book where the points are summarized in a perfunctory way, easily accessible to someone whose familiarity with the original has been delayed for fears of economic obscurantism. West also briefly touches on the ways in which Smith’s ideas influenced free trade in his own lifetime and afterward. After this, oddly West wanders off into some of Smith’s opinions concerning the now-outdated “Irish Question” (the significance of contemporary calls for Irish nationality). In short, if you’re looking for a reading guide in an effort to understand “Wealth of Nations” more fully, look elsewhere.
The book tries to discuss, at least in brief, all of Smith’s major bodies of writing. I don’t just mean the “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which is certainly worthy of study all on its own, but his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, his lectures on jurisprudence, and his major essays on philosophical subjects, most of which he wrote serving his dozen-year stretch as a professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University.
West couches all of this in vignettes by friends, scholarly influences, and co-workers – who included the likes of David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson among others – to paint a picture of him as a person. Because they help flesh out Smith as sympathetic and passionate as well as a skilled teacher, they were among my favorite parts of the book. In 1764 when Smith resigned from the University of Glasgow, he tried to return the fees he had previously collected from students because he would have been unable to give his full body of lectures they paid for. The students were so effusive in their praise of his abilities as a teacher and his learning that they refused, insisting that he keep it. While always more comfortable one-on-one or in small groups, Smith seems to have nevertheless been a memorable teacher. West claims that he was among the first professors at the University to not lecture in Latin, thinking that English would make his talks more accessible to students.
Note: In the 1980s, the Liberty Fund (which published Professor West’s book on Smith) also published the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith’s complete works, including everything I listed above in the review. For anyone who has the time and interest in learning about Smith’s encyclopedic range of interests, slowly working one’s way through that ten-volume set would be the ideal way to read this book. If you’re not interested in the entire set, they also sell the books separately. I currently have “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” “Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” and “Essays on Philosophical Subjects” in my library and plan to share reviews of them in the future. ...more
While this is a serviceable book whose prose can be described as a bit professorial and dry, it nevertheless does a very good job at introducing Adam Smith to a general audience of readers who were previously unfamiliar with his body of work. One of the aspects of the book I enjoyed the most is that West draws widely and broadly from contemporary letters, diary entries, and other books in a way that builds up a picture of Smith as a warm, companionable if slightly eccentric man. If you don’t like anything else about West’s effort, it would be hard to say that his admiration for Smith isn’t infectious.
This isn’t for anyone who wants a thorough exposition of the major points of “Wealth of Nations.” There is one longer chapter toward the end of the book where the points are summarized in a perfunctory way, easily accessible to someone whose familiarity with the original has been delayed for fears of economic obscurantism. West also briefly touches on the ways in which Smith’s ideas influenced free trade in his own lifetime and afterward. After this, oddly West wanders off into some of Smith’s opinions concerning the now-outdated “Irish Question” (the significance of contemporary calls for Irish nationality). In short, if you’re looking for a reading guide in an effort to understand “Wealth of Nations” more fully, look elsewhere.
The book tries to discuss, at least in brief, all of Smith’s major bodies of writing. I don’t just mean the “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” which is certainly worthy of study all on its own, but his lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, his lectures on jurisprudence, and his major essays on philosophical subjects, most of which he wrote serving his dozen-year stretch as a professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University.
West couches all of this in vignettes by friends, scholarly influences, and co-workers – who included the likes of David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Francis Hutcheson among others – to paint a picture of him as a person. Because they help flesh out Smith as sympathetic and passionate as well as a skilled teacher, they were among my favorite parts of the book. In 1764 when Smith resigned from the University of Glasgow, he tried to return the fees he had previously collected from students because he would have been unable to give his full body of lectures they paid for. The students were so effusive in their praise of his abilities as a teacher and his learning that they refused, insisting that he keep it. While always more comfortable one-on-one or in small groups, Smith seems to have nevertheless been a memorable teacher. West claims that he was among the first professors at the University to not lecture in Latin, thinking that English would make his talks more accessible to students.
Note: In the 1980s, the Liberty Fund (which published Professor West’s book on Smith) also published the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith’s complete works, including everything I listed above in the review. For anyone who has the time and interest in learning about Smith’s encyclopedic range of interests, slowly working one’s way through that ten-volume set would be the ideal way to read this book. If you’re not interested in the entire set, they also sell the books separately. I currently have “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” “Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres,” and “Essays on Philosophical Subjects” in my library and plan to share reviews of them in the future. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Sep 15, 2021
Sep 15, 2021
Hardcover
0142004103
9780142004104
0142004103
4.15
1,540
2003
Mar 02, 2004
really liked it
Outside of historians of photography or the occasional cinephile, the name Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) doesn’t ring many bells anymore
Outside of historians of photography or the occasional cinephile, the name Eadweard Muybridge (born Edward Muggeridge) doesn’t ring many bells anymore. If anything, he is perhaps recognized in passing for his 1870s collaboration with former California Governor and future Senator Leland Stanford and their mutual interest in trying to tell whether the four feet of a horse ever leave the ground all at once while a horse is at a full canter. Muybridge’s technological innovations revealed that in fact they do – to the surprise of many of his contemporaries. But aside from his fascination with studying the motion of horses, he led a fascinating life. In her book “River of Shadows,” Rebecca Solnit takes Muybridge’s life and accomplishments as a centerpiece, but slowly works outward to the study of his environment of the newly populated Western United States, and then ultimately to the now almost unnoticed impact he has on human perceptions of time and motion.
Muybridge was born along the shores of the Thames in 1830. When he was twenty, he came to the United States, eventually finding himself in San Francisco as a bookseller. In 1860, he suffered a massive head injury in a stagecoach accident near Fort Worth, Texas. Afterwards, some friends and acquaintances claimed that they experienced in him a significant personality change during which he grew more introverted and less observant of social customs and mores (what we euphemistically would call “eccentric”). This has led later neurophysiologists to believe that Muybridge’s injury may have been akin to the orbitofrontal cortex lesion that Phineas Gage suffered just twelve years earlier in 1848. It was shortly after his accident that Muybridge began to develop a fascination for photography. His first exhibitions of his work largely consisted of nature photography – mostly in the Yosemite Valley. These images are among the first which would earn him worldwide recognition.
One of the recurrent themes Solnit explores is how the West, rife with self-mythologization and constant reinvention, was the perfect place to go and completely reconstruct oneself. Muybridge engaged in this with a series of name changes throughout his career. Born Edward James Muggeridge, he went on to later use Muggridge and Muygridge, finally settling on Muybridge only in the 1860s. During a trip back home to England in 1882, he changed the spelling of his first name to Eadweard. I can’t help but think of the smirk that must have crossed his face when looking for a name under which to display his early photography: Helios. During the late 1860s and 1870s, Muybridge immersed himself in photography, twice accompanying Carleton Watkins where he made gigantic plates of the natural scenery around him. He also took countless photographs of San Francisco landscapes and cloud banks.
It wasn’t until the middle part of his career that Muybridge became increasingly interested not just in photography itself, but in how photography manipulated human perceptions of time and space. Around this time, he was approached by Leland Stanford to ask whether his favorite horse, Occident, ever lifted all four of his legs off the ground. He was able to take photographs of Occident at speeds of about 1,000 per second (or one picture every 1/1,000 of a second). He went on to engage in time and motion studies of just about anything one could imagine, from human nude figures to “amputee walking with crutches” to “legless boy climbing in and out of chair.” In 1880, Muybridge invented what he called a zoopraxiscope, a spinning disc with a number of apertures bored into it, that if spun quickly enough, appeared to result in a continuous, moving image. Now not only was he an accomplished photographer, but also one of the pioneers of early cinema.
In 1926, twenty-two years after Muybridge’s death, Virginia Woolf wrote in response to the bourgeoning world of cinema, “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.” One of the major criticisms of cinema was that it consisted of a flood of images which the eyes were forced to take in faster than the mind could possibly process. Whether or not Muybridge anticipated such a massive, consciousness-shifting change in the gradual conversion from a text-based culture to an image-driven one is unknown. But it’s an irrevocable one, and one that he played a major part in.
Solnit’s prose is readable and engaging enough, but not as compelling as I would have thought considering the wide amount of popular praise her books frequently get. In some ways, Solnit uses Muybridge as a tool to talk about wider themes of America in the nineteenth century, which is quite a feat for a book that is barely 250 pages in length. Sometimes it’s unclear precisely which theme she is trying to exemplify with a given point. Nevertheless, Solnit reintroduces the reading public to a figure whose contributions have forever shaped the ways in which time and space transform themselves, revivified, on the living screen. There isn’t a lot of new scholarly ground being tread in the book, or many new interpretive vistas being explored regarding Muybridge’s life or work. Sometimes a popular, narrative-driven history re-centering a neglected figure from the past just hits the spot, and this is exactly what makes this book so thoroughly enjoyable. ...more
Muybridge was born along the shores of the Thames in 1830. When he was twenty, he came to the United States, eventually finding himself in San Francisco as a bookseller. In 1860, he suffered a massive head injury in a stagecoach accident near Fort Worth, Texas. Afterwards, some friends and acquaintances claimed that they experienced in him a significant personality change during which he grew more introverted and less observant of social customs and mores (what we euphemistically would call “eccentric”). This has led later neurophysiologists to believe that Muybridge’s injury may have been akin to the orbitofrontal cortex lesion that Phineas Gage suffered just twelve years earlier in 1848. It was shortly after his accident that Muybridge began to develop a fascination for photography. His first exhibitions of his work largely consisted of nature photography – mostly in the Yosemite Valley. These images are among the first which would earn him worldwide recognition.
One of the recurrent themes Solnit explores is how the West, rife with self-mythologization and constant reinvention, was the perfect place to go and completely reconstruct oneself. Muybridge engaged in this with a series of name changes throughout his career. Born Edward James Muggeridge, he went on to later use Muggridge and Muygridge, finally settling on Muybridge only in the 1860s. During a trip back home to England in 1882, he changed the spelling of his first name to Eadweard. I can’t help but think of the smirk that must have crossed his face when looking for a name under which to display his early photography: Helios. During the late 1860s and 1870s, Muybridge immersed himself in photography, twice accompanying Carleton Watkins where he made gigantic plates of the natural scenery around him. He also took countless photographs of San Francisco landscapes and cloud banks.
It wasn’t until the middle part of his career that Muybridge became increasingly interested not just in photography itself, but in how photography manipulated human perceptions of time and space. Around this time, he was approached by Leland Stanford to ask whether his favorite horse, Occident, ever lifted all four of his legs off the ground. He was able to take photographs of Occident at speeds of about 1,000 per second (or one picture every 1/1,000 of a second). He went on to engage in time and motion studies of just about anything one could imagine, from human nude figures to “amputee walking with crutches” to “legless boy climbing in and out of chair.” In 1880, Muybridge invented what he called a zoopraxiscope, a spinning disc with a number of apertures bored into it, that if spun quickly enough, appeared to result in a continuous, moving image. Now not only was he an accomplished photographer, but also one of the pioneers of early cinema.
In 1926, twenty-two years after Muybridge’s death, Virginia Woolf wrote in response to the bourgeoning world of cinema, “The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think.” One of the major criticisms of cinema was that it consisted of a flood of images which the eyes were forced to take in faster than the mind could possibly process. Whether or not Muybridge anticipated such a massive, consciousness-shifting change in the gradual conversion from a text-based culture to an image-driven one is unknown. But it’s an irrevocable one, and one that he played a major part in.
Solnit’s prose is readable and engaging enough, but not as compelling as I would have thought considering the wide amount of popular praise her books frequently get. In some ways, Solnit uses Muybridge as a tool to talk about wider themes of America in the nineteenth century, which is quite a feat for a book that is barely 250 pages in length. Sometimes it’s unclear precisely which theme she is trying to exemplify with a given point. Nevertheless, Solnit reintroduces the reading public to a figure whose contributions have forever shaped the ways in which time and space transform themselves, revivified, on the living screen. There isn’t a lot of new scholarly ground being tread in the book, or many new interpretive vistas being explored regarding Muybridge’s life or work. Sometimes a popular, narrative-driven history re-centering a neglected figure from the past just hits the spot, and this is exactly what makes this book so thoroughly enjoyable. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Aug 03, 2021
Aug 02, 2021
Paperback
0691174105
9780691174105
0691174105
3.68
108
unknown
Oct 20, 2020
really liked it
Trying to get a grasp of an entire intellectual tradition, from its historical roots to its various contemporary incarnations, within the cover of a s
Trying to get a grasp of an entire intellectual tradition, from its historical roots to its various contemporary incarnations, within the cover of a single book is a daunting job. As it turns out, this is not the first time that Edmund Fawcett has accomplished such a task, but the second. His 2018 “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea” does largely the same thing. His book on conservatism came out in October 2020 and was also published by Princeton University Press.
The presentation and formatting of the ideas is chronological and easy to follow. Fawcett begins with two introductory chapters, the first of which discusses the birth of the idea of conservatism as two distinctly different kinds of responses to the events of the French Revolution: first, the more measured, quiet skepticism toward the Revolution advanced by Edmund Burke and then the more stentorian, aggressively counterrevolutionary response offered up by Joseph de Maistre. These are then followed up four chapters (1830-1880, 1880-1945, 1945-1980, and 1980-present) that each begin with a theoretical overview of the themes and events that defined conservative politics during that period, followed by near-encyclopedic commentaries on the events of the United States, France, Germany, and Britain.
Because of Fawcett’s four-fold analysis that relies heavily on a detailed knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, readers without this background will find this part of the book a bit of a chore. American readers will recognize, one hopes, their own history. But can you tell a Bourbonist from a Bonapartist? The British Reform Act of 1832? The Reform Act of 1867? How about 1882? It’s not so much that these play a large part in the book, but if you’re not at least passingly familiar with the general shape of British, French, and German politics over these two centuries, one’s appreciation of the book’s comprehensive approach will be limited.
What, then, distinguishes conservatism from any other brand of political thought? Whether in the realm of economics or social matters, thinkers Fawcett identifies as aligned with conservatism have a few things that loosely tie them together: the inscrutability of history, the severely limited power of human reason, and the imperfectability of man. Echoing Russell Kirk’s “permanent things,” Fawcett also claims most conservatives are drawn together in their mutual respect for established institutions, custom, order, tradition, and religion, though most of them are open and accommodating of gradual amounts of change.
In the first period (1830-1880), French politics were dominated by a discussion of whether or not to return to the monarchy, while conservative British leaders like Lord Derby and Disraeli tried to negotiate within the framework of liberal democracy. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Fawcett takes up thinkers as myriad and diverse as Orestes Brownson, Charles Hodge, Felicite de Lamennais, Otto von Gierke, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Cardinal Newman, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The third period (1945-1980) takes up De Gaulle, Adenauer, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Taft, Macmillan, and Thatcher and frames the conservatism of the latter part of the period as a backlash against the radical countercultural politics of the 1960s. I’d tell you Fawcett’s opinions on American conservatism post-1980, but I just want to get through this review without having to think about the Laffer Curve or Donald Trump.
The strengths of this book are many, but there may be a few weaknesses for the general reader. First, the likely aforementioned lack of familiarity with the politics of Western Europe over the last two centuries. A second would be the occasional oversight of what I would consider to be a major thinker, two examples being Michael Oakeshott and Raymond Aron. (Oakeshott is actually mentioned in the text, but for some reason isn’t listed in the Subject Index.) Aron remains completely absent from the book despite his radical critique of many strains of the French intellectual tradition for being overtly influenced by Marxism in his 1955 book “The Opium of the Intellectuals”. But I’m also well aware that any book on such a broad swath of intellectual territory as conservatism writ large must curate careful decisions about both omissions and commissions, and I myself often roll my eyes when I read reviews that exasperatedly exclaim, “But … but .. but, what about X, Y, and Z?” or “Too much time was spent on…” So enough with the quibbles.
Above, I used the word “near-encyclopedic” to describe Fawcett’s treatment of his subject. I promise that the long list of names that I gave wasn’t just to sate my insufferable garrulousness. It was to give some faint hint of the research and excavation of ideas that Fawcett clearly put into the book. You will learn names and ideas with which you were previously unfamiliar, even if only a few. This book’s overwhelming forte is its international approach. Books on American conservatism are easy to find, but ones that draw just as readily from European conservative traditions, and do so even-handedly, are few and far between. Because of all of this and more, it deserves a respected place on any bookshelf devoted to the history of political ideas.
I would like the record to note that I made it to the end of this review without ever once using the word “magisterial.” ...more
The presentation and formatting of the ideas is chronological and easy to follow. Fawcett begins with two introductory chapters, the first of which discusses the birth of the idea of conservatism as two distinctly different kinds of responses to the events of the French Revolution: first, the more measured, quiet skepticism toward the Revolution advanced by Edmund Burke and then the more stentorian, aggressively counterrevolutionary response offered up by Joseph de Maistre. These are then followed up four chapters (1830-1880, 1880-1945, 1945-1980, and 1980-present) that each begin with a theoretical overview of the themes and events that defined conservative politics during that period, followed by near-encyclopedic commentaries on the events of the United States, France, Germany, and Britain.
Because of Fawcett’s four-fold analysis that relies heavily on a detailed knowledge of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history, readers without this background will find this part of the book a bit of a chore. American readers will recognize, one hopes, their own history. But can you tell a Bourbonist from a Bonapartist? The British Reform Act of 1832? The Reform Act of 1867? How about 1882? It’s not so much that these play a large part in the book, but if you’re not at least passingly familiar with the general shape of British, French, and German politics over these two centuries, one’s appreciation of the book’s comprehensive approach will be limited.
What, then, distinguishes conservatism from any other brand of political thought? Whether in the realm of economics or social matters, thinkers Fawcett identifies as aligned with conservatism have a few things that loosely tie them together: the inscrutability of history, the severely limited power of human reason, and the imperfectability of man. Echoing Russell Kirk’s “permanent things,” Fawcett also claims most conservatives are drawn together in their mutual respect for established institutions, custom, order, tradition, and religion, though most of them are open and accommodating of gradual amounts of change.
In the first period (1830-1880), French politics were dominated by a discussion of whether or not to return to the monarchy, while conservative British leaders like Lord Derby and Disraeli tried to negotiate within the framework of liberal democracy. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Fawcett takes up thinkers as myriad and diverse as Orestes Brownson, Charles Hodge, Felicite de Lamennais, Otto von Gierke, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Cardinal Newman, James Fitzjames Stephen, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The third period (1945-1980) takes up De Gaulle, Adenauer, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, Taft, Macmillan, and Thatcher and frames the conservatism of the latter part of the period as a backlash against the radical countercultural politics of the 1960s. I’d tell you Fawcett’s opinions on American conservatism post-1980, but I just want to get through this review without having to think about the Laffer Curve or Donald Trump.
The strengths of this book are many, but there may be a few weaknesses for the general reader. First, the likely aforementioned lack of familiarity with the politics of Western Europe over the last two centuries. A second would be the occasional oversight of what I would consider to be a major thinker, two examples being Michael Oakeshott and Raymond Aron. (Oakeshott is actually mentioned in the text, but for some reason isn’t listed in the Subject Index.) Aron remains completely absent from the book despite his radical critique of many strains of the French intellectual tradition for being overtly influenced by Marxism in his 1955 book “The Opium of the Intellectuals”. But I’m also well aware that any book on such a broad swath of intellectual territory as conservatism writ large must curate careful decisions about both omissions and commissions, and I myself often roll my eyes when I read reviews that exasperatedly exclaim, “But … but .. but, what about X, Y, and Z?” or “Too much time was spent on…” So enough with the quibbles.
Above, I used the word “near-encyclopedic” to describe Fawcett’s treatment of his subject. I promise that the long list of names that I gave wasn’t just to sate my insufferable garrulousness. It was to give some faint hint of the research and excavation of ideas that Fawcett clearly put into the book. You will learn names and ideas with which you were previously unfamiliar, even if only a few. This book’s overwhelming forte is its international approach. Books on American conservatism are easy to find, but ones that draw just as readily from European conservative traditions, and do so even-handedly, are few and far between. Because of all of this and more, it deserves a respected place on any bookshelf devoted to the history of political ideas.
I would like the record to note that I made it to the end of this review without ever once using the word “magisterial.” ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
Jun 03, 2021
Jun 03, 2021
Hardcover
0375423745
9780375423741
0375423745
3.84
3,242
Feb 12, 2008
Feb 12, 2008
liked it
Anyone who has spent many years in the United States will have trouble denying the downright anti-rationalist, anti-intellectual strains in many corne
Anyone who has spent many years in the United States will have trouble denying the downright anti-rationalist, anti-intellectual strains in many corners of American culture. My interest in reading Susan Jacoby’s book arose from an interest that grew out of having read Douglas Hofstadter’s 1963 classic “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” with a group of friends last year. Hofstadter’s is a superb book many of whose claims are convincing, and which is enriched all the more by the fact that Hofstadter is a historian with a deep breadth of knowledge from which to draw.
One of Jacoby’s biggest bete-noires is the increasing time we spend in front of the television engaged in videogames which have encroached on our very human needs for reading and conversation. As true as this may in fact be, it doesn’t take an insightful cultural critic to point it out. It is simply a “that,” not a response to the markedly more interesting question of “why?” The argumentative approach of “youth culture is taking over and pushing away valuable artistic and cultural pursuits” leaves her sounding less like a defender of reason and intellectual pursuit than a slightly less curmudgeonly version of the Professors Bloom (Allan and Harold).
Her laundry list of complaints, sometimes perennial and sometimes new, are usually worthy of deeper analysis than she gives them in this book: the infantilization of culture (this is one example where I signed on with her wholeheartedly), resurgent religious fundamentalism, the local (instead of state or even national) control of schools, et cetera. Unfortunately some of her criticisms just leave you scratching your head. Jacoby’s book opens with a screed against the contemporary American usage of the word “folks,” especially its increasingly common use when politicians try to sound demotic and familiar. George W. Bush probably did it the most. She might be right to have a kneejerk reaction in thinking this is populist mollycoddling to an increasing uninformed public. It’s hard to argue against the idea of politicians trying to look relatable to their constituents, especially when conservative politicians are invested in disowning their Ivy League educations for the purposes of trying to look like the Everyman.
(An aside: from Jacoby’s criticism of the deployment of the word “folks,” she seems to think that words are passed from generation to generation without every changing in context, tone, usage, or half a dozen other characteristics. No one who thinks seriously about language believes it is prescriptive. It has always been and can only be descriptive. Dictionaries only describe the mere fact of word use. It is never a lexicographer’s aim to make normative claims about how a language should be “properly” used. End of rant.)
In an especially tone-deaf take, Jacoby romanticizes the decade in which she grew up, the 1950s, as one of the bourgeoning symphony orchestra, art museums, book-of-the-month clubs, and reading generally – in other words, as replete with the kinds of middle-class comforts that “we” all used to enjoy. I won’t enumerate here the ways in which this highly selective interpretation of the fifties is a product of the author’s own personal experience of childhood, which reads like it was simply dripping with privilege.
The biggest hope that one could possibly have for this book would be for it to approach the insight of Hofstadter’s, but it doesn’t. But in a way, knowing that Jacoby isn’t a historian, expecting this sets her up for failure. Nevertheless, whereas Hofstadter plumbs both the depths both historical and contemporary, Jacoby mostly aims for the all-too-easy-to-notice low-hanging fruit of today’s anti-intellectualism: the fact that American students are nowhere near the top of other countries in academic performance, that today politics are little more than telegenic displays of charisma, and that today the word “intellectual” itself is associated with pretentious literary eggheads or technocrats so nefarious they have to twirl their handlebar mustaches.
In the end, Jacoby makes fair points, but most of them are the easiest points. In most places she makes no attempt to dig into the historical origins of anti-intellectual attitudes, feeling satisfied in describe the superficial manifestations of problems that have deeply embedded cultural roots that are rife for a 21st century explanation. In other words, it’s like most books of its kind that come along to anticipate the death of the mind, like Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” and Dwight MacDonald’s “Masscult and Midcult,” all of which should be read in close conversational tandem with Jacoby’s book.
Here we are, at the veritable fin de lire, and yet we cannot help ourselves from reading about the death of reading. ...more
One of Jacoby’s biggest bete-noires is the increasing time we spend in front of the television engaged in videogames which have encroached on our very human needs for reading and conversation. As true as this may in fact be, it doesn’t take an insightful cultural critic to point it out. It is simply a “that,” not a response to the markedly more interesting question of “why?” The argumentative approach of “youth culture is taking over and pushing away valuable artistic and cultural pursuits” leaves her sounding less like a defender of reason and intellectual pursuit than a slightly less curmudgeonly version of the Professors Bloom (Allan and Harold).
Her laundry list of complaints, sometimes perennial and sometimes new, are usually worthy of deeper analysis than she gives them in this book: the infantilization of culture (this is one example where I signed on with her wholeheartedly), resurgent religious fundamentalism, the local (instead of state or even national) control of schools, et cetera. Unfortunately some of her criticisms just leave you scratching your head. Jacoby’s book opens with a screed against the contemporary American usage of the word “folks,” especially its increasingly common use when politicians try to sound demotic and familiar. George W. Bush probably did it the most. She might be right to have a kneejerk reaction in thinking this is populist mollycoddling to an increasing uninformed public. It’s hard to argue against the idea of politicians trying to look relatable to their constituents, especially when conservative politicians are invested in disowning their Ivy League educations for the purposes of trying to look like the Everyman.
(An aside: from Jacoby’s criticism of the deployment of the word “folks,” she seems to think that words are passed from generation to generation without every changing in context, tone, usage, or half a dozen other characteristics. No one who thinks seriously about language believes it is prescriptive. It has always been and can only be descriptive. Dictionaries only describe the mere fact of word use. It is never a lexicographer’s aim to make normative claims about how a language should be “properly” used. End of rant.)
In an especially tone-deaf take, Jacoby romanticizes the decade in which she grew up, the 1950s, as one of the bourgeoning symphony orchestra, art museums, book-of-the-month clubs, and reading generally – in other words, as replete with the kinds of middle-class comforts that “we” all used to enjoy. I won’t enumerate here the ways in which this highly selective interpretation of the fifties is a product of the author’s own personal experience of childhood, which reads like it was simply dripping with privilege.
The biggest hope that one could possibly have for this book would be for it to approach the insight of Hofstadter’s, but it doesn’t. But in a way, knowing that Jacoby isn’t a historian, expecting this sets her up for failure. Nevertheless, whereas Hofstadter plumbs both the depths both historical and contemporary, Jacoby mostly aims for the all-too-easy-to-notice low-hanging fruit of today’s anti-intellectualism: the fact that American students are nowhere near the top of other countries in academic performance, that today politics are little more than telegenic displays of charisma, and that today the word “intellectual” itself is associated with pretentious literary eggheads or technocrats so nefarious they have to twirl their handlebar mustaches.
In the end, Jacoby makes fair points, but most of them are the easiest points. In most places she makes no attempt to dig into the historical origins of anti-intellectual attitudes, feeling satisfied in describe the superficial manifestations of problems that have deeply embedded cultural roots that are rife for a 21st century explanation. In other words, it’s like most books of its kind that come along to anticipate the death of the mind, like Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind,” and Dwight MacDonald’s “Masscult and Midcult,” all of which should be read in close conversational tandem with Jacoby’s book.
Here we are, at the veritable fin de lire, and yet we cannot help ourselves from reading about the death of reading. ...more
Notes are private!
1
not set
May 2021
May 01, 2021
Hardcover
0691006784
9780691006789
0691006784
3.72
309
1972
Apr 26, 1999
really liked it
This book might not be the particular kind that most readers are seeking out, especially considering the title, which makes it seem like it’s all abou
This book might not be the particular kind that most readers are seeking out, especially considering the title, which makes it seem like it’s all about the artistic and cultural achievements of the Italian Renaissance. You won’t read the symbolism of the elongated figures in Parmigianino or Ghiberti’s doors at the Florence Baptistery. These and other similar considerations sometimes loom in the margins, but the bulk of the book is dedicated to a methodological study of how Italian politics, economics, and society allowed for the innovations in literature, painting, architecture, and music that we see develop in this time period. Burke isn’t offering up a Marxist analysis here at all, but imagining something like Marx’s base and superstructure here might be a good comparison: the “base” is made up of the social forces and relations of production (like labor conditions, guilds, kinds of patronage systems, et cetera) that allow for the specific kinds of artistic achievements that we see develop. It is precisely this social and cultural “base” that Burke is concerned establishing in this book.
To draw the conclusions that he is interested in, Burke hones in on a list of roughly 600 “uomini illustri” (famous men) – artists, scholars, writers, and humanists. This list is analyzed in several different ways: Where were they born? What did their fathers do? What was the extent of their education? Were their major patrons secular or religious? From there, he presents a series of topical chapters that analyze the data for the pertinent questions. For example, Chapter 3 (called “Artists and Writers”) compares and contrasts the levels of humanistic education between the two groups: artists, as it turns out, tended to have less of this type of exposure than writers.
The Italian Renaissance is often historically interpreted to be an important source of ideas about artistic individualism. While this might have been true later in the Renaissance, Burke argues, the times when painters and other artists were professionally associated with guilds tended to decrease the expression of that which we would eventually come to call “style.” Chapter 4 takes up the issue of patronage. Earlier on in the Renaissance, patrons exerted careful control over the artistic products that they commissioned, but as time wore on (into the sixteenth century) artists began to enjoy more intellectual independence regarding their subject matter. He also emphasizes the point that the artwork strictly as a means of aesthetic contemplation only comes along much later (probably in the eighteenth century). Rather, patrons presented artists with commissions to communicate religious ideas or practices to a largely illiterate broader public. Further chapters on iconography and worldviews – of artists, patrons, and the public at large – discuss some of the themes in art, and bring up the topic of artistic autonomy and individuality.
If this book could be said to have one drawback, it is that artists and writers are frequently mentioned for seemingly little more than the purpose of namedropping, which can occasionally render the prose on the tedious side. Strings of sentences like the following are not uncommon: “From the late fourteenth century, mechanical clocks came into use; a famous one was constructed at Padua to the design of Giovanni Dondi, physician-astronomer who was a friend of Petrarch, and completed in 1364. About 1450, a clock was made for the town hall at Bologna; in 1478, one for the Castello Sforesco in Milan; in 1499, one for Piazza San Marco in Venice; and so on. By the late fifteenth century, portable clocks were coming in. In Filarete’s utopia, the schools for boys and girls had an alarm clock (svegliatoio) in each dormitory. This idea at least was not purely utopian, for in Milan in 1463 the astrologer Giocomo de Piacenza had an alarm clock by his bed” (p. 189).
But if you can wade your way through prose like that, the amount you can learn from the book is well worth it. I read this because I have often seen it on syllabi for courses of Renaissance and early modern European history. It was written in the early 1970s, just as historians were just beginning to become seriously interested in not just literary and artistic production, but the cultural and social modes that allowed for that production to occur in the first place. For that alone, Burke’s opinions are worth reading if only to see how they influenced subsequent historians who are also concerned with those interstices of social, economic, cultural, and intellectual production. ...more
To draw the conclusions that he is interested in, Burke hones in on a list of roughly 600 “uomini illustri” (famous men) – artists, scholars, writers, and humanists. This list is analyzed in several different ways: Where were they born? What did their fathers do? What was the extent of their education? Were their major patrons secular or religious? From there, he presents a series of topical chapters that analyze the data for the pertinent questions. For example, Chapter 3 (called “Artists and Writers”) compares and contrasts the levels of humanistic education between the two groups: artists, as it turns out, tended to have less of this type of exposure than writers.
The Italian Renaissance is often historically interpreted to be an important source of ideas about artistic individualism. While this might have been true later in the Renaissance, Burke argues, the times when painters and other artists were professionally associated with guilds tended to decrease the expression of that which we would eventually come to call “style.” Chapter 4 takes up the issue of patronage. Earlier on in the Renaissance, patrons exerted careful control over the artistic products that they commissioned, but as time wore on (into the sixteenth century) artists began to enjoy more intellectual independence regarding their subject matter. He also emphasizes the point that the artwork strictly as a means of aesthetic contemplation only comes along much later (probably in the eighteenth century). Rather, patrons presented artists with commissions to communicate religious ideas or practices to a largely illiterate broader public. Further chapters on iconography and worldviews – of artists, patrons, and the public at large – discuss some of the themes in art, and bring up the topic of artistic autonomy and individuality.
If this book could be said to have one drawback, it is that artists and writers are frequently mentioned for seemingly little more than the purpose of namedropping, which can occasionally render the prose on the tedious side. Strings of sentences like the following are not uncommon: “From the late fourteenth century, mechanical clocks came into use; a famous one was constructed at Padua to the design of Giovanni Dondi, physician-astronomer who was a friend of Petrarch, and completed in 1364. About 1450, a clock was made for the town hall at Bologna; in 1478, one for the Castello Sforesco in Milan; in 1499, one for Piazza San Marco in Venice; and so on. By the late fifteenth century, portable clocks were coming in. In Filarete’s utopia, the schools for boys and girls had an alarm clock (svegliatoio) in each dormitory. This idea at least was not purely utopian, for in Milan in 1463 the astrologer Giocomo de Piacenza had an alarm clock by his bed” (p. 189).
But if you can wade your way through prose like that, the amount you can learn from the book is well worth it. I read this because I have often seen it on syllabi for courses of Renaissance and early modern European history. It was written in the early 1970s, just as historians were just beginning to become seriously interested in not just literary and artistic production, but the cultural and social modes that allowed for that production to occur in the first place. For that alone, Burke’s opinions are worth reading if only to see how they influenced subsequent historians who are also concerned with those interstices of social, economic, cultural, and intellectual production. ...more
Notes are private!
1
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Apr 20, 2021
Apr 20, 2021
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