From the monthly archives:
February 2025
Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced by the propertied representatives of the propertied classes in what can be fairly called an oligarchic government. Despite the (let’s stipulate) non-trivial class biases built into this reporting structure, the ‘blue books’ or ‘parliamentary papers’ (as they were known) were sufficiently objective and informative to be useful to the great enemy of oligarchy and property.
These nineteenth century oligarchs knew what they were doing. They needed objective information to help structure their internal debates about empire and national governance, and also to shape policy. (Elite bargaining is, of course, still an important function for the publication of public statistics and forecasting.) These reports also shaped the development of the administrative state. For example, the predecessor to the UK’s national statistics office, General Register Office for England and Wales, itself was born from such a select committee report in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The eminent sociologist Michael Burawoy died on Monday, after being hit by a car while walking near near his home. I’ve found a couple of tributes: this from Marta Soler Gallart which tells a story I didn’t know but surprises me not in the least, and this from Oleg Komlik. There’ll be loads of tributes to his remarkable intellectual contributions, and I’ll have nothing to add to them. So I’ll just say this. I didn’t know Michael that well really, but he was a very close friend of my very close friend Erik Olin Wright, so over many years I saw him briefly, and occasionally, always in the most convivial of circumstances. I discovered very quickly that I adored him and his company. He was generous and kind to treat me as an equal — he probably did that to everyone. I loved that somebody could combine a level of energy even into his seventies that I, personally, have never had, with a commitment and passion for all the right things and still give the sense of being permanently slightly amused with the world. When he and Gay Seidman were preparing the memorial volume for Erik Olin Wright, Michael was determined that I would contribute, despite being a complete outlier intellectually. I was resistant to writing a contribution (because an outlier and not thinking I had much to say), and Michael pressed me to write an essay which, in the end, I was really proud of. I realized after I’d finished it that he knew I’d produce something good, but that the reason he had pressed me was that he predicted (I’m sure correctly) that if I didn’t contribute I would regret it.
A great intellectual, yes, but I hope the tributes place that second to the fact that he was a lovely, generous, man.
One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for reverence toward the past; and his opponents have no time for reflection.
One defect in the US Founders’ constitution is that while they are very concerned with developing mechanisms against what Machiavelli and his followers called ‘corruption’ — a word frequently used in the Federalist Papers —, but that it leaves too little room for what Machiavelli and his followers would have called ‘renewal’ (or ‘renovation’)—a word almost wholly absent from the Federalist Papers. In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. There is a glimpse of awareness of this lacuna to be found in the historiographic debate(s) over the status of Lincoln as a so-called ‘refounder’ of the constitution, despite the fact that the US civil war conclusively indicates its failure.
Yet, as Machiavelli notes, “those [republics and religions] are best organized and have longest life that through their institutions can often renew themselves or that by some accident outside their organization come to such renewal.” Discourses on Livy (hereafter Discourses; 3.1), translated by Allan Gilbert (Chief Works, Vol. 1) p. 419. So, if you take what one may call, ‘Machiavellian social theory,’ seriously it is not an irrelevant topic.
If, like me, you follow Ones and Tooze, you will know that Adam recently had heart surgery.
It was a big deal. Luckily, America has some of the best surgeons in the world, to whom only a small handful of Americans have access – but Adam Tooze is one of them. In the episode dedicated to the expensive American healthcare system/Adam’s heart surgery, he talks with great (and deserved) admiration about ‘his team’, the ones who will do the surgery.
We really want these surgeons to be good at what they do. The considerable advances in medicine, medical technologies and surgical techniques is what will (we trust) Save Adam’s life, as indeed they did. We want experts.
But we don’t want them to be dickheads about their expertise – meaning, we’d like them to be ‘our team’ who work with us, acknowledging our agency. And not arrogant, bossy, or taking control of our lives.
See, Adam is not only among America’s privileged (as he acknowledges), but he is also a member of the same professional class as his surgical team. As we all know, this doesn’t guarantee an absence of dickheads.
However, chances are higher that we can see other professionals as members of ‘our team’. By recognizing one another as members of the same class, encountering other members of the PMC helps confirm one’s own values and expertise.
What this also shows is that it is possible to be a niche expert but honour other people’s self-determination, our ability to make choices about our own lives.
The other day I received an email from what might be one the few colleagues still checking into Twitter (most seem to have moved to Bluesky, as have I). The email was just a link with the subject title Did you see? I hadn’t.
Gosh, I wrote in response (which I gather they found a little understated).
My colleague was pointing to this tweet, where Adam Tooze described my fairly recently published book, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World 1870-2008 as ‘the sort of book that changes how you see the world’.
I mean. Well. Gosh.
https://x.com/adam_tooze/status/1864041896005267954 The link is to Chartbook where Adam quotes from Claire EF Wright’s review of Virtue Capitalists in The Economic History Review.
One of my Sunday routines is usually to post a photo here. Sometimes that’s easy, since I’ve taken something in the past few days, and sometimes that involves trawling through my archive to select something, sometimes from years ago. One problem with that is that there are just so many photos, and it is hard to keep track of everything I’ve posted here in order to avoid duplicates. It would be easier if I had enough discipline to put each photo selected in my Sunday Photoblogging album at Flickr, but I can neglect doing that for weeks, months, and even years at a time. So I’ve spent much of today going through Crooked Timber and making sure that all those photos are in that album. Well, it turns out there are 467 of them, which is an awful lot of Sundays. Quite an instructive exercise for me: there are some I like a lot, and others where I wonder why I selected it at all. There are influences I can detect such as Kertesz, Leiter, Gruyaert (not that I’m fit to be mentioned in the same sentence) but also E. Chambré Hardman, who use of natural frames I’ve often copied. Anyway: here’s the complete set, assuming I haven’t missed any out, which I probably have.
Last week, I finished reading an advance copy of Cory Doctorow’s Picks and Shovels. No spoilers about plot specifics, but the novel has a lot to say about two things. First, how Silicon Valley used to be a place where exit was possible and a good thing. If you didn’t like your boss, you went out and found somewhere else, or founded a company yourself. California didn’t recognize no-compete agreements, and the foundation myth of Silicon Valley is the Traitorous Eight. Eight engineers found William Shockley, a hateful unpredictable jerk and a pioneer of “racial realism,” such a horrible person to work for that they all left to do their own thing, founding an engineering culture and start-ups that begat start-ups that begat start-ups.
The second theme of Cory’s novel is how easy it is to get trapped nonetheless. There is a cult-like aspect to many organizations, a quasi religious fervor. Once you get pulled in, you reconstruct your whole identity around a particular set of values. You may start in a place where it seems that there’s a strong alignment between the organizational culture and what you yourself aspire to. You may discover that you are wrong, or the place may change. The wrong people end up taking over, or becoming influential. You find yourself in workplace conversations that leave you feeling weird and disturbed. But you aren’t sure what to do. Leaving would involve giving up on the values that you thought you shared, giving up, in a sense on your fundamental understanding of who you are.
“The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” In one form or another, this observation has been made many times over the last century or more.
What is true of people is true of nations. In the past 25 years or so it was often claimed (and , admittedly, often denied) that, in the modern world, the United States was the “indispensable nation”. Whatever the rights and wrong of this claim, it has become obvious that, whether we like it or not, the rest of the world will now have to dispense with the US as a defender of democracy, guarantor of global order, or even (as in Margaret Thatcher’s words about Gorbachev) a state we can do business with.
Anyone whose experience of the US began in the last eleven days would have no trouble recognising an archetypal kleptocracy, like Putin’s Russia or Mobutu’s Zaire (with a touch of Mao madness). The boss rakes off billions in tribute while his cronies scramble to please him, put each other down and collect their share of the loot. Regime supporters commit all sorts of crimes with impunity, while opponents are subject to both legal victimisation and threats of extra-legal terror against which they can expect no protection.
In dealing with such a regime, the only strategy is to buy off the boss, or a powerful underling, and hope that they stay bought long enough to deliver on their side of the bargain This approach is politely described as “transactional”, but without the implication that the transaction will necessarily be honoured. Dealing with kleptocrats can be highly profitable, as long as you get in and out quickly enough, but there’s no possibility of “doing business”, either commercial or political, in the ordinary sense of the word.
The problem is that for nearly everyone who matters, the last eleven days seem like an aberration. For decades, the US has been seen as the central pillar of a “rules-based order”, on which assumptions about the world were largely based. That’as true even for critics who pointed out that the rules were drawn up to favor the US, and that the US often breached them without any real consequences. And it’s true even though you can point to precedents for everything Trump had done.
But all that is over, and can’t be restored.