eric

Writing about the ways of making peace, Brad DeLong describes “the [1944-45] debate between [Secretary of the Treasury Henry] Morgenthau and [General George] Marshall that was carried on–largely below the surface, largely without explicit confrontation” over the fate of postwar Germany and notes “The State and Defense positions win entirely and utterly and completely over the Treasury-based Morgenthau Plan. We get the Marshall Plan instead. I am still not sure why.” Morgenthau, you will remember, wanted – in Winston Churchill’s word – the “pastoralization” of Germany.

I think there are two reasons for Morgenthau’s failure. First, though, I disagree with Brad: there was not a conflict between Morgenthau and Marshall, above or below the surface. The conflict was between Morgenthau and everybody else. As John Morton Blum writes, by the end of January 1945, Morgenthau “had yielded in his views toward Germany neither to his fellow New Dealers, nor to his colleagues in the Cabinet, nor to the arguments of his subordinates. So also, he had conceded nothing to the objections of Churchill, Eden, and Sir John Anderson. Nor was he moved by Russian plans.” That’s a lot of different people not to yield to; almost nobody wanted the Morgenthau plan except Morgenthau. Not even the man whom Brad – I think not 100% seriously – calls a “Marxist,” Harry Dexter White; White wanted internationalization of the Ruhr and its industrial production used to pay reparations. [click to continue…]

Californians gave their 55 electoral votes to Barack Obama – of course; the networks called it the instant the Golden State’s polls closed. But more importantly, the state routinely derided as ungovernable¹ has got its best chance of governance in generations. [click to continue…]

In the New York Times today you can read about the newly available transcripts from the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, as edited by Kurt Schuler and Andrew Rosenberg. I have a few things to say about them in the NYT – and why not a few more here?

Historians of Bretton Woods might well have said, eh, a transcript – no big deal; what happened at the conference was largely theater, and the real business was done before and afterward. There is some truth in this – and the transcript amusingly shows that – but it also shows some of the ways in which it is not true. [click to continue…]

Greetings all, and thanks for welcoming me back on a longer-term basis.

Recently a few high-profile commenters have rediscovered Franklin Roosevelt’s relevance. First The Daily Show and then The New Yorker marveled at the aptness of Roosevelt’s cheerful scorn for those who say they will preserve Social Security (and Medicare, one might now add) while simultaneously promising to cut taxes.

It was a position Roosevelt was accustomed to ridiculing, as in this 1944 campaign film (directed by Chuck Jones!) depicting the Republican provision for Social Security:

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So, that’s the week for me.  Please visit me and Ari at The Edge of the American West.  Please buy my books, if you possibly can (to make it easier: Rauchway books from Amazon US * UK * FR * DE * CA) (no, not California).

Many thanks to the Crooked Timber collective for letting me mess about with their site for a week.

Be excellent to each other.

During this week’s guest stint I’ve managed to touch on Palestine-Israel, the New Deal, and Michel Foucault. Steering clear of the real killer tripwires—i.e., sex roles, the Democratic primaries, or emacs/vi—that leaves a final frontier of Internet mischief….

On this day in 1945, only three days after the occupation of their city by French troops, the remaining full professors of the University of Freiburg assembled to elect new officers and to restore the customs under which they had operated before 1933, when their faculty, racially purged by the Nazis, elected as rector the philosopher Martin Heidegger. (All details here come from Hugo Ott; see more at the footnote.)¹

This is not a parable or an analogy. It is a story of one episode in which civil authorities and academic governing bodies reckoned with a disastrous crossover between scholarship and politics.

One of the first orders of business for the reassembled professors was the question of what to do about Nazis among their colleagues. They chartered an internal review committee for the purpose, and tried to keep jurisdiction over this process, without success. City authorities were conducting their own reviews, and they designated Heidegger’s house, among others, as a “Party residence” to be requisitioned for use. The university protested, based on the opinion of legal scholar Franz Böhm (an anti-Nazi dismissed from his post during Hitler’s regime) that for “establishing political guilt” one needed “a proper court of law.”
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Speaking of public intellectuals, Siva Vaidhyanathan gave a talk here a couple days ago on privacy and surveillance, developing the ideas here. (For one thing, he now prefers “Cryptopticon” to “Nonopticon.”)

Siva thinks we should stop our Foucauldian worrying about Bentham’s Panopticon. He says he’s lived in the Panopticon, in New York, where there are lots of visible cameras everywhere (when I lived in one of the home counties, where it is said you can go all day without being out of CCTV range, I knew the feeling). Siva points out a lot of the cameras aren’t maintained, monitored, or even attached to anything; that’s not the point of them. They’re not there to watch you, they’re there to make you think that you’re being watched. Such reminders (your call may be monitored) are supposed to get you to become your own social superego.

On balance, Siva seems to think, this is pretty harmless. The point of the Panopticon is to get you to behave, to hide your real self, to conform. About which we can note two things: one, if you’ve been to London or New York, you see that in the real Panopticon people get their freak on just fine, thank you very much. And two, to the extent that it does work, the Panopticon actually reinforces privacy—getting you to hide your real self draws the boundaries around that real self. What we really need to worry about is unannounced, concealed surveillance: the NonCryptopticon.
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There are all kinds of games you can play with this List of Top 100 Public Intellectuals, including Watch People’s Heads Explode! As a guest here I believe myself entitled to say, really? No Timberites? Tchah.

The stated criteria: “Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.” The large number of Iraq-war supporters would seem to suggest “influence … far beyond the borders of their own country” hugely outweighs “distinction in their particular field.”

Over at our joint I’ve been doing a fair bit of “this day seventy-five years ago” because of the anniversary of Roosevelt’s hundred days and, well, because. This one may hold some interest for an international readership:

On this day in 1933, British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald delivered an address from the National Press Club in Washington, DC, discussing the common problems of the US and UK: “In America at this moment and in Great Britain there are millions of men who want work and can’t get it…. Governments cannot be indifferent to a state of things like that.”

MacDonald looked forward to “wise international government action,” to be established at the upcoming international economic conference. He hoped it would revive “a freely flowing international exchange,” i.e., trade—“Self-sufficiency in the economic field on the part of nations ultimately ends in the poverty of their own people.”

He was mindful of the apparent irony in Britain’s having taken the nationalist, defensive action of going off the gold standard: “Can you imagine that in the early days of that crisis we said gayly and light-heartedly, ‘Let it rip. Let it rip. We will go off gold. There are benefits in being off gold, and we will reap them.'” Obviously he meant the answer to be “no.”—“And so on this currency question, agreement is the only protection.”¹
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By request, a quick bibliography on academic freedom off the top of my… well, not the top of my head, but the top of my EndNote file. With some annotations. I tried to do hanging indents, but WordPress defeated me.
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Greetings from <a href=”http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com”>the edge of the American West</a>, in the neighborhood of which friendly folks have been urging academics to brush up on <a href=”http://www.law.berkeley.edu/news/2008/edley041008.html”>how to fire each other</a>.  In the midst of everyone scurrying around and <a href=”http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/bylaws/so1039.html”>reading rules</a> and shouting, some of us noticed an article (<a href=”http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/14/080414fa_fact_kramer”>not really online</a>) in <em>The New Yorker</em>, which makes one wonder, is it maybe bad for academic freedom to have a free speech expert as university president?

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