History of Ideas

“Justwartheory.com”:http://justwartheory.com/ is a very useful set of resources on just war theory maintained by Mark Rigstad of Oakland University. There’s also “an accompanying blog”:http://www.justwartheory.com/editorial.html .

As CT’s resident Rousseauiste, I’d like to pass on the news to residents of New York City (and parts thereabouts) that the Johnson Theater will be staging the “first ever US production of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s play Narcisse”:http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/narcisse.htm from 7-10 April:

bq. an utterly contemporary drama that deals with the problem of narcissism and sexual ambiguity. The play is about a man who falls in love with an image of himself dressed as a woman and explores contemporary issues of desire, self-obsession and the difficulty of the relation between the sexes.

Enjoy!

Slate runs a good debunking of romantic popular misinterpetations of Godel’s theorem. Key quote

The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen dubious appeals to intuition or claims about chaos theory and the like supported with reference to Godel’s theorem, but I have derived the following proposition:

Quiggin’s metatheorem: Any interesting conclusion derived with reference to Godel’s theorem is unfounded.

Feel free to evaluate with reference to the post title, and your level of interest in the formalist program.

Direct him or her to “Scott McLemee’s”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html speculations about where Rand got her ideas (Scott doesn’t do permalinks – so if this link decays rapidly, don’t blame me).

A rather interesting paper by Richard Tuck at the OPT conference on Hobbes and Rousseau contained a longish quote from “De Cive”:http://www.constitution.org/th/decive10.htm (10.9) about the inconveniences of democracy. At the time it seemed to me to contain wise advice about the downsides of blogging, and on chasing it up, that view is reinforced:

bq. But perhaps for this very reason some will say, That a Popular State is much to be preferr’d before a Monarchicall; because that, where all men have a hand in publique businesses, there all have an opportunity to shew their wisedome, knowledge, and eloquence, in deliberating matters of the greatest difficulty and moment; which by reason of that desire of praise which is bred in humane nature, is to them who excell in such like faculties, and seeme to themselves to exceed others, the most delightfull of all things. But in a Monarchy, this same way to obtain praise, and honour, is shut up to the greatest part of Subjects; and what is a grievance, if this be none? Ile tell you: To see his opinion whom we scorne, preferr’d before ours; to have our wisedome undervalued before our own faces; by an uncertain tryall of a little vaine glory, to undergoe most certaine enmities (for this cannot be avoided, whether we have the better, or the worse); to hate, and to be hated, by reason of the disagreement of opinions; to lay open our secret Counsells, and advises to all, to no purpose, and without any benefit; to neglect the affaires of our own Family: These, I say, are grievances. But to be absent from a triall of wits, although those trialls are pleasant to the Eloquent, is not therefore a grievance to them, unlesse we will say, that it is a grievance to valiant men to be restrained from fighting, because they delight in it.

It seems that no op-ed piece on the British government’s proposals to criminalize incitement to religious hatred is complete without some reference to Voltaire. So, for example, “Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1373878,00.html (and cf Toynbee “on the same subject”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1285291,00.html in August):

bq. Voltaire would have defended Islamic communities to the death from racists – but not set their beliefs beyond ordinary debate.

From Maurice Cranston’s “The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 pp. 100–101:

bq. It was amid these ominous stirrings that the _Letters from the Mountain_ [by Rousseau] arrived in Geneva like ‘a firebrand in a powder magazine’, a phrase used in a letter from Francois d’Ivernois to Rousseau and often repeated. One or two magistrates proposed burning the book immediately, and Voltaire wrote impassioned letters urging them to do so. Posing as a champion of Christianity, he pressed his best friend on the Petit Conseil, Francois Tronchin, to ensure that the government acted against a ‘seditious blasphemer’ and put a stop to ‘the audacity of a criminal’ not simply by burning the book but by punishing the author ‘with all the severity of the law’.

Documents concerning Karl Marx’s life, including a shareholders’ certificate and the police advice on his application for naturalization, “are to go on display”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4042187.stm at the British National Archives in Kew. According to the Metropolitan Police he was a

bq. notorious German agitator, the head of the International Society and an advocate of communistic principles. This man has not been loyal to the King.

There seems to be another outbreak of Orwell quotation across parts of the blogosphere (at least I’ve noticed a couple of the usual suspects engaging in this over the past few days). Matthew Turner “commented”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/09/renegade-liberals.html on this habit in September:

bq. It’s by now well-established that a man who died over 50 years ago has all the answers to today’s problems (well except when he talks on economic policy, or social policy, or class, or etc).

Still, following a link to his “Notes on Nationalism”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html (not one of his better efforts, but anyway) I did find a few words that seemed descriptive of blogospheric “debate” :

bq. Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.

No sooner does “Des von Bladet”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/index.html leave a comment mentioning Marshall Sahlins than I click on a link in a document Henry sent me and get taken to the “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ site, where there’s an “interview with …. Marshall Sahlins”:http://creativecommons.org/education/sahlins on the topic of pampleteering on the internet. Sahlins has republished (and e-published) a number of pamplets from his “Prickly Paradigm Press”:http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/catalog.html , including his own “Waiting for Foucault, Still”:http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm1.pdf (PDF), which contains some great observations. Here are two:

bq. *Relevance*
I don’t know about Britain, but in America many graduate students in anthropology are totally uninterested in other times and places. They say we should study our own current problems, all other ethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is just our “construction of the other.”

bq. So if they get their way, and this becomes the principle of anthropological research, fifty years hence no one will pay the slightest attention to the work they’re doing now. Maybe they’re onto something.

And

bq. *Orientalism (dedicated to Professor Gellner)*
In Anthropology there are some things that are better left un-Said.

I can still recall my surprise when I happened upon a volume in a second-hand bookshop by Maurice Maeterlinck, author of Pelleas et Mellisande and one of history’s most famous Belgians, only to discover that it was all about the natural history of bees. If “James Meek’s piece in the latest LRB”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n21/meek01_.html is anything to go on, I’m in good company:

bq. Not long after the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des abeilles. When the script was translated Goldwyn read it with increasing consternation until he could no longer deny the evidence of his senses. ‘My God!’ he cried. ‘The hero is a bee!’

Further on in Meek’s review of Bee Wilson’s _The Hive_ [1] he claims that Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserts somewhere that nations which eat honey are natural democracies but those which use sugar as a sweetener are fit only for tyranny. I guess I can see what the argument might be — something about honey-gathering being a suitable activity for free citizens whereas sugar came from large plantations worked by slaves — but does JJR _really_ say it anywhere?[2]

fn1. One of the names we canvassed for this blog before we launched was “The Grumbling Hive”, I’m glad I lost that argument.

fn2. Montesquieu makes explit the link between sugar and black slavery at _Spirit of the Laws_ I.15.v.

This year is the 300th anniversary of the death of John Locke and since he was born in Wrington and brought up in Pensford (both small villages near Bristol) we’ve been doing our bit to celebrate. On Saturday we had “a one-day conference aimed mainly at schoolchildren”:http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Philosophy/Events/default.htm and last night I gave an evening class on his political thought (attended by, among others, our polymathically perverse commenter Count Des von Bladet who “asked a question about Levi-Strauss”:http://piginawig.diaryland.com/041025.html#5 that I didn’t understand). There’s also been a flurry of newspaper articles, of which “the latest is from Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1335926,00.html .

Reading “Scott McLemee’s review”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/books/review/24MCLEMEE.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position= of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s “The Roads to Modernity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=henryfarrell-20&path=tg%2Fdetail%2F-%2F1400042364%2Fqid%3D1098573377%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3Fv%3Dglance%26s%3Dbooks (as “discussed by Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002732.html yesterday), I’m struck by the inadequacy of her contrast between the “French” and the “British”. Take two of the alleged dimensions of difference:

bq. She finds in some English and Scottish thinkers of the 18th century (Adam Smith, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, for example) something like the first effort to create a sociology of virtue. The French savants exalted a bloodless notion of Reason to bloody effect. The British philosophers emphasized the moral sentiments, the spontaneous capacity to recognize another person’s suffering and to feel it as one’s own.

and

bq. Nor was this Enlightenment necessarily at war with religion, as such. Himmelfarb quotes the jibes of Edward Gibbon (no orthodox religious believer by any stretch) against those French thinkers who ”preached the tenets of atheism with the bigotry of dogmatists.”

Anyone who knows anything about the “French” enlightenment knows that at least that one of its non-French participants, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, differed from the likes of Voltaire on points such as these. Somehow, I doubt that this Jean-Jacques’ virtues on these points (if virtues they are) get highlighted by Himmelfarb since doing so would muck-up her division of the world into sheep and goats.

The Australian election campaign has produced some interesting shifts in political positions, with the Labor opposition attacking the Liberal (= free-market conservative) government for being “the highest taxing government in Australia’s history”[1], and the government responding with yet more public spending. This is largely a matter of political pragmatism. But the election has produced one statement that’s worth paying attention to, from Prime Minister John Howard in the Australian Financial Review (no link – this is a subscription-only site)

There is a desire on the part of the community for an investment in infrastructure and human resources and I think there has been a shift in attitude in the community on this, even among the most ardent economic rationalists[2]

Howard is, arguably, the last of the Thatcherites. He entered the Australian Parliament in 1974, just as the Keynesian social-democratic consensus of the postwar period was coming to an end. He was Treasurer in the Fraser government (which held office from 1975 to 1983) and, subsequently one of Fraser’s bitterest critics, arguing that the government had missed the opportunity to undertake radical market-oriented reform[3]. In Opposition through the 1980s, he was the leading advocate of free-market reforms, continually pushing the Hawke-Keating Labor government (by inclination a precursor of Blair’s Third Way) to the right. On gaining office in 1996 after a very muted campaign, he introduced drastic expenditure cuts and established a Commission of Audit to find more. He’s been gradually moving away from this radical position ever since, in the face of increasing public opposition. Until now, however, he has never openly repudiated the ideological goal of rolling back the public sector.

.I think it’s reasonable to treat this statement as representing the end of the neoliberal push to overturn the social-democratic settlement, at least in the English-speaking countries

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ABout 25 years ago I was innocently listening to my radio very late at night, and heard the first episode of a strange science fiction show. I was one of the few thousand people who listened to all the first series. It was not a success, but, being the BBC, they made another series anyway. A couple of years later it was transcribed as a book and became a huge publishing phenomenon, and the author wrote several more books added on to the series. I refrained from reading them, on the grounds that books are just second-rate radio shows, and if it wasn’t dramatised it probably wasn’t worth reading. It never occurred to me that, if I refrained from reading them, I might, eventually, be able to hear them dramatised on the radio as they should be, and not have any inkling of the plot. Fantastic.