by Chris Bertram on September 3, 2004
I bought my copy of Blom’s “Encyclopédie”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0007149468/junius-20 yesterday afternoon and it promises to be an entertaining read rather than a scholarly one. Leafing through for Rousseau references I found that the author claims that JJR’s unexpected death in 1778 may have been suicide. This is the first time I’ve come across such a speculation and it is certainly at odds with what Maurice Cranston has to say in “The Solitary Self”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 . Cranston tells us that Rousseau suffered a brief illness and died of a stroke. Incidentally, the relevant page of “The Solitary Self”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 also covers Rousseau’s re-interrment in the Pantheon in 1794. The fashion these days on the libertarian right (you know, the sort of people who bang on about “the wisdom of the founders”) is to see the French and American revolutions as springing from very different impulses and to hold Rousseau as responsible for the collectivist faults of the French model. For many reasons I think this latter is deeply mistaken, but the American participation in the Pantheon ceremony at least reminds us that people back then didn’t see the two traditions as so sharply divided:
bq. The procession escorting Rousseau’s remains was led by a captain of the United States Navy carrying the stars and stripes, along with others bearing the tricolour and the flag of republican Geneva. At the end came members of the national legislature, preceded by their “beacon”, _The Social Contract_ . The American Minister in Paris, James Monroe, accompanied by his staff, was the only foreign guest invited to witness the ceremony inside the Pantheon. (p. 186).
by Chris Bertram on September 2, 2004
Today’s Telegraph has two reviews of Philipp Blom’s Encyclopédie: one by “Graham Robb”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/08/29/boblo29.xml&sSheet=/arts/2004/08/29/botop.html and the other by “Anthony Daniels”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2004/08/29/boblo229.xml (aka Theodore Dalrymple). It sounds like another volume to add to my Enlightenment pile (some of which I’ve even read). From Daniels’s review:
bq. Because censorship was still strong, though not completely inflexible, in the France of Louis XV, the authors of subversive articles in the various volumes had to adopt an indirect Aesopian approach (a most aesthetically and intellectually satisfying technique that is closed, alas, to authors who have no censorship to evade). My favourite practitioner of such subtle subversion is the Abbé Mallet, who undermined religious dogmas by discussing them in deadpan and literal-minded fashion. He meditates, for example, at great and pedantic length on the precise geographical location of Hell – was it in Terra Australis, in the sun, or in the environs of Rome? And how many species of animal Noah would have had to take aboard the Ark, how many bales of hay and straw, and how often he would have had to clean out the animals’ stalls? No dogma can long withstand the onslaught of this kind of concrete-mindedness, posing in the garb of credulous orthodoxy.
At some point soon I want to write an extended post on the Enlightenment and the common references on blogs to “the Enlightenment Project” and “the values of the Enlightenment”. Pending that, here’s a link to Robert Wokler’s essay “The Enlightenment: The Nation-State and the Primal Patricide of Modernity”:http://www.colbud.hu/main/PubArchive/DP/DP46-Wokler.pdf (PDF) which digs overs some of the questions concerning the relationship between the Enlightenment and “modernity”. (The essay also appears in a collection co-edited by Wokler and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/ — _The Enlightenment and Modernity_).
by Chris Bertram on August 26, 2004
I’ve always found Foucault pretty hard going, as I intimated in yesterday’s post, though I think he’s a more interesting figure than his epigones. As it happens, he is the subject of not one but two biographies. The first is David Macey’s “The Lives of Michel Foucault”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679757929/junius-20 which is scholarly and fact-filled. The other is James Miller’s “The Passion of Michel Foucault”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674001575/junius-20 , and is a tremendous piece of writing which presents itself as a “narrative account of one man’s lifelong struggle to honor Nietzsche’s gnomic injunction, ‘to become what one is’.” I really can’t recommend Miller’s various books highly enough. As well as the Foucault volume he wrote a very readable study of Rousseau — “Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0872203379/junius-20 — and a highly entertaining history of rock music: “Flowers in the Dustbin”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684808730/junius-20 (also published as “Almost Grown”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099409925/junius-21 in the UK). Miller is currently editor of “Daedalus”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/daedalus .
by Chris Bertram on August 25, 2004
Surfing round the blogosphere, I find “Oliver Kamm banging on”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/08/fascism_and_the_2.html about alliances between “the Left” and theocratic fascism. Kamm’s correspondent, the philosopher Jeff Ketland of the University of Edinburgh, offers the following as an example:
bq. One can find examples in the postmodernist literature, and the most obvious example is Michel Foucault, once a member of the French communist party and main source of much recent postmodernist and social constructivist philosophy. Foucault visited Iran around the time of the revolution. He enthusiastically described the revolution as a new kind of “political spirituality”, and was very impressed with its characteristically anti-Enlightenment aspects.
This just doesn’t stack up, though as an instance of left-theocratic alliance. …
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by Belle Waring on August 23, 2004
A note in todays Washington Post describes a very interesting experiment:
Peter Gordon, a behavioral scientist at Columbia University, conducted an unusual set of experiments with seven adults of the 200-member Piraha tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil.
The tribe’s counting system consists of three words — one that means “roughly one,” one that means “a small quantity” and one that means “many.”
Gordon asked the Piraha subjects to perform various tasks in which performance would be greatly enhanced by the ability to count. These included laying out the same number of nuts or sticks that he had laid out; distinguishing two boxes whose only difference was the number of fish drawn on their tops; and knowing when a tin can was empty after watching the researcher put nuts into the can and then withdraw them one by one.
Gordon found that the Piraha were essentially incapable of following or accounting for more than three objects. When a task involved larger numbers — even five or six — the subjects’ answers were little more than guesses, even though they clearly understood the tests and were working hard on them.
He attributed this surprising finding to the fact the Piraha “have no privileged name for the singular quantity” — in other words, no one, no notion of an integer.
“The present study represents a rare and perhaps unique case for strong linguistic determinism” — the idea that language determines thought — Gordon wrote.
John D. Barrow explores similar ideas in his lively book Pi in the Sky: Counting, Thinking and Being. The most surprising thing, to me, is not the poor performance of the Piraha on these tests, given their linguistic disadvantage. Rather, I am amazed that anyone could get through life, particularly a no-doubt difficult struggle for existence in the jungles of the Amazon, with such a piss-poor numbering system. Perhaps the category “roughly one” has some unique areas of application which I am unable to appreciate. And it is by no means inconsistent with my strongly Platonic beliefs about numbers that it might take humans a long time to discover the existence of these supernatural, world-ordering entities. But the advantages of being able to count properly, even up to ten or twenty, seem so overwhelming, and the principles involved so obvious, that I am astonished anyone can get by without them.
by John Q on July 30, 2004
Tyler Cowen says
If I could have the answers to five questions in political science/sociology, the appeal of Stalinism to intellectuals would be one of them.
I don’t think this is as difficult a question as is often supposed.
Most of the intellectuals who professed support for Communism during the rule of Stalin (and Lenin) were primarily victims of (self-)deception. They supported the stated aims of the Communist Party (peace, democracy, brotherhood), opposed the things the Communists denounced (fascism, racism, exploitation) and did not inquire too closely into whether the actual practice of the Soviet Union and the parties it controlled was consistent with these stated beliefs. I developed this point, and the contrast with the relatively small group of intellectuals who supported the Nazis, in a review of[1] Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics
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by John Q on June 11, 2004
According to this report, Louis De Branges claims to have proved the Riemann Hypothesis. If correct, it’s very significant – much more so than the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem by Wiles.
It is also, I think, the last of the big and well-known unsolved problems in mathematics, and it would be nice to see the search ending in success. Some of the other big problems have been closed, rather than solved. The classic problems of the Greeks such as squaring the circle were shown to be insoluble in the 19th century, and the Hilbert program of formalisation was shown by Godel to be infeasible. And the four-colour problem (not a really important problem, but a big one because it was easily described, interesting and very tough) was dealt with by a brute-force computer enumeration.
Almost instant update Commenter Eric on my blog points to Mathworld which says “Much ado about nothing”. On the other hand, the same page reports a proof of the infinitude of twin primes which has been an open question for a long time, though not a problem in the same league as those mentioned above.
by Chris Bertram on April 13, 2004
The programme about Rousseau that “I blogged about”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001654.html the other day “is available on-line”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?sundayfeat (though I think this link may only work for about a week). I thought it was pretty good on the whole. Though it didn’t resolve the Derbyshire–Staffordshire controversy, it should have made listeners curious to read or re-read Rousseau’s autobiographies and there were some entertaining musical excerpts as well as contributions from such eminent Rousseau scholars as John Scott and John Hope Mason. Recommended.
by Chris Bertram on April 9, 2004
As part of a series about philosophers and places, BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting a programme this Sunday (21.30 GMT, so internet listeners should adjust for location) in which Jonathan Ree discusses “Rousseau in Staffordshire”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/playlists/sundayfeat.shtml . I’m rather hoping that this will clear up a little dispute I had with “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html . Chris emailed me soon after “my Rousseau book”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-21/026-9436596-5494024 came out to tell me that I was mistaken in writing that Rousseau had lived in _Derbyshire_ . Chris wrote, correctly, that the village of Wootton near where Rousseau stayed, is in Staffordshire and that, since the county line there is set by the River Dove, Wootton was almost certainly in Staffordshire in the 18th century too. We both set to consulting out various works of reference, only to reach a stalemate. So for, for example, this “1776 account of Hume’s life”:http://www.student.liu.se/~bjoch509/philosophers/intros/hum-intro.html has Derbyshire, as does Rousseau himself in correspondence, but other reputable sources insist on Staffordshire. I’m sure you’re all intruigued by this antiquarian mystery! I shall be listening with attention.
(And see “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_04_01_archive.html#108150415084287134 for a map of the area).
by Chris Bertram on March 9, 2004
Below the fold is a request for someone to dig out something Marx-related from their university library for me.
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by Chris Bertram on February 29, 2004
I recently read Nietzsche’s “The Genealogy of Morality”:http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/Nietzsche/genealogytofc.htm with a group of colleagues. To the extent to which I understood the book (and despite the book’s brevity I’m feeling somewhat sympathetic to those snakes who have to sit around whilst they digest a large mammal), my comprehension was greatly assisted by Brian Leiter’s excellent “Nietzsche on Morality”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415152852/junius-20 . Reading the reviews and commentary on Mel Gibson’s Passion, I was immediately reminded of a passage from the second essay, where Nietzsche is writing about the genesis of guilt from the sense of indebtedness (at first to ancestors) and remarks on the further excruciating twist that Christianity brings: on the pretext of having their debts forgiven, believers are put in a postition of psychological indebtedness from which they can _never_ recover (He sent his only son, and we _killed_ Him):
bq. …. we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity—God’s sacrifice of himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem—the creditor sacrifices himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?), out of love for his debtor! (sec. 21)
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by Chris Bertram on February 25, 2004
I’ve been rereading parts of the “German Ideology”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm , the text where Marx and Engels really start to get historical materialism straightened out. And very fine and interesting it is too. But my purpose in this post isn’t to discuss the content of a work which Marx and Engels did not publish but “abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but to reproduce (below the fold for bandwidth reasons) a page of the original MS which appears in facsimile in volume 5 of the MECW. What readers get, thanks to the intervention of subsequent editors, as a piece of elegant if vituperative prose, appears in the original in the form of a half-crossed out scrawl . The scrawl only occupied about half the page, the rest of which is filled with jottings, notes and many many doodled heads (probably by Engels). Other facsmile pages are in an even worse condition with great chunks consumed by the rodents. [I now discover that the page I’ve photographed and a few others besides are on the “marxists.org”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm website anyway, never mind ….]
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by Eszter Hargittai on February 16, 2004
Sometimes quotes take on a life of their own. They become famous and get attributed to someone without anyone citing a traceable origin. I ran into such a problem about five years ago when I wanted to use a quote by Herbert Simon in an article. The quote was this:
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
I remember doing all sorts of searches online to figure out the exact source of that quote. But others using those lines either cited no source or pointed to a piece by Hal Varian in Scientific American as the source of the quote. I checked out that article, but there was no citation. What to do? I ended up contacting Hal Varian directly for the source and he very kindly provided a pointer to it (p.40.).
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by Chris Bertram on January 12, 2004
I see that “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html is guest-blogging over at a “Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/. He’s sure to say much of interest at what is becoming one of the best blogs around. His “first post there”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000246.php alerted me to something I’d missed, namely “Scott Martens’s excellent exposition of Marx’s On The Jewish Question”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000228.php (in comments – you have to scroll down), which connects with some of the issues discussed in “my post below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001118.html about Clermont-Tonnerre and the 1789 debates about the rights of man in the French National Assembly.
by Chris Bertram on January 10, 2004
I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about “playing Monopoly in the old GDR”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_junius_archive.html#90066036 and “he about”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2002_12_01_archive.html Bertell Ollman’s game “Class Struggle”:http://www.aardwolfgames.com/aardmakehtml.mv?look4=2985.00000&src=DETAILS . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an _anti-capitalist_ game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is “here”:http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/ (scroll down to list of articles) and “here”:http://www.washingtonfreepress.org//36/monopoly.html .