History of Ideas

Like Chris, I want to object to Andrew Sullivan’s “post”:http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/10/effective-liber.html – but my objection is narrower. _What does he mean_ by insinuating that “at last” we’re “honest about the true agenda of the left”?? We let slip our hidden agenda of creating “a tyranny where Crooked Timber and the benign left will call the shots and enforce their orthodoxy” _years ago._ Not only that, but our nefarious plans have previously received widespread public attention. Andrew’s dire prognostications were _anticipated in their entirety_ in 2004 by “Mr. Nick Morgan Mr. Andy Duncan, commentator-at-large at catallarchy.net who not only pointed out that “What John Quiggin desires is Orwellian Newspeak, with Mr Quiggin and his friends at Crooked Timber being the Inner Party deciding the rules,” but sagaciously remarked that “Hell on Earth would be a World Government run by Crooked Timber.” You can’t say that you haven’t been warned. Repeatedly.

Matt Yglesias “takes issue”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/08/blaming_the_ivory_tower.php with Michael Ignatieff’s _New York Times Magazine_ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html?ex=1343966400&en=cb304d04accc6df8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss about why he screwed up on Iraq. [click to continue…]

Liberal Fascism, the forthcoming opus by Jonah Goldberg, has undergone a subtitle change, as perhaps you have heard. Formerly it warned of “The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.” Said temptation will now run “…From Hegel to Whole Foods.”

The delays in publication must have been necessary given the burdens of fresh scholarship demanded by this broadening of scope.

The pub date at Amazon is December 26, which is not the part of the season when trade publishers bring out books they are going to push very hard. Somebody at Doubleday probably had the same thought recently expressed elsewhere:

I assume Frederick Kagan, Bradley Schlotzman, and Jonah’s mom are already getting complementary copies; Dinesh von Souza will probably do his patriotic duty; which leaves – ? A mule train a half-mile long will have to be rounded up to ship the remainder of the edition to the respectively vice-presidential and presidential libraries of Dan Quayle and George W Bush, where they will serve to fill out the echoing bookshelves and glut the hungry silverfish.

Hint to Goldberg: Make it a little more “campaign friendly.” That’s where dropping Hillary from the subtitle is probably going to hurt you some. How about “The Totalitarian Temptation from Dialectics to the Democratic Candidates”? Plus you’d get that extra alliteration — a real bonus, catchiness-wise.

I’d started to write a short post responding to the first of Michael Gorman’s “essays”:http://blogs.britannica.com/blog/main/author/mgorman on the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ blog about the Eclipse of Reason in the Age of the Internet, but given up. However enjoyable the shoddiness of Gorman’s reasoning and grotesque luxuriance of his metaphors (the new digital barbarians are associated in succession with creationists, global warming deniers, Maoists, hive mind wannabes, dirty Haight-Ashbury hippies, and some sinister Borg-like collective), it was hard to get into it with a piece of which nearly a quarter was an extended rejoinder to our old friend, Some Dude in a Comments Section Somewhere. Thankfully, Scott has “taken up”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/20/mclemee the grim task of responding from his berth at _Inside Higher Ed_. This bit towards the end seems to sum it up nicely:

The tone of Gorman’s remedial lecture implies that educators now devote the better part of their day to teaching students to shove pencils up their nose while Googling for pornography. … But the idea that new forms of media require training in new kinds of literacy hardly counts as an evasion of the obligation to cultivate critical intelligence. Today the work of acquiring knowledge on a given subject often includes the burden of evaluating digital material…. let’s not pretend that such nostalgia is anything but escapism at best. What really bothers the neo-Luddite quasi-Mandarin is not the rise of digitality, as such. The problem actually comes from “the diminished sacredness of authority,” as Edward Shils once put it, “the reduction in the awe it evokes and in the charisma attributed to it.”

I can see why the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ has an urgent interest in pushing this line, but I don’t understand why the intellectual standards of argument among its appointed critics is so low (and they aren’t an aberration; I understand that they’ve made somewhat of an effort to publicize these pieces and get them talked about). There’s a quite reasonable and serious case to be made about the flaws of Web 2.0 type technologies (I tend meself to think that these flaws are greatly outweighed by the advantages, but I certainly recognize that they exist and can be quite important). However, I’m not aware of anyone, apart from the odd blogger in the odd blogpost who is making that case in a compelling and sophisticated way (I’d be grateful to be pointed towards any counterexamples by commenters).

Via Larry Solum, a piece in the New York Sun by Steven Smith, about Rawls, occasioned by the publication of Rawls’s Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy. (It’s sitting on my shelf, waiting for the summer: one friend commented that the paper is cheap, but in fact I like that for some reason).

One comment struck me as odd:

His very modesty and lack of speculative curiosity are what exclude him from the ranks of the great philosophers. Rawls is not an Isaiah Berlin with his anguished sense of the conflict of goods which besets human life; nor is he a Leo Strauss with his vivid awareness of the forces of persecution with which philosophy has always to contend; nor is he a Michael Oakeshott with his diagnosis of the dangers posed by excessive rationalism to the goals of a free society.

All true (except the not-great bit, in my opinion). But doesn’t this carry the implicature that, unlike Rawls, Berlin, Strauss and Oakeshott were great philosophers? Interesting thinkers, all of them, but great philosophers? Maybe I’m misreading it.

I’ve recently been blogging about the inadequacy of cultural explanations of national differences, but was struck by this “aside”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2007/05/tony_blairs_far.html by Gideon Rachman on Tony Blair’s farewell speech.

I really hated the bit when he declared that Britain is “the greatest nation on earth.” This struck me as a very unBritish statement. My faith in my fellow countrymen was, however, restored by the fact that this declaration was greeted with lukewarm applause, rather than whoops and standing ovations.

It’s true as best as I can see it, and it does make Britain quite different from other countries. Try getting away with a major speech in the US that doesn’t have some bumptious language about national greatness. France is the same I believe (albeit with a different language of triumphalism). Even Ireland has its passive-aggressive equivalent of _gloire nationale_; I read somewhere or another that there was a myth that Ireland had a special dispensation from the times of tribulation preceding the Day of Judgement because of its unsullied guardianship of the Christian virtues – the entire country would slide under the waves before the Antichrist got up to speed. But not Britain. My vague memories of reading Linda Colley’s work a decade or more ago (it surely talks about this _in extenso_) is that this wasn’t always the case. However, it certainly is now. Anyone up to date with speculations as to the reason why British nationalism doesn’t trumpet its virtues? My working hypothesis, which is open to revision or refutation, is that it’s a subtle form of Bourdieuvian one-upmanship along the lines of the “ironic gnome rule”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/11/the-ironic-gnome-rule/, expressing the belief that anyone who has to proclaim their national greatness by definition doesn’t possess it.

We had an interesting discussion the other day after Harry’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/25/roots/ about Show of Hands and their song “Roots”. That argument was partly about the possible recuperation of song by the radical right despite the inclusivist politics of the songwriter. Yesterday’s Guardian had “an interesting piece”:http://music.guardian.co.uk/folk/story/0,,2071468,00.html attacking the the politics at the origin of folksong as a distinct genre, and especially the politics of the folksong collectors Sharpe and Lomax. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor argue that the search for authenticity and the untainted roots of distinct national tradition as embodied in besmocked peasants (and so on) is imbued with ghastly racist assumptions of various kinds and that we should simply reject the idea of a distinction between folk and popular song.

My friend Scott Kaufman asked me to point you to the book event The Valve is hosting on Amanda Claybaugh’s The Novel of Purpose. He was even considerate enough to write this post for me — links and all! [Though, truth to tell, I did edit it a little bit. And the fact that I am saying as much in brackets shows that there are limits to how much control of the author function I will give up.– sm]

Miriam Burstein has already thrown her hat into the ring. And Scott [SEK, that is, not me-sm]* has written a briefer on the context in which Claybaugh’s book is, as we say in the [academico-litcrit] biz, “intervening.”

So if you find the 19^th century, social reform, literary realism or the works of Dickens, Bronte, and Twain at all interesting, I [or we? something like that-sm] suggest you check it out.

* [this is kind of like “Temptation Inside Your Heart” on the “lost” Velvet Underground album which has a couple of tracks of Lou Reed commenting on the song and arguing with his own commentary: “I can talk to myself if I want to….”-sm]

Two interesting arguments about the press and the 1960’s backlash against civil rights.

First, David Greenberg in a book review in _The American Prospect._

If the civil-rights movement represented one of American journalism’s finest hours, it carried a cost. It’s a shame that Roberts and Klibanoff don’t explicitly state the conclusion that much of their evidence suggests: Today’s right-wing bogeyman of “the liberal media” originated in this struggle. Coverage of the movement convinced much of the white South that the networks, papers like the Times, and magazines like Time and Newsweek were hostile and biased interlopers that told only one side of the story. … Roberts and Klibanoff also detail more subtle ways in which hostility toward the national media was voiced. In one fascinating section, they relate a conspiracy hatched among white Southern editors who belonged to the Associated Press to try to force the wire service to write about crimes by blacks in the North as avidly as it spotlighted the violence of the white South. Ultimately, politicians — notably Alabama Governor George Wallace — capitalized on this resentment. Wallace cited journalists alongside pointy-headed intellectuals and the Supreme Court in his litany of elitist villains who were screwing the little guy. Richard Nixon, too, picked up the strategy, which he bequeathed to men like Roger Ailes and Karl Rove.

Second, “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w061127&s=perlstein112906 (free reg required) in _TNR._

Since the late ’60s, however–not coincidentally, around the time Kevin Phillips rose to fame–a new, unspoken set of rules evolved. It happened in a moment of trauma. After the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, all the top news executives sent a wire to Mayor Richard J. Daley protesting the way their employees “were repeatedly singled out by policemen and deliberately beaten.” Such was their presumption of cultural authority they couldn’t imagine how anyone could disagree. Then Mayor Daley went on Walter Cronkite’s show and shocked the media establishment by refusing to apologize to the beaten reporters: “Many of them are hippies themselves. They’re part of this movement.” Polls revealed 60 percent of Americans agreed with Daley. For the press, it triggered a dark night of the soul. In an enormously influential column, the pundit Joseph Kraft, shaken, wrote, “Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communication field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America.” That air of alienation–that helpless feeling that we have no idea what’s going on out there–has structured elite discourse about the rest of the country ever since. A set of constructs about what “the great mass of ordinary Americans” supposedly believes–much more conservative things than any media elitist would believe, basically–became reified. Pundits like Kraft–a social class that spends much of their time among people like themselves, inside the Beltway–learned to bend over backward to be fair, lest they advertise their own alienation from everyone else. On subjects that chafed them–say, the relevance of certain ugly folkways of the South in electoral politics–they just had to bend harder. Or ignore the matter altogether.

Now the historical origins of a set of institutions and practices don’t necessarily dictate their current content. Much of the discourse around social welfare in the 1930’s had an unpleasant racist edge. But there does seem to be some continuity between what Greenberg and Perlstein (both of whom are excellent historians who are intimately familiar with their source material) document, and the ways that journalists tiptoe around the political importance of racism in the South today. Comments?

Readers bored by our recent all-wingnut, all the time focus are invited to read about two great things that go great together: Descartes and bees. (This is taken from our personal blog, where there are already some good comments.)

Every now and again, while I’m grading papers, I think my life might be a lot easier if Descartes had just refrained from letting his mind wander, and not come up with the wax example. It’s one of the most apparently simple, actually confusing thought experiments ever.

Also, think about this for a minute:

Let us consider those things people commonly think they understand most distinctly of all: namely, those bodies that we touch and see. I do not mean bodies in general–for general perceptions are apt to be somewhat more confused–but one particular body. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax, just come from the comb. It has not yet lost the sweetness of the honey it contained; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered; its color, shape and size are apparent; it is hard, cool, and can be readily handled; if you tap it with your knuckle it makes a sound. In short, it has everything which seems necessary to enable a body to be known as distinctly as possible. But see how, even as I speak, I place the wax by the fire: what remains of its taste evaporates; its scent dissipates; its color changes; its shape is lost; its size increases; it becomes liquid and hot; you can hardly touch it, and if you do it no longer makes a sound. But does the same wax remain?

Has any of you looked at a honeycomb lately? I have. The hotel we stayed at in Vietnam had a thick sheet of comb suspended in a wooden frame over a polished trough, and honey slowly dripped out of it and slid down to the bottom of the trough. It was really excellent honey, thin and floral tasting. But do you know what the most salient feature of the comb was? That would be the distinctive, mathematically regular, hexagonal structure. How does that not merit a place in Descartes discussion? It’s clear he chose the wax carefully both for its appeal to all the senses and its transformational power. In what world is that hexagonal structure of the comb not more salient than that it makes a sound (a dull, feeble sound, I might add) if you rap it with your knuckle? I mean, ‘its shape is apparent’, OK. But that description could just as well fit a blob of slightly melted, cooled wax or a ball made by crushing a piece of fresh comb with your hands. But this is ‘fresh from the comb’. Why is that not worth mentioning? Doesn’t it make the transformation more complete, as it moves from its regular lattice to undifferentiated liquid? Now, of course all Descartes’ readers knew what wax fresh from the comb looked like, certainly better than we. But it really seems strange to me that he would lavish all these sensual descriptions on the wax and just pass over in silence its single most notable feature. Why?

I came across “The Cambridge Companion to Keynes”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1163114559/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 in the bookshop yesterday and went to add it to my Amazon wishlist this morning. When I looked it up in the catalog I saw that it had a rating of only 2 stars and my first thought was: I bet _that_ guy is responsible! And I was right. A while ago I was poking around in the literature on Keynes and Post-Keynesianism and anytime I checked a book on Amazon there would be a review from “Michael E. Brady”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1UI9T8WKJPZN5/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-9644667-3828001. Typically, it would be a long, desnely-written single paragraph of criticism, complete with page references to the literature and especially to Keynes’s works.

In fairness, his “complete list of Amazon reviews”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1UI9T8WKJPZN5/002-9644667-3828001?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=3 (333 of them at current count) shows he is perfectly capable of writing a generous review. But he does have a couple of bees in his bonnet. “He”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//B0006C2TOW/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 “doesn’t”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1858986532/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 “like”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//0802022960/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 people who Get Keynes’ Macroeconomics Wrong at all. Even beyond the macro stuff, however, he gets very annoyed at critics of Keynes’ “Treatise on Probability”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1596055308/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001, whom he sees as slavishly following the “allegedly mistaken”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//0199279551/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 (and ad hominem) views of Frank Ramsey. In a way, Brady’s own reviews on this topic can be read as an effort to undo the effects of what “he clearly thinks”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//9812384081/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 of as the worst book reviews of all time, namely Ramsey’s 1922 and 1926 comments on Keynes’ _Treatise_, whose malign effects have propagated down through the literature. A true believer. Here is “his own book”:http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Keynes-Michael-Emmett-Brady/dp/141344959X on Keynes.

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cowan’s _The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Brian%20Cowan%20social%20life%20of%20coffee&PID=29956, Amazon) which I really enjoyed a lot (thanks to Rick Perlstein for the recommendation). Its structure is a little unwieldy – the first part is an essay in the history of consumption, the second a semi-related exercise in intellectual and social history – but it really lays out a very strong historical case for something that I’ve suspected and presumed was true, but haven’t seen treated systematically. The typical academic view of the coffeehouse has claimed it as the herald and avatar of a far reaching civil society of intelligent discourse. London coffeehouses have been depicted as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a space in which individuals could come together to discuss art and politics, free from both economic pressures and the oversight of the state. They’ve been portrayed as sites of rational and civilized argument. Cowan provides compelling evidence that this view is, to be blunt, romanticized bosh.
[click to continue…]

I’m really very sorry to hear the news of the death of Robbie Wokler. Wokler may well have known as much about the life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as anyone of the past half century. Sadly, much of that knowledge never made it into print, as Wokler was often reluctant to hand over final versions of his work to editors. Maybe there is material that will emerge. His essays, though, on Rousseau — and on the Enlightenment more generally — were often brilliant, insightful, iconoclastic and scholarly, all at the same time. He was a lively character, who often asked questions at conferences in a pretty robust manner, and was often willing to share a few drinks afterwards. I’m glad to have had the opportunity to learn from him a little. There’s “an obituary in the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2296552,00.html , I’ll add more as an when I hear of them. UPDATE: Josh Cherniss has “a fine appreciation”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1856123,00.html in the Guardian.

The term “conservative” gets bandied about a lot these days, and readers may wonder where it comes from. Jason DeParle in the NYT has the answer. It was invented by one Russell Kirk in 1953. DeParle’s opening para (“lede” in US newsspeak) introduces us to

Russell Kirk, the celebrated writer who a half-century ago gave the conservative movement its name

and elaborates later on

Kirk, who died in 1994, wrote 32 books, the most famous being “The Conservative Mind,” which was published in 1953. It championed 150 years of conservative thought, and offered “conservative” as a unifying label for the right’s disparate camps.

I must say, it’s a great term, offering a neat contrast with “progressive”. Surprising nobody came up with it earlier, really.