History

Scott McLemee has a good “article”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/14/mclemee on Francis M. Cornford’s _Microcosmographia Academica_, a sort of Lifemanship for the young academic. Some of Cornford’s Edwardianisms have a faint odour of fustian, but in the main his skewering of academic politics is as sharp and relevant as ever. He’s especially fine on the combination of high sounding perorations, low self interest and relentless tedium that marks politics in the self-governing university, and on the ruthlessness of “young men in a hurry,” whose professed radicalism only imperfectly conceals their desire to accommodate their own bottoms comfortably to the seats of power. Cornford’s analysis of academic publishing rings true today (except for the bit about government subsidy):

bq. The Principle of Sound Learning is that the noise of vulgar fame should never trouble the cloistered calm of academic existence. Hence, learning is called sound when no one has ever heard of it; and ‘sound scholar’ is a term of praise applied to one another by learned men who have no reputation outside the University, and a rather queer one inside it. If you should write a book (you had better not), be sure that it is unreadable; otherwise you will be called ‘brilliant’ and forfeit all respect. University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.

Scott points to an “online version”:http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/iau/cornford/cornford.html of _MA_ (slightly dodgy scan, but still perfectly readable), which inspired me to do a Google search on the first book by Cornford that I ever read, _Thucydides Mythistoricus_ , only to discover that it’s “online too”:http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Thucydides/Cornford/CTOC.html. It’s a quite brilliantly written Marxisant account of the Peloponnesian war, which blames the outbreak of hostilities on the desire of the Athenian commercial classes to maintain a stranglehold on trade. I’ve no idea how well Cornford’s analysis has held up among classical historians, but he’s still read by international relations scholars.

Addendum: I’ve been meaning to mention for a while that _Inside Higher Ed_ now has an “XML feed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/frontpagerss2 and that Scott’s columns are collected “here”:http://insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs.

Why is Karl Rove more appalling than Richard Nixon? There are actually any number of answers, but Kevin Drum has a good one.

“Juan non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_19-2005_06_25.shtml#1119376430 quotes one of his correspondents to rebuke Brian Leiter for not understanding that corporatism means government by corporate entities rather than corporations. Non-Volokh’s correspondent is right in stating that corporate entities don’t equal corporations, although apparently disinclined to address Leiter’s main point, which is that business did indeed play a prominent role in the Fascist state (the extent to which the political was “autonomous” from the economic is the subject of considerable historiographical debate, in the German case at least). Unfortunately he then goes on to give a quite distorted and politically loaded account of what corporatism actually was. He tells us that a “corporate is a production planning board made up of workers, owners, and others involved in production advocated by the syndicalist school of socialism,” and then goes on to try to claim that the modern left has a lot more in common with fascism than the modern right. Now it’s true that Giovanni Gentile was influenced by Georges Sorel, who was the most prominent advocate of syndicalist thought. But the two were very different, both in theory and practice. Corporatism, more than anything else, was an attempt to put the conservative and anti-socialist ideas expressed in Leo XIII’s encyclical, “Rerum Novarum”:http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html ,into practice. Its animating philosophy was the belief that the corporate interests in society – business, workers etc – should work in solidarity to organize economic and political life. It was explicitly conceived as a rejoinder to the twin threats of socialism and democracy. Syndicalism was a very different creature, and argued that politics and economy should be under _trade-union_ control. Philippe Schmitter’s seminal essay, “Still the Century of Corporatism?,” which spurred the revival of the modern study of corporatism (and more particularly of its analogies with post WWII forms of economic organization), discusses the difference between these two social philosophies at length – indeed he predicts tongue-in-cheek that if the twentieth century is the century of corporatism, perhaps the next stage of history will see the rise of syndicalism as a counter-movement. Juan non-Volokh’s correspondent’s spurious historical analogy seems to me to be a rather transparent smear job.

Update: I should make it quite clear that this post is not a broad statement of support for Brian Leiter in his ongoing dispute with Juan non-Volokh. I don’t find his “threat”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/who_is_juan_non.html#more to find out who Juan non-Volokh is, and to out him, any more respectable than Donald Luskin’s somewhat similar effort to use a bogus libel suit to find out who Atrios was, when Duncan Black was an anonymously-blogging non-tenured economics professor.

Update 2: Brian Leiter asks me in correspondence to make it clear that he, unlike Luskin, has not threatened Juan non-Volokh with a lawsuit; instead, he’s relying on someone to tell him who non-Volokh is. While I consider this to be quite irrelevant to the matter at hand (the threatened harm is in the outing, not in the methods used to pursue it), I’m happy to state this for the record.

Update 3: It would appear that Brian Leiter has “reconsidered”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2005_06_19.html#003635. I’m glad to see it.

We have finalized our list of speakers for next year’s Technology and Social Behavior Colloquium Series at Northwestern. Bruno Latour will be our first visitor followed by other great researchers engaged in fascinating projects representing numerous academic disciplines (in order of their visits): Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, Anne Holohan from Univ. Trento, Bob Kraut from CMU, David Mindell from MIT, Linda Jackson from Michigan State, Sarah Igo from UPenn and Batya Friedman from Univ. Washington.

You can sign up on our announcement list to receive reminders about these events.

I don’t think much of most conspiracy theories which require that an improbably large number of people to keep a lid on some explosive piece of information forever. However, I could just be the victim of availability bias. Obviously, in the event of a successful conspiracy, I’d never hear about it.

I point this out, not to rip anything from today’s headlines, but as an excuse to quote this jewel from a book full of jewels, David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace. Lord Kitchener, the general beloved by the British people for his successes in extending the empire in Egypt and India, had done a poor job directing British military strategy in World War I. Since his popularity made him impossible to fire, he had been sent on a trip to Russia. Kitchener was among the casualties when the ship hit a German mine. It shouldn’t have happened:

The departure route of the Hampshire had already been plotted, but should have been changed. Naval Intelligence, which earlier had broken the German radio code, intercepted a message to the German minelaying submarine U75 in late May. It indicated the the submarine was to mine the passage that the Hampshire intended to follow. Two further intercepts confirmed the information, as did signtings of the submarine. In the confusion at British headquarters at Scapa Flow, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, the British naval commander, and his staff somehow failed to read or to understand the warnings that Naval Intelligence sent to their flagship. (At a court of inquiry that convened later in 1916 to look into the matter, Admiral Jellicoe succeeded in hiding the existence of these intelligence warnings, which were revealed only in 1985.)

Stephen Bainbridge ruminates on Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels and the reasons for the success of the British Navy in its wars against Napoleonic France and the US. He gives a brief discussion of a “paper”:http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/navy2.pdf by Douglas W. Allen, which analyzes the institutions of the British Navy as a solution to a set of principal-agent problems. Now, the paper is interesting, but it seems to me to be flawed, in a manner that’s unfortunately rather typical of many economists who analyze social institutions. Allen treats the rules of the Navy as an efficient solution to a set of monitoring problems, where the British state wanted to make sure that its captains, officers and seamen fought well on its behalf. In other words, he’s making a functionalist argument.

Now the functionalist part of the story is an important one; the British Navy clearly existed for a reason. But if the Aubrey-Maturin novels provide any sort of an accurate picture of the institutions of the British Navy, there’s strong countervailing evidence to suggest that many of the institutions of the Navy were less intended to maximize the overall efficiency of the Navy as a fighting machine, than to provide powerful actors in the Navy with the opportunities for individual gain. Viz., the institutionalized prerogatives of pursers to engage in certain forms of peculation. The right of admirals to a third-share of any prize money won by captains under their command. The need to pay sweeteners to those in charge of the docks to provide timely repairs. The arbitrary system of promotion, which depended at least as much (and probably rather more) on patronage and political connections as on merit. Not to mention Aubrey’s (and Hornblower’s) continual source of complaint – the miserable official allotment of gunpowder, which meant that captains had to lay in their own supplies to have any chance of fighting successfully at sea. Now I imagine that one could construct “just-so” stories which explained why most (or all) of these institutionalized features of Navy life contributed to the overall goal of maximizing the Navy’s efficiency as a fighting machine. But they would be just-so stories – not especially convincing on their merits. To the extent that O’Brian is right (and he clearly did a hell of a lot of research), the institutions of the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars weren’t even a second-best solution. They were an ungainly compromise between a wide variety of different actors, each of whom had a strong streak of self-interest, and the ability and desire to bargain in order to achieve that interest, whatever this meant for the British Navy as a fighting force.

Update: title changed following comment from Kieran

Yom Hashoah – Holocaust Remembrance Day – was just a few days ago. I thought I would post a note about one of the most difficult films I have ever seen: Spielberg’s “The Last Days”. It documents the final stages of the war when it was clear that Hitler was going to lose yet the Nazis did all that they could to continue to kill as many Jews as possible managing to annihilate over 400,000 Hungarian Jews in just two months. The movie looks at the lives of five Hungarian Jews who escaped to the U.S. and revisits the locations of their past with them. One of the people featured is California Congressman Tom Lantos. The movie is very effective. Although it is impossible to understand fully what these people experienced, this film brings you very close to the events. I did have one problem with it though. It completely ignores the plight of the thousands who returned after the war and had to start their lives over in the country that had taken everything away from them. I am surprised that the movie is rated PG13. Some of the images are among the most disturbing ones I have ever seen, certainly not for the faint of heart.

For some more personal thoughts on Yom Hashoah, check out this post over at Is That Legal?. (Be forewarned: difficult images.)

I had a conversation at the weekend where the topic of baby-farming came up. Unmarried mother in Victorian England? Can’t stand the social stigma? No problem, babies disposed of no questions asked …. The full details are in Dorothy Haller’s online essay “Bastardy and Baby Farming in Victorian England”:http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm . A sample quote:

bq. Baby farmers, the majority of whom were women, ran ads in newspapers which catered to working class girls. On any given day a young mother could find at least a dozen ads in the Daily Telegraph, and in the Christian Times, soliciting for the weekly, monthly, or yearly care of infants. All these advertisements were aimed at the mothers of illegitimate babies who were having difficulty finding employment with the added liability of a child. A typical ad might read:

bq.

NURSE CHILD WANTED, OR TO ADOPT — The Advertiser, a Widow with a little family of her own, and moderate allowance from her late husband’s friends, would be glad to accept the charge of a young child. Age no object. If sickly would receive a parent’s care. Terms, Fifteen Shillings a month; or would adopt entirely if under two months for the small sum of Twelve pounds.

This ad may have been misleading to the general public, but it read like a coded message to unwed mothers. The information about the character and financial condition of the person soliciting for nurse children appears to be acceptable at first glance, but no name and no address is given. No references are asked for and none are offered. The sum of 15s a week to keep an infant or a sickly child was inadequate, and a sickly child and an infant under two months were the least likely to survive and the cheapest to bury. Infants were taken no questions asked and it was understood that for 12 pounds no questions were expected to be asked. The transaction between the mother and the babyfarmer usually took place in a public place, on public transportation, or through a second party. No personal information was exchanged, the money was paid, and the transaction was complete. The mother knew she would never see her infant alive again.

No doubt this practice flourishes in certain societies today and would do wherever the theocrats get the upper hand. Read the whole thing, as someone-or-other is wont to say.

I watched “Der Untergang”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363163/ (Downfall) last night at Bristol’s Watershed cinema. An astonishing film. Bruno Ganz is fantastic as the increasingly stressed and incoherent Hitler and Corinna Harfouch is chilling as the the unremittingly evil Magda Goebbels. The film works partly through the contrast between above-ground where Berlin crumbles under Soviet bombardment and the bunker where reality impinges on fantasy intermittently and increasingly shockingly. There’s a great scene where Hitler addresses Albert Speer across the model of his planned Berlin-of-the-future whilst the real Berlin is flattened. Hitler is petty and selfish to the end, screaming of betrayal, his hatred of the Jews, and telling all that will hear that the German people deserve to die for letting him down — personally. The only slightly false note was when Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) escapes at the end — one suspects some embellishment.

When the film ended the cinema was perfectly still for a moment or two. Everyone in the audience was, I think, psychologically winded by what they’d seen. Ganz, Harfouch and director Hirschbiegel deserve Oscars for this, no question.

Jared Diamond tells us more about rat by-product consumption in the Old West in Collapse:

In 1849, hungry gold miners crossing the Nevada desert noticed some glistening balls of a candy-like substance on a cliff, licked or ate the balls, and discovered them to be sweet-tasting, but then they developed nausea. Eventually it was realized that the balls were hardened deposits made by small rodents, called packrats. that protect themselves by building nests of sticks, plant fragments, and mammal dung gathered in the vicinity, plus food remains, discarded bones, and their own feces. Not being toilet-trained, the rats urinate in their nests, and sugar and other substances crystallize from their urine as it dries out, cementing the midden to a brick-like consistency. In effect, the hungry gold miners were eating dried rat urine laced with rat feces and rat garbage.

These middens are quite valuable to paleontologists interested in finding out about local vegetation in specific periods; they serve as rough-and-ready time capsules. Diamond seems to have an interest in rats as food sources; he also tells us in passing about recipes for laboratory rat that circulated among British scientists during the post-WW II period of food rationing.

From “a piece by Andrew Clark”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8cf0b7c8-a0e0-11d9-95e5-00000e2511c8.html in today’s Financial Times:

bq. Until the final scene, the Hamburg State Opera’s November 2002 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg had proceeded without comment. Everyone was primed to applaud the hymn to “holy German art” that brings Richard Wagner’s four-hour pageant to a climax. Then came the bombshell. Midway through Hans Sachs’s monologue about honouring German masters over “foreign vanities”, the music came to an abrupt halt. Suddenly one of the mastersingers started speaking: “Have you actually thought about what you are singing?” he asked. No one had experienced anything like it in an opera house. There followed a lively stage discussion – some of it shouted down by outraged members of the audience – about Wagner’s anti-Semitism in the context of 19th and 20th century German nationalism.

There’s much to disagree with in Clark’s piece, both in terms of particular judgements about the relationship between ideology and music and over the claims he makes for the extent of Wagner’s influence. Still, worth a look.

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the St Pauls in Bristol riots that initiated a period of urban unrest in Britain which ultimately led to the “Scarman”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Scarman report. The riots followed a police raid on the Black and White cafe on 2nd April 1980. The Bristol Evening Post has “some”:http://www.thisisbristol.com/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=144936&command=displayContent&sourceNode=144919&contentPK=12141802&moduleName=InternalSearch&keyword=riots&formname=sidebarsearch “coverage”:http://www.thisisbristol.com/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=144936&command=displayContent&sourceNode=144919&contentPK=12145074&moduleName=InternalSearch&keyword=riots&formname=sidebarsearch , but I’ve not managed to find much on the web (the BBC’s “On This Day”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/default.stm page ignores the events entirely). The following day’s Daily Telegraph headlined with:

bq. 19 Police Hurt in Black Riot

and editorialized thus:

bq. Lacking parental care many (black youths) ran wild. Incited by race-relations witchfinders and left-wing teachers and social workers to blame British society for their own shortcomings, lacking the work-ethic and perseverance, lost in a society itself demoralized by socialism, they all too easily sink into a criminal sub-culture. (Quotes from “an academic paper”:http://www.psa.ac.uk/cps/1995%5Crowe.pdf .)

I doubt that even the Telegraph would dare to cover such events in these terms today. Contrary to the Telegraph’s fantasy version, neither these riots nor the ones of the following year in Brixton, Handsworth, Toxteth and elsewhere were race riots — black and white youths were involved together, though systematic racial harrassment by the police (throught the “Sus” law) and pervasive racial discrimination undoubtedly underlay the events. This was an important moment in postwar British history, now all but forgotten.

I’ve just finished Günter Grass’s “Crabwalk”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0156029707/junius-20 , which which I read partly because it dovetails with some other stuff I’ve been reading (such as Sebald’s “Natural History of Destruction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375504842/junius-20 ) and partly because I have to give a presentation to my German class about a recent book I’ve read. I figured that if I chose a German book there’s be plenty of on-line material to help me work out the relevant vocabulary.

There’s been “much blogospheric concern”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/02/14/thousands_of_neonazis_march_in_dresden.php recently about the resurgence of the German far-right, and that’s very much Grass’s concern. One of the favourite themes of the neo-Nazis is Germans-as-victims and Grass’s underlying thought is that the embarassed silence of the German mainstream about the fate of the refugees from Germany’s lost eastern provinces has gifted the extremists a monopoly of that issue. The novel is centred around the sinking of the “Wilhelm Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KdF_Ship_Wilhelm_Gustloff on 30 January 1945. The ship, a former pleasure cruiser, was carrying as many as 10,000 people when it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Nearly everyone on board perished and it therefore ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters even. The narrator protagonist Paul Pokriefke is a cynical journalist whose mother, a survivor, gave birth to him on one of the lifeboats. His estranged son, Konrad, is a neo-Nazi obsessive who runs a website devoted both to the ship and to the assasinated Nazi functionary after whom it was named. Paul tells us of the sinking itself, of his difficult relationship with mother (a DDR loyalist who cried when Stalin died) and son, and of the assassination of “Gustloff”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Gustloff himself in Zurich in 1936 by a Jew, “David Frankfurter”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frankfurter .

One thing that Grass gets absolutely right is the atmosphere of internet chatrooms. The son, Konrad, is forever engaged in hostile-but-matey banter with a “Jewish” interlocutor “David”. Not only are their identities not quite what they seem but he gets the adolescent faux-enemy-I-hang-out-with thing. I won’t say more about this, because I don’t want to spoil the denoument for anyone.

I’m not sure that Grass ends up telling us all that much about the neo-Nazi phenomenon. What he does get across though is a sense that the commitment of all of his protagonists to anything like a liberal democracy is fragile and contingent. Certainly a book worth reading for both its literary and historical interest, though the translation is occasionally clunky.

Today’s Financial Times has “a remarkable article about the Tulsa riot of 1921”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/20de5fec-821b-11d9-9e19-00000e2511c8.html — essentially a bout of ethnic cleansing — its disappearance from official memory for over fifty years and the long struggle of the survivors and their descendants for recognition and compensation:

bq. Historians call the firestorm that convulsed Tulsa from the evening of May 31 into the afternoon of June 1 the single worst event in the history of American race relations. To most Tulsans it is simply “the riot”. But the carnage had nothing in common with the mass protests of Chicago, Detroit and Newark in the 1960s or the urban violence that laid siege to Los Angeles in 1992 after the white police officers who assaulted Rodney King were acquitted. The 1921 Tulsa race riot owes its name to an older American tradition, to the days when white mobs, with the consent of local authorities, dared to rid themselves of their black neighbours. The endeavour was an opportunity “to run the Negro out of Tulsa”.

The whole thing is worth reading.