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.
Very sad news. Eric Hobsbawm, one of the 20th century’s great historians, has died. The Guardian has [a report](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm-died-aged-95?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038) and [an obituary](http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/01/eric-hobsbawm?intcmp=239). No doubt there will be more obituaries to come. (In fact there’s [a very nice one by Marc Mulholland](http://shar.es/5qeO4) for Jacobin.)
When I was in Texas I met Carl T. Bogus, law prof. and author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism [amazon]. He and I turned out to have something in common: affection for Clinton Rossiter’s forgotten Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion [amazon]. I was trying to baffle someone else at the conference, saying ‘Look, the thing you think conservatism should be is the thing the conservatives made a point of writing off in the 1950’s. You’re a neo-Rossiterian.’ Carl’s ears pricked up. We hit it right off.
When I got home I bought and read Bogus’s Buckley book. I liked it, and it filled in some blanks for me, history-wise. Going back and reading the reviews, I see TNR’s reviewer thought Bogus didn’t much improve on John Judis’ earlier Buckley book. I can’t say. Haven’t read it. (But Judis is a good writer so probably his book is good.) But the reviewer does grant that one area in which Bogus really distinguishes himself is in handling the dead and forgotten ‘new conservatives’ – Rossiter, Viereck and Nisbet, in particular. (Kirk was another, but not one who has been forgotten.) [click to continue…]
A family friend, Susi, just turned 90. Since I’m home in Oregon, I attended the B-Day party. Her Jewish family got out of Germany in ’39 and she found herself a teenager in the US. Got an education, got married, raised a family. She was – is – an artist, and she ended up teaching. But she worked as a gag strip cartoonist in New York, from ’46 to ’50. I’m interested in the history of comics, so she loaned me a rather large file box (which I am being very careful with!) Lots of old clippings, old battered bristol board with typed captions taped on. Neat! [click to continue…]
[This post was co-written by Chris Bertram, “Corey Robin”:http://coreyrobin.com/ and “Alex Gourevitch”:http://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/ ]
“In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.” —Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 79
Libertarianism is a philosophy of individual freedom. Or so its adherents claim. But with their single-minded defense of the rights of property and contract, libertarians cannot come to grips with the systemic denial of freedom in private regimes of power, particularly the workplace. When they do try to address that unfreedom, as a group of academic libertarians calling themselves “Bleeding Heart Libertarians” have done in recent months, they wind up traveling down one of two paths: Either they give up their exclusive focus on the state and become something like garden-variety liberals or they reveal that they are not the defenders of freedom they claim to be.
A brief note for anyone who remembers “my post from last August”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/08/25/the-rise-and-fall-of-dr-struensee/ on the career of Dr Struensee. “A Royal Affair”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1276419/ is now out, I’ve seen it, and it is excellent. Superb performances from Mads Mikkelsen and Alicia Vikander, beautifully shot and with a cracking script. There’s even a guest appearance for _Du Contrat Social_. Don’t miss it!
As a young Trot and reader of Intercontinental Press (I’m talking late 70s, early 80s) I was somewhat astonished when people told me about Gerry Foley, who has just died. As Jeff Mackler’s obit on Red Mole Rising says, he could read in 90 languages and was fluent in more than a dozen. There’s lots of bonus detail on the history of American Trotskyism, on McCarthy, and on the extent of FBI surveillance of far-left meetings. Worth a read. RIP.
Today’s Guardian has a series of articles today concerning Britain’s colonial past and evidence of the “widespread destruction of documents”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-destroyed-records-colonial-crimes with evidence of crimes against humanity by British forces. Other pieces include material on “planned poison gas tests in Botswana”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/britain-poison-gas-tests-botswana , on the “coverup of the deportation of the Chagos islanders from Diego Garcia”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/18/archives-diego-garcia (now used by the United States to bomb various countries), and of “serious war crimes during the Malayan emergency”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/18/colonial-office-eliminations-malayan-insurgency?intcmp=239 . And then there are “eighteen striking photographs”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/gallery/2012/apr/18/colonial-archives-kenya-malaya-aden of the British at work in Kenya, Malaya and Aden . The Aden photographs in particular call to mind similar later ones of British troops in Northern Ireland, where of course, torture was also employed: the techniques used on colonial populations being brought to bear against Irish republicans. And, of course, the look on the faces of the soldiers as they manhandle and abuse “natives” is really no different from what we see in pictures of the French in Algeria, of American troops in Iraq and, indeed, in footage of the Israeli Defense Force in the occupied territories. A timely reminder of the evils of imperialism and colonialism.
Ben Bella is dead, as the charismatic leader of the FLN in the Algerian war of independence, he was one of the great (though flawed) figures of the wave of post-war revolutionary decolonisation. Obituaries and reports in the New York Times , Guardian, Le Monde .
Our 10-year old daughter is only now becoming a serious reader. She had terrible trouble for a long time. We thought she had dyslexia, and maybe she does. Or maybe it’s an eye thing. One a bit lazy. Anyway, lots of letter reversals. b’s and d’s. p’s and q’s reduced her to tears. Reading made her literally sick to her stomach and exhausted for a long time. For her any reading was like reading in a car for anyone else. On the other hand, she could read stuff upside down just as easily as right-side up. Which is to say: not very easily, but better than you would expect. And then she got over it. Now I’m looking for good history books, or history-themed (possibly fictional) books for 10-year old girls, because Zoe has gotten more curious about that and she doesn’t get much history in school, somehow. US history. World history. Ancient history. Modern history. I’m flexible, so long as it seems like the treatment is likely to be entertaining to a bright 10-year old girl.
Accordingly, I’ve taken a flutter on this Kickstarter project that got BoingBoing’ed this morning. Seems like the right idea.
Suggestions?
Re the whole learning to like reading thing. It does seem that somehow she just outgrew or worked through whatever problem she was having, but Harry Potter seems to have played a not-inconsiderable part in the drama. I used to have a theory that the Harry Potter books just got freakishly lucky, being as popular as they were. Sure, they were good, but not that good. I thought it was more a social thing. Once everyone got into Harry, everyone got into getting into Harry and the snowball rolled down the hill into an avalanche. But my daughter is a counter-example to that. Harry Potter electrified her brain as nothing really had before, and it was nice that some of her friends liked it, too. But the books were the thing. It seems that J.K. Rowling’s formula is, simply, the perfect formula. Good to know.
Let me begin with an apology—for two things, actually. First, for the fact this response to the seminar on my debt book was so long in coming. It happening that at the time the seminar was going on I was desperately trying to finish a book with a very firm deadline (not to mention I was also struggling with a flu, which added all sorts of interesting complications. I did finish it though. Only just.) Second, for the fact that, to make up for the delay, I seem to have overcompensated and the response became… well, as you can see, a little long.
Sorry.
Allow me also to remark as well how flattered I am by so much of this discussion. When I wrote the book it never occurred to me I would end up being compared with the likes of Polanyi, Nietzsche, or even Ernest Mandel. I shall try very hard not to let this go to my head. Now how shall I start? It would be ungracious not to respond to each in some way. But I think it might be best to start by clarifying a few issues that seem to crop up pretty frequently, both in this seminar and in other reviews and comments I’ve seen on the internet. Then I will take on the specific responses. [click to continue…]
I’ve just sent back the proofs for the new edition of Rousseau’s _Of the Social Contract and Other Political Writings_ (edited Bertram, translated Quintin Hoare) that Penguin Classics are publishing in September. One of the “other writings” is the _Constitutional Proposal for Corsica_ . Reading through, I suddenly alighted on an sentence and thought, “hang on, that makes no sense!” The relevant phrase in French (OC3: 936) is
bq. …quand le Prince hausse les monnoyes il en retire l’avantage reel de voler ses créanciers …
For which we had
bq. …when the Prince raises the value of a currency he derives the real advantage of stealing from his creditors …
But, but …. Surely what the prince needs to do to steal from his creditors is the exact opposite? You inflate. You inflate away the debt. You make the currency worth less, not more. Isn’t Rousseau just writing nonsense then?
It turns out not, and, thanks to the help of the estimable Chris Brooke I now understand. My thinking on this, and that of just about all modern readers I suspect, is formed by thinking of fiat currency. But if we have currency that (purportedly) derives its value from its metallic content (such as gold) then you can debase the coinage by raising its _face value_ whilst keeping the metal content the same. (Or alternatively, you could adulterate the metal or clip the coin to get the same effect.) Finding out this kind of thing really is great fun.
David Graeber’s three social principles – hierarchy, exchange and communism – are useful devices to think about the world, particularly when you become sensitized to the way in which one can turn into or mask another. One site of human interaction that may be illuminated by Graeber’s principles is the modern university: perhaps especially the British version which has evolved from nominally democratic modes of governance to extremely hierarchical ones within a generation. [click to continue…]
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years begins with a conversation in a London churchyard about debt and morality and takes us all the way from ancient Sumeria, through Roman slavery, the vast empires of the “Axial age”, medieval monasteries, New World conquest and slavery to the 2008 financial collapse. The breadth of material Graeber covers is extraordinarily impressive and, though anchored in the perspective of social anthropology, he also draws on economics and finance, law, history, classics, sociology and the history of ideas. I’m guessing that most of us can’t keep up and that we lack, to some degree, his erudition and multidisciplinary competence. Anyway, I do. But I hope that a Crooked Timber symposium can draw on experts and scholars from enough of these different disciplines to provide some critical perspective. My own background is in political philosophy and the history of political thought: so that naturally informs my own reactions as do my political engagements and sympathies. So mine is merely one take on some of the book’s themes.
If you haven’t come across Jourdon Anderson’s 1865 letter “To [his] Old Master” yet, do read it; it’s marvelously pointed, far more rhetorically adept than its recipient deserved. Jason Kottke did a little digging–wait, is this some of that digital humanities stuff all the kids are doing nowadays?–and found out <a href=”http://kottke.org/12/02/what-happened-to-the-former-slave-that-wrote-his-old-master”>what happened to Jourdon Anderson</a> and his family. The short version seems to be that they lived happily ever after.
[amazon]. He and I turned out to have something in common: affection for Clinton Rossiter’s forgotten 
[amazon]. I was trying to baffle someone else at the conference, saying ‘Look, the thing you think conservatism should be is the thing the conservatives made a point of writing off in the 1950’s. You’re a neo-Rossiterian.’ Carl’s ears pricked up. We hit it right off.