History

I’m just back from an excellent Rousseau Association conference at UCLA to find, now I’ve tuned back in to CT, that we’ve been discussing sociology v economics as theories of society. Funny, because one of the the things that came up in LA was the old Robert Nisbet thesis about the conservative origins of sociology. The idea is that sociology has its origins in the counter-enlightenment attempts of Burke, de Maistre, Saint Simon etc to theorize about social order in the light of the Revolution. It turns out that I’ve long since lost or given away my copy of _The Sociological Tradition_, so I haven’t been back to the original, but I’m curious as to what the thinking is on the Nisbet thesis today. I’m perfectly fine with the use of methods drawn from economics in the social sciences (and with other approaches too) but it is worth noting that most economics involves a straighforwardly rationalistic and enlightenement attitude to the social world, one that the Burkean tradition disputes as being inadequate to social understanding.

Via “Arthur Goldhammer”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-blog-of-interest.html, this is a “very interesting post”:http://withoutbanisters.blogspot.com/2009/06/what-was-algerian-warwhy-should-you.html.

The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the end of the war, most spectacularly during the “Battle of Algiers” in 1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape. …The FLN’s use of terrorism — in particular their targeting of European civilians at popular clubs, bars, and so on in urban bombing campaigns — served as the rationale for this “exhaustive interrogation” of “suspects.” … The Algerian War was a war of independence, a war of decolonization. In that sense, it cannot and should not be understood as analogous to, or a direct precursor to, the United States’ “war on terror.”

As an American today, what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to *France*, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria. … what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact that the military was torturing, French governments turned to censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to publish evidence that torture was going on. … The reason all the government censorship was necessary was that a small but incredibly passionate, intellectually high-powered anti-torture movement developed in France from late 1956. … historical comparison can function as illuminating intellectual practice. … cell phone cameras really changed the world. Because the main reason the French torture-defenders didn’t argue that stuff like simulated drowning was no big deal was because *they didn’t have to: they didn’t have to admit simulated drowning was happening AT ALL.* In the absence of certain forms of highly-circulated, red-handed visual evidence, like the Abu Ghraib photos in Bush-era America, “deny, deny, deny” (even if massive, overwhelming proof actually does exist) remains a plausible public-relations strategy. … Denial that these things happened at all, which will always be the first line of defense, is no longer possible. And that is encouraging, despite everything.

… as, for example, when the conversation is <a href=”http://theconversation.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/guns-gays-and-abortion/”>an exchange between Gail Collins and David Brooks</a> on “Guns, Gays and Abortion” that begins,

<blockquote><b>Gail Collins:</b>  David, can we talk hot-button social issues for a second? I know this is not really an area where you fly the conservative colors, but <i>you’re the go-to guy on how America lives</i>, and I’d like to hear your thoughts even if we can’t work up a fight.</blockquote>

This just makes me want to lie down on top of the <a href=”http://www.hoffmania.com/blog/2008/06/brooks-obama-do.html”>Applebee’s salad bar</a> and never get up again.

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Help requested – I am frantically writing a paper, and trying to remember where I came across a particular datum from a historian (which was, I think, cited in a more general text – perhaps James Scott’s _Seeing Like A State_; perhaps not) The datum was that peasants in mediaeval societies knew only a very limited number of other people, and that the average peasant in France (or perhaps the UK), would meet only eighty people or so over the course of his/her life. Anyone out there know where this claim comes from?

John’s post reminds me that I was giving some grief to Matt Welch about seasteaders and the more … conceptually novel side of libertarianism last week (Matt held his own).

This came up in an argument over Peter Leeson’s new book on the joys of eighteenth century piracy as an exercise in stateless government, and the recent excitement off the coast of Somalia. I suggested that Somalia looked like a libertarian paradise – no government, lots of guns etc – something that Matt certainly didn’t agree with personally. But what I didn’t know (until one of the bloggingheads commenters pointed it out) was that Peter Leeson himself has written an article arguing that “modern Somalia is teh awesome”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.peterleeson.com%2FBetter_Off_Stateless.pdf&ei=f1HvSY3bIt6HlAfM_tQp&usg=AFQjCNGG2u3zX0OOHBmfsJ00LJIiuI829Q (or, at least, a lot better than you might think). As he argues in a different, summary essay (linked to below):

Like all other choices, the choices we face in “selecting” governments are constrained. Unfortunately for most developing countries, the political choice set they face is far smaller than the political choice set more developed countries face. Historical features, such as clan tension, rampant corruption, territorial conflicts, and many others, which cannot be changed in the short run, severely restrict the kind of government countries like Somalia can reasonably expect to have if they have a government. Sadly, well-functioning, well-constrained governments like the ones we observe in the U.S. and western Europe are not part of this choice set. Ultra-predatory, corrupt, and abusive governments, however, are. And so is anarchy. As Somalia’s experience illustrates, for many LDCs with these limited options anarchy may very well be the best feasible choice.

I’ll leave the claim here to others who know African politics better than me (Chris Blattman, feel free to chime in) and merely note that these views presents an interesting question for the Princeton people charged with publicizing his book. On the one hand, piracy and Somalia are surely topical issues, but on the other, professor Leeson’s views on piracy and the benefits of Somalian political organization are likely to be unpopular with many people (his current proposed solution for the Somalian piracy problem, by the way, is to privatize the ocean).

I’ve started reading his book on piracy, which is an entertaining enough exercise, but one which I suspect is a bit fishy on the empirics. He clearly has his ideological druthers (see “here”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/08/06/peter-t-leeson/anarchy-unbound-or-why-self-governance-works-better-than-you-think/ for his grand theory of why we don’t really need government), but then, so do we all. While I don’t find his claims for anarcho-libertarianism to be particularly convincing, I am probably not the target audience, and they have their place in the grand ideological debate. What I do find disconcerting though, is his obvious sweet tooth for efficiency arguments and just-so stories. History, when you look at it at all carefully, is much too messy to support any ideological explanation unequivocally. The book (and the academic articles that it draws upon) simply feel too neat to me, and don’t persuade me that he went into his research on these topics looking to be surprised by what he found (which I really think you should, any time you engage in empirical research). Others’ mileage may vary.

The historian John Hope Franklin has died at the age of 94. The Post’s Obituary notes, inter alia,

In 1985, Franklin was in New York to receive the Clarence Holte Literary Award for his biography of historian George Washington Williams, a 40-year project for which he was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. The next morning, he and his wife were unable to hail a taxi in front of their hotel. Ten years later, when he was to receive the [Presidential Medal of Freedom], Franklin hosted a party for some friends at Washington’s Cosmos Club, of which he had long been a member. A white woman walked up to him, handed him a slip of paper and demanded that he get her coat. He politely told the woman that any of the uniformed attendants, “and they were all in uniform,” would be happy to assist her.

Here is From Slavery to Freedom.

“Matthew Yglesias”:http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/matthewyglesias/~3/550003555/the_chamber_mobilizes.php today

I’m probably not breaking any news if I tell you that American business really hates unions and, thus, really hates the Employee Free Choice Act. Thus, even though John Boehner is trying to destroy the American economy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is squarely focusing its fire on pro-EFCA Democrats. Your typical business executive would rather let the world burn, or see his children fed to a pack of wild boars, then see a union form at his firm. And it makes a certain amount of sense—businessmen appreciate the value of class solidarity. If you run your company into the ground, you get a nice severance package and another job at another company. But if you let your company be unionized, you’d be dead to your brethren. An attack on one is an attack on all, and they all stand together on this point.

“Adam Smith”:http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-08.html, 233 years ago:

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

This sort of puts Mary Rosh in the ha’penny place:

The son of a prominent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar was arrested on Thursday on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation, and aggravated harassment relating to a complex online campaign designed to smear opponents of his father’s theories. The Manhattan district attorney’s office alleged in a statement released on Thursday that Raphael Haim Golb, 49, son of Norman Golb, a professor of Jewish history and civilization at the University of Chicago, used dozens of Internet aliases to “influence and affect debate on the Dead Sea Scrolls” and “harass Dead Sea Scrolls scholars who disagree with his viewpoint.” …

The office contends that Mr. Golb impersonated and harassed Lawrence H. Schiffman, a professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University and a leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, by creating an e-mail account in Mr. Schiffman’s name and using it to send e-mail messages in which the sender admitted to plagiarism. Mr. Golb also allegedly supplemented that campaign to discredit Mr. Schiffman by sending letters to university personnel accusing Mr. Schiffman of plagiarism, and by creating blogs that made similar accusations. Two blogs, each with a single entry, accuse Mr. Schiffman of plagiarizing articles written by Norman Golb in the 1980s. …

Mr. Cargill began tracking the cyberbully—whom he calls the “Puppet Master”—two years ago after he himself was targeted. At the time, he was a doctoral student at UCLA helping to produce a film about Khirbet Qumran—the site in present-day Israel where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered—and its inhabitants for an exhibit on the scrolls at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Mr. Cargill said it was then that the aliases began attacking him and his film, both in e-mail messages to his superiors and on various Web forums, for failing to give credence to Norman Golb’s long-held theory about the origin of the scrolls and how they came to Khirbet Qumran. Some scholars, including Mr. Schiffman and Mr. Cargill, believe that the 2,000-year-old documents were assembled by inhabitants of Qumran. Mr. Golb, however, holds that they originated in Jerusalem and were transported to Qumran later.

Risa Levitt Kohn, a professor of religious studies at San Diego State University who curated the San Diego show and several subsequent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions, said she too has been “under regular attack” by Internet aliases since then, both in Web forums and in e-mail messages addressed to her superiors. “Sometimes the criticisms of me are straightforward and overt,” she told The Chronicle via e-mail, “and sometimes the letters appear reasonable but essentially demand that these individuals take note of previous exhibitions’ supposed ‘failings.’ Then they provide helpful suggestions to find solutions, almost always involving Norman Golb in one way or another.”

A number of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars also said they have been harassed by mysterious Internet personas. Because the messages were written under aliases, they had little choice but to ignore them. “This person has posted horrible stuff about me online,” said Jodi Magness, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I don’t even look anymore, it makes me too upset.”

According to The NY Times, Golb Sr has commented, too:

Professor Golb said that opposing scholars had tried to quash his views over the years through tactics like barring him from Dead Sea Scrolls exhibitions. He said he saw the criminal charges as another attack on his work. “Don’t you see how there was kind of a setup?” he said. “This was to hit me harder.”

Sounds like this might get both uglier and more entertaining in equal measure.

The Online Photographer reports that the firm of Franke and Heidecke is going out of business – perhaps permanently. That’s very sad news, for they are the firm that launched the famous Rolleiflex brand in 1929. As it happens, I bought a 1932 Rolleiflex Standard that I bought in a junk shop in Wales last year. I’d actually seen it a year before. The owner had spotted me with a camera and asked me whether I was interested in the Rollei. At the time I declined, but regretted it as I thought back to the beauty of the image in its ground-glass screen. So I was amazed, when I went back, to find it still unsold and snapped it up. I keep meaning to write a post about what you could, pretentiously, call the “phenomenology of technology”. The Rollei feels so different to a modern digital camera: since it is a twin-lens reflex, you hold it at waist level and look downwards; like other film cameras you don’t get the instant satisfaction of digital – you have to wait and see what came out; and since you have a mere 12 shots on 120 medium format film, you can’t just snap away and select for the best. There’s also the fact that is is a superbly made object. How many other machines made in 1932 still work, and work pretty well. Vorsprung durch Technik, I suppose. Here’s a photograph I made with it:

A few summers ago we were having our house appraised. I opened the door to the appraiser who took a step back, blinked, and then stared rudely at me for about 30 seconds. Then “Oh, you’re English”, he says. (The tip-off being the large picture on my T-Shirt of Zebedee saying “Time for Bed”). He was from a Yorkshire mining community; his father and brothers had both been miners but he was too young himself; his brother (somehow) came to the US to become a hairdresser, and my appraiser followed a few years later.

There’s probably a dissertation to be written about the migration of participants in the Miner’s Strike to the US. A BBC exec chased down the two protagonists in this wonderful Don McPhee photo, and although the miner in the picture (George Brealey) died in Edington some years ago, the copper who you can see trying unsuccessfully to suppress a smile now lives in Tennessee. Full story here. And, if it works, a gallery of McPhee’s pictures (they’re all great, but #4 of the kids being evacuated, and #6 of Wilson lighting his pipe, are fantastic). (Hat-tip, Chris, who thought this was more down my alley than his).

Over on the Edge of the American West, Eric has been working up some graphs on what the WPA spent its money on. Data visualization nerdery is below the fold. The rest of you can go back to your pie charts, whether in honest ignorance or a spirit of desperate contrarianism.

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I’m so far behind on this one. Here’s a figure based on a table Eric sent me.

There is a PDF version. There is also a 4-category version (with a PDF too), that breaks out farm workers from the main category.

When I first started going out with my partner Pauline, in the early 1980s, I had a somewhat dismal opinion of Liverpool. She wanted to show me how great the city could be, so she insisted on taking me to the Palm House in Sefton Park. I rather vividly remember how distressed she was to find that the beatiful structure of her childhood was derelict and vandalized. My father, whose mother came from the city often recalls a visit just after the war, to a city that was incomparably exciting. He remembered the overhead railway, the buses, the underground – a place alive.

That Liverpool is the subject of Terence Davies’s wonderful poetic treatment, “Of Time and the City”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1232790/ (“Official site”:http://www.oftimeandthecity.com/index.php ). He takes the city of empire, of shipbuilding and docks, of sport, of children playing on working-class streets — the city of his childhood — and traces its decline and collapse through the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, he indicates, through music — especially his use of Mahler’s 2nd — that there is life yet and the possibility of return. It is hard to give a flavour of the combination of image, music, poetry and personal recollection that Davies conveys, but he tells us of a place that is badly damaged but still has immense weight and grandeur (aptly evoked in his shots both of industrial landscape and of great Victorian buildings like St George’s Hall). Of course it is a film that will mean most to those from the city, perhaps especially the legion of exiled scousers. But it said a lot to me, with a more episodic connection, and even those who only know it from a distance will love Davies’s work. Get to see it if you possibly can.

Via Cosma, Canadian historian Rob MacDougall on a characteristic American tendency to see radical social change as the inevitable expression of values expressed and promises made at the country’s inception:

“We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. … King went on: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note … a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And here Sancho [Panza] or Sacvan [Bercovitch] whispers to the guy standing next to him, “Were they? Really? If we went back in time and asked the architects of the republic–Jefferson and Madison and Washington and the rest–did you mean for this to apply to your slaves too, would they agree? … Because it would have saved a lot of trouble if they’d spelled all this out in 1789.”

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. … At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

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