Obituary

Comment on his career seems superfluous and almost impertinent. I have difficulty thinking of another recently living musician who so defined the contours of the world I grew up in and lived in. The one thing that’s noticeable to me (at least for the music I know, which is obviously far from everything), is that while you can trace his influence on musicians of pretty well every subsequent generation, it’s hard to discern any significant backlash against him. He was sui generis.

Obituary here. His _Imagined Communities_ was an important book to me, as it was, I suspect, to many other people in the Crooked Timber community. Indeed, it’s the book that made me decide to do graduate studies in political science (how could it not be wonderful to work in a discipline where one could read novels and newspapers to reach grand conclusions about political and social life; I was to find out). He was of Anglo-Irish stock – how much that double alienation (membership of an unintegrated but socially privileged minority within a state based on the usual national myths) shaped his viewpoint has been the subject of a lot of amateur speculation. I liked his book on international anarchism (review here, combined with a review of Scott’s Art of Not Being Governed), but more for the details than the whole. There’s a funny anecdote in it about an assassination attempt on a Captain-General:

bq. With the help of two Asturian anarchists, a young Cuban nationalist called Armando Andre hid a bomb in the roof of the ground-floor toilet of the Captain-General’s palace. The device was supposed to explode when Weyler sat down on the pot, bringing the whole second floor down on his head. The plotters were unaware, however, that Weyler suffered so severely from haemorrhoids that he almost never used the facility, preferring an earthenware field-potty when he had to relieve himself. The bomb went off, but no one was hurt, and Weyler decided to inform Madrid that the explosion had been caused by stoppages which prevented the latrine’s gases from escaping normally.

with further references to how the General was “partly relieved” and to the “diehard colons” of the revolution. I like that he had a low (if somewhat pince-sans-rire) sense of humour, despite his formidable learning and clipped Etonian accent – I can only imagine that he took great delight in smuggling the story and dubious jokes into an otherwise serious and densely researched academic book. More of us should be like him.

Obituary here (via Tyler Cowen). He was a fascinating and very important writer and thinker, although his final two books were not as strong as his earlier work. The politics of his ideas are complicated – on the one hand moving away from the efficiency arguments of markets towards political processes of institutional formation, but on the other never precisely able to decide whether and when these political institutions were guided by a logic of lowering transaction costs or by the desire of powerful actors to reap distributional benefits. Path dependence in his work serves more as a stand-in for an explanation than an explanation in its own right, especially given the continuing question (not really resolved in his work or the work of those he influenced) as to why some economies (by his account) changed and began to develop towards the rule of law while others did not. Still, even if he didn’t explain this, no-one else has done an especially good job either. One thing that is likely to get overlooked in his work is his continued engagement with the left. The first time I had had a serious conversation with him, he described himself as a “Marxist of the right,” which seems correct to me (I’m pretty sure I’m not the only person he used this self-description with). There’s a good essay to be written on his encounter with Karl Polanyi – this essay (PDF) disagreeing with Polanyi contains the seeds of some of his most crucial arguments. He will be missed.

The playwright, Brian Friel has died. He had been failing in recent years, but his death is still an enormous loss. I didn’t know him, but I loved his plays. His most famous play was probably Dancing at Lughnasa (which repurposed bits and pieces from a book by my and Maria’s grand-aunt, Maire MacNeill), but it wasn’t his best. That honor surely goes to _Faith Healer_; the Abbey production, with Donal McCann as the fantastic Francis Hardy, is the most extraordinary play I’ve ever seen. Its depiction of the main character’s embrace of the comforts of failure is in some ways more savage than Beckett, and certainly more intimate. _Translations_ is also very fine, and has considerable social science interest – it’s no coincidence that James Scott uses a snippet of dialogue taken from it as his epigraph for _Seeing Like A State._ I’m sorry that he’s gone.

Winton organized the Czech kinderstransport that delivered a total of 669 children bound for concentration camps to the UK, instead. He kept quiet about it until his wife found his records in the attic. He lived to 106, and died today, the anniversary of the train carrying the largest number of children — 241 — departed from Prague. BBC story here. Account of how he pulled it off here. He said that anybody would have done it.

Interesting video story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6FlMLyf0yk

Challenge to cynics:

One thing about the interwebs is that you sometimes get to find out about someone you’ve been disconnected from for years. It happened to me yesterday, when I discovered that the guy who had been my “handler” in Lutte Ouvière [had died in 2011 aged 62, following a stroke](http://www.lutte-ouvriere-journal.org/2011/10/12/notre-camarade-denis-robin_25765.html). I’d noticed that some prominent French administrator had the same name and googled to see if it was the same guy. It wasn’t, but up came the obituary of Denis Robin, comrade Cerdon, and with it a whole bunch of memories of the nineteen-year-old me from 1978.

Back then I had finished school, having taken the Oxbridge entrance exams before Christmas. I therefore had about nine months on my hands and wanted to spend it in Paris, where I had friends (and still do) through a language exchange with a family there. I landed a job as a courier with an agency called the Banque Centrale de Compensation which recorded transactions on the Paris commodity exchange, the Bourse de Commerce. This meant that I spent my days running from our office to the Bourse and to the HQs of the various coffee, cocoa, soya and sugar companies.

I’d long been interested in the French left and had even done a school project on May 1968, sucking up lots of information on the various groupuscules. This was, I think it fair to say, alternately irritating and amusing to my French friends who were stalwarts of the Socialists, then in electoral alliance with the barely post-Stalinist Parti Communiste. After one dinner-table debate they expressed scepticism about whether my money would ever follow my mouth, and I took this as something of a challenge. The following day, when I was making a delivery to the main offices of the Crédit Lyonnais, I encountered a bunch of militants selling Lutte Ouvrière, a Trotskyist weekly newpaper and engaged them in conversation. One of the people there was comrade Cerdon, and I agreed to meet him on the evening of Mayday for a conversation, ideally having joined up with their contingent on the big demonstration. I never found LO demonstrators that day and ended up marching with UNEF, the Communist student union. But we did meet in a café in the Place de la République that evening and began one of a series of long conversations about politics and related matters, the purpose of which was to recruit me to the organization.
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New York Times obituary.

I guess I’m the one who should make this little post, since for the last couple weeks I’ve been talking, a bit, about his classic book, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. I didn’t know very much about the man, myself, before reading his obit this morning. I haven’t really thought much about his legacy – how much of what he wrote was valid, or is still valid in light of subsequent historiography. But he has had an influence on me. In sophomore (?) year of college I heard about him from a Freudian psychology prof. I struggled through The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. It was maybe the first ‘proper’ intellectual history I read. I found it fascinating. But I had such screwy ideas at the time that the details didn’t really stick. Maybe I should go back and give it a reread in honor of the man. Well, maybe not the whole thing …

Any thoughts about Peter Gay?

Fuck. Although we knew it was coming, and I am glad if he went out (as I am guessing) on his own terms. Guardian obituary here. I’m pretty sure that his books will continue to live, just as PG Wodehouse’s books have continued to live, although they were very different comic writers. Both were liberal in a small-l sense of the word, but Pratchett’s liberalism was very much more worldly. I’ll always have a particular fondness for the enlightened despot, Lord Vetinari and for the model of hydraulic Keynesianism in Making Money. And for the Ramtop Mountains, an antiquated technology joke that has long outlived its original meaning. And the constellation of the Small Boring Group of Faint Stars, which I bored my nine year old with the day before yesterday. And where Rincewind has seen his life flash before his eyes so many times that he can nap during the boring bits. And the gods’ celestial habitation – Dunmanifestin. And Wyrd Sisters, which is perfectly paced as a novel, with particular attention paid to the standing stone that refuses to be counted and the castle (if my memory is correct) designed by an architect who had heard of Gormenghast but didn’t have the budget. And I could keep on going, and going, and going, which is the point.

Guardian story “here”:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/27/pd-james-detective-fiction-dies-aged-94-detective-adam-dalgliesh. Harry is, I think, the official Crooked Timber PD James aficionado, and likely has far more interesting things to say than I do. Obviously, I disagreed with her politics, and I disliked her main character, Adam Dalgliesh, in direct proportion to the tender regard that she lavished on him. But she was excellent in describing disagreeable but interesting characters, and especially disagreeable but interesting women. She also had an astute sociological eye for the distinctive worlds that middle-class women in certain vocations and professions (viz. nursing in Shroud for a Nightingale) created amongst themselves in the interstices of the workplace before feminism. While she was unsentimental about the dynamics of mutual dislike and competition among women in these worlds, I felt that she missed them, and I sometimes wondered how much of her conservatism was grounded in a positive sense of loss.

Chris Brooke reminds us that today is the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Jean Jaurès.

Gary Becker, University Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of Chicago, has died at the age of eighty three. I am certainly not going to attempt an obituary or assessment. But something Tim Carmody [said on Twitter](https://twitter.com/tcarmody/status/463022768209285120) caught my eye: “People sometimes talk about ‘neoliberalism’ as a kind of intellectual bogeyman. Gary Becker was the actual guy.” In a somewhat similar way, people sometimes talked about ‘poststructuralism’ as a kind of intellectual bogeyman, and Michel Foucault was the actual guy. It is worth looking at what one avatar had to say about the other. Foucault [lectured on Becker and related matters in the late 1970s](http://www.amazon.com/The-Birth-Biopolitics-Lectures-1978–1979/dp/0312203411/). One of the things he saw right away was the scope and ambition of Becker’s project, and the conceptual turn—accompanying wider social changes—which would enable economics to become not just a topic of study, like geology or English literature, but rather an “[approach to human behavior](http://www.amazon.com/The-Economic-Approach-Human-Behavior/dp/0226041123)”. Here is Foucault in March of 1979, for instance:

> In practice, economic analysis, from Adam Smith to the beginning of the twentieth century, broadly speaking takes as its object the study of the mechanisms of production, the mechanisms of exchange, and the data of consumption within a given social structure, along with the interconnections between these three mechanisms. Now, for the neo-liberals, economic analysis should not consist in the study of these mechanisms, but in the nature and consequences of what they call substitutible choices … In this they return to, or rather put to work, a defintion [from Lionel Robbins] … ‘Economics is the science of human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses’. … Economics is not therefore the analysis of the historical logic of processes [like capital, investment, and production]; it is the analysis of the internal rationality, the strategic programming of individuals’ activity.

Then comes the identification not just of the shift in emphasis but also point of view:

> This means undertaking the economic analysis of labor. What does bringing labor back into economic analysis mean? It does not mean knowing where labor is situated between, let’s say, capital and production. The problem of bringing labor back into the field of economic analysis … is how the person who works uses the means available to him. … What system of choice and rationality does the activity of work conform to? … So we adopt the point of view of the worker and, for the first time, ensure that the worker is not present in the economic analysis as an object—the object of supply and demand in the form of labor power—but as an active economic subject.

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Sue Townsend is also dead. Guardian obit here. I have a small supply of Adrian Mole books, which I give to students (even if, sometimes, I don’t know them well) who have prolonged illnesses — or sometimes just to cheer them up. I have no idea whether it works for them, but it pretty much always works for me.

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Richard Hoggart is dead, at 95. BBC obit here; Guardian obit here. His first book, The Uses of Literacy is still in print after 58 years. I was struck by this para from the Guardian obit:

Late in life he wondered if his readiness to serve on committees was a byproduct of a childhood that had left him “unusually glad to find myself wanted”. Yet he was sceptical about the idea that these compulsions had stopped him from producing another Uses of Literacy. “Did you really expect that I would?” he asked an interviewer. “I didn’t. That’s the sort of book that – if you’re lucky – you can write once in a lifetime.”