Obituary

Pete Seeger, dead at 94.

Dearest Mao Cheng Ji,
We are the staff and posting priveliges of Crooked Timber.org webmagazine. We have been recommended to you as a person of trustworthiness for any trolling enterprise. At the moment we have over 5,893,903 (five million, eight-hundred-and-ninety-three-thousand, nine-hundrend-and-three) US comments waiting in the spam queue of a blog that was formed by Hector St. Clare, until recently the most acclaimed and five-times elected troll of our blog. However, his blog has been shut down for some time while he has been in exile from his native land, and for this reason we have no way to access our comments, as we all lack passports because or paperworks problems due to our initial blog-formation not being intended to be a group blog. Our blog was expanded to have more members of the board but the requisite letters of incorporation are awaiting approval and must be approved in many countries at the same time if we are to regain bloggging passports. So we have contacted you to ask you to move to Hector St. Clare’s blog permanently in the hopes that as soon as he re-continues his blog we will be able to access our 5,893,903 US comments currently waiting in the queue. We will need you to assist us in this enterprise by commenting their a small amount to cover the transfer fees but we will be happy to repay you for this service with 20% of the comments 1,178,780 US comments. Thanks be to God, we are all very excited at the prospect of you commenting permanently at Hector’s blog, and never commenting here at Crooked Timber again, under any circumstances, even needing to use a false name. I speak for all of us in saying we were lucky to of been given the chance to use your help to get our comments back from Hector’s blog. We may be contacting you with more details about the 5,893,903 comments.

For real, no. Hector was a substantially better feminist than Mao when it came to recognizing that gendered threats of violence are a special case, worth considering as different from generalized internet threats, for reasons other than ‘prudishness’–namely they are an attempt to drive women out of public fora.

The great Mandela is dead. A political prisoner for 27 years, a courageous fighter against racism and injustice, and finally a great statesman. There is much to remember there and much to mourn. Those who suffered under apartheid, the exiles, those who were active in solidarity overseas: all will have their memories of the struggle. Some of their voices will be heard. But sadly, they have to share a stage with the official voices of commemoration: politicians and others who cared little for the ANC or who actively opposed it. In the UK it is sickening to hear eulogies from the braying Tories, the Bullingdon-club types and ex-members of the Federation of Conservative Students who sang “hang Nelson Mandela” in the 1980s. No doubt, in the US, there will be some prominent Reaganites who utter similar word of appreciation. There’s an implicit narrative emerging that everyone recognized his greatness after 1990. But this isn’t so. The warbloggers and Tea Partiers (and their followers in the UK) were vilifying him when he criticized US policy under George W. Bush or said something on Palestine that deviated from the standard US-media line. Just as with Martin Luther King, we are witnessing the invention of a sanitized version of the man, focused on reconciliation with those who hated him – and who still hate those like him – and suppressing his wider commitment to the fight against social and global injustice.

The Guardian has an “obituary here”:http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/18/william-weaver ; good translators so rarely get the attention they deserve. I knew him mostly through his translations of Italo Calvino – my Italian is (or was) just about good enough that I could begin to appreciate what an extraordinary job he did. His translations are not only lovely in themselves, but perfectly capture Calvino’s mixture of gravity and sly humour. I’ve “quoted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/09/17/in-which-italo-calvino-discourses-on-the-fundamental-cleavage-of-the-social-sciences/#more-12990 Weaver’s lovely rendition of a couple of key passages from _Citte Invisibili_ before:

Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to comparison with the game of chess. … Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions; he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal passages opened by the bishop’s incursions, by the lumbering, cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn … By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.

But Marco Polo, it turns out, understands the chessboard in a very different way.

Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods, ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist. … Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was once a larvum’s nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree’s being chosen for chopping down … This edge was scored by the woodcarver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding …

[viaThe Browser]

Via “Kevin Drum”:http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/09/fred-pohl-dies-93 who has a good appreciation. Like Coase, he was intellectually active (and “blogging”:http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/) up to his death at the age of 93. As everyone says, _The Space Merchants_ is just wonderful – politically lively (I believe Pohl was a Trotskyist at the time), and very, very funny. _Gladiator-At-Law_, his other collaboration with Kornbluth, gets less attention, but is also excellent. Many of his short stories are also very fine, and have much to say about economics and politics – “The Midas Plague,” for example, is a lovely illustration of themes explored in more rarified prose by both Veblen and J.K. Galbraith. His satire of advertising and politics, “The Tunnel Under the World,” which is its own thing, but also foreshadows Dick’s generalized paranoia, is “available for free online”:http://www.gutenberg.org/files/31979/31979-h/31979-h.htm. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Via “Tyler Cowen”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/09/ronald-coase-has-passed-away.html. I met him briefly once, at the third meeting of the International Society for the New Institutional Economics, where he gave the “keynote address”:http://www.coase.org/coasespeech.htm. His address was followed by the usual kind of discussion, in which various prominent institutional economists asked self-serving ‘questions’ that were obviously crafted to magnify their role, or further their own specific agenda. Coase, who was then in his late eighties, did a wonderful job of deflating them in a fashion that combined acerbity and politeness. His contribution to economics is sometimes misunderstood. He repeatedly “deplored”:http://coase.org/coaseinterview.htm the way in which the Coase ‘theorem’ had been taken up in the literature – economists had focused on the model in which bargaining would resolve social problems perfectly well in a world without transaction costs, while ignoring his actual point (that such a frictionless environment did not, and never would exist). Obviously, his politics weren’t my politics, nor the politics of anyone else here at Crooked Timber – he’s still worth reading. That he remained so intellectually active – into his 11th decade! – is extraordinary.

I learned this afternoon that Robert Bellah has died following complications from surgery. He was 86. Bellah was one of the giants of American sociology, especially the sociology of religion. He taught at Harvard for ten years and then at Berkeley for most of his career. Bellah was a student of Talcott Parsons, and some of that influence can be seen in his late work, Religion in Human Evolution. (Bellah was a rather better-informed theorist of social evolution than Parsons.) But he is best known for his work on American religion and society. He formulated the concept of “American civil religion” in the late 1960s and it quickly became the standard shorthand for the fusion of Christian and secular ideals and rituals that anchor much of American public life. His work on that idea led to the book The Broken Covenant in 1975, and much else besides. A little later on he was—together with Charles Glock and other colleagues and students—at the leading edge of the study of changing forms of private religious practice. Initially, in The New Religious Consciousness, the focus was on religious aspects of 1960s counterculture and their persistence into the 1970s. By the 1980s this line of thought led to Habits of the Heart (again a collective product), a study of American religious practice and its connection to the common good. Habits of the Heart had a huge influence in the field. For a serious piece of social science it sold in large quantities; it pinned down some aspects of spiritual life in the U.S. (most notably with the idea of “Sheilaism“) that were in the air at the time; it helped set the agenda for a revived sociology of culture in the United States; and its methodological mix of in-depth interviews backed by survey research was an influential template for a great deal of sociological work that followed it.

I can’t really do justice to the man and his work here. I’m sure that over the next few weeks there will be many more in-depth appraisals from colleagues and experts. But he was the sort of academic whose influence was felt both through his work and his students, and whose scholarship shaped work in subfields at one and two removes from his own, even if this wasn’t always directly acknowledged.

“Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/06/iain-banks-has-passed-away has an obituary.

Bill Pertwee is dead. Guardian obit here, BBC account here. In recent years Radio 4 Extra has taken to playing his reminiscences from time to time, in which he sounds like the antithesis of the character he is best known for and also reveals an amazing talent for mimicry (he could do Mainwaring so well you wouldn’t know it wasn’t Arthur Lowe). When I heard, my first thought was that it is going to be hard to tell my 12-year old, who loves Dad’s Army, but also Beyond Our Ken and Round the Horne. I think Pertwee was the last living cast member of Round the Horne — but I notice that one of the original castmembers of Beyond Our Ken is still living (the prize for guessing who without resort to the internet is that you can feel smug all day — I guessed instantly).

Marianne Ferber died a few days ago, at age 90. Ferber was one of the founding feminist economists. There is a nice Obit by Frances Woolley here.

I remember Marianne from the IAFFE conferences that I visited as a grad student. One of the most striking memories I have about her is how she would, despite her seniority and fame/status in the field, talk to anyone – indeed, perhaps she even looked out for those who were young or new to the feminist economic community – a virtue one does not always see among the most senior/famous people in a field, and which was definitely not my experience at other economic events. I also remember some of our conversations – how courageously she was in thinking independently and fearlessly and taking the analysis where the argument goes, rather than where the model forces you to stop. As for other women of her age, you can only dream of how she could have been even much more influential if she had been given the same opportunities as men of her generation.

Marianne Ferber will be much missed, not only by her family and friends, but by everyone in the feminist economics community.

I presume it is a bit silly to point to any obituaries. So, instead, a heartwarming story. A few weeks before he died Eric Heffer, in one of his last interviews, Eric Heffer told a story against Neil Kinnock. (If you are too young to remember Heffer, well, here’s wikipedia). He, Heffer, was dying, and one evening, walking down a corridor in the Commons, he got to the point that he couldn’t walk any further. He thought he was alone but Mrs Thatcher was several feet behind him. Seeing his distress she made him put his arm round her, and walked him to a nearby office, made him a cup of tea, and sat with him while they waited for a nurse. His observation, about Neil Kinnock, was that he would have walked straight by.

It turns out that Heffer and Thatcher were friends of sorts; similarly Thatcher and Allan Adams. (See Frank Field on Thatcher’s liking for socialist company). The first 6 years of my political life was devoted to opposing nearly everything Thatcher did (including the Falklands War, about which I have changed my mind; the exception: sale of council houses), and that only ended because I moved somewhere that I could oppose what Reagan was doing instead. But there’s plenty of space on the internet for people who want to speak ill of the dead — I just thought I would tell a story I heard about 22 years ago and is not, as far as I can find, recorded elsewhere.

Ronald Dworkin has died of leukaemia at the age of 81. I can’t speak to his work in jurisprudence, but his work in political philosophy has been some of the most original and creative of the past 50 years. In particular, the first two of his equality essays (welfare and resource), published by Philosophy and Public Affairs in 1981 and then featuring as the opening chapters of Sovereign Virtue had a major effect on the field and paved the way (for better or worse) for luck egalitarianism. I’m sure there will be obituaries over the next few days. In the meantime — though prephylloxera claret may be unavailable — I hope we all raise a glass to his memory.

(Here’s Dworkin talking about Justice for Hedgehogs, starts at about 12 minutes in.)

Obituaries: The Guardian, New York Times, Financial Times, Oxford Law Faculty (with links to radio), Daily Telegraph, Atlantic, Independent

As Crooked Timber readers will already know, there was a memorial service for Aaron in DC this week. Like “Rick Perlstein”:http://www.thenation.com/blog/172761/aaron-swartzs-dc-memorial-radical-brings-bipartisanship-washington, I wasn’t able to go. Unlike Aaron’s funeral, it was a specifically political event, intended to draw publicity both to Aaron’s causes and the causes of Aaron’s death.

Public deaths are strange. When someone dies, what is left is an imperfect aggregation of different people’s memories, which can never surprise you in the way that the real person could. But when the aggregation of memories is mostly made up of the memories of people who never knew Aaron directly, it is stranger again. The person whom you knew becomes a mythological figure, onto whom others map all sorts of things that may, or may not, have anything to do with the actual individual. It must be much stranger for the people who knew Aaron much better than I did (we were good friends, but not intimate ones).
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For those who can be there:

Members of House, Senate Join Family and Friends of Aaron Swartz for Public Memorial Event at the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, DC

WASHINGTON, DC – On Monday, February 4th, family and friends of Aaron Swartz will join members of Congress at the Cannon House Office Building to honor and celebrate the life, work, and legacy of Aaron Swartz, the accomplished activist and technologist who took his own life on January 11. Aaron’s supporters will also discuss possible reforms and other steps that can be taken to honor his memory

WHAT: Public Memorial Event for Aaron Swartz in Washington, DC, free and open to all

WHO:

Aaron’s father Robert Swartz, his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, his friends David Segal and Ben Wikler, and several members of Congress. Likely attendees include Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rep. David Ellison (D-MN), Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) and Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), as well as others to be announced.

WHERE:

Cannon Office Building, Room TBA,
Independence Avenue SE. Washington, DC 20515

WHEN:

Monday, 4 February 2013. 7:00pm – 9:00pm EST

For details or to RSVP, please visit http://bit.ly/aaronswDC

For more information, or for interviews please contact Trevor FitzGibbon at 202-406-0646 or by email at trevor@fitzgibbonmedia.com.

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Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com.