“David Bernstein speculates”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_04_23-2006_04_29.shtml#1146187672 about the casting for a new film of _Atlas Shrugged_. Inevitably, “someone in the comments”:http://volokh.com/posts/1146187672.shtml#85930 points out the obvious, viz, that Ayn Rand is an atrocious novelist fit only for insecure fifteen-year-old boys. Some other Volokh readers are not amused, and stomp off in a huff to listen to their _Rush_ CDs. In the course of his snipe at Rand, the commenter says “At least Marx, for all his faults, didn’t attempt fiction.”

Well, as a matter of fact, he “did”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/verse/verse41.htm. _Scorpion and Felix_ is Marx’s unpublished comic (I do not say “funny”) novel, written around 1837, when he was 19. It is not for the faint-of-heart. In essence it is a pastiche of _Tristram Shandy_, a book Marx thought was fantastic. Here is the entirety of Chapter 37:

David Hume maintained that this chapter was the _locus communis_ of the preceding, and indeed maintained so before I had written it. His proof was as follows: since this chapter exists, the earlier chapter does not exist, but this chapter has ousted the earlier, from which it sprang, though not through the operation of cause and effect, for this he questioned. Yet every giant, and thus also every chapter of twenty lines, presupposes a dwarf, every genius a hidebound philistine, and every storm at sea — mud, and as soon as the first disappear, the latter begin, sit down at the table, sprawling out their long legs arrogantly.

The first are too great for this world, and so they are thrown out. But the latter strike root in it and remain, as one may see from the facts, for champagne leaves a lingering repulsive aftertaste, Caesar the hero leaves behind him the play-acting Octavianus, Emperor Napoleon the bourgeois king Louis Philippe, the philosopher Rant the carpet-knight Krug, the poet Schiller the Hofrat Raupach, Leibniz’s heaven Wolf’s schoolroom, the dog Boniface this chapter.

Thus the bases are precipitated, while the spirit evaporates.

In his “biography of Marx”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393321576/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, Francis Wheen points out that the convoluted parodic style seen in the novel was a feature of Marx’s writing throughout his life, and in _Capital_ in particular. He also notes that the passage above, with its contrast of Napoleon and Louis Philippe as giant and dwarf, clearly prefigures the famous opening of the _Eighteenth Brumaire_:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere after Danton, Louis Blanc after Robespierre, the _montagne_ of 1848 to 1851 after the _montagne_ of 1793 to 1795, and then the London constable [Louis Bonaparte], with a dozen of his best debt-ridden lieutenants, after the little corporal [Napoleon Bonaparte], with his roundtable of military marshalls.

At any rate, it is striking that Marx had such versatility that he could write a novel even less readable than _Atlas Shrugged_.

Via Norm, a very interesting article by Max Hastings, arguing that if Britain had been invaded by the Nazis the British would have behaved much as the French did:

Most of France’s “haves” collaborated not willingly, but in the face of perceived necessity. The bourgeois classes allowed their view to be determined by law-and-order arguments, which possess even greater force in war than in peace. Sabotage provoked murderous reprisals upon the innocent. Surely, people said, it is in the interests of the community that we behave in such a way as to be spared killings and confiscations, when daily existence is harsh enough already.

Resistance, confined to a small minority until 1944, was dominated by what middle-class people would categorise as “the awkward squad”: teachers and unionists (many of them leftists), young mavericks, communist activists, journalists, peasants: in short, little people.

All this, I think, would have applied equally in a German-occupied Britain.

Hastings commends Eden’s statement, when asked to comment on the behaviour of the French during the war, that “It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did.” We’d all do well to reflect on that brilliantly diplomatic, and true, comment. Hastings concludes that

Némirovsky’s great novel paints a portrait of a society that did not conduct itself with conspicuous courage or honour. I am doubtful, however, that we would have done much better.

I can think of only one piece of counter-evidence, which I can’t link to because my googling skills aren’t up to it, but I undertsand that as soon as the war began the British government started to train a secret domestic guerrilla army in preparation for invasion, comprised of conscription-age men who were (because of their age) regarded throughout the war (and until the end of the 50-year embargo on the confidential records) as conscientious objectors. But this is slim evidence (made even slimmer by my inability to cite it: did I dream that I heard a Radio 4 documentary about them?)

Talking of Eden, I recently read Kenneth Harris’s wonderful biography of Attlee (prompted by being fascinated by the role Attlee plays in Five Days in London: May 1940).

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“Apparently,”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_23_atrios_archive.html#114610748283196427 Michelle Malkin is ticked off by a song that incorporates bits of the _Star-Spangled Banner_ in Spanish — or “Star-Spangled Mangle” as she prefers to say. It’s an outrage, and so on. Meanwhile, here is a quiz: 1. What do the following words have in common? California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Montana, Oregon.

Jon’s post below reminds me that I’ve been meaning to link to the Kennedy School’s “Program on Networked Governance”:http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/netgov/html/ which co-sponsored a talk I gave last week. A very interesting program, bringing together traditional concerns of social scientists with some of the new arguments about network topology etc. This is also probably a good time to mention that we’re going to be running a Crooked Timber seminar on Yochai Benkler’s new book in a week or two – the book has a lot to say about networks, governance and much else besides. Previously, these seminars haven’t been announced in advance – but it seems to me to make sense to provide some advance warning this time, for those who would like to participate in comments, and want to read the book first. The book is available to read online “here”:http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Table_Of_Contents under a Creative Commons license. It is quite long though, so those who want to save their eyesight can purchase the hardcopy version from Powells (yer union-friendly store) “here”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Yochai%20Benkler%20Wealth%20of%20Networks or Amazon “here”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0300110561%2Fsr%3D8-1%2Fqid%3D1146106167%2Fref%3Dpd_bbs_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8. I’m hoping to introduce another innovation to this seminar, which is to link selectively from the seminar to posts on other blogs that seriously get involved in the conversation (I will be somewhat selective in this – but hope to include a diverse set of points of view on the book and what it says).

Via “Locus”:http://www.locusmag.com/ I see that John Crowley now has a “Livejournal”:http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/. Crowley’s novel _Little Big_ is a masterpiece. I keep three or four copies around the house so that I always have a spare to press on visitors. It’s astonishingly good – and if you don’t believe me, ask Michael Dirda of the Washington Post (who thinks it’s a candidate for best American novel of the last thirty years), Harold Bloom (his favourite novel: point blank) or “James Hynes”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR25.6/hynes.html:

bq. I’ve read _Little, Big_ four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it–it is inconsistently in print). When “You’ll love this” isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ and Nabokov’s _Ada_.

Worth blogrolling (how many genuinely great writers are out there in the blogosphere?), and more to the point, worth buying his books (esp. _Little Big_; I also loved his recent chapbook, “The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines”).

On May 11-13, the Kennedy School at Harvard will be hosting a conference on “Equality and the New Global Order.” The three days are organized around “Foundational Questions,” “Institutions,” and “Global Public Health.” The tentative schedule is very impressive. Versions of several of the papers are now available – I’m guessing more will be put up over the next two weeks. The talks are free and open to the public. I’m going to try to make some of the sessions, so please say hello.

Mustafa Barghouti, who is Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, and was recently elected to the Palestinian parliament as an independent, is in Madison at the Havens Center. His first talk (yesterday) is already on the web (audio); my guess is that today’s talk will be up within 24 hours.

Havens Center talks are now routinely recorded and made available on the web, so you might be interested to check out the list here. Two that I would particularly recommend are our own Chris Bertram, and also Richard Miller, both on global justice issues.

I was just in gmail reading some emails from John and Daniel which mention some technical questions about choice under uncertainty and, in the rh pane, there appears under “sponsored links” an advertisment for Tyler Cowen’s “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ — “The greatest econ blog on the web! Insightful & interesting every day.” Well, often, I’ll give them that. Are many bloggers paying google to advertise their on-line scribblings?

Sad news. Jane Jacobs, thinker about cities, eclectic economist and brilliant nonconformist, about whom I’ve blogged a “couple”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/08/jane-jacobs/ of “times”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/07/24/lunch-with-jane-jacobs/ , died this morning in Toronto. “Globe and Mail”:http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060425.wjanejacobs0425/BNStory/National/home and “Toronto Star”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1145976509962&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154 among others have reports.

Update: I’ll add links to other coverage and obituaries sporadically. “Douglas Martin in the New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26jacobs.html . “Jeff Pruzan in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/225787b2-d491-11da-a357-0000779e2340.html .

“Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_04/008682.php complains that

bq. I’ve been trying to understand this whole “net neutrality” thing and I’ve failed utterly. I just can’t figure out the underlying issues.

Duncan Black tells him “not to be an idiot”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_23_atrios_archive.html#114593357022853905. But Kevin has a point – the network neutrality debate isn’t quite the no-brainer that it might seem to be at first. There are different kinds of discrimination that might occur, some of which are straightforward to regulate, some not so straightforward. See further, Ed Felten’s “two”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=983 “part”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=986 primer on the topic, and his two “follow up”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=989 “posts”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=995 on the topic, which provide by far the most accessible overview of the underlying technical issues that I’ve read. One very interesting argument which emerges from Felten’s series of posts is his suggestion that a move away from network neutrality might have damaging consequences for the _sociological_ underpinnings of cooperation over resource sharing.

bq. [endpoint computers] deduce that the network is congested. So they will re-send the dropped packet, but in response to the probable congestion they will slow down the rate at which they transmit data. Once enough packets are dropped, and enough computers … One interesting aspect of this system is that it is voluntary — the system relies on endpoint computers to slow down when they see congestion, but nothing forces them to do so. … there is an incentive to defect from this deal. Suppose that you defect — when your packets are dropped you keep on sending packets as fast as you can … By ignoring the congestion signals you are getting more than your fair share of the network. … Despite the incentive to defect, most people keep the deal by using networking software that slows down as expected in response to congestion. … there is a sort of social contract … One of the reasons users comply, I think, is a sense of fairness. If I believe that the burdens of congestion control fall pretty equally on everybody, at least in the long run, then it seems fair to me to slow down my own transmissions when my turn comes. … But now suppose that the network starts singling out some people and dropping their packets first. … the incentive for those machines and applications to stick to the social contract and do their share to control congestion, will weaken. Will this lead to a wave of defections that destroys the Net? Probably not, but I can’t be sure. … We should also listen to the broader lesson of this analysis. If the network discriminates, users and applications will react by changing their behavior. Discrimination will have secondary effects, and we had better think carefully about what they will be.

This seems to me to make sound sociological sense – one of the reasons that the system works as well as it does at the moment is because there’s a set of norms governing behaviour, and a sense that the costs of obeying these norms are, to use Robert Sugden’s terminology, cross-cutting so that they fall on everyone equally in the long run (Sugden has an apposite analysis of norms governing which car crosses a one lane bridge first). If we undermine the basic sense of rough equality in burden sharing, we’re likely going to weaken (and possibly destroy) these norms. There’s a general (and in this case, I believe entirely sound) sense that network neutrality has worked to date, and that we shouldn’t try to fix it. Felten’s analysis helps us move beyond this intuition to a more coherent analysis of what the costs of regulatory change might be.

Update: “Duncan replies here”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_04_23_atrios_archive.html#114596726044778822, saying “Henry says I’m wrong to think this net neutrality issue is a no-brainer and then proceeds to outline one of the many reasons it is, in fact, a no-brainer.” This misses the point I was trying to make. Even assuming that you agree that network neutrality is a good and wonderful principle of regulation, it’s not clear how best to regulate so as to make sure that it’s achieved in practice. Felten makes this clear in his discussion of the tricky ways that telcos might undermine network neutrality through apparently neutral technical decisions. This makes for complicated regulatory problems. Two pertinent examples. First, the DoJ action against Microsoft – I suspect that most people other than the hacks and the Chicago school true believers now accept that Microsoft was a bloated and abusive monopoly – but that’s the easy part. Figuring out how to regulate it successfully is considerably harder; there aren’t any very obvious solutions (my preferred solution would have been the “Zittrain one”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=174110 but it would have turned the copyright system upside down). Second, efforts to unbundle the local loop in Europe – i.e. to allow new entrants to compete effectively with dominant telcos in providing broadband. This was great in principle – but in practice proved more or less impossible to implement (the dominant telcos proved adept at exploiting loopholes in the regulation to hobble their competitors). Finally, the whole point of the Felten argument that I quoted from is that the effects on exchange of information on the Internet _aren’t_ a no-brainer. We can predict that changing the status quo will have consequences for actors’ behaviour, and we can make a good guess that the consequences will be negative. But without working through these consequences carefully, we don’t know what’s likely to happen. The Felten argument happens to accord with my intuitions on this – but my (and others’) intuitions have been known to be wrong on the past, which is why working through the arguments is important. And Felten’s argument was surely non-obvious to me before I read it – perhaps because I’m an idiot too. None of this detracts from the fact that the legislation under discussion is almost certainly a revolting give-away to lobbyists – but the underlying issues involved make for complicated debates and complications of implementation.

Peter Levine has a post objecting to my argument in chapter 6 of On Education that schools should not teach patriotism. Peter makes the case for patriotism (understood as “love of country”) being a legitimate feeling in itself, and that it has various instrumental benefits, in particular that it encourages citizens to participate in the affairs of the nation, and that it can play an important role in moral development, training the sentiments to attach beyond the confines of those we are immediately attached to, and therefore helping our characters to learn the virtue of impartial justice. (See also, Sigal Ben-Porath’s nice new book, Citizenship under Fire : Democratic Education in Times of Conflict ). He then tackles two of the main arguments I make against teaching patriotism; that if its agencies promote love of country the state interferes with the development of authentic, legitimacy-producing, consent, and that using, say, History teaching to produce patriotism can conflict with other more academic goals of History teaching (like, e.g., getting the students to learn the truth!). He points out that learning the full truth about Rosa Parks’s involvement in politics can increase one’s sense of attachment to the nation (as it did his) and describes an interesting hands on history project with black students in a local school which was aimed in part at cementing their attachment to their own communities.

Peter’s post is lengthy (if concise), and rather than reproduce it I’ll assume that readers have followed the link and done the reading. Here’s my response:

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A long promised post for one of our readers in a bi-national marriage.

Use a soft whole grain bread. Spread crunchy natural peanut butter thickly on the first slice. Spread a sweet or medium lime pickle thinly on top. Cover with the second slice of bread.

This is an incredibly annoying recipe because I have been unable to find a really good peanut butter anywhere in the UK, or a really good mild lime pickle in the US (Pataks is occasionally find-able here, but frankly nothing beats Marks and Spencer). Still, if you can find the ingredients, enjoy it.

Update: if, like jr, you’ve no idea what lime pickle is, here’s a recipe and picture. Now it occurs to me I could make my own; has anyone reverse-engineered the Marks and Spencer recipe?

Two opinions on wikis last weekend.

From the former editor of _Encyclopedia Britannica_, quoted in the “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/surveys/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6794228 (sub required).

bq. Contrast that with the joyful reaction of Wikipedia’s detractors to Brian Chase, the dodgy biographer (whose article was literally one in a million). Somebody who reads Wikipedia is “rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom,” says Mr McHenry, Britannica’s former editor. “It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.”

From an aside in “John Clute’s review”:http://www.scifi.com/sfw/books/column/sfw12574.html of Theodora Goss’s new book of short stories.

bq. It is something that may derive from the tendency of mutants to emit blog gas, for the net culture they live in has no internal or external censors, no _captaining_ of the unsorted untested wikipedian utterances of the gawping soul, no place for the buck to stop.

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My former student Colin Farrelly (now Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo) has started a blog — “In Search of Enlightenment”:http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/ — go visit!