Simon Schama protests too much. He claims that academic history is “obsessed with scientific data and obsessive footnotes rather than good storytelling”:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=493908 and calls for a return to a “golden age” of historical writing — Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle. This mostly seems like promotional fluff for his “new TV series”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/02_february/16/historians_genius.shtml. Yet “Timothy Burke”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/3715.html and “Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000471.html broadly concur with Schama, though as cogs in the “juggernaut of academic history” that he condemns they add the caveat that “a broadly communicative, publically engaged rhetoric of history is dependent upon the existence of a body of much more meticulous scholarship.” That’s true — but it’s more than a caveat!

Schama’s Great Historians fused authoritative judgment, great range and vivid prose and brought the result to large audiences, helping to define the practice of history as they went. What fun it must have been. He wants those things, too. Yet although he speaks to an audience bigger than any of his heroes, Schama must know he can’t occupy that niche, because it no longer exists. The vast differentiation of the academic division of labor over the past century and a half destroyed it. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of excellent, accessible narrative history written for a mass audience by respected historians. Schama’s complaints notwithstanding, you’ll find your local bookshop stocked full of the stuff — far more, alas, than you’ll find excellent and accessible sociology, political science or economics. But, unavoidably, these histories are written on the back of all those footnoted monographs, and they cannot command the field in the way that Carlyle or Macaulay might have.

Once asked what he specialized in, the sociologist “Daniel Bell”:http://www.pbs.org/arguing/nyintellectuals_bell.html replied, “Generalizations.” It’s a line worth stealing for job interviews, but it tells an important truth. Being a generalist these days is itself a kind of specialization. Like any other role in an advanced division of labor, it depends on thousands of others, most notably all those monographic specialists dug into the archives. Timothy Burke would like to see historians be trained “to write well, to seek audiences outside the academy, to stretch their powers of persuasion.” Those are worthwhile goals, but whereas the mills of academic specialization can grind exceeding small, we can’t all have our own BBC miniseries. Besides, I don’t think Schama simply wants historians to write better prose. Rather, he himself yearns to play the same role today that Macaulay or Gibbon did in their time. He covets the way they could grasp their subject whole and bring it to almost the entire reading public. Which of us scribblers wouldn’t want to do the same? But his “off-lead qualifications and dilutions”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2004/02_february/16/historians_genius.shtml suggest that, deep down, he knows that’s the sort of anachronistic wishfulness that historians teach us to avoid.

Ed Felten has posted a call for science/tech books we’d like all students to read. Ed is disturbed by the low number of science- and technology-related books that appear on the “must read” lists of an international group of college presidents. (Note that the response rate to the survey was quite low at around 25%.) Another interesting result is that very few contemporary books are on these people’s lists.

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We’re going to have two new guestbloggers with us over the next week; John Holbo and Belle Waring from “John and Belle Have a Blog”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/. Most CT readers will know them well already; I reckon that JABHAB and the Volokhs are the two main contenders for the coveted blog-most-linked-to-by-Timberites award. John is a philosopher at the National University of Singapore; he also blogs about literature, politics and academia. Belle covers all of the above, as well as cooking (including tasty “rat anecdotes”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/dangerous_but_w.html) and popular culture. She’s ABD (or AWOL) at the Classics Department at Berkeley, and is currently writing a rather good detective novel with surreal elements. Enjoy …

I went to a great klezmer concert yesterday in Princeton. It started off with the Princeton University student klezmer group: the Klezmocrats. They are a talented young group. The main attraction was the Klez Dispensers. They, too, started out as a Princeton student group some years ago but by now work independently. It’s been wonderful to watch them grow over the years. They’re amazing. But don’t take my word for it (admittedly somewhat biased given my friendships with about half of them:), according to Pete Sokolow they are “the finest young group playing classic American Klezmer style today”. I recommend their new CD, the New Jersey Freylekhs. (I realize blogging about this before the concert would have been more helpful than doing so after.. I’ll try to be better about that next time.)

The “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/arts/21DISS.html?ex=1392786000&en=afaf726e7ed23f35&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND has an article on “Dissent”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/ Magazine, which is about to hit its 50th anniversary. It’s a publication which is a little to my right, and to the right of some other CT-ites, but has published some really good pieces over the years. The Times refers to Dissent‘s continuing financial difficulties – the journal has always been a labour of love, more aimed at getting ideas into circulation than at breaking even. This leads to an interesting question. There’s always been a lot of guff in the blogosphere about how blogs represent a fundamental threat to traditional media. It’s mostly nonsense – Atrios and Glenn Reynolds aren’t about to eat the NYT’s lunch any time soon, let alone Crooked Timber. Still, the one section of the media that faces a real challenge to adapt is the small opinion journal. There are things that these journals can do that bloggers are bad at – run long and detailed articles for one. But blogs – at least the more successful ones – are arguably starting to catch up (and in certain areas of debate to dominate). And they’re a lot cheaper. _Dissent_ has a circulation of 8-10,000 and loses over $100,000 a year. It costs a few hundred dollars a year to run a blog with the same daily readership.

I don’t think that these magazines are going to disappear – I certainly hope not. According to Chris, _Imprints_, another small journal, seems to have no trouble in covering its costs. However, if blogs continue to feed directly and indirectly into public debate, it’ll be hard for small journals to resist taking advantage of the possibilities (and cost savings) that they offer. I imagine that we’ll see various forms of symbiosis continuing to emerge, from opinion-blogs like Talking Point Memo, through blog-journal hybrids like the TAP and Reason websites, to niche print journals that get smarter about using bloggers to get the word out about good pieces. All sounds good to me.

[via “politicaltheory.info”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/]

Tyler Cowen “writes”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_22_volokh_archive.html#107755227239247513

bq. Read Michael’s recent treatment of “The Economics of Mozart”:http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/001314.html#001314. The bottom line? Mozart was a successful commercial entrepreneur. His economic problems stemmed from a war with Turkey, not the failures of the marketplace.

He should definitely have known better than to start a war with Turkey. That whole “abduction from the seraglio”:http://www.texnet.net/scarpia/Abd.html business was a complete farce. Meanwhile — sorry, I’m not even going to pretend to link these comments — Matt Yglesias “makes the following observation”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/002635.html#002635 about Greg Easterbrook’s _The Progress Paradox_:

bq. The real progress paradox isn’t “why doesn’t all our stuff make us happy” but rather, given that all our stuff pretty clearly doesn’t make us happy, how do we come to have all this stuff.

Which seems about right. An unwillingness to distinguish these two questions — or rather, the decision, for technical purposes, to treat them as if they were the _same_ question — is a hallmark of modern economics. Robert E. Lane has “a book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300091060/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ that argues this point. Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer “have a solid rejoinder”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691069980/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ from the economist’s point of view, arguing that money can indeed go a long way towards making you happy — but not as far, surprisingly, as democratic institutions and local political autonomy can.

I’ll be on strike on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. I’m sure that the bourgeoisie are making plans to flee the country and that their lackeys in the capitalist press will be uttering their denunciations … but I don’t care.

Actually, I feel duty bound to participate because I’m a member of the union, and the ballot went in favour of a strike. But since “the union”:http://www.aut.org.uk/ is possibly the feeblest one in the TUC, has no ideas for how to get money into higher education, is challenging a deal that every other campus union has signed up to already and is most famous for marching under the stirring banner “Rectify the Anomaly!”:http://web.bham.ac.uk/J.C.Duffy/prentice.htm , I hold out no hope of success. The BBC has “some”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3508209.stm “details”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3507137.stm on the dispute, as does “the Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/specialreports/lecturerspay/story/0,5500,1153895,00.html , but most of the newsmedia have so far chosen to ignore the strike completely.

Comrades! To the barricades!

Nice to see the APSA “Foundations”:http://poltheory.uchicago.edu/ of Political Theory website has been revised and extended (link via “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/). Lots of very useful links for anyone interested in the field.

Yesterday, a colleague pointed out to me the following passage in the late Jean Hampton’s “Political Philosophy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813308585/junius-20 . Professor Hampton, who died in 1996, must have thought it inconceivable that a certain person would achieve high political office:

bq. Now while it is undeniable that some people are smarter or more virtuous or stronger than other people, these differences by themselves do not seem relevant to establishing political domination. Think, for example, of all the ways in which people are different from one another, physically, mentally and temperamentally. If someone has greater muscle strength than another, does that mean that he gets to rule the other? No: Arnold Schwarzenegger is not considered, by virtue of his physical prowess, a political authority. (p. 19)

So I started blogging a year ago today. At first, it took me awhile to get a template together at my old “blog”:www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com. Then, after a couple days of toying around with links to other blogs, I recall receiving an email from a current member of this blog saying: “I’ve seen you show up in my referrer logs a couple of times now. Time for you to get blogging I’d say!” Well, he’d probably say the same thing today, but, at the time, it was great to have some encouragement. I don’t know about others, but my first ventures out into the blogosphere were certainly apprehensive. Did I really want to be putting my name on this half-baked stuff? Is anyone really going to read this? (Welcome to “Sitemeter”:http://www.sitemeter.com.) Then there was: note to self, this is rather addictive; and, from whence the pressure to post everyday?

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Harvey Mansfield, class of 1953 and Professor of Government at Harvard, reflects [pdf – scroll down] on changes to sexual relations since the time he was an undergraduate. He finds

Much improvement since my day. Undergraduate men and women see one another every day; they study together and eat together. Everyone now gets to meet many more people of the opposite sex. In these meetings there is less pressure, less artificiality. You can be yourself. I remember weekend dates brought into the dining hall to stand in line for dinner, running a gauntlet of leering envy or contempt.

But on the other hand: “What is not so good is the loss of romance. Less formality means less romance – less courting, less tension, less excitement…. There is more consummation and less yearning.”

I rather doubt this is right, but at least I think I understand his point. Soon he loses me, however:

Men are less spirited than they were in my day, when we lived in relative isolation from women. Men today are always in the presence of women, hence always in fear of making fools of themselves before women. College men have become premature husbands.

So much for the ability to “be yourself” of the previous paragraph – now men are “always in fear of making fools of themselves”. But “less spirited”? “premature husbands”? I really have no idea what he is trying to get at. But he needs something to balance the manifest increase in social justice of allowing women to control their own sexuality.

In his final sentence, he gets to his point, as the loss of “spirit” is transformed into the loss of “love” and “happiness”:

Altogether, in comparison with the time of my youth, I think I see more equality now and less love and spirit; or more justice and less happiness.

Somehow, I don’t think he has in mind the women “brought in” to run “the gauntlet of leering envy or contempt.” How spirited and romantic it all must have been!

If current trends continue, “‘John Quiggin'”:http://www.johnquiggin.com may begin to challenge “‘Kieran Healy'”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog as the most frequently misspelled name on Crooked Timber, with “‘Eszter Hargittai'”:http://www.eszter.com a surprisingly distant third. In terms of sheer variety, however, “Kieran Healy” looks set to retain its dominance, as virtually all Quiggin-related mistakes are accounted for by “‘Quiggan'”:http://www.notfrisco2.com/webzine/Lynn/004318.html#004318, whereas both the first and last parts of “Kieran Healy” offer multiple opportunities for error. Transposing the “i” and “e” or moving the “e” after the “r” are universally popular choices[1], while others show interesting cross-national variation. English readers find it hard to to resist converting “Healy” to “Healey,” while Americans love to change “Kieran” to “Kiernan.” This latter variant is linguistically interesting because Americans usually choose to misspell words by removing letters rather than by adding them. These errors are sometimes compounded with another common mistake. Beginning an email with the words

bq. Dear Ms. Healey,

does not encourage a sympathetic reading of your comments, for instance.

A subsequent post will give some handy tips on more advanced CT-related topics, such as how to tell “John”:http://www.johnquiggin.com from “Jon”:http://www.albany.edu/philosophy/Faculty.html#mandle, “Henry”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/ from “Harry”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/people/#brighouse and “Ted”:http://tedbarlow.blogspot.com/ from “Tom”:http://trunnacl.org/blog.

fn1. Though their simultaneous use has yet to be observed in the field.

My post on Cyprus raised some eyebrows with its reference to the relative insignificance, in geopolitical terms, of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Looking back, I’m not surprised that this was controversial. After all, the idea that the war in Iraq is crucially important is a common background assumption in most of the debate, shared by both supporters and critics. Of course, geopolitics isn’t the only criterion of importance – the costs and benefits in terms of lives lost and saved, human rights and so on need to be discussed, not to mention economic impacts. But still, I think it’s fair to say that most people assumed that the presence in Iraq of more than 100 000 US troops, with a demonstrated capacity and willingness to overthrow governments, would make for big changes one way or another.

The most obvious candidate for such effects is Iran¹. It is number 2 country in the Axis of Evil (and everyone knows North Korea was only thrown in at the last moment for rhetorical balance). It has advanced weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program activities. And its current rulers are the same ones who humiliated the US in 1979 and who were, until Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, US Public Enemy Number 1 in the region.

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“Timothy Burke”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/socsci/tburke1/perma22004.html has a fascinating short post on Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_ as a Foucauldian genealogy. As Burke says, Stephenson succeeds in looking at history from a skew angle, making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar. Read the piece – it’s an example of the very best kind of academic blogging. All that I can add is to point out one of the ways in which Stephenson (and Thomas Pynchon in _Mason and Dixon_) tries to defamiliarize the past; the use of anachronism. At various points in the narrative, Stephenson introduces modern ideas or inventions into the margins of his historical narrative (he can get away with this more easily, because _Quicksilver_ is an alternative history of the world, a history that never happened). He does this so as to make a tiger’s leap into the past.

Stephenson uses anachronisms to jar our sense of the seventeenth century as a fixed stage along the progression that has led ineluctably to the modern world. He wants to bring home to us how the past was, like the modern age, a ferment of possibilities. It could have developed in many different directions. In _Quicksilver_, the past and the present are related not because the one has led to the other, but because they are both the same thing at different stages; vortices of possibility. Even if _Quicksilver_ isn’t really a historical novel, it’s a novel of history, which to my mind is a much rarer and more interesting thing.