Rorotoko

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Chapter two of the book focuses on the writer Ben-Lévi (the pseudonym of Godchaux Weil, 1806-1878) who published a dozen short stories, as well as many non-fiction pieces, in the reform Jewish newspaper, Les Archives Israélites, in the 1840s. Originally from Alsace, Weil’s father was a prosperous porcelain manufacturer and a leader of the Parisian Jewish community. His nephew was perhaps the most famous of all modern French writers—Marcel Proust.

Written entirely in French, the articles in Les Archives Israélites targeted an acculturated, elite readership, eager to modify Jewish religious practice and tradition in order more fully to embrace the opportunities offered to them by France’s revolutionary granting of citizenship.

Ben-Lévi’s fiction theorizes the nature of this transition, extolling the advantages of emancipation while exhorting readers to remain loyal to a newly modernized Judaism. Written in the new descriptive style of Balzac that critics at the time were beginning to label “realist,” Ben-Lévi’s stories stand out from the other articles in the newspaper, which tend to flatter the ethnic pride of the community, by asking readers to contemplate what they have left behind in their social ascent.

One story from 1841 entitled “The Rise and Fall of a Polish Taleth,” narrates the adventures of a prayer shawl as it gets handed down through three generations of a Parisian Jewish family. The story opens in the 1780s, as the very orthodox Père Jacob, an iron dealer, imports a taleth from Poland for his wedding. Upon his death, the prayer shawl passes to his son Jacobi, an officer in Napoleon’s army, who is “much less religious” than his father but nevertheless venerates the taleth as a link to family tradition. By the time it reaches Jacobi’s son, a fashionable French gentleman who calls himself Jacoubé “in order to dissimulate entirely his israelite origin,” the taleth has become a mere piece of cloth, devoid of both familial and religious significance. At the end of the story, we learn that Jacoubé has given it to a prostitute to wear to a costume ball.

Whereas the taleth story functions as a modern parable criticizing the losses entailed by the assimilation process, Ben-Lévi holds out hope in his other stories for a renewed appreciation of the Jewish tradition. In a story from 1846, called “The Fish and the Breadcrumbs,” an assimilated skeptic named Gustave learns to respect the Jewish religion by watching a widow comfort her young son through the performance of a religious ritual. The spiritual awakening of Ben-Lévi’s character has little to do with the supernatural or with God as such, but rather with a new understanding of the way Jewish tradition forges ethical bonds linking human beings in spite of the pressures of capitalist modernity.

In the conclusion to the book, I ask how the rediscovery of Ben-Lévi’s fiction might help us to understand what his much more famous great-nephew, Marcel Proust, had to say about Jews and Judaism. I show how both writers ask very similar questions about what it means to be a Jew in the absence of religious faith, inherited tradition, or legal strictures. I suggest that Proust’s character Swann, an assimilated Jew who “returns to the spiritual fold of his fathers” as a result of the Dreyfus Affair, becomes a kind of modern(ist) version of Gustave, Ben-Lévi’s reformed cynic.

Lastly

Taken together, this fiction helps us reconsider what we thought we knew about Jewish history and literature. It reveals that nineteenth-century French Jews envisioned other fates for themselves besides assimilation and homogenization. In the mid-nineteenth century, at a time when French Jews were first beginning to take advantage of the new opportunities offered to them, they sought out creative ways to become French while remaining Jews and to express their difference in the public sphere.

This literature also helps us reconsider what we thought we knew about French history and literature. These writers were very likely the first members of a minority religious or ethnic group in France to describe that group’s experience in fiction. They thus reveal that difference inhabited modern French literature from the start, and provide a useful historical context for examining current examples of minority or postcolonial fiction, which concerns itself with very similar issues.

Moreover, these Jewish writers help us re-evaluate the tradition of French universalism, which is often seen as hostile to all forms of minority identity. By showing how these Jewish writers attempted to reconcile their particular identities with the French universalist tradition, or to substitute a Jewish form of the universal in place of what they felt to be the Christian one of the dominant culture, I indicate that nineteenth-century French universalism was far less monolithic and hegemonic, far more malleable and adaptable, than has previously been supposed.

The recent “return of religion” in France has made these issues newly topical. The last few decades have seen fierce clashes over the role of religion in contemporary society, as France has struggled to accommodate the increasingly vocal demands of its religious (and ethnic) minorities. The 1989 “Affaire des foulards,” or head-scarf controversy, in which French Muslim girls fought unsuccessfully for the right to wear head coverings in public schools, demonstrates how fraught the question of laïcisation continues to be in France.

While I do not address such recent issues in my book, it is my hope that the nineteenth-century debates around Jews and Judaism will provide a useful historical context for understanding current controversies.

© 2010 Maurice Samuels

nineteenth-century French universalism was far less monolithic and hegemonic, far more malleable and adaptable, than has previously been supposed

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One bit of Animal Characters should interest anyone who has ever wondered about the history of cats and their relationship with human beings. In it I unearth a centuries-long tradition of cat-torture, both on the European continent and in Britain, which evolved out of pagan worship to become part of Catholic calendar festivals and then, still later, of Protestant festivals as well.

The tale of this evolution is both fascinating and grisly, with cats publicly tortured on festival days in ways obscenely reminiscent of Christ’s passion. I trace the story of these animals’ maltreatment through literary works such as William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (sometimes called the first English novel), the Cambridge University comedy Gammer Gurton’s Needle (the earliest surviving English play to bring a cat onstage), and works by Shakespeare, Cervantes, and others.

The cats I look at are tormented in endless ways, with whips and cudgels and firebrands and more, in fiction and drama and historical records over a span of many centuries. And always, so it seems, the violence occurs in a spiritual context. In pagan religious practice, cats are tortured to effect magic. In Catholicism the cat-torture is assimilated to church calendar festivals such as the feast of Saint John the Baptist. And when England goes Protestant, the cat-torture continues—now as an anti-Catholic insult.

As this story unfolds, the persecuted cats of early modern Europe come to seem more and more like doubles of the suffering Christ himself: the ritually tormented scapegoat on whose sacrifice the system of ritual itself depends.

Lastly

Our treatment of nonhuman beings has grown into one of the more worrisome aspects of modern social practice, posing problems on the economic, ecological, dietary, and ethical levels. Destruction of habitat, species persecution, factory farming, zoo-keeping, animal experimentation, animal entertainment: these and related practices have grown markedly—some would say alarmingly—over the past five hundred years.

As a piece of literary and social history, Animal Characters supplies some of the back-story to these issues. One chapter traces the history of the turkey from its domestication by the Aztecs to its appearance on the tables of European diners. Another follows the transformation of the horse from a sentient instrument of warfare into an accouterment of elite sporting activities. Another describes the parrot’s evolution from menagerie marvel to annoying house-pet.

More generally, Animal Characters draws inspiration from the idea that our humanity is nowhere put more clearly on display, for better and for worse, than in our encounters with nonhuman life. To this extent, the book contributes to a broad and ongoing conversation about how we relate to the natural world and its other living creatures.

© 2010 Bruce Boehrer

the persecuted cats of early modern Europe come to seem more and more like doubles of the suffering Christ himself: the ritually tormented scapegoat on whose sacrifice the system of ritual itself depends

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I would hope that potential readers who come across the book in their local or campus bookstore will either, having glanced at the opening pages, be sufficiently intrigued to glance at the concluding ones, or vice versa. Even a casual glance at either should be enough to make the potential reader aware that the book is deliberately intended to be provocative.

I have little doubt that there will be specialists in Platonic, Hobbesian, and Marxian studies who will regard some of my criticisms as exaggerated, misconceived, or fallacious. But I believe that the attempts to rebut my criticisms, whether successful or not, will in themselves contribute to the understanding of how and why the three texts have sustained their enduring reputation.

If, accordingly, there is a single aspect of the book on which I would like prospective readers to focus it is its combination of provocative questioning with underlying seriousness of purpose.

Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto are great books. Their themes are as relevant in the 21st century world as they were in the worlds of Plato, Hobbes, or Marx. But that should not lead them to be exempted from criticism with the benefit of hindsight from a perspective inevitably different from their own.

Lastly

The significance of the book is proportionate to the significance of its implications for the questions of perennial interest and importance which Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto address.

Plato was not wrong in thinking that intellectual reasoning can be applied to the enhancement of human wellbeing. Hobbes was not wrong in thinking that the protection afforded by the state imposes reciprocal obligations on the part of those it protects. Marx was not wrong in thinking that arrangements can be devised which will constrain the inequalities of power which arise from unregulated competition. I am at pains to make this much clear in my book.

I also draw particular attention to the work of Elinor Ostrom, who has been awarded a Nobel Prize since I wrote, as one of the outstanding contributions of recent behavioural science to Hobbes’s central preoccupation with the need, as he saw, for binding agreements to be underwritten by the sanction of force.

If my book can persuade readers both to look back at the three deservedly famous texts in the light of my comments—and thereby be prompted to catch up with the best of the recent sociological research which bears on the issues they raise,—it will have achieved its purpose.

© 2010 W. G. Runciman

Plato, Hobbes, and Marx want their readers to share not only their anger and dismay at what they see in the world around them but their passionate hope that a way can somehow be found to bring into being institutional arrangements whereby human beings can live together in harmony

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The book’s introduction is titled “Thinking about Jews and Capitalism.”

Capitalism has been the most important force in shaping the fate of the Jews in the modern world. Of course, one could plausibly argue that it has been the most important force in shaping the fate of everyone in the modern world. But Jews have had a special relationship with capitalism, for they have been particularly good at it. Not all of them, of course. But, whenever they have been allowed to compete on an equal legal footing, they have tended to do disproportionately well. This has been a blessing—and a curse.

Jews have been a conspicuous presence in the history of capitalism, both as symbol and as reality. Yet the relationship of the Jews to capitalism has received less attention than its significance merits.

The encounter of the Jews with capitalism confounds disciplinary boundaries: it is the stuff of economic history as well of social history, of political history as well as cultural history, of the history of business, but also of the family and the nation-state. But there are other reasons for the relative neglect of the topic as well. Discussions of Jews and capitalism touch upon neuralgic subjects.

For Jews, Jewish economic success has long been a source of both pride and embarrassment. For centuries, Jewish economic success led anti-Semites to condemn capitalism as a form of Jewish domination and exploitation, or attributed Jewish success to unsavory qualities of the Jews themselves. The anti-Semitic context of such discussions led Jews to downplay the reality of their economic achievement—except in internal conversations. Moreover, for most people, the workings of advanced capitalist economies are opaque and difficult to comprehend.

When economic times are bad and people are hurting, some inevitably search for a more easily grasped, concrete target on which to pin their ill fortunes. That target has often been the Jews. Even today, some Jews regard the public discussion of Jews and capitalism as intrinsically impolitic, as if conspiratorial fantasies about Jews and money can be eliminated by prudent silence.

For economists and economic historians, the extent to which modern capitalism has been shaped by premodern cultural conceptions and cultural predispositions is a source of puzzlement at best. It simply doesn’t fit into the categories in which contemporary economic historians who have adopted the armature of econometrics are predisposed to think.

In recent decades, economists have added the concept of “human capital” to their kitbag, by which they mean the characteristics that make for economic success. But they prefer to think of it in terms of measurable criteria such as years of schooling. To the extent that human capital involves character traits and varieties of know-how that are not provided by formal education, it becomes methodologically elusive.

Much of the reality of economic history, and of the Jewish role within it, is bound to elude those who proceed on the tacit premise that “if you can’t count it, it doesn’t count.” For liberals, the reality of differential group achievement under conditions of legal equality is something of a scandal, an affront to egalitarian assumptions. For nationalists, the fact that modern nationalism had fateful consequences for the Jews precisely because the Jews were so good at capitalism was itself a source of embarrassment. For all these reasons, the exploration of Jews and capitalism has tended to be left to apologists, ideologues, and anti-Semites.

Lastly

Capitalism and the Jews tries to make historical and social scientific sense of patterns in modern history that for a variety of reasons tend to be neglected by social scientists.

I draw upon a range of social sciences, and try to bring together the work of many historians who have dealt with one or another of the history of the economic, social, political and cultural histories of the Jews. Yet I deliberately wrote so that the book would be accessible to a broad educated public.

In a brief book, Capitalism and the Jews covers a great deal of historical ground—ranging from medieval Europe, to contemporary America and Israel.

© 2010 Jerry Z. Muller

Jews have been among the most articulate defenders of capitalism as well as among its most vociferous critics.

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While the final paragraph of the introduction is perhaps the best synopsis of the book’s argument (page 18), my favorite paragraph in the book is on page 277.

This paragraph tells the story of what the men in the burial party found in the council area when they went back to it a day or so after the massacre. What they found was horrific, of course, but the paragraph does more than simply describe carnage; it carries the weight of one of the strongest themes of the book.

Years later, the men who saw the council area before the bodies were removed remained haunted by what they saw: women, girls, and babies, who, torn by bullets, had crawled together to die in each other’s arms.

The story in Wounded Knee is a story of political maneuvering and military campaigns, spheres in which women in 1890 had very little voice. The men who designed economic policies and fought over patronage, launched military campaigns and supplied troops, did so in a world that they held separate from the world of wives and homes and babies. Politicians and businessmen insisted they were protecting their dependents, doing what was best for them, but they made decisions according to an economic theory that focused on men. When writing Wounded Knee, I was careful to keep that focus on the men’s world. Women very rarely appear, and then only incidentally.

But the point of the book is that national policies and national political rhetoric matter, and they matter on a very personal level. While President Harrison and General Miles and Sitting Bull were arguing about economics and voters and troops, women were trying to feed their children, and to protect them. For all the righteous language of the midterm campaign, what really mattered in the end was that people died.

Women and children who had had no say in any of the debates that led to the events of December 29, 1890 were murdered. And in their extremity, fearfully wounded mothers and daughters clung to each other so they could die together.

Women are there throughout Wounded Knee, but they are invisible. The one place they become visible is that paragraph on page 277. And in that one paragraph, I think, they balance—and trump—everything else in the book.

Lastly

Wounded Knee shows that we must reject extreme political rhetoric.

Leading up to the 1890 midterm election, Republicans refused to admit that their policies were not working for many Americans. Rather than addressing the legitimate concerns of farmers and workers, they accused them of being “socialists” who wanted to destroy the nation. Having defined a Democratic victory as the end of America, the Republicans made it imperative that they win, no matter the cost.

In the short term, that cost was a massacre that left more than 250 people dead.

The Republicans’ conviction that they must win to save America had longer term consequences, as well. During the Harrison administration, officials added six new western states to the Union to increase their power in the Senate, sowed the seeds for draconian voter purges, committed the government to a western policy that dramatically changed the western environment, and undercut the ability of the Sioux to participate in the American economy in the future. These efforts dramatically reshaped the nation, and we still live with their consequences.

Today we deplore what happened at Wounded Knee Creek. But we must recognize that what made it possible was extreme political rhetoric. Beyond “racism,” it was the accusation of political opponents as being un-American that made any action acceptable so long as it would achieve political goals.

So long as we accept hyperbolic political rhetoric and reward the politicians who use it, we are laying the groundwork for other disasters.

© 2010 Heather Cox Richardson

Continuing inequalities in society cannot be explained away by blaming somebody else’s racism. They implicate anyone who participates in the system without addressing its flaws.

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If I could look over the shoulder of a reader browsing through my book in a bookstore and whisper advice about how best to spend fifteen minutes of sampling the book, I would direct him or her to my discussion of Lincoln’s speeches in the first chapter.

Though my book is about the American novel, not American oratory, I think the case of Lincoln, one of the great masters of style in nineteenth-century America, is illuminating. Lincoln, as most of us recall, was a self-taught man, having had only a couple of years of formal schooling. He was, of course, a genius, in writing as well as in political leadership. Like most literate Americans of his era, he had read the Bible—along with many very different things—in the King James Version, and he seems to have known it backward and forward.

In my first chapter, I look at the astonishing things Lincoln does with the language of the Bible in his two greatest speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Neither of these addresses is biblical through and through, but biblical elements play a crucial role in both—in the oratorical power and in the sense of historical and theological resonance.

I conduct a little thought experiment by picking up a couple of the biblical turns of phrase, rewording them in order to eliminate the biblical echoes, and then asking what the difference would be in feel and meaning. It is, I think, an instructive illustration of how style makes a significant difference in what is said. And, as such, it prepares the way for the reader to follow what I do in discussing style in the various novels from Melville onward.

Why, for example, does the Gettysburg Address begin with “Four score and seven years ago”? Is that somehow different from “Eighty-seven years ago”? The phrase, incidentally, is not an actual quotation from the King James Version but is patterned on the frequent occurrence of “two score” in the 1611 translation.

I invite readers to see that this biblicizing initial phrase of the Address creates a perspective for what is said that could not come into place without the Bible.

Lastly

Much of what I regard as the book’s larger context, at least concerning the study of literature and of American literature in particular, is spelled out in The Wide Angle above.

To that I would add the following thoughts: Literature, unlike technology, very rarely discards its earlier significant phases. We no longer think about the abacus, except as a curiosity, when we have computers. On the other hand, we are still living with Homer and Virgil and Shakespeare even though we are many centuries removed from their worlds.

For me, the presence of the Bible in American culture, in the very texture of the language written by some of our greatest writers, is something we still need to come to terms with.

Outside of evangelical circles, biblical illiteracy in contemporary America is notorious. And we certainly are no longer the kind of Bible-suffused culture we once were. Yet, the Bible remains with us. And even in the twenty-first century, there are some American writers who still quarry from it the building-blocks of their prose.

Edmund Wilson once remarked that this is a book we have been living with all our lives and that we can never quite accommodate to our lives. It is that dynamic and ambiguity in American culture that Pen of Iron seeks to address.

© 2010 Robert Alter

Why does the Gettysburg Address begin with “Four score and seven years ago”? Is that somehow different from “Eighty-seven years ago”?

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Adrenaline was isolated by Jokicki Takamine in 1901. And it was at once described in terms of human energy, of movement, as “fight or flight,” as the source of increased alertness. The automobile, at almost the same moment, become the technology with which one’s alert reflexes, powered by adrenaline, could be tested and exercised.

Both the new technology and the new drug (for adrenaline was synthesized and marketed soon after) were part of a new cultural interest at this moment in human energy. In the case of the car, it was as if the new technology as prosthesis involved such a display of mechanic energy and speed that the human organism felt the need to measure up.

Both adrenaline and automobile speed thrills are symptoms of the new role of energy at this moment in the very definition of human life itself. Just as there is a history of slowness as well as a history of speed, a history of human energy too remains to be written. The turn of the century moment that saw the isolation and description of the role of adrenaline is a key transformative moment in that history.

Lastly

Though I barely use the word in the book, I hope The Speed Handbook contributes to the growing field of biopolitics.

By “biopolitics” I mean the ways in which, in modernity, various powers, such as—but not only—the state, have progressively made the human body, its well-being, and its very life, the subject of their attention. Clearly, technology and science, as well as culture, have played a huge role in the advance of a politics of “bios.”

In other words, it is not enough that those in power influence what we think; there is even more at stake in controlling our bodies, and in controlling life itself. Our sense of our own bodies, the variations of our affective lives as well as our emotional states and moods, even our reflexes, are more intertwined in power networks, and networks of production and consumption, than ever.

In this enmeshing, the moment in the 20th century when human speed thrills were vastly enhanced by technology marks a striking new development. Seduced by speed and the joys of adrenaline, the modernist subject, as she accelerated to the unprecedented personal speeds of forty- five miles per hour, learned how to gauge her alertness and intensity in cohabitation with the machine. The state, with its speed limits and traffic laws, was on hand to monitor this new techno-enabled freedom.

Human energy, as biopolitical resource, was being recalibrated in relation to machine power. Movement—at any speed—was enshrined as the basic sign of nothing less than life. And we all had access to a new pleasure, a thrill not known to our ancestors, and a certain freedom to use it, a characteristic thrill of the modernist era which can still teach us lots about what it means to be modern.

© 2010 Enda Duffy

Before, the home had been cast as the—static—place of pleasure: the unknown world beyond, as the place of threat and possible adventure. With the automobile and its thrills, the home ceased to be the place in which to experience the best of modernity. Now the space of movement thrilled more than any place.

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I’d like the browsing reader to come, first, to the general introduction to my book – here I outline the principles and scope, the personal experiences that led me to write it, and the expectations of the reader.

Then, I would like the reader to experience the book’s various chapters according to his or her tastes.

For example, “Theaters of Girlhood” discusses literature for and about young women, addressing the performative nature of female identity in history and locating that focus in some of the classics of the genre (Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, The Wizard of Oz).

Male readers may be fascinated by the chapters on boys’ adventure books and the “ripping yarns” of the nineteenth century (with their blend of colonial aspiration and Darwinian science).

Historians may be intrigued by the importance of the work of John Locke in the history of children’s literature and may focus on the chapter devoted to him.

Similarly, scholars and students of American Studies may find the chapter on the Puritans particularly interesting, especially the understanding of the Puritans as deeply focused on childhood and family and, in effect, as developing modern children’s literature out of a blend of religious instruction, private journal writing, and allegorical narrative.

Lastly

I’d like my book to have a wide readership, not only teachers and students, but parents, librarians, public activists—and even children themselves.

I have tried to treat children’s literature as literature: that is, as the sustained, imaginative work of writers with aesthetic concerns, social interests, and technical flair.

I’d like to see my book stimulate further work in the field, especially the notion of children’s literature as a “world” phenomenon, the idea of children’s literature in a digital age, and the changing nature of public and school libraries.

Finally, I’d like to encourage readers of the book to read to children—to recognize that social and personal bonding goes on over the pages of a book and that the best dreams come from having been read to sleep.

© 2010 Seth Lerer

while authors may intend a particular meaning for literary works, meaning is made by or brought to literary works by readers ... children’s literature, I argue, works in these ways

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On page 343 one meets Frederick Willetts, the self-proclaimed Pirate King of Edwardian London. In the early years of the twentieth century, Willetts ran a “People’s Music Publishing Company” in East London that issued pirated popular music in millions of copies, distributing it across the country.

The music industry employed its own private army of “commandoes” to track him down, which they eventually succeeded in doing, but not before the industry had effectively ceased publishing songs in protest at his effects.

What is remarkable is that when Parliament launched an inquiry into pirated music, Willetts volunteered to come to Westminster and testify. This is, I think, the only time in history when a self-proclaimed pirate has shown up at a center of power and mounted an explicit, populist defense of piracy itself.

Willetts’s case bears examination, because many of the elements of later music pirates, including the digital ones, can be seen in embryo in his declarations. For example, he condemned the orthodox industry as monopolistic, hidebound, and dedicated to elite customers at the expense of the working class. And he proposed market segmentation as an appropriate way forward—another line that has been revived in recent years.

Willetts’s bravado gesture—which did him little good, incidentally, as he was jailed shortly after—exemplifies the point that major convictions of today can be traced back to controversies about piracy in previous decades. It throws unfamiliar light on the familiar, and encourages us to rethink our assumptions about what is permanent and what changeable. And Willetts himself exemplifies the kind of colorful personality that Piracy repeatedly finds at the heart of these controversies.

Piracy is really full of stories; this is but one favorite.

Lastly

I hope that the book will encourage protagonists in today’s intellectual-property debates to think more deeply and broadly than they usually do about what is at stake and how we might move forward.

Often very passionate, those debates take place on grounds of policy and law. That makes sense, of course. But it also means that present intellectual property debates leave untouched what are important, perhaps even essential, constituents of the issues at hand. That is, IP in practice is a matter of custom and convention as much as it is of law per se.

If we neglect that fact, our responses to what everyone agrees to be a crisis in the field are likely to be deficient, and quite possibly even damaging.

The upholders of ever-stronger IP protections in particular tend to make this mistake. Their arguments about the practical effects of such protections rest largely on political-economic theories and models.

We need profound engagement with how IP operates in practice. And a necessary part of that engagement must be an appreciation of how the nature and effects of intellectual property have changed over time. That is, the intellectual property wars need some historical insight if they are not to be waged interminably.

Piracy makes that argument. And it further shows that an historical understanding can suggest why our current disputes are so intractable.

By identifying the emergence of an “intellectual property defense industry” the book calls attention to a social and economic phenomenon that has gone largely unrecognized, but which in fact lies at the heart of the problem.

© 2010 Adrian Johns

the intellectual property wars need some historical insight if they are not to be waged interminably

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By the early 1870s, Sam Ward was becoming known as the "King of the Lobby.” While there was a dash of hyperbole in the title, Sam loved it. To his sister Julia Ward Howe, he boasted that he was a sort of Figaro: “Tutti mie chiedono, tutti mi vogliono,…sono il factotum della citta. [Everybody calls me, everybody wants me, I am the factotum of the city.]”

But what exactly did Sam do for his clients? How did he, as he put it, “corral my congressional elephants”? In chapter four, pages 73 to 85, the key to Sam Ward’s success, what set him apart from other lobbyists, is revealed. Sam’s secret weapon was food.

Sam knew a recipe for success when he tasted it. Tinkering with the ingredients that had showed promise before the war, Sam used dinners and diplomacy as his preferred means to his ends. When Sam told Julia that “tutti mi vogliono,” what most of them really wanted was a seat at one of his dinners. Sam’s note about his “Congressional elephants” ended, “… call at the New York Hotel on Monday at 10 a.m., when you will find me at breakfast, and I will unfold to you my plan de campagne.” Sam’s special plan de campagne often began with pâté de campagne and champagne, with a client footing the bill.

Whether in consultation with a restaurant’s chef or his own, Sam took great care in composing every meal from his intimate lobby dinners to the grand banquets he orchestrated. The menu was, after all, he declared, “the plan of campaign, dependent upon the numbers of the enemy who will be reduced to capitulation by the projected banquet.” While Sam chose the menu, he deferred to his clients, whether the Secretary of the Treasury, European financiers, or American manufacturers, when drawing up the guest lists for his lobbying dinners. If their interests were financial, Sam would make sure that key members of the appropriate House and Senate committees received invitations. Mining and mineral rights? That was another group of players. Which members were alone in Washington and lonely? Who was most persuasive and who most easily persuaded? Who was leaning one way and who another? Who might like to sit next to whom? All of these factors went into the mix when selecting guests.

Once he had determined his tablemates, Sam concentrated on orchestrating the talk around the table. Good conversation was as essential as good food and wine, Sam believed, to the success of the evening: “It is with the succession of courses as with the sparkling wit that enlivens the repast. The airy nothings, the mots, the repartees and spontaneous flashes of wit and humor that crackle like so many electric sparks, are as unrecoverable as the lost patterns of a kaleidoscope.” Sam used stories from his variegated life like condiments at his table. He could salt dinner conversation with all sorts of tales: one of his favorites was about the time he improvised a weir to catch salmon in the hills of California.

The results of Sam’s great care in composing and conducting his dinners? “Ambrosial nights,” gushed one guest. An evening at Sam’s was, enthused another guest, “the climax of civilization.” “Nothing was ever served on Sam’s table,” claimed society reporter Emily Briggs, “that was half as delicious as himself.” He captivated Lillie de Lindencrone-Hegermann, the beautiful Boston-born wife of the Danish Minister. Sam Ward was, she wrote to her mother, the “diner-out par excellence…the King of the Lobby par preference….”

Lastly

The social lobby that Sam Ward perfected lived on. In the 1990s, hearings into lobby activities confirmed that the social lobby was alive and well in Washington. So well, so important, and so effective, in fact, that dinners and entertaining were specifically singled out for special rules in the 1995 Lobbying Disclosure Act that were tightened further in 2007. One can almost hear Sam sputter with indignation upon learning that neither members nor their aids can accept free meals from registered lobbyists.

Despite this closer scrutiny, the social lobby endures. It endures in part because of loopholes. There is the “toothpick rule” (food served on toothpicks, rather than on plates, does not constitute a meal) and the “reception exception” (members may still attend events where at least 25 people who are not congressmen and congresswomen are present). But the social lobby lives on primarily because, as Sam shrewdly recognized when he arrived in the capital in 1859, bringing people together over good food, wine, and conversation remains a fruitful way to break down animosities, make a point, and conduct business. What was a sure-fire plan de campagne for Sam is often a successful strategy still. Whenever lobbyists, clients, and congressmen come together at social occasions, even though they are more circumscribed, Sam is there, even though none present may know his name.

Sam almost certainly could slip into a well-appointed office at one of Washington’s top public relations firms on K Street and, in his well-cut suit, armed with statistics and his BlackBerry, make the rounds on Capitol Hill by day and, dressed in a dinner jacket with his diamond studs and sapphire ring, host and lobby at receptions, dinners, and benefits by night.

Sam would be happy to see that the social lobby, while just one of many avenues leading to influence in Washington, was still going strong and that entertaining remains an important opportunity for communication in the capital. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr., another keen observer of Washington, noted 100 years after Sam’s death, exaggerating just a bit as Sam was wont to do, “every close student of Washington knows half the essential business of government is still transacted in the evening…where the sternest purpose lurks under the highest frivolity.” Sam’s art was to guarantee that the men and women who enjoyed his ambrosial nights never focused on the purpose that lurked beneath his perfectly cooked poisson.

I’ve woven biography together with social, cultural, and political history to create a colorful tapestry that not only examines a life but tells a bigger story about power, class, or gender–sometimes all three

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The idea that the meaning of art may not be exhausted by its visual manifestations and the desire to look is examined as a response to the pressures of commodification implied in the emergence of public exhibition and market forces in the late 19th century.

I show that Duchamp’s readymades inaugurated the shift from the idea of capitalizing on the object’s visual appearance to exposing and playing on its modes of public presentation and display.

But what is art when “looks” no longer count? I argue that rather than enacting the negation and ultimate abandonment of painting, as most critics have contended, the readymades demonstrate the impossibility of defining art.

Coupling the ideas of art and anti-art in a dynamic play, their back and forth movement will mark their impasse (or “draw”) with painting, alluding to its postponement as visual expression and its continued promise as a conceptual enterprise.

It is in terms of this dynamic play that the readymades will emerge as paradigmatic of Duchamp’s later works, ranging across experiments in optics (windows, glass, and mirrors), in film, chess, and installation works. Conflating artistic and critical activities, these later works will conceptually question the meaning of art while outwitting the necessity for its physical manifestations. They will continue to attest to the impossibility of defining art even as they irrevocably demonstrate the necessity of moving beyond its visual impulse.

Lastly

The impossibility of defining art once and for all may convince us of the viability—indeed, of the necessity—of no longer trying to do so.

If one accepts the legitimacy of the claim that not trying to define art is an acceptable premise, then this lack of a founding definition will not foreclose debate and dissent about its nature; it will invite and drive them.

What Duchamp (along with his Dada co-conspirators Picabia and Man Ray, and his Surrealist counterpart and sometime collaborator Dali) preserved and indeed reserved for postmodernism is an idea of art understood no longer as visual essence or expression but as locus of dissent and disparity of opinion. It is this modernist legacy that later collaborators such as Baj and/or postmodern appropriators such as Matta-Clark and Wilson drew upon and critically took to task.

The emphases of their works shifted away from the production of objects to the manipulation of the contexts that frame the idea of art in order to expose the institutional scaffolding that props up the possibility of meaning ascribed to works of art.

I argue that such an understanding of art no longer belongs to the realm of aesthetics alone, since it brings into play through its activation and engagement with spectatorship questions of responsibility and ethics.

Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company shows how the idea of art, insofar as it relies on the works of the past not just as resource but as the springboard for the emergence of postmodernism, can become critical fuel for artistic impetus.

© 2010 Dalia Judovitz

But what is art when “looks” no longer count? I argue that rather than enacting the negation and ultimate abandonment of painting, as most critics have contended, the readymades demonstrate the impossibility of defining art.

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A book reveals itself in its fullness, in its sweat and swagger. But if you must rivet attention on one thing in this volume then I would hope that it is my overriding sense of struggle.

Struggle with moral issues, I think, is too often absent. We approach challenges—personal and political—with sharply defined strictures, moral laws, and codes of conduct. I’ll be the first to admit that without these baselines we would be adrift, lost in a moral wilderness. But when we face the complexity of events and the muddiness of situations, we have to be more contemplative and self-conscious.

Thinking about things, as Hannah Arendt once remarked, is valuable for stopping action, for holding us back. Now we cannot nor should we always hold ourselves back—to do so would be to jettison any moral action. But by thinking more deeply, we might at least act with a better sense of limitations, of the tragic distance often found between ideal and result. Rather than rushing into a situation, without appreciation for the many shades of morality and irony, we might be more sober and successful when and in how we act.

We can, as was the case with our former president, be blinded by our moral confidence. After meetings with moral heroes such as Russian dissident Natan Sharansky and the Iraqi Kanan Makiya, George W. Bush believed that Saddam Hussein was evil personified. He did feel valuable empathy with the plight of the Iraqi people. Yes, he also had a myopic eye towards his own agendas—finishing off his father’s enemy, establishing greater American hegemony in the region, and erasing the weapons of mass destruction that were presumably in the Iraqi arsenal. But the empathy he did feel for the Iraqi people was real and valuable. Alas, it was abstract empathy—weakly related to the circumstances of the moment, the complexities of Iraqi nationalism and politics, and, most definitely, hobbled by an unreflective confidence that the war would be easily won and that Iraqis would flock to our side.

The same danger of moral absolutism and confidence appeared when Bush was the governor of Texas. He was a firm supporter of the death penalty. While I disagree with the death penalty, I can understand the moral imperative and justness behind retribution. But, once again, certitude cannot be allowed to override complexity; ideology should never trump the singularity of each case. As governor, Bush quickly approved all but one of the death penalty cases brought to him. This is a gross example of moral resignation to absolutes.

Even a quick browse through the varied narratives in my book should drive home my desire to muddy the waters of various situations. A little muddiness may go a long way towards allowing complex moral issues to be discussed in a fuller and less rancorous manner. And it may also force us to reevaluate our presumptions, not to plummet us into moral passivity but to draw us into a range of actions that are colored by a useful sense of hesitancy and sobriety.

Lastly

As I reflect back now on the five years that I spent living with Morality’s Muddy Waters and my original intention of responding to the issues raised by the film Hotel Rwanda, I hold to a belief that I have progressed, albeit in hesitant, baby steps, towards a moral position that has value.

Perhaps at the root of moral evil is the problem of certitude, our willingness to cling tightly to strictures of right and wrong or to embrace our gut feelings. Moral clarity, as philosopher Susan Neiman brilliantly argues, is a wonderful thing but it is also a chimera when it simplifies complexity. We need to accept that doubt and anxiety, muddiness, about our moral posture and actions are positive things.

Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr celebrated this notion of moral modesty in contrast to moral hubris. Read what President Barack Obama, in a blurb on the back-cover of a reissue of Reinhold Neibuhr’s classic The Irony of American History (originally published in 1952), has to say: “I take away [from Niebuhr’s works] the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief that we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction.”

This is, I now believe, a reasonable way of thinking about and responding to the horrors that darkened the Rwandan landscape. Not a morality that unfurls all-too-predictable banners of certitude and passion. Rather a morality that might help us put on boots of moral depth to wade into the moral muddiness that confronts us daily.

© 2010 George Cotkin

Perhaps at the root of moral evil is the problem of certitude, our willingness to cling tightly to strictures of right and wrong or to embrace our gut feelings without sufficient reflection.

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If I were yelling at someone from a fast moving train and had only one chance to say one thing about my book before they went out of earshot, I suppose it would be the stuff at the end. The concepts that lead up to this point are interesting, of course—“the mesh,” which is what I call ecological entanglement, and the “strange stranger,” which is how I think about life forms.

But the real juice of the book would have to be the writing about how important it is to create a politics and an ethics based on non-self.

We modern humans have given rise to the most terrifying things like global warming and plutonium—I call them hyperobjects. These monsters massively outlive us and vastly extend beyond our personal backyard to encircle the entire Earth. There is no way you can think of them without your mind opening up. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,100 years. That means we have a 24,100-year responsibility to the future. However you think of it, everyone, anyone you meaningfully care about as connected to so-called “you” will be long gone by then—will there even be humans? Twenty-four thousand years is twice as long as all of recorded human history thus far.

Likewise global warming is mind-bending. Unlike snow, you can’t see it or touch it; this gives global warming deniers a foot in the door. But the kicker is, it’s much more real, in a very precise sense, than a snow shower. It’s the snowfall that becomes the abstraction! Weather is an abstract subset of climate. It’s just what you think you can feel falling on your head in a certain time at a certain place. This is why the fiercest battles are fought over global warming right now. Right wingers know that if they give this idea a sliver of a chance, they literally don’t have a leg to stand on. Because reality isn’t hardwired their way. It’s a whole, dynamic process in which we are all implicated and for which we all have responsibility. Who cares whether we caused global warming or not? If you can understand what it is, you have a responsibility to fix it. It’s like seeing a small girl about to be hit by a truck. Saying “Well she’s not my daughter, why should I care?” would clearly be wrong. You just jump into the street and save her.

Lastly

We urgently need to formulate reasons for doing things that aren’t based on concepts of self, because even if we modify those concepts to include as many others as possible, we’ll always leave someone out. And gamma rays don’t leave anyone out—hyperobjects are pretty inclusive beasts. Our philosophy has to be at least as inclusive as they are to stand a chance of dealing with them.

I think the whole project of The Ecological Thought itself is a kind of “lastly” type of a project. If you don’t think that there’s something very wrong with Earth and with our ways of thinking about our place on Earth, then—well you just proved that there is truly something wrong!

© 2010 Timothy Morton

It’s the Romantics’ love of irony that I see as most helpful for the ecological thought, not their supposed fondness for big mountains. Remember, if we’re all intimate with all other life forms, there’s a lot of strangeness there. Think about your long-term partner if you have one. When you wake up next to him or her, doesn’t s/he seem like the strangest person in the world?

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I think it’s a pretty safe bet that most readers will first want to take a look at the Paul Wolfowitz chapter.

As a public intellectual with a Ph.D. as well as a second-tier official whose government service dated to the years, Paul Wolfowitz had an out-of-proportion role in encouraging as well as formulating the Bush administration’s Iraq policy and strategy. And this role was a central to my decision to write this book.

Moreover, it was intellectually exciting to write about Wolfowitz. And because Cornell University is so integral to his story, I probably found it more exciting to focus on Wolfowitz than many others would. (Selfishly, I hope some readers will pause on pages 198-200; here I situate Wolfowitz within the context of the occupation of Cornell’s Willard Straight Hall and anti-Vietnam War protests, his residency at Telluride, where he met of Allan Bloom, and his decision to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago—in political science instead of biochemistry.)

But to appreciate how I reached the judgment that I could not have invented a more appropriate figure for this book’s last chapter than Paul Wolfowitz, readers must stumble onto several other passages.

The first of those is a paragraph within the discussion of Cornell that runs from the bottom on page 198 to the top of page 199. This is where I introduce the reader to Wolfowitz’s engagement with the Holocaust from a very young age. Influenced largely by his father, who had escaped Poland just prior to Hitler’s invasion, Wolfowitz read what he later conceded were “probably too many” books on the Holocaust. What is more, he read almost as much about Hiroshima, which he coupled with the Holocaust and labeled the “polar horrors.” Even before he graduated high school, Wolfowitz came to see world politics as a struggle between good and evil.

A bit further on, on pages 207-208, there is a snapshot of Wolfowitz’s three-year stint as ambassador to Indonesia. Secretary of State George Shultz appointed his Jewish assistant ambassador to this Muslim country as a reward for what Schultz assessed as a positive contribution to easing Ferdinand Marcos out of the Philippines.

Wolfowitz sought this position because his wife, an anthropologist, studied the Archipelago. But once there it was Wolfowitz who went native. He learned the language and he toured the neighborhoods—even won a cooking context. And he developed a close friendship with Abdurrahman Wahid, a Muslim and a democrat. Wahid’s subsequent election as president confirmed to Wolfowitz that his service in Indonesia was part of a larger project of replacing the world’s evil with good.

Paul Wolfowitz turns out to be an extremely complicated individual—much like the American Empire.

Lastly

Initially, I completed the manuscript without a concluding chapter. I just finished with Wolfowitz losing his position at the World Bank and going into “exile” at the American Enterprise Institute. But everyone who read the draft insisted that I include a conclusion of some sort. So I added a postscript on the “Dark Side.”

Borrowing the title from Jane Mayer’s chilling book on the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties in the name of security—not coincidentally also Vice President Dick Cheney’s nickname within the White House—I argue that for much of the American public, the Global War on Terror has become more about enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, and wiretaps without warrant than about capturing Osama bin Laden and eradicating Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Photographs of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the widely publicized denial of due process to “enemy combatants” imprisoned in Guantànamo Bay have severely challenged the narrative of America as the bastion of liberty. Americans’ identity, their sense of self, was under assault as much as their civil liberties.

It was within this context, I wrote, that Barack Obama’s candidacy, especially his rhetoric of “change,” resonated deeply with the American electorate. Conversely, the emphasis Bush placed on liberty and freedom in his farewell address rang hollow—despite Bush’s use of the keywords nine times within thirteen minutes.

To me, Obama’s decisive victory indicated that perhaps Americans had finally lost their appetite for an Empire for Liberty. But I don’t know how readers will evaluate this conclusion.

While I would have been inclined to end with Wolfowitz’s retreat from the public sphere, Obama’s election compelled me to close on a more optimistic note. I quoted his inaugural address, in which he repudiated much of the “dark side.” I stressed his pledge to shut down Guantànamo.

But Obama has not closed Guantànamo. And, thus far, there is little evidence that his call to “change” will affect the trajectory of American’s Empire for Liberty. Obama is swimming against the stream of history. That’s not easy.

© 2010 Richard H. Immerman

it was intellectually exciting to write about Wolfowitz ... even before graduating from high school, he came to see world politics as a struggle between good and evil

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I would like to highlight just two passages.

The first is from the start of Chapter 2:

In early 1865, Abraham Lincoln was the most powerful man in the Western Hemisphere. He was also a man whose grandfather had been killed by Indians. He saw his infant brother die, he lost his mother when he was ten and his older sister when he was nineteen, and he grieved when Ann Rutledge—perhaps his sweetheart, perhaps just a friend—died of typhoid. He buried two of his four sons before they had reached the age of twelve and a third when he reached eighteen. He had a wife who was emotionally unstable, suffered depression himself, and would die prematurely and violently. This Job-like litany was perhaps severe even in the nineteenth century, but its like was familiar to Lincoln’s contemporaries. For example, most parents of that era buried at least one child, an experience that mercifully few American parents faced a century later. Life was precarious.

Over the centuries, American life became much less precarious. The threat of arbitrary and unpredictable calamities from illness or injury or economic misfortune abated. Being able to count on food, shelter, and safety from one day to the next helped more Americans gain confidence in their own power and a sense of self-reliance. More Americans made plans, charted their careers, scheduled their childbearing, designed their children’s education, arranged their retirements. Greater physical and economic security probably lowered Americans’ feelings of anxiety. In myth, the past appears to be seemingly unproblematic, but the prospect of, for example, a crop-destroying blight probably once frightened Americans more than the specter of a job layoff does today.

The historical expansion of security was unevenly distributed. In some eras, for example, when medicine began to seriously improve, richer Americans gained much more than poorer ones did. In other eras, for example, when public health measures took effect, the poorer gained the most, because their conditions had been so bad. Such qualifications in mind, we can still say that modern Americans lived with far more security and predictability than their ancestors did, even than their presidents did. Whether Americans’ feelings of security kept pace is a more complex question.

And this one is from the start of Chapter 6:

Sometime in the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln gave his wife a copy of a popular advice book he had closely studied, Mary G. Chandler’s The Elements of Character. Early in the book, Mary Todd Lincoln would have read, “Weak and helpless as we may be in the affairs of this life, there is, however, one thing over which we have entire control ... one thing left which misfortune cannot touch, which God is ever seeking to aid us in building up, and over which He permits us to hold absolute control; and this is Character. For this, and for this alone, we are entirely responsible.” Building character, constructing a better self for which one is “entirely responsible,” has for centuries been an American project. Later generations used the term character less and psychological jargon more, but the construction project was much the same. In 2007, for example, entrepreneurs of “positive psychology” offered to teach people to “understand how our thoughts drive our feelings and our actions ... [to] utilize a concrete set of skills to think more accurately . . . [and] apply these skills ... to become more resilient, productive, and successful.” Mary G. Chandler would have approved.

Over the generations, more Americans participated in more such self-conscious self-improvement. Slowly shedding an old-world fatalism, they saw greater possibilities to control the world and themselves. With new knowledge, new technologies, and more options, planning and calculation could be increasingly effective. Critically, self-construction involved examining and molding one’s emotions. Middle-class Americans learned and taught their children to check feelings of aggression and to nurture feelings of sympathy and affection. Greater self-control, self-determination, and self-absorption and the “entire responsibility” for one’s character may have carried psychic costs in worry and regret. The Lincolns certainly were tortured souls.

Lastly

Often our discussions about the issues of today rest on vague and even false understandings of yesterday. I hope that this book might enrich and perhaps complicate readers’ understandings of the American past. And I sure hope that journalists—and academics, please—would stop automatically using phrases like “in our ever more mobile modern society;” it just is not so!

We should appreciate, for example, the great physical and economic insecurity earlier generations faced, that the most early Americans were “unchurched”—anything but theologically as Christian as Americans are today, and that the lust for baubles and bangles is a long-standing American state of mind. We should also appreciate that the coming of material security—albeit still shaky at times—relied greatly on our collective efforts as Americans, through our governments, to build that security.

The world-views of literate, twenty-first-century Americans are rooted in a variety of conventional assumptions about our social history. These assumptions are part of what might be called the “modernity story”—that modern life (and post-modern life even more) entails the disintegration of a stable, cohesive, intimate “world we have lost”—replaced by a rootless, fragmented, and cold new social order. This is a powerful story line, and omnipresent in western culture. We often use it to make sense of the world around us. But it is mostly wrong.

I hope this book will offer you some insight into the nature of “modernity,” American style.

© 2010 Claude S. Fischer

I mean this book to speak to such classic interpretations of America as The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart. Yet, Made in America challenges many of their conclusions.

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When browsing in a shop or library, my grandfather would always turn to the last few pages of a book. If he liked the end, then it was worth a read. Anyone doing this with The Thirty Years War would find the chapter on how the War was seen by those who experienced it first hand.

The War began amidst the early modern “communications revolution” which witnessed the development of the first successful commercial print media. The War accelerated this, as the general uncertainty left all hungry for news. It also coincided with changing perceptions, as the spread of printed almanacs and calendars encouraged a more chronological sense of time. Ever more people recorded their lives in autobiographies, diaries, letters and family chronicles, many of which survive, offering an insight in how ordinary folk experienced extraordinary events.

I include in the book Peter Hagendorf, author of the only surviving diary of a common soldier, who records the War as a travelogue as he tramped 22,400 kilometers to and fro across the Empire between 1625 and 1649. His laconic account of his own part in plundering Magdeburg (in his own home region!) contrasts with several more graphic accounts of other civil and military eyewitnesses, yet is typical of much contemporary testimony.

Most contemporaries recount personal hardship, though this was clearly relative. Some record direct experience of violence. Others are silent, often probably suppressing trauma which fragmentary post-war evidence suggests resurfaced later in nightmares and psychological disorders. Fear is the most common emotion. The War represented a violent and unwelcome intrusion into communal and family life. Occasionally, some express relief when things turned out better than expected, such as a Catholic nun who recorded that though the Protestant Swedes “had appeared terrible towards us, as soon as they saw us and talked to us, they became patient and tender little lambs.” More usually, accounts break off, often in mid-sentence, their authors either unwilling to continue or no longer alive.

Lastly

I hope that my book makes such experience intelligible and relevant for readers today.

The early seventeenth century seems very distant. Much of it is irretrievably lost and we shall never be able to reconstruct it “as it actually happened,” as Leopold von Ranke and other empirical historians once thought possible about the past. However, the seventeenth century was a formative period in Europe’s development and it has been woven into many of the basic assumptions used to understand today’s world. These include an international order based on sovereign states, allegedly ushered in by the Peace of Westphalia which concluded the War in 1648.

The Peace of Westphalia is also associated with a shift to a more secular, tolerant society. I indicate in the book that this view is not entirely correct. The peace still left the Empire “holy” in the sense of Christian—all other faiths were denied recognition. Peace rested on defusing disputes by shifting them from contests over singular, absolute truth, and channeling them into arguments over particular rights which could be resolved through legal arbitration.

This suggests that religion should not be written out altogether. It shaped how the War was perceived both then, and subsequently. The most vocal commentators were clergy who were more willing to see God’s hand at work, for example hailing the invading Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, as a “Lion of the North” sent to liberate not to conquer.

More significantly, faith convinced several key players that they were justified in gambling their subjects’ lives to pursue their own risky agendas. And here, the experience of the seventeenth century offers a warning for our own times.

© 2010 Peter H. Wilson

The Peace of Westphalia is also associated with a shift to a more secular, tolerant society. I indicate in the book that this view is not entirely correct. The peace still left the Empire “holy” in the sense of Christian—all other faiths were denied recognition.

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There is no more controversial aspect of Calvin’s life than the execution of Michael Servetus in Geneva in the fall of 1553, an event I treat on pages 217-228, in chapter 13 of the book. This is a subject on which most people have long made up their minds—though rarely on the basis of knowledge. The image of Servetus burning at the stake has sealed Calvin’s posthumous reputation as a monster.

Servetus was a multi-talented Spaniard credited with important discoveries about the circulatory system. But he was also a heretic. His denial of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was blasphemy to Catholics and Protestants alike. Servetus and Calvin had a long history, dating back twenty years to when both men lived in France. Over the years, Servetus had corresponded with Calvin, sending him his controversial works. Calvin was appalled and sought to end the relationship, confessing to a friend that should Servetus show up in Geneva he would never escape with his life. In August 1553 Servetus did just that, for reasons no one quite understands. Calvin participated in his arrest and, as leading theologian in the city, prepared the case against him.

If Calvin is in turn to be judged for his actions, this case must not be treated in isolation, but rather be determined within its historical context. It is rarely understood that Calvin himself was in a precarious position in Geneva when Servetus arrived. He was locked in a power struggle with the ruling authorities and was losing. He thought he would have to leave the city. The magistrates were not prepared to grant the church independent authority—a position which was a clear defeat for Calvin. Many among his opponents used the Servetus case to embarrass the reformer. Calvin was adamant that Servetus was a heretic and the animosity between the two men was unmistakable. In the end, however, it was the civic council’s decision to have the Spaniard executed. It did so on the advice of the other Swiss cities. Heresy was not regarded as a matter of opinion. It held to be a poison that would kill the community. Calvin’s call for a more humane form of execution was ignored as Servetus went to the stake to be burned with his books. Did Calvin think Servetus should be executed? Yes. Did he want the execution? Probably. Did he have the authority to condemn Servetus to death? No.

The execution of Servetus, however, was quickly attributed to Calvin by a number of opponents closely connected with the printing business. His name was rapidly traduced across Europe and his defensive responses proved impotent. Calvin became associated with intolerance and doctrinal fetishism while Servetus was turned into a martyr for freedom of the conscience. Neither man suited the role granted him. It mattered little that executions for religious convictions were widespread across Europe in the sixteenth century—here was decisive proof that the Protestant reformation was no better than the medieval Catholic church against which it had rebelled.

Lastly

Why does Calvin still matter after five hundred years? That question can be answered in several ways. In his own time, he emerged as a brilliant leader who gave shape to Protestantism at a moment when it might have been swept away by resurgent Catholicism. He refined the teaching of Martin Luther and others to define God’s church in the torrid world of the sixteenth century. He spoke eloquently of a great God who is always near and whose providence, though inscrutable, always works for good. As a lawyer he knew how to draft ordinances and run institutions. As a humanist he wrote some of the most exquisite prose of the century in interpreting God’s Word. His vision was of God’s people journeying through the world under the unshakable protection of the divine promises. God’s providence may be rough, but it is always good, and God never abandons the elect. The world is the wonderful manifestation of God’s creation and goodness, and humanity is called to mirror God’s righteousness through service. All his life Calvin wrestled with the seeming paradox of an utterly sovereign God and human agency. This is more than a conundrum: it is the creative tension of his legacy.

Calvin’s life was not a completed circle. When he died many of his most cherished dreams remained far from realized. His native France was engulfed by what he most feared: executions and religious war. Many of his fellow French had not embraced the Gospel in the manner he had wanted. Across Europe Protestant churches were far from united. In England an irate Queen Elizabeth refused to hear his name mentioned.

Yet the ideas by which he had so inspired his contemporaries continued to rouse others after his death. Calvin had created new possibilities for the secular world by envisaging the separation of spiritual and temporal authority. Rulers, in Calvin’s view, were to protect religion, not interfere in it. As Max Weber would famously identify, Calvin and Calvinism spawned cultures in which the search for assurance of salvation would shape patterns of behavior. This was true of English Puritans and the settlers of New England.

Calvin had preached and written for his age. Others would subsequently take his words and ideas and interpret them in new contexts. In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century and the Atlantic world of trade Calvinists would prove adept in the adaptation of economic and religious principles. These issues are still with us. The rise of Calvinism in Korea and the new forms of Neo-Calvinism in America demonstrate diverse engagements with the ideas of the man who had shaped his own age, that most crucial epoch, the European Reformation.

© 2010 Bruce Gordon

Did Calvin think Servetus should be executed? Yes. Did he want the execution? Probably. Did he have the authority to condemn Servetus to death? No.

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My favorite chapter concerns the nature of international environmental norms. This may sound like an abstruse topic, but international environmental norms are closer to home than most people realize. In countless ways, we are affected by international norms—some social, others legal; some quite general, others very specific.

When my air conditioning system broke down a few years ago, the technician reported that the coolant had leaked out. In its place he installed a synthetic chemical called HCFC-22. If the same problem had occurred twenty years earlier, the replacement would have been a more ozone-unfriendly chemical, CFC-12. In the future, it will be an even more environmentally benign chemical that does not contain chlorine. The changes have been driven not by changes in technology or in domestic law (though technology and domestic law have both played a part) but by developments in the international treaty regime to protect the ozone layer.

In the Wal-Mart near my house, fish packages now display labels saying that the fish were harvested in a sustainable manner, in compliance with standards developed by the Marine Stewardship Council. The Council is an independent non-profit organization that, according to its web site, “promote[s] sustainable fishing practice.” Along similar lines, a leading home improvement store, Home Depot, has announced that it will, to the extent possible, buy wood from sustainably managed forests.

At home, my ten-year-old daughter used to reject tuna fish because she believed that eating it would harm dolphins. Once she asked, in a worried tone, whether we had any ivory in the house. And when, to be provocative, I responded, “Is rhino horn okay?,” she answered emphatically, “No, it is not!”

What are the central features of these norms, and how might norms influence behavior? How do we determine which ones are “legal” in character? In the absence of judicial enforcement of international law, or sanctions for violations, does the legal status of a norm even matter? In what sense can we say that a non-enforceable norm is “binding”?

The answers to these questions are not self-evident. Most people unconsciously transfer their understanding of domestic law to the international sphere and assume, in a common-sense way, that, if an agreement is legal in character, then its provisions are “legally binding” and the penalties for violation are also binding.

The Kyoto Protocol negotiations indicate otherwise. The negotiating mandate for the Protocol was to develop a “protocol or other legal instrument,” but for the first year of the negotiations, a central issue was whether this legal agreement should contain legally binding obligations. Then, after countries agreed to negotiate legally binding emissions targets, they adopted a provision on compliance that left open the “binding” character of the non-compliance regime. It is no wonder that confusion is widespread.

In working on the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, I often encountered the view that, if the Protocol’s compliance committee cannot impose “binding” sanctions on violators, then this means that the Protocol itself is not legally binding. Such a view is certainly understandable. How can a norm be legally binding if the legal consequences for its violation aren’t binding? Isn’t this like saying that stealing is illegal, but the jail sentences imposed against violators are optional?

To try to make sense of these puzzles, I explore the nature of international norms and their relation to behavior. I then analyze what it means to characterize a norm as “legal” or “binding” and examine other important dimensions along which international environmental norms vary.

Lastly

Is international environmental law on the right track?

Some think it has been a complete failure, but I view the picture as more complicated. Yes, the looming threat of global warming, the deterioration of many ecosystems, and the high rates of species extinctions should disabuse us of too optimistic an outlook. At the same time, international environmental law has achieved some notable successes—the Montreal Ozone Protocol and the North Pacific Fur Seals Convention, to name two. In doing so, international environmental law has displayed impressive ingenuity, developing a wide range of mechanisms for setting standards and promoting implementation.

In the end, international environmental law aims to find not the optimal outcome, but rather the skillful compromise that bridges the gap between competing positions and advances the ball, even if only a little. This view of international environmental law is admittedly more prosaic than heroic. It counsels us to resist the tempting oversimplification. It accepts that international environmental law, like politics, is the art of the possible—and seeks to find the “sweet spot,” which goes as far as feasible but not beyond. Above all, it sees the discipline of international environmental law, not as a panacea, but rather as an art and a craft.

© 2010 Daniel Bodansky

International environmental law aims to find not the optimal outcome, but rather the skillful compromise that bridges the gap between competing positions and advances the ball, even if only a little. This view of international environmental law is admittedly more prosaic than heroic. It counsels us to resist the tempting oversimplification. It accepts that international environmental law, like politics, is the art of the possible.

A close-up

The red guards’ violence against their victims was shocking, and this is how they are rightly remembered. It turns out, however, that they were not all mindlessly violent. In fact, a very vocal group of students from China’s best high schools spoke out strongly and repeatedly against the “gangster-ish” behavior of the movement in the summer of 1966. They argued for more restrained and disciplined behavior, and certain Communist leaders who were trying to steer the students onto a less violent path gave them a lot of support.

The problem with this is that Mao himself saw complaints about violence as unnecessarily restricting “the masses.” He wanted things to get more chaotic.

But the students who opposed violence wouldn’t give up, and eventually challenged the radical officials under Mao who were urging the students forward. They ended up being persecuted by their red guard opponents who enthusiastically called for “dictatorship” over these “class enemies”—who were then arrested and imprisoned.

It was only as detailed reports of the mounting death toll in the capital reached Mao—red guards murdered more than a thousand people during the first month—that he told his subordinates to stop making such a fuss.

What is most galling is that those very students who protested violence were then blamed for all the violence of the red guard movement up to that point in time.

This is all described in Chapter 5, which shows how utterly cynical and nasty the politics of the period could be, and how confusing and dangerous it could be for students, especially red guards who were relatively well-meaning.

Lastly

The Cultural Revolution was certainly a crucial turning point in China—and a defining event in 20th century history. We really know very little that is well-grounded about this complex period, and much of what we think we know is either a caricature of actual history or just plain wrong.

In fact, as I researched for this book, I realized how poorly I understood China’s Cultural Revolution, even though I have been reading and writing about it for some years.

Research and publication on the Cultural Revolution is suppressed in China; for the time being, most of this work will have to be carried on outside.

So my book will not be the last word on the subject. But I hope it will convince others to look carefully at the materials that are now available.

© 2010 Andrew G. Walder

People’s choices in confusing historical circumstances aren’t as clear as social scientists sometimes think.

A close-up

A reader encountering Relationscapes in a bookstore might find themselves attracted to the front cover, which is a reproduction of a painting by Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kngwarreye. This might lead her to open the book to the chapter on mapping as it functions in Aboriginal culture. In this chapter, I take a close look at the work of both Clifford Possum and Emily Kngwarreye, two contemporary Aboriginal artists.

To paint the landscape with acrylics is a relatively new form of art for the Aborigines of Australia. Until the early 1970s, stories of land and spirit were evoked mostly through other media—sand, bark, wood. The paintings produced since then are all associated with Dreamings—Jukurrpa—which are an integral aspect of life in Central Desert society. Stories told for more than 50,000 years of continuous history, Dreamings not only speak about the landscape and its vicissitudes, they create spacetimes of experience.

For Aborigines, life is Dreaming in the sense that the coordinates of spacetime out of which everyday lives emerge are significantly in line with creation and recreation of the land and its laws (which is one of the translations of Dreaming). The land is not an extension of the Aborigines—it is them. To be the land is to become in relation to it, in relation not to space itself, but to the living coordinates of a topological relationscape that embodies as much the law as it does the grains of sand that prolong it in real-time.

Clifford Possum is significant both in the history of contemporary Aboriginal art and in terms of what Relationscapes attempts to convey. One of the foci of this chapter is Possum’s so-called “map series.” In this series, Possum paints the Dreamings for which he is custodian (Dreamings are managed through complex kinship ties), completing a number of paintings that “map” the large areas and stories the Dreamings conjure. In terms of movement-moving, it is perhaps most noteworthy in these paintings that Clifford Possum does not adhere to a Euclidean set of coordinates for his map. He paints them while moving around the canvas lying on the ground. This results in a continuously shifting perspective that might astound those of us who organize landscapes into grids. In Aboriginal culture, the landscape—and the Dreamings that activate it—are always experiential. The landscape is never observed from outside its eventness, nor is it painted as though it had stopped moving.

Lastly

In my work, Relationscapes has opened the way for the continued exploration of the relationship between microperception and micropolitics. It has also introduced me to a growing group of philosophers, artists, dancers, activists whose concerns—both aesthetic and political—are in tune with the propositions Relationscapes calls forth.

This has fed my work as director of the SenseLab, which, with a large array of international and local collaborators, organized an event in 2009 called Society for Molecules, and is planning a next event for July 2011, Generating the Impossible. At SenseLab, I seek to allow for a wide regrouping of collectives and individuals who similarly are impatient to create modalities of existence and thought that propose more creative ways of working academically and in the art world.

© 2010 Erin Manning

Imbricating spacetimes of experience with communication (foregrounding the complex sensory dimension of the world conceived as relational environment), Amanda Baggs complicates the notion that language functions only denotatively and proposes instead a challenging and important interweaving of the sensing body in movement and language in the making.

A close-up

To gain a sense of the immediacy of coverage, turn to page 53 to begin a sample of the panicky reporting when the sniper was on the loose.

These pages detail the first hour of television coverage of a shooting on October 7, 2002. After the initial six murders on October 2 and 3, an eerie calm had settled over the metropolitan area that was later somewhat disrupted on October 5 when a woman was wounded south of the city in Virginia. Already on October 4, Charles Moose, chief of police for Montgomery County and head of the task force, had assured the public that children were safe in school. In this context the October 7 shooting of eighth-grader Iran Brown at Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland, would, of course, prove quite unsettling.

Nothing about the press coverage mitigated the anxiety that would have normally occurred over this shooting. In fact, following the attack at 8:09 A.M., the press scrambled exceptionally hard to get reporters into place. As news teams consolidated, the broadcasts, including anchors and reporters, developed a style in which coverage moved from source to source in a staccato rhythm that created anticipation and fed worry. The frenetic style of the production overwhelmed the customary calm of the anchors. In the most extreme case, one anchor added to the unease. Insightful and highly experienced Mike Buchanan fidgeted, adjusting his tie and holding his head, as in pain. He showed his exasperation with the investigation. In yet another case, the on-site reporter, with a crack in his voice, described the chaos as parents showed up to pick up their kids.

All this was exacerbated by an announcement on the local FOX station that six or seven police cars were heading off to another shooting. Seen from the camera on a helicopter, a speeding police convoy proceeded to a Wal-Mart only a couple of minutes away. FOX threw doubt on the story right away, but only ten minutes later could watchers on the NBC affiliate breathe a sigh of relief. Still those watching the ABC station could find a new cause for fear. Even as FOX changed its story, ABC reported not one but two shootings. Then ABC put up a map labeled “New Shootings.” Finally, twelve minutes after the initial retraction, ABC abandoned this tack. Of course, the reports returned to Tasker which was still awash with nervous parents extracting their children from the school. After continuing several more hours, finally the defeated channels had to give up on any progress in the case.

Lastly

I hope this work will contribute to three contextual areas: understanding the economic/career motivations of journalists, evaluating the media by standards derived from its period, and discovering a chronological history of fear.

Such evaluation of the media from several angles can lead to a number of other observations. For example, the book scrutinizes separately the television opinion shows which one might hypothesize would be most likely to spread fear. I found, however, that this was generally not the case. In fact, hosts like Chris Matthews on Hardball evinced virtually no interest in the sniper story.

The opinion press also followed the lead of the rest of the media in asserting that the snipers were not political terrorists. Sean Hannity, the one journalist who suspected terrorism, dropped that tack after several of his own guests demurred. It remains unclear why the opinion press rather unexpectedly remained relatively loath to raise the decibel level. Perhaps, that so many broadcasts originated from outside the Washington reduced anxiety on the subject.

In describing the printed press, I sampled the regional, national, and international printed press in an effort to understand not only the coverage by the press but also to contribute to the debate and discussion over nationalism and globalism.

While I expected that different areas of the country would appropriate the story to meet their own concerns, the sample I used (from New York, Houston, Chicago, and San Francisco) did little more than occasionally point out matters consistent with the concerns of the paper.

One theme somewhat developed was the way that this incident showed the need for greater gun control. But most reporting followed the line laid down by the local papers in the Washington region.

This same lack of independence was even more evident in the international press from France, England, South Africa, and India that I surveyed. Likely, the explanation here is the reverse of that of the opinion shows: most journalists who covered this story, regardless of their home paper, did so through correspondents based in Washington. These results might underline the unconscious way that the temper of a region affects reporting.

© 2010 Jack R. Censer

Objective knowledge is not really attainable for complicated issues. As a substitute, the press tries to meet the goal of objectivity by simply showing “both” sides—even if one or even both of these sides have only a vague claim to fairness.

A close-up

If a reader were to ask where to sample a page or two of A Brave Vessel, I would suggest turning to the beginning of chapter five. At that point in the book a rogue wave sweeps the Sea Venture in the midst of a black July night. William Strachey’s description of the foaming sea pouring into the ship is one of the most thrilling passages of his narrative:

So huge a sea broke upon the poop and quarter, upon us, as it covered our ship from stern to stem like a garment or a vast cloud. It filled her brim-full for a while within, from the hatches up to the spardeck. The source or confluence of water was so violent, as it rushed and carried the helmsman from the helm and wrested the whipstaff out of his hand, which so flew from side to side that when he would have seized the same again it so tossed him from starboard to larboard as it was God’s mercy it had not split him, it so beat him from his hold and so bruised him.

The sailors manage to wrestle the ship under control and the voyage goes on. Later in the same chapter the ordeal ends when the tops of palm trees are seen on the horizon. The men, women, and children on the ship—exhausted and all but resigned to sinking beneath the sea—receive the news by an exhilarating cry from the bridge:

Admiral George Somers continued to scan the ocean, watching the waves but also looking for ships that might offer relief. He was exhausted, famished, and thirsty, but still he watched and called rudder adjustments to the helmsman below. On one of his sweeps, a movement far off caught his eye. At the crest of a swell he detected a flutter on the horizon to the west, slightly higher than the surface of the sea. The ship descended into a trough and he froze and waited for it to rise again. At the top he saw it again, and this time more clearly—above the waves, he was almost sure, he saw the tops of palm trees moving in the wind. He waited one more time as the ship dipped between swells. The consequences to morale of making a mistake would be devastating. They were far out in the Atlantic and sighting trees—while not impossible—was incredible. At the top of the next wave he saw them again and this time he was sure. Somers then let go a bellow that reached the ears of everyone on the ship, and he repeated his call, drawing out in a sustained holler the word “Land.” To the people on the Sea Venture it was a miraculous sound.

Lastly

In addition to recreating the tale of the Sea Venture, much of my work in A Brave Vessel involved surveying the work of Shakespeare scholars of the last two centuries and presenting their findings alongside the full story of Strachey’s voyage for the first time.

In addition to rediscovering the work that preceded mine, I made some discoveries of my own. One of the most important was the realization that two Powhatans of Virginia were almost surely aboard the Sea Venture. The greatest chronicler of Jamestown, Capt. John Smith, alleged that they were present on the vessel when it wrecked, but scholars have doubted his account because he waited fifteen years to publish it. By drawing attention to a hitherto overlooked source that dates to just after the castaways returned home I was able to show that Smith was almost surely telling the truth.

The two Powhatans were very likely aboard the doomed vessel, and, as Smith alleges, one probably did die on Bermuda. Smith claims that one of the men murdered the other on the island. While I suggest that the “murder” was more likely a misunderstood accidental death, I nevertheless corroborate the basic facts of Smith’s long-questioned account.

One of the fascinating results of my showing that the Powhatan voyagers were almost surely on board the ship is that it is now clear that a tale of alleged murder by an island-bound Native American reached London just as Shakespeare was composing his play. He is thereby provided with a model for Caliban, the murderous wild man of The Tempest.

Literary sleuths have long seen Caliban as a portrait of a New-World man as seen through a filter of Jacobean culture. With the publication of A Brave Vessel, scholars no longer have to depend upon vague generalities when drawing that comparison. They now know that a story of a supposedly murderous New World man marooned on an enchanted isle reached Shakespeare just as he was creating his Tempest. Thus the Powhatans’ presence on the Sea Venture has as much importance to literary history as it has to the history of America.

© 2010 Hobson Woodward

Two Powhatans of Virginia were almost surely aboard the Sea Venture. The greatest chronicler of Jamestown, Capt. John Smith, alleged that they were present on the vessel when it wrecked, but scholars have doubted his account because he waited fifteen years to publish it. By drawing attention to a hitherto overlooked source that dates to just after the castaways returned home I was able to show that Smith was almost surely telling the truth.

A close-up

Good books draw in readers in their opening pages. I hope Forbidden Fruit does the same.

In those pages I justify my choice of title. I also explain the need for counterfactuals and offer examples of just how committed policymakers, historians and international relations scholars are to the inevitability of important events. They are so to the point of obvious absurdity. And they also believe, against all evidence, that big events must have big causes.

Readers must wonder why otherwise intelligent people do this and why all of us want to see the world as explicable and partly predictable. A bit unsettled, intellectually and emotionally, the reader, I hope, will be interested in learning more about the way the world actually works and why we hold to and defend simplistic and often logically contradictory understandings about our world.

Lastly

The significance of this book is two fold.

The first is methodological, a word and concept that might seem far-removed from real-world concerns. But methods guide our thinking and can lead us into counterproductive, even disastrous, political, economic and social policies. By developing the counterfactual method, I aspire to improve policy analysis.

More importantly, counterfactuals provide alternate worlds from which we can observe our own from distance and think with more detachment about it and about us. This is essential to probe not only how our world works but who we are and how we have become ourselves.

© 2010 Richard Ned Lebow

Psychologists speculate that counterfactuals are credible because of their vividness: they draw people into scenarios and make them appear realistic by providing small details of the kind we associate with our world. I start with a story of my own, about an alternate world in which Mozart lives to sixty-five and, as a result, neither World War nor the Holocaust occur.

A close-up

Probably the part of the book I like best is the chapter on Donald Judd’s Minimalist sculptures; if someone were to casually flip through and land on a section to read, I’d want it to be the end of this last chapter and then the book’s short conclusion.

Judd’s art has lately been understood primarily as a resistance to depiction: his simple metal boxes don’t represent anything, they insist instead on simply being there. This interpretation is based on Judd’s own remarks, and I think it is right. What I found in my research, though, is that Judd and his early critics (and this seems to be a contradiction) also thought about his work in relationship to architecture, shipping, computers, and so on. I became really interested in trying to think both of these things at once: Judd’s work is totally independent of reference and, at the same time, deeply influenced by the contemporary landscape. “I don't much like the idea of representing the United States in my work,” Judd once told an interviewer in the sixties, “It's just that you live here and you are involved in your sense of what's around you.”

I became especially interested in an ambivalence or dialectic in Judd’s work (perhaps easiest to see in the works before his Minimalist boxes) between an aesthetic of abstraction, modularity, and systematicity, on the one hand, and a traditional, sometimes even gummy aesthetic of palpable materiality, on the other. This fact helped me to see that a similar dialectic was then at work in New York, too—even on the section of Fourth Avenue beneath Judd’s windows: the city was caught between a new fantasy of the frictionless, globally interconnected provision of services and an old industrial landscape of manual labor and quirky architecture.

As he moved on to making his sculptures by ordering metal boxes from a sheet-metal shop, Judd said he wanted the works to be hand-made, but to look as if they had been “stamped-out.” He was ambivalent about whether to refer to his fabricators, Bernstein Brothers Sheet Metal Specialties, with the antiquated term “tinsmiths,” or instead to call them, somewhat grandiosely, a “factory.”

What I seek to do at the end of the chapter is to connect these tensions in the city’s character to the vocabulary that animated art criticism throughout the postwar decades. I think I have discovered that terms and problems that seemed purely to belong to the realm of the art discourse were in fact so bitterly contested precisely because they were also ways of thinking about the changing texture of New York, even of contemporary life. For a fuller explanation, you’ll have to read the book!

Lastly

I would be pleased if The Disappearance of Objects could make a few different kinds of contributions.

On one level, of course, I simply hope to give readers a means to complicate and enrich their encounters with the art works discussed. I hope, too, that the book will change the way we think about art in the postwar decades, by helping us to understand that the problems and ideas of late modernist art were deeply intertwined with the changing quality of everyday life. By extension I hope that this book can serve as an example for a new kind contemporary art history—one that combines the theoretical interests that usually dominate the field with the weight and flavor of historical specificity.

Above all, I think we need to be able to think really closely about art while thinking equally closely about history. I would be especially gratified if historians took up the book as an account of the ways in which our experiences of ordinary space have changed with the rise of the postmodern economy.

© 2010 Joshua Shannon

Judd’s work is totally independent of reference and, at the same time, deeply influenced by the contemporary landscape

A close-up

One very important point I try to make in my book is that the Communist Party did not set out to destroy Chinese food, as many Western visitors to China concluded in the 1970s, when the country began receiving visitors from outside the socialist world, and when the food was, indeed, often terrible.

There is no denying that the party was deeply troubled by the political and moral economy of Shanghai’s pre-1949 food culture: by the presence of beggars and orphans starving in the street outside of extravagant restaurants; by apparent links among restaurants, seedy cabarets, crime lords, and brothels; and even by the possibility that that restaurants might become dens of counterrevolutionary activity.

It is also clear that, in its efforts to nationalize the food supply and the service industry, the Party introduced new kinds of inefficiencies that led to massive food shortages and distribution problems, especially in the case of the deadly famine following the Great Leap Forward. Indeed, there is little evidence of nostalgia for the food prepared in communal kitchens or government owned restaurants, and the anecdotal evidence of bad service in those restaurants is overwhelmingly convincing.

But alongside this history of bad food, hunger, and surly waiters, I also found ample evidence of a political party deeply concerned with the deterioration of the quality of cuisine. Government units thus established cooking schools to train new generations of chefs. Officials in these units wrote glowingly of chef talents in chef personnel files. Party representatives, moreover, supported, and even prided themselves on supporting, local initiatives to restore cultivation of local special crops, such as the Shanghai honey nectar peach. Party officials even sought to ennoble the cooking profession, so that chefs, who historically occupied a low social status, might enjoy the same social recognition as the food they prepared.

Few passages of my book better illustrate the investment of Communist Party authorities in saving Chinese cuisine than the brief section (page 209) on the remarkable “memory discussion sessions,” which Party officials conducted with professional chefs from the neighborhood of the City God Temple, long home to some of the city’s most famous and popular local snack foods. Authorities in Shanghai had recently become aware that many of the city’s most treasured specialty snack foods were no longer being served, and also that the city’s corps of professional chefs was aging.

These memory discussion sessions gathered together the leading chefs of the City God Temple neighborhood, so that through dialogue, mutual memory stimulation, and exchange, they might be able to remember collectively how to cook the specialty foodstuffs that had faded from the marketplace, and also help guarantee that the recipes would be passed on to a younger generation of chefs. Readers familiar with the wider history of such memory sessions will be struck by the difference from their conventional uses, which more typically involved inciting peasants to criticize the past abuses of their landlords, or pressuring participants into remembering and disclosing the life histories and past social relationships of alleged counterrevolutionaries.

Revolution, as the saying puts it, was not a dinner party, but the Communist Party wasn’t necessarily opposed either to cuisine or to celebrating cuisine as a key aspect of China’s cultural heritage.

Lastly

Aside from inviting readers to take food and nostalgia seriously, I think that there might be a kind of mirror in Shanghai’s historical record for the evolving set of broader concerns about the state of the world food supply today. The stridently “localist” impulse that animates practices ranging from the Slow Food Movement to the rise of community supported agriculture is not unprecedented. Those who deride localism as elitist or “nostalgic” in the worst sense of the word would thus do well to listen more carefully to what that nostalgia is saying about what people want to eat and why.

The tenacity of regional food culture in China meant that nobody ever seriously considered the possibility of creating a national cuisine, let alone considered that doing so might be desirable. It may be that food just doesn’t lend itself, ultimately, to such a product. The last century and a half of food processing and industrialization has, of course, facilitated the spread of foods across regional boundaries, so that Americans can, if they wish, all eat the same condiments, canned goods, and prepared foods. But the backlash, however long in coming, may be telling us that the attempt to nationalize cuisine, rather than culinary nostalgia, is the true pathology in the history of food.

© 2010 Mark Swislocki

One of the dangers of studying “food” is that food as such becomes the subject matter, while social relationships become incidental.

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If a browsing reader were to encounter Europe’s Promise in the bookstore, I would like her or him to read the final few pages, and contemplate the final scene and probing question that ends the book:

So now, whenever I am in Europe, whether in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Stockholm, London, Rome, Prague, Oslo, Berlin, Vienna, Barcelona, Ljubljana, Budapest or elsewhere, at some point in my journey I always make a point to stand on a street corner and stop and look around me at all the people milling about. I watch them for a few minutes, take a deep breath, and, remembering Matthias’ words I think to myself, “Everyone I see, all those people walking by, no matter their age, gender, religion, or income, has the right to go to a doctor whenever they are sick. And all those I see have a decent retirement pension waiting for them, and parents can bring their children to day care, or stay home to take care of themselves or their sick loved one, and get paid parental leave or sick leave and job retraining if they need it, and an affordable university education.”

Of course, not every European country, or every region or city within each country, lives up to every aspect of this menu 100 percent of the time. Economic fluctuations will always result in contractions and expansions of the social agenda. That’s to be expected. But all of them, even the poorer countries among them, achieve a far higher level than the United States can muster, and the arc of their trajectory is clear.

At the end of the day, the clever Europeans have crafted something that we have not yet figured out how to do in the United States. Their social contract is still vibrant and durable, and that’s worth contemplating as I stand on street corners in Europe, with the memory of Matthias’s words ringing in my ears: “In America, you are so rich—why don’t you have these things for your people?”

Lastly

Many of the reviews in the media have captured well the book’s larger context, implications, and significance.

Financial Times :

Steven Hill is surely right in saying that Europe’s prosperous, peaceful and democratic social market economy looks attractive when contrasted with the unbalanced, excessively deregulated US model or with China's politically repressive capitalism. He is a lucid and engaging writer...he makes you sit up and think.

Reuters International :

Europe’s Promise marshals an impressive army of facts and comparative statistics to show that the United States is behind Europe in nearly every socio-economic category that can be measured and that neither America’s trickle-down, Wall Street-driven capitalism nor China’s state capitalism hold the keys to the future. (February 2010)

Foreign Affairs :

In this timely and provocative book, Steven Hill…argues that the "social capitalist" policies of European countries represent best practices in handling most of the challenges modern democracies face today…Europe’s Promise explains why in most areas, it is Europe's constitutional forms, economic regulations, and social values, not those of the United States, that are the most popular models for new democracies. The oldest one should take note.

Reuters International:

“U.S. militarism has long been a core part of the American Way,” writes Steven Hill in a just-published book, Europe’s Promise, that compares the United States and Europe. Militarism does “triple duty as a formidable foreign policy tool, a powerful stimulus to the economy, and a usurper of tax dollars that could be spent on other budget priorities.” (Feb. 5, 2010)

Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker :

Like a reverse Alexis de Tocqueville, Steven Hill dauntlessly explores a society largely unknown to his compatriots back home. Sweeping away the ideological posturing, he shows us exactly how the modern European Way works and the promise it holds for an America which has slipped to become, in terms of social, economic and energy policy, the Old World.

© 2010 Steven Hill

Europe is now the world’s largest trading bloc, producing nearly a third of the world’s economy, almost as large as the U.S. and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China together, and more small businesses creating two thirds of the jobs in Europe, compared to only half the jobs in the U.S. Europe is the largest trading partner with both the U.S. and China, and had a higher per capita annual growth rate than the U.S. from 1998-2008.

A close-up

Histories of disco emphasize the antagonism between rock and disco, and with good reason. Rock publications covered the glitter-ball world begrudgingly and/or sneeringly. Rock radio was even more hostile. Punk rockers, in particular made a point of attacking disco. And yet as I listened again to the music of that era I was struck by how deeply disco penetrated particular corners of punk. Punk’s penchant for fitful rather than groovy rhythms, un-soulful vocals, choppy, harsh sounding guitars, and the sonically stripped-down made its incorporation of disco sounds and techniques unlikely. Unsurprisingly the earliest dance-rock hybrids were often spoofs of disco. “Fodderstompf” by PiL, fronted by ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon, is one such track.

“Fodderstompf” was a 7:46-minute prank meant to cause maximum offense. The track grew out of PiL’s recording sessions for their first album, 1978’s First Issue. Looking for a way to meet their contractual obligation to Virgin Records—thirty minutes of music—PiL hit on the idea of recording a long, obnoxious song to finish off their album. The cut consists of little more than their screeching like Terry Jones, Monty Python’s spam-serving waitress, over an unchanging, thunderous funk bass line set to a snare-heavy disco beat. You can hear Jah Wobble talking in the background about wanting to complete the record with minimal exertion, which he notes, “we are now doing very suc-cess-fully.” Band members rattle on about going out for cigarettes, mumble about the song’s tediousness, and urge listeners to be boring. Those who persevered to the end were told that they were as “sad” as the band churning out this drek.

The cut was guaranteed to piss off their record label as well as Pistols’ fans unprepared for music that so violated punk’s conventions of speed and economy. Like other punks in the “Disco Sucks” period who were experimenting with danceable sounds, PiL gave themselves an out: “Fodderstompf” was a spoof of disco. Journalist Simon Reynolds observed that it was almost a parody of Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” Its German-sounding title alone suggested inferior material, stomping beat, “stumpf” (meaning numb or blunt), and perhaps the German penchant for the mechanistic, as in Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, aka the Munich Machine. As for the lyrics, the track’s whining cries of wanting “to be loved” mocked disco’s faith in the restorative power of “love” (“Love’s Theme,” “Love Train,” “Love is the Message,” “I Love Music,” etc.).

Designed to be off-putting, “Fodderstompf” proved unexpectedly compelling, even to those it apparently meant to disparage. Legend has it that the song ended up being played at Studio 54 where dancers would scream along with its manic chorus, “We only wanted to be loved!” Over the years critics and fans have rhapsodized about the song’s bass line. PiL bassist Wobble admitted that it was in its own way “as mental as Funkadelic.” (George Clinton’s P-Funk crew likely influenced PiL, but “Hydraulic Pump,” the 1983 collaboration between P-Funk and Sly Stone, sounds like “Fodderstompf.”) Moreover, far from being a one-off, “Fodderstompf” prefigured PiL’s embrace of dance music. Their next LP, 1979’s critically acclaimed Metal Box, found the band further developing their “anti-rock & roll.” Soon Lydon was shocking former fans with the news that the only music he really liked was disco, and that PiL was actually a dance band.

How did they become disco converts? Reggae was certainly one route into dance music. PiL were “total dub fanatics.” Lydon’s characterization of London’s reggae clubs emphasizes the high-volume bass, whose physicality, he writes, “just left me gobsmacked.” Lydon and his friends had also been going to gay bars for years to avoid “boot boy harassment” and because these underground clubs “always had the best records.” In the late 1990s Lydon admitted that he had “loved disco” and saw “no shame at all in admiring the Bee Gees and being a Sex Pistol.” He was never an Abba fan, but two other Pistols—Sid Vicious and Glen Matlock—were. Matlock’s original riff for the Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” drew upon an unlikely source: Abba’s “SOS.” In certain punk circles, then, “Disco Sucks” may have been little more than a pose.

Lastly

Obviously I would like to see Hot Stuff spark further discussion about disco—which is all over today’s charts, even if it isn’t called disco.

The book challenges the stereotypical view of disco as the encapsulation of the Me Decade—hedonistic, narcissistic, and forgettable. But it also questions the depiction of disco emerging in what I call “disco studies.” Too much disco revisionism is driven by an effort to debunk the pervasive view of disco as crassly commercial, exclusionary, and politically regressive. The result is work that overemphasizes disco’s subcultural purity, democratic beginnings, and transgressive practices.

Mind you, I agree with parts of this analysis. But it follows too faithfully the usual narrative whereby an inventive underground (it could be rap, punk, or disco) is eclipsed by its debased commercial version. The result is a two-tier schema of “good” versus “bad” disco that creates all sorts of distortions, including the by-now routine disparagement of Saturday Night Fever, a movie I discuss at some length.

Just as importantly I want Hot Stuff to build on the work of other historians who have been chipping away at the usual view of the seventies as a time when nothing happened, or nothing good happened. According to this view the Disco Years are an era memorable for America’s hapless presidents, declining prestige, bad fashions, ludicrous music, and over-the-top narcissism. However, in these years small but growing numbers of African-Americans entered the ranks of the middle class, women moved into the workplace and nightlife, and gays vacated the shadowy margins of American life.

Disco’s One Nation Under a Thump impulse succeeded in integrating American nightlife to an extent unthinkable just a decade earlier. Pornography began moving out of seedy red-light districts and into respectable businesses—and into American homes—as a result of video technology. The explosion of pornography, the resurgence of feminism, the ready availability of the birth-control pill, the legalization of abortion, and disco itself re-made America’s sexual landscape in ways that created unprecedented (and sometimes risky) possibilities of sexual pleasure for women. Meanwhile the feminist assault on masculine privilege, defeat in Vietnam, de-industrialization, and affirmative action posed challenges for American men. As I hope Hot Stuff demonstrates, the 1970s were, in fact, the combustible years.

© 2010 Alice Echols

The ear-shattering volume and bass-driven sonics of disco encouraged physical intimacy and sexual straightforwardness. After all, the volume was set so high that patrons had to dispense with the usual formalities and chit-chat.

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Chapter 3, entitled “Which Came First?”, goes over a number of examples of engineering achievements that were accomplished without full scientific understanding or explanation of the phenomena involved. Among those examples are rockets, which preceded rocket science; the steam engine, which preceded thermodynamics; powered flight, which preceded a fully formed science of aerodynamics; and hybridization, which preceded genetics.

Such examples—and the implications they have for the way the world really works—should lead the general reader to a fuller understanding of the nature and practice of science and engineering. I hope that they will be encouraging to inventors and engineers who wish to pursue a goal even in the absence of full scientific support for their idea.

Lastly

The larger context of The Essential Engineer is its relevance to the world of public policy and legislation.

Since so much of what is considered by lawmakers today is necessarily technological at heart, there is great value in a book laying out clear distinctions between science and engineering and their relationship to the important political and economic goals of innovation and global competitiveness. Legislation intended to promote and support innovation, for example, may have just the opposite effect if it encourages only science, at the expense of engineering, and this should be emphasized to political leaders and lawmakers.

Unfortunately, the distinct endeavors of engineering, invention, and technology are often subsumed under the single rubric “science” and so are not highlighted in their own right. This lack of attention to the true sources of innovation can jeopardize our nation’s future. The Essential Engineer is one attempt to correct this situation.

© 2010 Henry Petroski

the distinct endeavors of engineering, invention, and technology are often subsumed under the single rubric “science” and so are not highlighted in their own right. This lack of attention to the true sources of innovation can jeopardize our nation’s future

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If someone were to flip casually through the pages of the book, I would hope that they would appreciate, and be intrigued by, its variety of illustrations.

Of course I do not expect these images to convey per se the trajectory of my argument. Yet, even when starting from the end—that’s how I flip through books, anyway—my hope is that the casual reader would formulate hypotheses about what could possibly link film frames from immigrant melodramas, Griffith’s Civil War film In The Border States (1910), and such travelogues as Picturesque Colorado (1910), with popular prints from Harper’s Weekly (1875) or the bestselling volumes of Picturesque America (1874), old photographs by Riis, Stieglitz, Watkins, Hine, von Gloeden, and Sommer, and even older paintings by Cole, Gilpin, Volaire, Rosa, and Lorrain.

The picturesque view from a hilltop makes it a coveted guard post in Griffith’s In the Border States. Biograph, 1910. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.)

I would hope that the book’s front and back covers, not to mention its rich filmography, could similarly prompt the reader to want to read (or just flip through the pages) more.

Lastly

Italy in Early American Cinema seeks to place the question of race at the center of our discussions on how early American cinema became a national, mass entertainment. One of the goals of this study is to stimulate a treatment of race as visual form, at once aesthetically and commercially effective, and not just as films’ subject matter. More work certainly ought to be done in this direction to verify, articulate, and broaden the validity of my racially based intermedial hypothesis.

For instance, one could examine broader samples of films, photographs, and other visual materials, particularly with regard to racial groups I have not systematically discussed, such as Irish, Slavs, Latinos, and Asians-Americans. One could also pair picturesque characterizations with another major vector of racial identification: physiognomy. If picturesque representations kept figures in the middle ground or background, physiognomy brought them most forcibly to the foreground, into an extreme and most expressive “close-up.”

Linked to the book’s specific argument is also a methodological reframing associated with the question of modernity. I devote the Afterword to this. Motion pictures emerged at a historical juncture that did not just feature technological and industrial innovations and their impact on everyday (urban) life, but also involved transatlantic migrations, nationalist ideologies, and imperialistic formulations of racial difference, as well as their ingrained traditions of visual representation.

When examined through the lens of racialized representations and receptions, studies of early cinema may profitably complicate medium-specific textual analyses, with their penchant for closely defined time frames. A historiographical consideration of larger geopolitical occurrences, from colonialism to imperialism, nationalism to migrations, and their related scientific rationalizations (i.e. anthropology, ethnography, and urban sociology) does not abolish textual analysis. On the contrary, it reveals films’ expressive, ideological, and commercial debts to a host of other representational practices, from paintings, theater, literature, and illustrated prints to caricatures, lantern slides, and photography.

This broader approach ultimately reveals a dynamic, centuries-old network of intermedial representations which constituted the lively, and equally modern, terrain that defined an aesthetic of racial difference and which, at the turn of the twentieth century, cinema furthered, expanded, and popularized in a unique fashion.

The discipline of cinema studies has been very fond of a formulation of modernity neatly positioned at the end of the nineteenth century and fittingly coinciding with the emergence of cinema. When it comes to national and racial discourses, however, a longer dureé of the category of the Modern, one for instance adopted by the discipline of history, may expand even further the interdisciplinary heuristics of early cinema history.

© 2010 Giorgio Bertellini

a historiographical consideration of larger geopolitical occurrences reveals films’ expressive, ideological, and commercial debts to a host of other representational practices

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Is mass violence justified if it brings about a better world? This question has been raised frequently in relation to communism, as crimes of Stalin and Mao exposed the murderous core of this utopian ideology. But with the end of the Cold War, a rather startling reversal took place: utopianism migrated from the revolutionary Left to the neo-conservative Right.

Indeed, the justifications for the invasion and occupation of Iraq convey the impression that much of the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism is being straightforwardly deployed on behalf of a radical program to extend democracy and free markets throughout the globe. The endemic strife that has overtaken Iraq compels us to question what it means to be regarded as a potential beneficiary of utopian violence—to question the experience of a person who is forced to accept the gift of freedom and all the horrors it has thus far entailed: terrorist bombings, ethnic cleansing, and a brutal insurgency that may trigger a civil war.

In the South Korean film Save the Green Planet, an erratic and violent young man kidnaps the wealthy and famous CEO of a chemical company, who he believes is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy leading a mission to destroy the earth. The protagonist, named Lee Byung-Gu, is unhinged by a lifetime of devastating suffering and has compelling reasons for carrying out a brutal vendetta against the industrialist. He was once an employee of the company run by the supposed alien, and his girlfriend was beaten to death during the break-up of a workers’ strike. His beloved mother, who also worked for the same company, lies in a deep coma from chemical poisoning. The CEO is a brusque and venal boor named Kang Man-Shik, who has recently won a suspicious, very public acquittal from charges of stock fraud. Aided by his girlfriend, a trapeze artist named Sooni, Byung-Gu overpowers an inebriated Kang returning home from a drunken night out.

What ensues is a series of horrific tortures, inflicted by Byung-Gu on Kang, to force him to reveal his identity as an alien agent and to set up a meeting with the alien prince. Kang, after a failed escape attempt, finally admits that he is an alien, but that his mission is not to destroy humanity but to save it from its most dangerous impulses, which now threaten the entire planet with annihilation. But the only way to save humanity is to single out a few individuals for experiments that test their capacity to endure suffering. Byung-Gu’s mother was singled out as an ideal test subject because, as the alien executive explains, “physical and mental suffering stresses organisms, forcing them to adapt and develop more quickly.” Indeed, Kang reveals that Byung-Gu and his mother were deliberately subjected to agonizing torment and misery in order to bring the experiments to more advanced stages.

Stunned by the obscene essence of the injunction underlying Kang’s speech—“Forgive me for the suffering and death of your mother, and you and your kind will be rewarded with peace and plenty!”—Byung-Gu reacts to Kang’s words by shooting out a mirror reflecting the face of his prisoner, and then opens fire against his own desk. Although one may account for his acting-out as a kind of admission of failure, since the aliens are revealed to be far less one-sidedly malevolent as Byung-Gu believes, this scene can also be understood as a demonstration of his resistance to the persuasive force of Kang’s argument for the salvational correction of the human species.

Lastly

What is the value of studying hypothetical transformations and imaginary upheavals overtaking fictitious individuals and societies? The speculative context enables the mechanisms that measure and sanction political violence to become properly visible.

The interpretation of serious literary works is more liable to arouse the reader’s moralistic impulses, whereby political violence is likely to be grasped as inexplicable acts of inhuman evil. But when one encounters fictional atrocities, when the victims belong to imaginary societies or to alternate realities, the perspective of the perpetrator, as well as that of the beneficiaries of his or her violence, assume an uncomfortably human proximity to the standpoint of the reader. This is not to relativize actual atrocities or to excuse inhuman acts, but rather to seek a deeper understanding of the persistence of violence in human history, especially in an age that distinguishes itself from the past by its unequivocal condemnation of cruelty and by its embrace of humanitarian values.

Such understanding can only come about by engaging in a speculative activity that has been condemned as imperialist and rendered taboo under the ascendancy of post-structuralist deconstruction: the work of imaginatively inhabiting a certain perspective and seeing the world according to its terms.

The ability to inhabit another perspective is crucial to grasping the mechanisms of political change, for what is being transformed is a specific outlook. The science fiction narratives I study are especially productive of this kind of reflection, as they show how an idea or action plays out within a concrete temporal sequence. We are taken from one distinct point to another, as well as shown the consequences of the action that unfold. As such, these texts evoke the experience of unwilled change that ensures the passing of one epoch into something new and different.

The pressure of tragic necessity is felt in the dangers that confront us in the present: the scarcity of vital resources, catastrophic climate change, and the inertia that afflicts our political and economic systems. The contemporary critique of capitalist society by contrast depends on the health of the economic and political status quo: an oppressive authority that is “strong” is far easier to condemn than one that is weak and caught in the process of dissolution. By contrast, tragedy, as the study of making decisions and suffering consequences, enables us to take the measure of what is intractable and what is transformative.

© 2010 Peter Y. Paik

the justifications for the invasion and occupation of Iraq convey the impression that much of the rhetoric of revolutionary socialism is being straightforwardly deployed on behalf of a radical program to extend democracy and free markets throughout the globe

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If someone began thumbing randomly through this book, I’d hope that it would fall open to page 168–not because that’s where I make a particularly powerful point or lay out my argument, but because it was so much fun to write. It comes near the end of a chapter titled “If you like Ms., You’ll Love Pvt.” (taken from a late 1970s recruiting ad). In this chapter, I argue that the labor-market model essentially created a structural imperative to increase the number of women in the Army, most particularly in “nontraditional” military occupational specialties (MOSs).

Courtesy of US Army

But commanders and policy makers, in their attempts to attract women volunteers, relied heavily on lessons learned during World War II, when women servicemembers were frequently portrayed as sexually promiscuous floozies or Amazons with “unnatural” interests. Well into the 1970s, recruiting attempts stressed old-fashioned notions of respectability, femininity, and excellent prospects for marriage. This presented a bit of a problem: If you want to attract women who want to fix trucks, emphasizing femininity is probably not the best strategy. Pushed by personnel needs, those with authority to do so made a serious attempt to recast the portrayal of women in the army, turning to a language of women’s liberation in all its 1970s inconsistencies and complexities.

Through most of the 1970s, women’s expanding roles were supported by Congress. The Senate passed the Equal Rights Amendment with a vote of 84 to 8 in 1972, in 1975 Congress voted to open all military academies to women, and by the end of the decade—with the first women scheduled to graduate from the nation’s military academies in 1980—the House Armed Services Committee was holding hearings on the use of women in combat.

By the late 1970s, members of Congress were feeling pressure—or finding support—from a growing conservative movement that opposed government-mandated equality and argued that Americans should hold to timeless truths and traditional values that defined the differences between men and women. These hearings reflect that change. I describe the testimony of Mrs. Tottie Ellis of the Eagle Forum, who argued that women were not suited for combat because combat is “violent and dehumanizing. . . in fact, men I have known who were in combat do not even enjoy war movies.” Jeremiah Denton, co-founder of the Coalition for Decency, linked women in the military to “godless Sodom and Gomorrah poison” and psychiatrist Harold Voth testified that women’s “search for an identity and role which permits them to live out a pseudo-male identity” which had led to “social pathology” and national decline.

And if the book happened to fall open one more time, I’d root for page 236. It’s a description of the Army of One recruiting campaign and reactions to it. While criticism of the new campaign came hard and fast (“Has anyone considered,” asked one noted military sociologist, “that ‘An Army of One’ isn’t likely to scare potential enemies?”) and the slogan proved short-lived, no one seems to have understood the logic behind it. The images of Corporal Lovett running through the desert in the commercial that premiered in January 2001, along with the entire “An Army of One” campaign, were parts of an attempt at rebranding. This army wasn’t about benefits and opportunity, not about money for college or the chance to learn computer skills. This was an army of warriors in training. The army’s current emphasis on the “warrior ethos” began well before the attacks of 9/11, and it had very different origins.

Lastly

In the mid-1950s the majority of adult men in the United States were veterans. Today that percentage (male and female) is less than thirteen. That is in large part for a positive reason: no ground war has been fought by mass armies in recent decades. But because the all-volunteer force has long been drawn from a small and relatively self-contained portion of the American population, a huge number of Americans—including many of those most likely to buy works of serious non-fiction—have no significant contact with anyone in military and know little to nothing about it.

Some of the most important and most difficult questions we face as a nation seem to require a basic understanding of America’s military. I hope this book will give those readers a clearer understanding of the contemporary military and its recent history, knowledge that they can use to make their own arguments about the nation’s future.

I also hope, in the wake of the war in Iraq and the current escalation in Afghanistan, that this book contributes to a national discussion about what it means to fight an extended war in which a small number of men and women bear the burden of military service while most of the nation is asked no sacrifice.

In most ways, such a discussion is moot. Short of massive, total war, the United States is not likely to reinstate the draft. There is little public desire; there is no political will. The military has become a powerful advocate for the volunteer force, and in practical terms most analysts agree that a volunteer force provides best for the defense of the nation. Perhaps the reinstitution of the draft (a lottery system with very limited exemptions?) would constrain American military adventurism–but that was precisely the argument the opponents of the Vietnam War made for moving to a volunteer force in the first place.

None of the answers are easy, but the moral complexities need to be acknowledged and debated. In the end, I argue, an institution that once seemed mired in crisis has achieved remarkable successes, both as purveyor of military force and as provider of social good. Nevertheless, in a democratic nation, there is something lost when individual liberty is valued over all and the rights and benefits of citizenship become less closely linked to its duties and obligations.

© 2010 Beth Bailey

The images of Corporal Lovett running through the desert in the commercial that premiered in January 2001, along with the entire “An Army of One” campaign, were parts of an attempt at rebranding. This army wasn’t about benefits and opportunity, not about money for college or the chance to learn computer skills. This was an army of warriors in training. The army’s current emphasis on the “warrior ethos” began well before the attacks of 9/11, and it had very different origins.

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No one can write about Helen of Troy without thinking about the meaning of beauty.

Consider the following statements about Helen’s beauty. Here is Guido delle Colonne writing in the thirteenth century: “Helen was famous for excessive loveliness.” Guido’s phrasing is interesting: Helen is not the most beautiful woman in the world (that would be a compliment: Helen as the absolute of womankind); she is a woman with too much beauty (a hint of a problem: that in this case surplus is deficiency). Here is the Renaissance writer Giovanni Petro Bellori, arguing that Helen did not have enough beauty: “Helen was not as beautiful as they pretended, for she was found to have defects and shortcomings.” Here is the New York Times film critic reacting to Diane Kruger’s portrayal of Helen in the Hollywood film Troy: “she isn’t sufficiently fabulous-looking to be convincing as the face that launched a thousand ships.”

Common to these statements is an economy of surplus and lack: Helen’s beauty is “excessive” or “insufficient.” These binaries are attributed to beauty but they are also, as it happens, properties of narrative. Plenitude and lack are common to both, and the result is the same: desire. In life we call it longing; in narrative it is called suspense.

In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra Enobarbus attempts to describe ancient Egypt’s most beautiful ruler, Cleopatra. Although he can describe everything around her in sumptuous and erotic detail, when it comes to Cleopatra herself he summarizes simply: “she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.”

What is true of Cleopatra is true of Helen and is true of narrative itself: it makes hungry where most it satisfies. Narrative detail is the literary equivalent of the dermatological itch, where one scratch of inflamed skin is too many and one hundred is never enough. Any attempt at literary representation of beauty invites detail (was she blonde? tall? what color were her eyes?) and all details about Helen prove problematic, for reasons related to the binary sketched above. As Susan Stewart put it, in On Longing, “detail . . . does not tell us enough and yet it tells us too much.”

Thus beauty, like its linguistic proxy, detail, paradoxically creates the one thing it tries to forestall: the longing for more. Of all other desires—a good meal, a new car, a bigger house—the fulfillment of the desire coincides with the termination of longing. As Elaine Scarry argued, when the object is acquired or the dream realized, desire ends; beauty, however, renews the longing.

In this sense, the specific narrative problem of detail is a problem of closure. For in attempting to describe and to detail, narrative tries to pin down and to contain. Detail is really an attempt at closure. The history of Helen’s story is a series of attempts to close that story, a closure Helen and her narrative consistently elude and frustrate. Closure is something that beauty, not just Helen’s beauty, resists.

Lastly

What happens when a story is translated—literally, “carried across”—or updated to modern political and cultural conditions?

The rape of Helen was clearly topical in the 1590s when poems and plays about Helen (including several allusions by Shakespeare) abound. These literary retellings of Helen’s story coincide with a change in rape law: in 1597 a statute change made rape a crime against the woman rather than against the male “owner” of the woman (her husband or father).

But what happens when Helen changes ethnicity? (Derek Walcott gives us the first black Helen in his 1997 Caribbean Omeros.) What happens when Helen’s story gets rewritten to whitewash her? (Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway is presented as a latter-day Helen, one who never succumbed to temptation.) What happens when the story foregrounds Helen’s motherhood? (A Victorian novel does this, A Daughter of the Gods, by the unknown female writer, Jane Stanley.) Or when Helen’s story becomes the subject of comedy and parody (as in Offenbach’s operetta La Belle Hélène) or a silent movie (Helen of Troy won an Oscar for its witty intertitles in the first year of the Oscars, 1928)?

Getting to know a story helps us get to know the period that told it.

© 2010 Laurie Maguire

Narrative detail is the literary equivalent of the dermatological itch, where one scratch of inflamed skin is too many and one hundred is never enough.

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The beginning of Chapter Two sets the stage for understanding what an unusual position Twain occupied at the end of his life.

Due to his longevity, Twain had almost become a lost figure, caught between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—comfortable in neither. This tension contributed to the stresses and strains that surfaced in his family. Born two months prematurely on November 30, 1835, Twain’s birthplace was the hamlet of Florida, Missouri, located at the fork of the Salt River. Red-haired Samuel Langhorne Clemens arrived to his parents in a tiny two-bedroom, rented cabin with an outdoor lean-to kitchen. By the fall of 1905, at age sixty-nine, he had become a wealthy resident of lower Manhattan, New York City.

New York City in 1905 boasted the world’s busiest harbor, the biggest ships and longest bridges, the worst slums and overwhelming prosperity. There were elevated trains that crossed rivers and twenty miles of newly completed New York subway with the fare costing just a nickel. Traffic was thick with people, pushcarts, horses, cars and trolleys all jostling for a place in the crowded streets. The largest conglomeration of millionaires in history, who had accumulated gigantic tax-free fortunes, lived in massive homes on tree-lined boulevards. An enormous wave of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy was passing through Ellis Island, changing the city’s ethnic make-up and culture and creating tremendous social and political stresses. New York was the largest Jewish city in the world, the largest Irish city, one of the largest German cities, and home to more than 700,000 Russians. This was Mark Twain’s city and he was its most celebrated citizen, popularly recognized as the “Belle of New York.”

Twain belonged to the world and was the first global celebrity. On December 6, 1905 he celebrated his seventieth birthday at Delmonico’s Restaurant with 170 of his friends and fellow writers. President Theodore Roosevelt sent a speech to be read in his absence, pointing out that Twain “is one of the citizens whom all Americans should delight to honor, for he has rendered a great and peculiar service to America, and his writings, though such as no one but an American could have written, yet emphatically come within that small list which are written for no particular country, but for all countries, and which are not merely written for the time being, but have an abiding and permanent value.” After a banquet lasting five hours, with fifteen speeches given and nine poems read, those in attendance were given a foot-high plaster bust of the honoree. By the close of the evening, there were 171 Mark Twains in the room. This unschooled son of Missouri had become as big as New York City.

Lastly

My ambition for this biography is to encourage a reappraisal of Mark Twain in this centennial year of his death. For too long, the public version of Twain has been the image of a calcified, genteel, white statue that apparently was free of the worries that constitute the human condition. In fact, Twain was utterly human in his struggles as a spouse and parent. At the end of his life, he gave free rein to his feelings of rage and inadequacy, and in his frantic efforts to establish his legacy he reveals his narcissism and insecurity.

If anything, Twain’s literary genius lay in his ability to sublimely capture our common humanity and make us realize that even in the midst of horrendous social evils, it was possible for an unschooled, poor, southern boy to do the right thing when it came to protecting Jim, the only adult who had ever treated him with kindness.

It is time to make Twain human again. The purpose of Mark Twain’s Other Woman is to lift the layers of what has come to be accepted as truth about Mark Twain’s life and to explore what actually existed in the beginning and what finally remained at the end.

© 2010 Laura Skandera Trombley

In the beginning, Twain biography featured politically savvy scholars who avoided controversial topics to insulate themselves from criticism—both from the public who wanted to believe in their literary heroes as well as surviving family members all too ready to sue. Nowadays danger emanates from the opposite end of the academic continuum: biographies with the subtlety of smash-and-grab vandalism.

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Lost the Collective reconstructs the rituals that developed in response to suicides among members of the Bolshevik Party and demonstrates how these practices helped to promote a particular vision of Soviet individuals and society.

Although suicide in Russia was decriminalized in 1917, it remained an act of transgression under the Bolsheviks. Killing oneself violated the party’s code of ethics. It signified the triumph of egoistic impulses over the collectivist spirit and became associated with weakness in the face of life’s trials and tribulations. In other words, suicide functioned as the alter image of the ideal Bolshevik, who remained optimistic, embraced struggle, and realized himself through the collective. Most egregiously, by committing suicide a Bolshevik essentially treated his life as his own, an attitude that violated the party’s prohibition against private property.

Acts of suicide by party members were thus regarded as a kind of sin that revealed the impure soul of the individual. Indeed, one of the most interesting facets of the Bolshevik Party’s reactions documented in the book involves the recasting of religious ideas and practices in secular terms. Instead of violating God the creator, suicides were seen as violating society, which had given birth to them and had the ultimate say over whether they lived or died. As punishment for their misdeeds, party members who killed themselves were publicly condemned and denied funeral escorts or burial in sacred places. In some instances they were even expelled posthumously from the party. Such acts symbolically separated the sick individual from the healthy members. They echoed ecclesiastical laws that forbade the internment of suicides in hallowed ground or stripped the suicide of his or her rights.

The Bolsheviks also reconstructed the suicide’s story through ideologically tinged narratives. Investigators looked above all for the telltale signs that indicated the party member’s moral and political downfall. The reading of decadent literature, drinking and debauchery, frequenting politically suspicious places, or abandoning interest in party work, were all read as signs of alienation from the collective.

One suicide’s comrades, for example, attributed his act to excessive womanizing. This mixing of sex and politics was particularly prevalent in the Red Army. In a modern version of the tale of Adam and Eve, the petit bourgeois woman was cast as a temptress who distracted the party member from his duties by placing the fulfillment of her material needs above the needs of the socialist cause. Torn by guilt and weakened by isolation from the collective the man killed himself as a way out of his dilemma. In the hands of the Bolsheviks, suicide became a marker of the ongoing struggle between the forces of revolution and counterrevolution.

This is what ultimately troubled the Bolsheviks about suicide. Each act suggested the incomplete state of the revolution. Until that moment an unhealthy element among their ranks had been masked or gone undetected by others. The collective rituals that the Bolsheviks constructed around suicide fostered a negative attitude toward self-destruction as an illegitimate response to personal difficulties. They also intensified practices aimed at exposing and diagnosing a person’s inner thoughts and feelings. The end goal was a system that would reveal suicidal individuals before they made themselves—and their political degeneration—known in the most horrific manner.

Lastly

I strongly believe that the study of history is as much a dialogue with the present as with the past. My interests in Soviet responses to suicide are inextricably bound with my interests in our society’s attempts to deal with uncertainty and death. Despite many changes in our technology and our thinking, suicide today remains a riddle. It still haunts the survivors. It still creates a vacuum of meaning that demands filling. It still raises fundamental questions about human agency and responsibility. And it still functions as a catalyst for analyzing our politics, our relationships, and our selves. Moreover, I believe that many of the same anxieties and aspirations that animated the Soviets in their explorations continue to shape the work of our governments, researchers, and community organizations.

My sense of continuity with the past is periodically reaffirmed by stories in the media. For example, a few years ago a group of researchers announced that they had found a possible genetic marker for major depression and suicidal behavior. With this announcement came the promise of preventing suicides through the early identification of at-risk individuals and the development of improved drug treatments. Both are certainly laudable goals. But the research reminded me of Soviet experts’ frustrated attempts to identify the root causes of suicide in the body and of their unshakable belief that the eradication of suicide was a matter of better technologies and greater knowledge.

Viewed broadly, the story of Soviet suicide asks us to reflect upon our medicalized understandings of life and own faith in policy makers and experts. Like the Soviets, many of us have a hard time dealing with uncertainty and desire ever more clarity in the face of an increasingly complex and fast-paced world. Moreover, many of us retain an unspoken belief in the power of the sciences to eventually overcome the murkiness of human nature, which then promises a greater degree of control over fate. While recognizing that the Soviet experience represents a particular expression of these assumptions and desires, Lost to the Collective poses the fundamental question of whether such control is possible or even desirable.

© 2010 Kenneth M. Pinnow

In a modern version of the tale of Adam and Eve, the petit bourgeois woman was cast as a temptress who distracted the party member from his duties by placing the fulfillment of her material needs above the needs of the socialist cause. Torn by guilt and weakened by isolation from the collective the man killed himself as a way out of his dilemma.

A close-up

Earlier, I began to develop a contrast between Wright’s first person plural in 12 Million Black Voices and Roosevelt’s rhetorical performance of “seeing” the economic violence wrought on the poorest “one third of a nation.” Now, I would like to take a closer look at Wright’s “we” via a different comparison, one I develop in the final chapter: that of Time, Inc. board chairman Henry Luce in his famous essay “The American Century,” also published in 1941.

As I mentioned above, Wright’s text is structured around an antagonistic relationship between a narrating “we” that speaks for the titular “black voices” and a “you” that is initially designated as bourgeois and white. At the beginning of the text, the implied white reader is left blindly picking at the “knot” of blackness whose “snarled strands converge from many points in time and space.” By the end, Wright shifts to a different metaphor, of blackness as a “dark mirror,” to emphasize the extent to which white readers are themselves implicated in African American history and vice versa:

Look at us and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives!

What one sees in this dark mirror is not a neatly framed self, but an uncanny mixture of self and other, a nascent “we” whose coalescence is promised but not yet achieved.

The complexity of Wright’s revision of “we, the people” comes into clearer view in contrast to that of Luce, whose “The American Century” was originally entitled “We Americans” and was published in the pages of Life around the time of Wright’s book’s appearance. Luce’s logic is a nearly perfect inversion of Wright’s, assuming the internal coherence and transhistorical persistence of the very “we” whose internal divisions and historical development Wright takes such pains to trace out.

Moreover, Luce’s “we” is explicitly imperial in ways that anticipate the neoconservative ideology of the last several decades. He urges readers to view America, not as a “sanctuary” of democratic ideals but as “the powerhouse from which [these] ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.”

In the final chapter, I examine some ways in which Luce’s flagship publications—Time, Fortune, and especially Life—model this coercive vision of collective identity. I pay special attention to the way Time Inc. publications, no less than the avant-garde work of the period, experimented with new media and new ways of combining images and text. But they did so to nearly opposite political ends, constructing a world in which “we Americans” is a product rather than a process, an answer rather than a question, and outside of history rather than continually produced within it.

Lastly

Like many critics working at the crossroads of media history, modernism, and photography, I found myself peering over the shoulder of early twentieth century cultural critic Walter Benjamin at many points. In closing, I would like to share one particular moment that helped me to keep in view the central aims of my work.

In his brilliant essay “A Brief History of Photography” (1931) Benjamin analyzes the photographic portraits of his German contemporary August Sander, whose collations of German physical and occupational “types” Benjamin found resonant with the cultural moment. Somewhat enigmatically, Benjamin declares in regard to one of Sander’s published collections, “Sander’s book is more than a book of pictures; it is a book of exercises.”

I began to understand the rich implications of Benjamin’s statement as I worked with Depression-era documentary in the United States, observing that documentary books are not valuable as eyewitnesses to a stable social reality but as little thought experiments in a subjunctive mood: Could this be? What if this were? Might this have been? What if I were you?

For Benjamin, Sander’s photographic exercise books presented an alternative to the fascist belief in a “pure” identity that reveals itself fully and immediately to the naked eye. For me, modernist documentary books make similar demands of readers, asking them to see themselves in and through others, implicated in an often traumatic, shared history. It’s my hope that _ American Modernism and Depression Documentary_ can serve as a “book of exercises” in this sense.

© 2010 Jeff Allred

Time Inc. publications, no less than the avant-garde work of the period, experimented with new media and new ways of combining images and text. But they did so to nearly opposite political ends, constructing a world in which “we Americans” is a product rather than a process, an answer rather than a question, and outside of history rather than continually produced within it.

A close-up

Chapter 7, on the topic of the database city, is probably my favorite chapter. In it, I examine the development in Hollywood, California known as Hollywood and Highland. This urban entertainment district is meant to be a representation of Hollywood in Hollywood. It is not simply filled with images of Hollywood’s past; instead, it functions as a platform from which to consume those images. It offers a view of the Hollywood sign from every corner, it opens up into the existing streets, and it references the city’s past without having to be explicit. The development carefully nourishes an active spectator that can assemble and reassemble the city’s references with each turn. This is the database city—a city with no content other than to grant access to content. Hollywood and Highland has adopted the formal characteristics of a database.

Hollywood and Highland is a response to a new kind of spectatorship, one that I call the digital possessive. In digital culture, possession is quite literal—networked media encourage, if not mandate, the possession of thoughts, practices and memories in personal folders, accounts and devices. Think blogs, Flickr, Twitter, etc. Just as information online is assembled and ordered in digital aggregators, in Hollywood and Highland, material structures, physical spaces, narratives, imagery, and other people are assembled and ordered as an urban aggregator—a physical space built to construct a sense of possession and control over urban experience and history.

While Hollywood and Highland is a spectacular example of the database city, the logic of the database and the desire for efficient aggregation is influencing much of the contemporary thinking about new urban developments. To design good urban spaces, we need to consider how technology will be used within those spaces. But the practices of digital consumption are not only changing how we interact with digital media in urban space; they are changing also what we expect from our spaces. Media practices do not end when we turn away from the screen – they continue into other aspects of our lives by transferring expectations of usability from the screen to the urban environment.

Lastly

My book makes an argument about the influence of media on urban design and culture. Too often, cities are designed without considering how people actually experience them. The nature of spectatorship, how it is constructed through media practices, is absolutely essential for designing good cities.

Digital media is already altering the urban landscape. GPS-enabled smart phones, for instance, are making it possible for one’s physical location to factor into their web searches. So whether or not architects and planners are paying attention, the digital possessive will be formative of American urbanism in the foreseeable future.

The real challenge will be in the more subtle changes that the digital possessive implies. Spectatorship is not only the result of direct interaction with technology. In most cases, technology has served primarily as a structuring metaphor for urban looking. The digital possessive will begin to alter how spectators interact with each other, with or without network connection. It will begin to alter how they interact with the built environment, with or without technology. It is imperative for designers, planners, and architects not to mistake spectatorship for the technology that helps shape it. Spectatorship is culture; and the way we design and inhabit cities is a direct reflection of that culture.

The Urban Spectator is about the 20th Century American city. But as more and more people move into cities throughout the 21st century, the experiences born of them will be even more influential on the way we live and on shaping the values that guide our lives.

© 2010 Eric Gordon

It is imperative for designers, planners, and architects not to mistake spectatorship for the technology that helps shape it. Spectatorship is culture; and the way we design and inhabit cities is a direct reflection of that culture.

A close-up

The end of chapter 2, pages 95-100, just before the book’s gallery of photos, deals with one of the biggest questions I faced when doing the research: why, in fact, were Sacco and Vanzetti executed?

It was always assumed that the executions were just a follow-up to their convictions, and the two events, the conviction and the execution, were treated as almost one and the same. But six years passed between the time they were found guilty and the time they were led to the electric chair, and during that period a lot had happened—the entire context of the case had changed. Sacco and Vanzetti went from being anonymous anarchists who barely knew English to being international celebrities and, for some, even folk heroes (for others, they were dangerous terrorists, frauds, criminals, or all three). It wasn’t enough to say that they were executed because they had been found guilty; to execute them in 1927, at the height of the political storm that surrounded them, required a decision. I wanted to know how and why this decision was made.

A member of the French Comité Sacco-Vanzetti collects signatures for a petition to be sent to President Calvin Coolidge and Governor Alvan Fuller, Paris, May 1927. (Photo by Henri Manuel/Courtesy of the Trustees of Boston Public Library/Rare Books.)

In this part of the book I try to answer these questions by telling the story of Georg Branting, a Stockholm attorney who visited the United States in the Spring of 1927 to investigate the case on behalf of “European opinion.” After meeting with many of the protagonists of the story, including Sacco and Vanzetti, Branting became convinced that the men were innocent, as they claimed all along, and that, because of this, the authorities would stop their execution. When that didn’t happen, he came to the grim conclusion that the international pressure exerted on the United States by Europeans, Latin Americans, and others around the world made many Americans in positions of power worry about appearing weak to the rest of the world. This was especially true of Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller, a man with presidential aspirations, who appointed a special advisory commission led by Harvard University President A. Lawrence Lowell, but who chose, at the moment of truth, not to pardon Sacco and Vanzetti. They were executed, in other words, for the same reason they became famous.

This is part of why I argue in the book that, as opposed to what high school and college students read in their history textbooks, Sacco and Vanzetti were executed not in spite of the global protest but rather because of it. In this sense, I think the affair revealed a powerful division among Americans between those who viewed the U.S. as part of an international community, and those who insisted on its principled separateness from the rest of the world. Ironically, by the way, Fuller lost his political gamble, because the Republican Party, fearing to make the Sacco-Vanzetti case an issue in the 1928 presidential election, essentially sidelined him. By 1928 Fuller was out of politics and back at his business, selling automobiles.

Lastly

Sacco and Vanzetti left a number of odd legacies. A lot of people in the United States, Europe, and Latin America still recognize their names. I’ve seen or heard them mentioned in The Sopranos and Sports Illustrated, in novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Phillip Roth, in random conversations. The largest pencil-producing factory in Russia was named after them, and generations of Russian children associated the names Sacco and Vanzetti with the pencils and crayons they used. There was a film in Italy, a tango in Argentina, a song by Joan Baez and Ennio Morricone, a punk band in Germany, a brand of cigarettes in Uruguay. There are streets named after them in Italy and France. They often come up when people give examples of past injustices, or more facetiously, when people want to denote famous duos, as in Abbott and Costello, Jagger and Richards, Sacco and Vanzetti.

I think all this reflects an uncertainty in how they are remembered. Sacco and Vanzetti do not have a clear place in our civic life or historical record. Part of the reason for this has to do with the fact that we still don’t know—and never will know—whether they “did it.”

But in many ways, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair is still with us. Certainly the issues that animated it are very much alive. Americans today still do battle over the issue of immigration, and intolerance toward foreigners is still widespread, sometimes virulent, especially when times are hard. Europeans, Latin Americans, and other non-Americans are still concerned over, and in some cases outright hostile to, America’s presence in the world, and the way Americans handle international politics. And then as now, Americans are still divided over what was called, in Sacco and Vanzetti’s day, “foreign interference” in American affairs.

Whether it is the death penalty, or the health care system, or how to deal with terrorism suspects, or even who should be elected U.S. president, non-Americans have and will continue to have opinions, because the United States is so powerful and what it does domestically reverberates externally. Many Americans bristle at this but many others welcome this. It depends on whether they see the United States as an entity separated in principle from the rest of the world, or as a genuine part of the world—a world in which Americans have a stake in the lives of non-Americans, and vice versa.

This issue divided Americans when Sacco and Vanzetti were what one magazine called “the two most famous prisoners in the world,” and it still divides Americans today. This, I believe, is the context in which the Sacco-Vanzetti affair took place. My book is not an attempt to end the discussion about Sacco and Vanzetti, or to provide a definitive account. My aim was to start a new conversation, one that would not be about guilt or innocence but rather about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair—its significance and place in history.

© 2010 Moshik Temkin

foreign pressure on American authorities—which included everything from riots in the streets, peaceful demonstrations, angry editorials, respectable petitions, appeals from heads of states—both gave Sacco and Vanzetti their chance at clemency and sealed their fate

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The completion in 1884 of the Washington Monument—the great obelisk in the center of the Mall—is the pivotal moment in the book’s larger narrative. While the project began in the early nineteenth century, it wasn’t until a brilliant West Point officer named Thomas Lincoln Casey, from the Army Corps of Engineers, took hold of it in the late 1870s that the monument would finally be finished.

Casey became obsessed with the ancient purity of the obelisk form and the technical challenge of how to inflate the form into a modern electrified skyscraper. Initially dismissing the whole project as the “football of quacks,” Casey soon imposed his own personal vision on it, despite the united opposition of Congress and the art world to the obelisk scheme. He transformed the early-nineteenth century idea of a Revolutionary pantheon into a plain, crystalline shaft equipped with an elevator and observation windows at the top— a technological marvel in rigorously abstract form. How he managed this feat is a tale of engineering and bureaucratic wizardry. For a short while the Washington Monument became the tallest structure in the world. The great shaft introduced a new spatial experience into the Mall landscape and signaled the beginning of the end of the old scheme of public grounds.

In many respects the story is typical of the aesthetic and political controversies that have plagued the memorial landscape from the founding of the nation. Americans have long had a love-hate relationship with the public monument. In the earliest debates Congress had on the subject of a memorial to George Washington, many argued that Washington needed no monument and that monuments were “good for nothing” in a democratic society. The question of the appropriate form was at once a political question, as partisan as any legislative issue then or now.

But due to the scale of the project, and the rigor of Casey’s approach, the Washington Monument became a unique achievement, a game-changing accomplishment. In its final form it had absolutely nothing to do with the wooded grounds and gardens that surrounded it and was a strange departure from the heroic statues that populated the city’s streets and parks.

Visitors who took the elevator to the top found themselves in a new abstract spatial realm, so far removed from the ground that the ordinary benchmarks of human existence no longer seemed to apply. On the ground many continued to wrestle with the monument’s mystifying blankness; they imagined that the monument would one day be “finished” with appropriate inscriptions or narrative scenes. But the real completion of the monument would come when the landscape around it was cleared and transformed, creating a new, more abstract space that would remold the nation’s center in the monument’s image. Without Casey’s magnificent obelisk, the nation’s monumental core might never have emerged.

Lastly

At the end of the book I discuss the paradox of the public monument: meant to be permanent and “timeless,” monuments typically slide into obsolescence.

Even as brilliant a monument as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial has lost some of its original charge as the veterans of that era grow old and the events retreat into ever more distant memory. For this reason the sponsors are now planning a huge underground visitors’ center near Lin’s wall, which will supplement her memorial with museum displays about the war and pictures of the men whose names appear on the wall. But this solution simply raises new questions. Does every war memorial deserve an accompanying museum? And who deserves a monument in the first place? If the twentieth century witnessed a shift from the great hero to the ordinary soldier and even to history’s victims, then which victims merit a name on a wall or a picture in a museum?

Meanwhile the great space of the Mall has already changed radically since its birth in the mid-twentieth century. The Civil War theme of its original design has been overshadowed by a series of major monuments to America’s wars in Europe and Asia. Since the attacks of September 11, the space itself has been carved up by security walls and by the immense new barrier of the World War II Memorial. Yet despite all these changes the monuments that get built continue to be the products of special interest groups that can successfully navigate a byzantine legislative and regulatory process. Change occurs, but in a haphazard, ad hoc way.

To expand the possibilities for democratic debate and representation, the closing pages of Monument Wars propose a moratorium on permanent public monuments in the capital, and a period of experimentation in which many groups and designers would be empowered to erect temporary memorials and installations.

While it is doubtful that this simple proposal will find much support in the current political climate, I am gratified that the book is being read and discussed within the planning bodies that do have responsibility for stewarding the Mall and its monuments. If Monument Wars can make even a modest contribution to a more open and informed national conversation about the landscape of public memory, then it will have done its job.

© 2010 Kirk Savage

without a brilliant West Point officer named Thomas Lincoln Casey, the nation’s monumental core might never have emerged

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In the mid 1870s, thousands of wealthy young people, many no more than eighteen years of age, left their luxurious homes, good schools, and comfortable clothing to live like ordinary workers and peasants in the slums and villages of Russia. Many sewed their own coarse linen apparel, others purposefully sunburned their faces to darken their complexions, and still others learned ordinary trades such as shoemaking, all in order to work and live side by side with the poorest of their countrymen.

Their purpose was twofold: to repent for the sins of the Russian noble and merchant classes, and to preach socialism to those who were meant to be saved. It was an extraordinary time—after a long day’s work on a grimy factory floor or in a baking hot farm field, Russian radicals would bring out their socialist pamphlets or even the Bible and speak to peasants and workers of the coming revolution against the exploiters, and the joy that was to follow. Sadly, most peasants and workers found socialism incomprehensible at best and pernicious at worst, and the movement crumbled within a few short years.

Every historian of Russia knows about the “to the people” movement, but I wanted to bring it to life for the general reader. I wished to capture all of the intoxicating hope of the initial days of the movement, and also its subsequent collapse into disillusionment and despondency. To me, the movement is a snapshot of the tragedy of Russian socialism—a tragedy of good intentions gone astray.

On the one hand, I want the reader to appreciate the noble self-sacrifice of those Russians who sought desperately to alleviate the suffering of the poorest among them. On the other hand, I wish to make it clear that it was fatal folly for socialists to ignore the voices of those they wished to save. Socialism proposed a clear, elegant, and rational solution for the inequality and oppression of imperial Russia. But few stopped to ask the oppressed what they thought.

Lastly

I hope that Angel of Vengeance will help a reader understand the essential complexity of the phenomenon of terrorism.

Too often, terrorists are defined by what they oppose or what they hate. The hatred is real, of course, but most terrorists, even modern terrorists, are equally motivated by what they desire. In Vera’s case, the ultimate dream was a world of equality, prosperity, and peace—where all of the injustice of the present world would pass away. It was not anger or hatred, but this dream, which she believed was ultimately worth killing for, and dying for.

In the mind of Vera Zasulich, her violence was “angelic,” because its aim was holy. Only later did she discover that terror in the name of virtue was an ill-fated project.

© 2010 Ana Siljak

it was fatal folly for socialists to ignore the voices of those they wished to save. Socialism proposed a clear, elegant, and rational solution for the inequality and oppression of imperial Russia. But few stopped to ask the oppressed what they thought

A close-up

Half way through the book I make the argument that Theodore Roosevelt and some of his distinguished contemporaries can be thought of as conservatives. TR never needed to make money for himself (he inherited a fortune) and he exhibited many of the characteristics of a European aristocrat: disdain for the grubbiness of business, a love of the martial virtues, a high sense of honor, and a belief that war is inevitable and glorious. He was a first-rate hunter, believed in the strenuous life, and jumped at the chance to fight in the Spanish-American War. No president has matched him as a vivid and evocative writer: he was an excellent naturalist and a first-rate historian. His histories of the early Republic show the imposition of his conservative judgments on the first decades of American history. He gave high praise to Alexander Hamilton but showed nothing but contempt for Thomas Paine (“that filthy little atheist”). Strong for Washington, he was skeptical about Jefferson.

Among TRs friends and contemporaries was Elihu Root, the New York Senator who was dismayed by passage of the 17th Amendment, which transferred the election of senators from the state governments to the entire electorate. Like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Root was too proud to grovel to the electors, and resigned his seat rather than run for re-election. The New Republic bade him good riddance, adding that “no man can lead a people who has his back to the future.” Ironically, that’s just what a conservative should do; look backwards to the rich and complex lessons of the past while moving cautiously into the future.

Another contemporary was Alfred Thayer Mahan, author of The Influence of Sea Power on History. Mahan also thought that war was inevitable and that the United States needed to be sure that when war came America would fight at an advantage, with the strongest possible force and the most up-to-date weapons. At a Hague peace conference in 1907 he urged his fellow American delegates not to accept the principle of international arbitration, and not to favor the outlawing of poison gas shells. Such commitments would actually put America at an awful disadvantage, he told them. When it came to the point, unscrupulous regimes would use the shells and would reject arbitration, forcing an America that had hamstrung itself through credulity to fight at a disadvantage.

Lastly

I finished the book shortly before the 2008 election and it came out shortly afterwards, when the American conservative movement had suffered a severe check with Obama’s victory and the Republican Party’s defeat. Reviewers and interviewers have all asked me what I make of the current situation, whether Sarah Palin is the future of the GOP, and what will happen next. My answer is: the more you study history, the more you realize how hopeless it is to try to predict the future.

I have also often been asked: who are the real conservatives? There is no simple answer to that question. You could take the view that nothing has done more to transform the world in the last 200 years than industrial capitalism, and that to describe its supporters as “conservatives” is an obvious contradiction. But most defenders of capitalism do call themselves conservatives, largely because they see their job as to defend it against various forms of economic collectivism. My job as an historian is to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. If the champions of capitalism do in fact call themselves conservatives, my job is to explain why, rather than try to contradict them.

Another question I face nearly every time I write and speak on this topic is: are you a conservative? The answer is a mixture of yes and no. On the one hand I grew up in Britain during its long flirtation with socialism and always believed in the essential rightness of the National Health Service. That makes me a lefty by American standards. On the other hand I became a passionate anti-Communist after reading the work of Solzhenitsyn in the 1970s, and I believe equally strongly in the essential rightness of free-market capitalism, which has done more than anything else to enrich the world and liberate the masses from misery and poverty. That makes me a conservative, at least of a kind. So does my skepticism about the perfectibility of human nature. I agree with many of the people I wrote about that we are all sinners and that we need to live with institutions that recognize this reality and impose necessary constraints on us.

© 2010 Patrick Allitt

Reviewers and interviewers have all asked me what I make of the current situation, whether Sarah Palin is the future of the GOP, and what will happen next. My answer is: the more you study history, the more you realize how hopeless it is to try to predict the future.

A close-up

I think in some sense any portion of the book will give a sense of it at the level of the writing, the way it wants to talk about its subjects. And it’s composed in relatively small sections, a few pages each. But I’m not sure any single passage would get at the arguments or the motion of the book. 1989 builds its case stone by stone—if you’ll forgive the wall metaphor!

For me part of the pleasure is watching the import of some isolated moment—for that’s what pop gives us, isolated moments—slowly become visible as part of a larger dynamic. But I suppose there are a couple favorite parts. The Jesus Jones song, “Right Here, Right Now,” gets taken up twice—once in the Introduction and once at the beginning of Part II. If one were to put these two passages together, one would get a sense of the approach, and how the book develops its account.

Alternately, I’m fascinated by the history of the song “Listen to Your Heart,” by Roxette. There are a couple sections at the end of Part I, in Chapter Four. It’s an example of a song that more or less defines schematic pop cliché, albeit really well-done. One naturally assumes it’s a sort of cipher: catchy, generic, hum it for three weeks and move along, nothing to see here. And yet its historical place is astoundingly rich and particular. This was the Number One song on the charts when the Wall came down. But that’s merely the beginning of its strange relevance, of its unique place in the development of the music biz, and its implausible role in the politics of central Europe.

Lastly

What sometimes seem like complete episodes turn out to extraordinarily partial, to be awaiting their complement. Some might say that 1989 was answered a dozen years later, the fall of the Wall answered by the fall of the Towers. It seems right to say, at least, that the period 1989-2001 suddenly became visible as a distinct era, a sunny “Pax Americana” (war-filled as every other Pax) in which the US was unchallenged as a global power. But this period was not summer so much as autumn for the US empire. It’s probably more accurate to consider the answering event to be the economic collapse of 2008: “capitalism’s 1989,” let’s call it. Not the end of an idea, but its discrediting on a global scale.

And as a result the very terms that were disallowed, lost, rendered unspeakable in 1989—“communism,” “socialism” even “class”—have returned. They’ve returned in part as mock-up demons for political hysterics. But also as serious topics of conversation: one is at least able to entertain “the communist hypothesis” without appearing purely as a quaint recidivist.

The book is in many ways about the paradoxical feeling which contains both the exultation of triumph, of overcoming, of the end of a struggle—but also the loss of something instantly out of reach, and the haunting feeling it might still matter. This is what is now returning, bit by bit. The book’s topic, the events of 1989: in the moment it all seemed exclusively like the end of a long story, a denouement. But from another perspective it’s merely the preface.

© 2010 Joshua Clover

The Jesus Jones song itself knows about Francis Fukuyama. But not just that. I think it’s cognizant of the famous passage from Ulysses where Stephen Dedalus says that history is “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Which is in turn Joyce working through Hegel and Marx.

A close-up

Here are my suggestions for browsing Clash of Extremes. Begin with the Introduction: it provides a brief overview and roadmap for the rest of the book. Then take a look at Chapter 4, “Rise of the Lake Economy.” It’s right at the heart of the changes that transformed the North. It’s a chapter filled with portraits of the important, colorful individuals who spoke for the districts near the Great Lakes. Among those featured are Joshua Giddings, “Long John” Wentworth (one of the few lawmakers taller than Lincoln), Benjamin Franklin Wade, and Lewis Cass. The chapter also discusses the emergence of a peculiarly Northern strand of “nationalism”—a belief that “what’s good for the North is good for the entire nation.” That self-serving philosophy would guide the Republicans in the decades after 1860.

Clash of Extremes is an economic interpretation that takes antislavery very seriously. The fifth chapter, “The Campaign Against Slavery,” portrays such activists as William Lloyd Garrison, Salmon Chase, Charles Sumner, and Gerrit Smith. These pages explore why such crusaders had only a limited impact on the North and why moral concerns remained subordinate to economic ones.

After that, if you are still browsing, explore topics that you find intriguing. You might examine Andrew Jackson’s role in party formation (Chapter 1); follow the activities of Robert Barnwell Rhett in leading the campaign for secession (Chapter 10); or see how Ulysses Grant handled the battle against Klan violence (Chapter 13).

Lastly

Among the joys of writing Clash of Extremes—an undertaking that took more than a dozen years—were the exchanges I had with other historians. I am grateful to the many individuals who read the manuscript and provided carefully reasoned critiques. I’ve brought some of that dialogue into the text, for example in discussions of the arguments about the relative importance of antislavery and economics in shaping the North, and in an examination of the various reasons—including the defense of slavery, hysteria, and the breakdown of parties—that scholars have put forth to explain secession.

That dialogue continues. Hence I’ve established a website that readers are invited to visit: www.clashofextremes.com. It provides links to all the reviews, blogs, podcasts, and videocasts dealing with my book. It also includes my response to several of the critiques set forth since the book’s publication.

© 2010 Marc Egnal

a belief that “what’s good for the North is good for the entire nation” would guide the Republicans in the decades after 1860

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There are 170 illustrations in Le Corbusier and the Occult. And they are not just pretty pictures. Some of them tell stories in their right.

One reviewer said that he could not understand the relevance of such a picture as the late nineteenth-century photograph of a Chaux-de-Fonnier boy in a Biedermeier apartment, looking wistfully past the net-curtains at the world outside. And, yes, the boy in the photograph is not Jeanneret. But the photo is emblematic of what it would have been like for an ambitious child to grow up in exactly that kind of stifling petty bourgeois milieu in La Chaux-de-Fonds with its drapes, crystal gold-fish bowls, aspidistras and all the associated mental baggage: a domestic etui as described by Walter Benjamin.

Then there are photographs in the book that provide evidence and replace written text: these photographs reveal history. Such are the images of Masonic rituals.

Interior of the Masonic lodge of La Chaux-de-Fonds, La Loge L’Amitié

Le Corbusier and the Occult is an intensely visual book. You can flip through it as if through a storyboard and you will get the narrative. I am deeply grateful to the MIT Press—and in particular to Roger Conover, my commissioning editor. It is a joint achievement, in fact, that Le Corbusier and the Occult became a “concept” book worth collecting—even if you were not to read all the words.

Lastly

I write in the introduction that it is now up to others to follow up the hypotheses, research methods, and historiographical approaches I outline, in order to prove, improve or disprove my research findings.

Hayden White (in his classic book, Metahistory) expresses the desire for a historiography that embodies contemporary ethical ideas. This book embodies my ethical ideas about the importance of historical research methodologies for cross-cultural understanding.

But I also hope that my Burckhardt-like notion of historiographical context will have an effect on architectural history and on our way of thinking about modernism in terms of its underlying regional cultures. There exist other cultures and other ways of being that must be considered and respected if we want to understand architecture.

In 1976, Isaiah Berlin said of Herder, another Freemason: “He deeply hates the forces that make for uniformity, for the assimilation, whether in life or in the books of historians, of one culture or way of life to another. He conscientiously looks for uniformities, but what fascinates him is the exception.”

© 2010 Jan Kenneth Birksted

Eclecticism is not what makes Jeanneret’s work inexplicable—it is precisely its basic structural feature. The eclecticism of Jeanneret’s art and architecture is isomorphic to a symbolic system that is also eclectic.

A close-up

The recent earthquake in Haiti echoed—on a much larger scale—the events of Hurricane Katrina, provoking a depressingly familiar reaction from the authorities responsible for militarizing or “securitizing” relief efforts.

In Chapter 7 of Political Affect, I look at how a racialized fear contributed to the delay in government rescue efforts in Hurricane Katrina until sufficient military force could confront thousands of black people in New Orleans; the government's racialized fear flew in the face of the massive empathy of ordinary citizens, a communal solidarity that lead them to rescue their friends, neighbors, and simple strangers until they were forced to stop by government order.

The Katrina chapter has the widest angle of approach of the three case studies. Deleuze’s ontology of self-organizing material systems not only uses the same concepts to think about natural and social systems, it thereby shows how they can interact. I begin the chapter with a study of the “elemental” factors of the hurricane event. I first examine the land and the river to examine the precarious state of Louisiana’s coast. Flood-proofing the Mississippi river has starved the bayous of their annual dose of rich alluvial sediments, while navigation channels for oil company boats have introduced salt water far into the wetlands, upsetting the balance required for their growth and maintenance.

I then look at the sun, the wind, and the sea in the formation of hurricanes as meteorological systems. These natural factors of the earth’s thermal regulation system are also key factors in Louisiana’s history: the trade winds and Gulf Stream enabled the Atlantic triangular trade system, while sugar (a bio-usable form of solar energy) was a key crop in both Saint Domingue/Haiti and Louisiana.

Next, I examine the role a racialized fear of a black slave uprising has played in Louisiana history, especially the Pointe Coupee conspiracy trial of 1795. At the height of both the Haitian and French Revolutions, a group of black slaves and poor whites conspired to rebel against the white power structure. The conspiracy unraveled, but only the blacks were put on trial, effectively turning a Jacobin political revolt into a racialized revenge fantasy.

The book then briefly reviews recent affective neuroscience evidence of increased amygdala action in racial perception; I speculate as to the racial undertones of the decision to stop the spontaneous rescue effort. In particular, I look at the rumors of shots at rescue helicopters and the subsequent echo of the “Black Hawk Down” episode in Somalia, as well as the rumors of black men sexually assaulting “tourists” (a code word for “whites”).

The political philosophy framework of the chapter comes out as I juxtapose the way in which pundits indulged a rhetoric of Hobbesian fantasy, when the reality was much more Rousseauean. In New Orleans, there was very little, if any, atomized anti-social predation; there was instead massive and spontaneous solidarity born out of empathy for threatened lives. If Hobbes was present at all in New Orleans, he was there beforehand in the atomizing practices of neoliberal capitalism, and afterward in the neoconservative militarization of rescue efforts. During the storm and the days of solidarity following it, he was absent.

Lastly

I hope that Political Affect will benefit both political philosophy and cognitive science by placing affective cognition in a political context. Cognitive science benefits by appreciating negative affects as well as the positive cognitive aspects of culture. It is true, as Andy Clark in particular has shown, that cultural forms and technological products can be “props” and “scaffolds” for our thinking. But not all cultural forms empower subjects. Depending on your developmental path, cultural practices can disempower you emotionally, just as they deny you access to heuristic resources. On the other hand, political philosophy benefits by stepping back from a focus on the rational subject and understanding how we sometimes respond to social triggers with decisions mediated by fear, anger, anxiety, and sadness; or even, at other times, with blind panic and rage.

Not all affects are negative, however, so we need to rethink human nature in terms of our capacity for love and empathy (what Aristotle would call philia). Theories of human nature are a political battleground, and we cannot be intimidated by the cheap cynicism and blustering scientism of the Right. For too long, the Left has adopted social constructivism to fight racist and sexist constructions of human nature. But in the meantime the neoliberal Right has distanced itself from old-fashioned racism and sexism to put forth a version of human nature as the individualist, competitive, utility-maximizing rational agent, an agent they claim is the result of natural selection in ultra-Darwinian competition.

But the neoliberals’ monopoly on biological discourse is overthrown by new research. We have to have the courage to claim that current evolutionary biology and developmental psychology show that human nature is prosocial in its default setting.

Similarly, in their overreaching claim to be the inheritors of the classical liberals, neoliberals open the door to rehabilitating the theory of moral sentiments proposed by Adam Smith and David Hume. The political challenge of the new view of human nature is to extend the reach of prosocial impulses beyond the in-group, protect them from the negative emotions, and build on them to genuine altruism.

All this is not to deny the selfish nature of the basic emotions of rage and fear. The key to a fruitful Left approach to human nature is the study of how such selfish, negative emotions are manipulated, or, more positively, how a social order can be constructed to minimize them and to maximize positive affects. I hope Political Affect can contribute to that project.

© 2010 John Protevi

During the Katrina storm and the days following it, pundits indulged a rhetoric of Hobbesian fantasy. The reality was much more Rousseauean. There was very little, if any, atomized anti-social predation in New Orleans; there was instead massive and spontaneous solidarity born out of empathy for threatened lives.

A close-up

I’ve developed an analytical framework in which politicians and bureaucrats mainly respond to demands from economic interest groups in deciding trade policy. Institutions and culture do matter, but only idiosyncratically. Ultimately, it is economic self-interest that plays out in the political arena.

The book traces the pattern of the negotiation of several trade agreements. The substantive chapters devote much space to the political struggles that ultimately define the design of an agreement. Trade policy seems like a dry subject, but for the people involved, livelihoods are at stake, giving the process a surprisingly colorful and emotional character. Political action ranges from sit-ins in front of Japanese Ministries to attempted self-immolation by Korean farmers to the heartwarming invitation offered to trade bureaucrats to visit a pig farm to see the plight of farmers with their own eyes.

The Japanese cases are particularly interesting. Their first trade agreement was signed with Singapore, who conveniently had almost no trade barriers. And yet, even here, agricultural protectionism almost led to a failure of the negotiations, because Singapore exports aquarium goldfish. Although the negotiations with Singapore were just supposed to be a gentle trial run, they already foreshadowed the intense resistance that an FTA with Mexico would run into. The sensitive issue is almost always agriculture. But given the asymmetries between the partners—Mexico still needed Japanese investment more than Japan needed Mexico as a production site—the most competitive exports from the developing country are often excluded from the deal.

Clearly, preferential trade agreements are often brought about at the behest of a very narrow range of actors. The EU-Mexico agreement was first and foremost a deal to protect the interests of one multinational firm—Volkswagen—and its chain of suppliers. Volkswagen is not only an industrial giant in Europe, but also one of the biggest employers in Mexico. Although present in Mexico since the 1960s, the company found itself at a severe disadvantage once NAFTA had come into force. Mexico had previously offered a variety of tariff benefits to foreign manufacturers, but in the NAFTA negotiations, US trade officials had managed to have all of these banned and new barriers erected. The primary targets were Japanese and European manufacturers. Volkswagen supported an FTA to counter these measures, and largely succeeded. But neither European nor Mexican exporters gained much additional access to the other’s market.

The characters that emerge as heroes in these cases are often the developing countries’ negotiators. Chilean and Mexican trade officials can hold their own against any highly-paid Washington lawyer or école nationale—trained European Commission official. Nonetheless, what they can achieve is severely limited by their country’s relative position in the global economy.

Lastly

The integration of developing countries into the world economy is a defining feature of globalization, and North-South trade agreements are where much of this plays out. For some, these trade agreements are a path to economic development after the policies of import-substitution have failed. But as politics and power intrude, the benefits that economic theory promises are hard to obtain. With this in mind, many critics of globalization have set their aims on the WTO. My book shows that the WTO is almost a sideshow by now, compared to these countless preferential agreements. But for developing countries, the WTO actually promises greater economic gains. What’s worse, by satisfying the interests of multinational firms, these bilateral deals actually erode the political support for broader, non-discriminatory free trade.

Talk of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the decline of the West aside, the global economy is still characterized by stark asymmetries of power. It is not economic globalization itself but the politics of it that reinforce these asymmetries. North-South agreements reflect this. They are primarily a competition between economic giants. Yet with this insight, we can start to think about solutions that spread the economic gains more widely.

© 2010 Mark S. Manger

North-South PTAs create a competitive dynamic that draws in ever more countries into the trend toward discriminatory trade.

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While most of my book is about the TRC as performance rather than artistic performances about the TRC, the final chapter returns to the aesthetic realm by examining Philip Miller’s REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony. The controversy and production challenges surrounding the REwind cantata are quite revealing of contemporary South African ambivalence about the past, and how the work of the TRC remains both unresolved and ongoing. The composer immersed himself in the raw archival material from the hearings, especially the sound recordings. What emerges is the potency of performance, the nuance of meaning in a hesitation, an inflection, in the grain of the voice.

The cantata provided yet another iteration of those TRC stories that were performed and embodied, and like the hearings themselves, it relied upon the presence of an audience to receive and be part of the process. Ultimately it is this encounter between speaker and audience that most expresses what made the commission so extraordinary: it demanded face-to-face encounters between witness and audience, an apt format for expressing the Zulu notion of ubuntu upon which the TRC is based. “A person is a person through other people” says ubuntu, and it is through performance that such a concept is fully realized.

Lastly

By viewing the TRC as performance we can see the potential for such forums as truth commissions to dramatize the complexity of the present’s relationship with the past, especially in places that have experienced massive, state-sponsored violations of human rights. Performance can provide a necessary corrective to the often-narrow epistemologies that often govern such bodies in terms of statement-taking protocols, investigative and corroborative processes, and published findings.

The next set of questions Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission raises is how much we can generalize South Africa’s experience to other forums of transitional justice elsewhere in the world. A performative public truth commission made sense for South Africa, both because of the country’s history of spectacular political trials during the early years of apartheid, and because of the unique constellation of performers who brought South Africa’s TRC into being: the charisma and showmanship of key interlocutors such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the way South Africa as a multi-lingual state necessitated the prominence of language interpreters who were, essentially, the first actors to re-perform testimony. But how does the TRC’s embrace of public performance translate elsewhere in the world? Does South Africa provide a model that can be replicated elsewhere? If so, how? If not, why not? This is where I hope other scholars will take up and extend my work by applying it to other geographic locations.

When I first started research in 2002, my topic was decidedly politically incorrect in South Africa. One of my hopes is that this book might be part of a fresh reconsideration of the TRC by South Africans, one that moves beyond a narrowly evaluative mode. While outside the country the TRC is generally celebrated as a great success, South Africans are profoundly ambivalent about their experience with transitional justice. The TRC is seen as being emblematic of the morally and politically problematic compromises that brought about a new dispensation as well as of the failures and disappointments of the post-apartheid era.

Whether we think of the TRC was a success or failure, the TRC did put into the public record an extraordinary amount of testimony and information from people who had long been excluded from representation at all. So I think the commission deserves reconsideration as an archive, as a repository that tells us much beyond what the commission’s narrow mandate was meant to achieve.

I also hope this book will lead to a revaluation of the TRC’s rich audio-visual archive. This record is dense, evocative, and voluminous, but also neglected and imperiled. The analogue audio and VHS tapes are now quite old and fragile. They document what may well prove to be one of the richest records of the TRC’s complex cultural work. Ironically it is artists—not scholars—who have recognized this archive’s importance.

© 2010 Catherine M. Cole

performance has served as a potent and complex forum for negotiating rapid cultural, political and social changes on the African continent in the 20th and 21st centuries

A close-up

There are two episodes, in chapters two and seven, that I hope will reward the patience of the reader. Two duels, one in 1880 and the other in 1894, mark the apogee and the decline of the formalized use of violence among Mexican elites. In the first one, opposed views about the incoming presidential election lead to an increasingly acerbic polemic between two newspapers, La Patria and La Libertad. The editor of the former, Ireneo Paz, challenged a writer of the latter, Santiago Sierra, on the mistaken assumption that he had authored a particularly virulent column in La Libertad. From the balconies of each newsroom, as both had offices on the same street in Mexico City, they dared each other to back up their words with actions, and their seconds arranged a meeting in a forest outside Mexico City.

Paz had participated in the war against the French and the conservatives as a supporter of the caudillo Porfirio Díaz, and was a seasoned journalist and printer; Sierra was a young and promising poet whose family came from Yucatán and had close connections with Díaz. Both were very similar in their romantic and bohemian attitudes about freedom and sincerity. In the duel, both missed in the first round, but their seconds, including the journalist who had really written the offending words, forced them to be serious. Sierra died and Paz could only apologize to the victim’s brother, Justo, as he arrived late to the field of honor. Nobody was prosecuted, Paz continued his career as a printer although he never regained the friendship of Díaz, while Justo Sierra decided to quit journalism and devote himself to education and literature, eventually becoming one of the most important historians and ministers of education in the Mexico’s history.

The second duel reflects the changes that took place in public culture around the idea of honor. As he was entering the home of the Barajases, a socialite couple with deep connections in government and the elite, colonel Francisco Romero heard Stamp Administrator José Verástegui make a disparaging remark about him to Ms. Barajas. After a complicated series of negotiations, a duel was arranged and Romero, who was a very good marksman, killed Verástegui, whose ample body offered an easy target for the dueling pistol.

The Verástegui-Romero duel. Engraving by José Guadalupe Posada (no date). Reproduced in the book on page 230.

In contrast with other cases, and perhaps because of Verástegui’s position in the administration, this time those involved were prosecuted. As Romero and the seconds were members of Congress, the case was discussed on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies and they were stripped of their parliamentary immunity. The trial was the occasion for a debate in the courtroom and the press. In addition to the revelation that the two duelists were competing for the affection of Ms. Barajas, whose husband had to testify, the scandal elicited public criticism to the very idea of honor as a value that was worth a man’s life. Romero was sentenced to prison, although quickly pardoned by Díaz. But the case clearly signaled the shift from a romantic notion of personal integrity, in which a clean conscience and a good name was worth life itself, to a positivist view of honor as a good that the state could protect, and therefore should not be placed above the authority of Díaz and the law.

Lastly

It is difficult, even risky, to predict how a history book will be used by its readers. I have always been wary of history books that present information about great men intended to serve as example for contemporary decision-makers. It is much more fun—although it probably sells fewer copies—to try to understand how the very category of “great man” came to be.

The emergence and hegemony of public men in Mexico has its own history, and I hope The Tyranny of Opinion provides a useful path for a critical reading of it. More importantly, perhaps, the book shows the connections between public life and other, less prestigious but more intimate terrains of culture and social relations. One, alluded by the title, is the anxiety that the protection of honor imposed on men and women of all classes: it was not possible to avoid responding to any direct or indirect statement that undermined one’s reputation, whether it happened in the newspaper, the bar, the theater, the sidewalks or the market. It was a constant vigilance that in some cases resulted in the need to use violence or seek the protection of the police, and was always economically and emotionally costly.

I tried to rethink politics as an object of study. The political history of Mexico and other Latin countries has too often been told as one of the naked exercise of power by the elites over the subaltern. In these views, class exploitation, racial discrimination, foreign pressures are some of the forces that ultimately explain the permanence of inequality and authoritarianism. I hope to contribute to a growing body of Latin American historiography that, against these views, contends that Latin America was, from the beginning of independent life, a territory of struggle for democracy, full citizenship and freedom of speech. It is the permanence and modalities of that struggle that needs to be explained, rather than our superficial contemporary views about the region as an instance of failed modernity.

I argue, in sum, that honor, even violence, played a positive role in building an autonomous space for political debate for Mexican citizens in the late nineteenth century. But it came at a very high cost: the exclusion of women from public life and, indirectly, the justification of violence against them when their autonomous words or actions were thought to undermine the authority of men. Mexican women were able to vote only in 1953, and sexual violence has plagued everyday life up to our days. Both facts are related in that they are based on the premise that the voice of women should not be too loud in public settings, be it the press, political campaigns, or courtrooms.

© 2010 Pablo Piccato

Throughout independent Latin America, the public sphere emerged as a more politicized field than in Western Europe; a field where disputes, sometimes violent, centered from the very beginning on sovereignty and representation, but also on personal reputations—central issues in societies emerging from three hundred years of colonial domination.

A close-up

On page 149 I start to describe the Disco Demolition rally in Chicago that occurred just a few days before Jimmy Carter gave his speech. The rally is a wonderful portrait of a chaotic America—youth streaming onto a baseball field after thousands of disco records have just been blown up amidst orgiastic chants of “DISCO SUCKS!” The chaos—stoned teenagers setting a baseball field on fire—gives the reader a sense of where America was at the time, chaotic, conflicted, and unruly. But it’s also important because disco was so central to defining 1970s American culture.

Disco had started early in the decade in a marginalized, predominantly African-American and gay urban music scene. By 1979, disco was mainstream and literally everywhere. But there was something about disco, especially in its later and more commercial renditions, that seemed fake and superficial. The kids who chanted “Disco Sucks” weren’t necessarily even aware of what they were doing. But they were showing how fed-up Americans had become with the state of their culture, among other things.

The Disco Demolition Rally gives a nice sense of just how wild things were in America at the time, with murders and riots occurring on the gas lines that were getting longer and longer. 1979 makes you realize that the chaos of the 1960s never really ended; it just turned uglier.

Lastly

I hope the book helps us re-explore what were the 1970s.

The Carter presidency should not be dismissed as a blip in time before Ronald Reagan assumed power in the 1980s. Carter had a unique vision for America’s role at home and abroad, one worth remembering as our country comes out of a very conservative period in our more recent past. Jimmy Carter’s sense that America must have a sense of humility, a realization that its power is real but also evanescent, is crucial to rethinking what we should be today. So a speech from 1979 becomes, in a way, a chance to reassess a path that we didn’t take but that we can take today.

Clearly the language that Carter used in the speech and the themes that resonated throughout it are still important today. In fact, President Obama’s inaugural address had many similar lines. Obama spoke of a “crisis of confidence” existing in America. He talked about the need to learn some hard truths about the state of our democracy. Like Carter, Obama has a deep interest in the theological teachings of Reinhold Niebuhr—who emphasized that humans are sinful and naturally self-interested. Niebuhr believed that only humility and self-inquisition could potentially prevent us from doing bad things in the world—and even still we’d likely do bad things.

Whereas Ronald Reagan used the language of America as the chosen land—something he shared with the Christian right of Jerry Falwell, and that today Sarah Palin consistently references—Carter projected a vision of America that was humble. Carter thought that America should never think of itself in terms of “chosen” or “blessed” (the oil crisis itself showed that we weren’t). So too does Obama. And I think that a vision of America as humbled by the complexities of the world is a vision that we’re rediscovering today. As a historian, I have tried to write a book that recollects how we once had a leader with that language and how he came to decide to use that language.

© 2010 Kevin Mattson

1979 makes you realize that the chaos of the 1960s never really ended; it just turned uglier.

A close-up

The preface provides a perspective for the book, as well as an explanation of the structure of each chapter, so that might be the appropriate place to start browsing.

The prologue (subtitled “Suburban Beginnings”) also helps set the stage for much of the writing. There I describe my first job as a biologist, working on the sub-arctic tundra of Cape Churchill, Manitoba and encountering a wide array of wildlife, including polar bears. Later in the prologue I introduce the coyote, and what the species means to our society and what it represents in terms of how we now view nature, and how nature continues to infiltrate our lives, independent and indifferent to our wants and desires.

The prologue also introduces the idea of the dichotomies that proliferate when the worlds of humans and wildlife merge. Although we tend to think of human and wildlife realms as separate, they are indeed one world; we share one planet.

I have been fortunate enough to experience the mysteries and beauties of nature in different biomes in the world, and I portray these in the introductory vignettes at the beginning of each chapter. These should give the reader a feel for that aspect of the writing. Although these opening narratives are connected in some way to the chapter, they could be considered stand-alone pieces.

To me, all of the issues discussed in the book come down to our collective philosophies, feelings, and actions toward the land. Because our lives are so busy, our time is filled with so many gadgets, and we have grown accustomed to so many conveniences, I think it is easy to forget, or at least take for granted, the reliance we have on the land. So the last chapter, “A Suburban Land Ethic,” embodies probably the book’s most important message.

My ideas regarding the land come from Aldo Leopold’s writings, particularly Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic” (in A Sand County Almanac). I think it is worth repeating today what Leopold advocated several decades ago.

Lastly

The coyote is an important icon or symbol to our society, and to the societies in North America that came before us. For example, our relationship with predators like coyotes can be seen as emblematic or representative of our relationship will all of nature. This, in turn, leads to the theme of the dichotomies that we face in life and in nature, which appear often in the book: We cherish and fear nature; we preserve it yet exploit it; we try to live our lives sustainably and yet with such a profusion of consumer goods and services that we strain the ecological systems upon which we depend.

At times, my writing may have gotten almost too personal. I hope this will not be seen as self-indulgent but rather as an attempt to put our continuing struggle to understand our place in nature on personal terms. The issues I write about are not restricted to those who might call themselves environmentalists or conservationists—they are rather both a challenge and an opportunity for everyone in our society.

A friend who read the book thought that I may be too optimistic regarding our ability to understand our place in nature, formulate a land ethic, preserve open space and wildlife habitat, and live a more sustainable life. In the face of so many global crises, such as depleting oil reserves, climate change, an exponentially growing human population, and unending wars, it may be difficult to maintain a level of optimism. However, I have continually been amazed and impressed at the resourcefulness and ingenuity of people to seek and implement solutions. It is with that hope that I ended Coyote at the Kitchen Door.

© 2010 Stephen DeStefano

Although we tend to think of human and wildlife realms as separate, they are indeed one world; we share one planet.

A close-up

Pistols! Treason! Murder! contains numerous original illustrations, which I scripted and storyboarded, and which were created by Dan Hallett. The one reproduced here, titled The Wounds of Giulio Cazzari, accompanies the title chapter. It depicts in allegorical form the assassination of Giulio Cazzari, one of Vano’s numerous victims.

Vano’s costume here is taken in part from that of the figure of “The Spy” in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, a ubiquitous visual source book of the period. Note the cloak of eyes and ears, and the winged boots of Hermes, messenger of the gods, who was also patron of “revelation, commerce, communication and thieving” (Vano’s activities fell under all four categories).

The cup is filled with ink, but obviously alludes to the Holy Grail, while the imagery as a whole also suggests the iconography of the wounds and sacred heart of Christ. However, in the context of the book, there is a more explicit reference to a passage from an earlier chapter, “Idiolect,” in which Vano’s words, read aloud, “taste like red wine—or, to be more precise, bad red wine: acidic, furring the tongue, lips and teeth; intoxicating, yet also prone to induce sore eyes and jabbing headaches. The more of them you speak, the more they numb the mouth and brain, and induce slurring.”

Intoxication as a response to Vano’s words is a recurrent theme in the book, underlined elsewhere by another image in which I am shown drinking from the same cup into which Vano dips his pen here.

In the image above, intoxication is further associated with a kind of knowledge based on vicarious participation in historical events through exemplary re-enactment, that is with the stigmata, and with holy communion, in which a Christian devotee respectively receives the wounds of Christ, or ingests the blood of Christ. But here the sacred meaning is violently profaned. The secular grail that Vano holds aloft is therefore the elusive, unattainable goal of every historian’s quest: direct, unmediated access to the past. Finally, the disassembled corpse of Giulio Cazzari, the victim whose remains lie within the heart at the image’s apex, also alludes to the fragmentary nature of the sources recounting his death, which cannot be stitched together into a single, coherent narrative.

To be absolutely clear, this image makes no claim to be a literal depiction of anything. Although it is composed of elements adapted from early modern sources, I have no idea what Vano or Cazzari looked like or wore. And while Cazzari certainly was assassinated as a result of Vano’s reports on his activities, his dead body was not in fact dismembered. This image is therefore a kind of diagram, one mapping arguments and elaborating subtexts rather than describing events.

None of the ideas outlined in the discussion above are expressed directly in the text of the book. Such explanation would be redundant: the argument is all there in the illustration itself, and in its implied relation to other elements of the presentation, both visual and linguistic. So another of my arguments is, in effect, that we should take images seriously as independent vehicles for complex and abstract ideas.

Lastly

The conventions of professional historiography require abstraction, restraint, and decorum. Gerolamo Vano has no place within this regime, just as he had no place within the official rhetoric of political culture in seventeenth-century Venice. Vano demands instead exemplification, excess, and vulgarity. By exemplification, I mean that the way the story is told becomes a commentary on its subject, so that the form of the presentation itself embodies the argument. By excess, I mean that the presentation borrows Vano’s contagious enthusiasm, and echoes his violent disregard of all conventional pieties. By vulgarity, I mean a willingness to cross the divide between high and low culture, a divide that Vano also ignored. Hence, allegorical comic strips; hence, three exclamation marks in the title; etc., etc.

Several reviewers have responded to this approach with bafflement or irritation. Why can’t I just write a normal history book? The point is that the normal protocols of interpretation do not work when applied to Vano’s reports; nor will his fragmentary story fit within the bounds of a conventional narrative.

In response to these difficulties, we might simply conclude that the endeavour is impossible, and choose another subject. But an alternative course of action is to try to make the difficulties a compelling part of the story. When words fail, silence is not the only alternative. We can use pictures instead, or invite the participation of other voices through dialogue, or foreground gaps in the record by jump-cutting.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! is not, therefore, just the story of Gerolamo Vano, a Venetian spy, although Vano is certainly a uniquely interesting individual; nor is it simply an attempt to place Vano within a particular historical context, although that context is certainly of unique importance. It is also an attempt to test the limits of historical representation, and to ask what happens if we deliberately transgress those limits.

© 2010 Jonathan Walker

Although this image is composed of elements adapted from early modern sources, I have no idea what Vano or Cazzari looked like or wore. And while Cazzari certainly was assassinated as a result of Vano’s reports on his activities, his dead body was not in fact dismembered. This image is therefore a kind of diagram, one mapping arguments and elaborating subtexts rather than describing events.

A close-up

If a “just browsing” reader were to pick up Animals as Persons in a bookstore, I would hope that s/he would first encounter pages 26-28, where I first describe the phenomenon I call our “moral schizophrenia” with respect to nonhuman animals.

Our moral thinking about animals is confused to the point of being delusional. We say that we regard as morally wrong the imposition of “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals. Whatever the finer points about the meaning of necessity, if it means anything at all in this context, it must mean that we cannot justify imposing suffering and death on animals for reasons of mere pleasure, amusement, or convenience. We excoriated Michael Vick for participating in dog fighting because the dogs suffered and died only because Vick and his friends derived pleasure from this activity. But how is Vick any different from those of us who eat meat and animal products?

We kill and eat approximately 56 billion animals annually, not including fish. There is no doubt that the overwhelming majority—almost all—of these animals have absolutely horrible lives and deaths and are treated in ways that clearly and undisputedly constitute torture. The animal you ate for dinner last night—even if raised in the most “humane” or in “free-range” circumstances—was treated as badly if not worse than Michael Vick’s dogs.

And there is no distinction between meat and other animal products. Animals used for dairy are kept alive longer, treated at least as badly as animals used for meat, and end up in the same slaughterhouse. There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk than in a pound of steak.

No one maintains that it is necessary to eat animals to lead an optimally healthy lifestyle and an increasing number of mainstream health care professionals tell us that animal foods are detrimental to human health. Animal agriculture is a disaster for the environment because it involves a very inefficient use of natural resources and creates water pollution, soil erosion, and greenhouse gases. The only justifications we have for the pain, suffering, and death that we impose on billions of animals are that we enjoy eating animal foods, or that it is convenient to do so, or that it is just plain habit. We treat some nonhumans as members of our family; we stick forks into others.

Lastly

In addition to demonstrating that the animal welfare approach to animal ethics is unsatisfactory both as a moral and practical matter, another significant aspect of Animals as Persons is to make the case for veganism. We should not eat, wear, or consume any animal products.

Most of the current literature on animal ethics—academic as well as commercial—defends the “conscientious omnivore” who is careful to eat only animal products that are produced in a supposedly “humane” way, or, at most, defends vegetarianism, a vague term used to describe a diet that does not include meat, poultry, and, perhaps aquatic animals. But if we take animal interests seriously and regard animals as members of the moral community, we really have no choice other than eliminating the consumption and use of all animal products. What we consume is not a simple matter of choice; there are moral issues involved.

It is my hope that the book makes clear to readers that to talk about animal rights at all when animals are chattel property is similar to talking about the rights of slaves. To be property is the opposite of being a person. A person is an entity with inherent or intrinsic value; property has only external or conditional value. At the present time, we regard only humans as eligible to be natural persons. But we should remember that, at various times, we have excluded from the class of persons certain humans based on irrelevant characteristics, such as race and sex.

Animals as Persons is a call to include all sentient beings in the class of persons and to recognize that the interest of animals in not being used as resources should, like the similar human interest in not being a chattel slave, be protected with a right.

The abolitionist position presented in Animals as Persons does not mean that we release domesticated animals to run wild in the street. If we took animals seriously and recognized our obligation not to treat them as things, we would stop producing and facilitating the production of domestic animals altogether. We would care for the ones whom we have here now, but we would stop breeding more for human consumption.

With respect to non-domesticated nonhumans, we would simply leave them alone.

© 2010 Gary L. Francione

The only justifications we have for the pain, suffering, and death that we impose on billions of animals are that we enjoy eating animal foods, or that it is convenient to do so, or that it is just plain habit. We treat some nonhumans as members of our family; we stick forks into others.

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The introduction, the envoi, and two pictures may be worth several thousand words.

The introduction surveys the book, and the envoi traces Macaulay’s impact to our times.

The book’s dust jacket reproduces Edward Matthew Ward’s 1853 portrait of Macaulay in the National Portrait Gallery in London, an institution that Macaulay helped to invent. He sits comfortably in a well-appointed study, but the stacks of manuscripts on his writing table challenge the order of his bookshelves. Half of his face is shadowed. He is alone. Intimating that there’s more to Macaulay than meets the eye, Ward’s artistry captures the man’s mysterious doubleness, the need to conform and be accepted, as well as to simulate and dissimulate, which marked him from adolescence and helped to enable his success. It also captures Macaulay’s self-absorbed detachment from other people.

Facing pages of Macaulay’s annotated copy of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War in Greek, preserved in a former country home of his distinguished collaterals, fill pages 142-143. During his Indian years Macaulay passed “the three or four hours before breakfast in reading Greek and Latin” and kept at it while being shaved. His numerous annotations in English, Latin, and Greek evidence his immersion in antiquity. The bloodstained, much-fingered pages testify to his impervious concentration rather than a shaky barber. Macaulay was a genius who lived mainly in his own mind.

Should a reader be intrigued and her bookstore cappuccino still warm, she might scan pages 449-468 in the last chapter. It’s called “A Broken Heart.” The words are Macaulay’s and capture both his long-term depression and the cardiovascular disease that killed him. He was teary and food-addicted. Neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, I am unwilling to inflict incompetent theories on someone long dead. And so I let Lord Macaulay speak for himself at great length. My aim is to use his own record of himself, primarily in his letters and manuscript diaries to try to capture his sensibility, the patterns in his recorded perceptions and interactions that reveal how he saw and negotiated the world.

Lastly

Those pages are subtitled “The Sensibility of Power.” The condition and its consequences are inescapable human realities—I believe in original sin. At the end of 2008 while finishing the manuscript, I read Richard Holbrooke’s review of Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam. Long ago in Saigon, Holbrooke, now our special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, encountered Bundy. After serving as a uniformed noncombatant during World War II, Bundy became self-confidently one of “the best and the brightest” and then an architect of the Vietnam War, hopelessly but unwittingly out of his depth. Holbrooke still blanched at Bundy’s encompassing emotional “detachment.” It fed on the deficient self-knowledge that enabled him to reduce groups and individuals to bloodless abstractions. To some extent, so must everyone who wields power over life and death. Imbued with the sensibility of power and brilliance, Macaulay was nearly complete and potentially lethal in his detachment.

© 2010 Robert E. Sullivan

Lord Macaulay dared to write and say publicly what many other respectable people in Europe and North America had previously dared only think or whisper. He was a cool realist, who understood that political power depends on violence or the threat of violence, inferred that in politics might and right are much the same thing.

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I’ve got two of these. The first is on pages 16-17, where I talk about what this book is not. Unlike most of the writings on the topic, The Language of the Heart is neither “for” nor “against” recovery, and it’s important that people know that going in. Twelve-step groups like AA may work well for some people but not for others. The broader culture of recovery is in some ways insipid, banal, and politically reactionary, and in other ways profound, exciting, and progressive. Like any complex cultural phenomenon, recovery can’t be easily boiled down to a “good” or a “bad” thing, and people who come to the book expecting such blanket praise or condemnation will be disappointed.

The second thing I hope a browsing reader would come across is the series of images on pages 89-91. These show the iconic figure that people in AA refer to as “the man on the bed,” the de-toxing drunkard being visited by sober AAs and encouraged to try their program of recovery. The first image is a staged photograph that accompanied the 1941 Saturday Evening Post article that first brought AA national attention; the second is an illustration for an article in the AA magazine The Grapevine. That illustration was translated into stained glass by AA members in Akron, Ohio in 2001, and the final image is of their work, which hangs in the Akron AA archives.

This triptych of images is important to me for two reasons. The image of “the man on the bed” exemplifies both the vulnerability (represented by the man on the bed himself) and the mutuality (represented by the AAs who have come to offer him help) that together form the heart of 12-Step recovery. Mid-twentieth-century straight white masculinity did not value either of those traits particularly highly, and AA’s most radical feature may be its injunction to its members (about 66% of whom are men) to give up the habits of “domination and dependence” that have shaped their lives and their drinking. The man on the bed is poised to renounce those habits or to slip back into them, and so his image appears frequently in AA’s material culture. on sobriety medallions, bookmarks, murals, etc. That AAs continue to re-imagine the man on the bed in new media suggests that even as the organization has grown into a global phenomenon of millions of members, its radical potential— the possibility that individual men might transform their lives by embracing relationships of compassion, rather than competition—remains alive.

Second, these images testify to the enormous help I received from recovering people while I was putting this book together. Few of my primary sources reside in standard repositories like libraries, museums, or professionally-maintained archives; instead, they came from private collections, offbeat literature dealers, and the archives maintained by recovering people interested in their own history. Their generosity in sharing these materials with me has been one of the greatest rewards of my research, and it is emblematized in these photos.

Lastly

One of the things I’ve become most aware of while working on this book is the degree to which cultural critics inside and outside of the academy write about phenomena that reflect and reinforce their own tastes and worldviews. There’s a lot of writing out there about addiction, because addiction, despite its tragic dimension, retains a sheen of cool. Drug and alcohol use and abuse are dis-inhibiting; they de-stabilize social norms. Without too much effort, we can see them as heroic challenges to the staid routines of our uptight bourgeois lives.

Recovery culture, by contrast, is really square, both as aesthetics and as politics. One of the amateur authors I talk about drew inspiration from Lawrence Welk in many of his writings, for crying out loud—and not in an ironic way! It’s this squareness, I think, that has led critics to overlook the complexity of recovery—its existence as a cultural formation with a genuine intellectual and social history that both reflects and helps to construct the larger economic, political, and psychic realities around it.

Personally, I would rather listen to hip-hop than to Lawrence Welk, and prefer reading high modernism to the personal stories in the Big Book. But that doesn’t mean that the culture of people whose tastes don’t run to transgressive or ironic texts is transparent or not worthy of scrutiny. Neither belletristic nor academic critics of the popular expend much energy on square cultures, however, except to occasionally talk about how awful they are. I wonder what other cultural formations besides recovery scholars of popular culture have simplified or overlooked in recent years simply because they don’t give us aesthetic or intellectual pleasure.

© 2010 Trysh Travis

That AAs continue to re-imagine the man on the bed in new media suggests that even as the organization has grown into a global phenomenon of millions of members, its radical potential— the possibility that individual men might transform their lives by embracing relationships of compassion, rather than competition—remains alive.

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The prologue of Birthright is the portion to which I devoted the most energy. If it does not capture the reader’s imagination, chances are that the rest of the book will not either. Commencing with the sudden death of Annesley’s father, Baron Altham, the prologue recounts James’s life as a street waif, climaxing with his abduction and being placed aboard a ship in Dublin Bay bound for America. Legal records, maps, city records, even a diary of Dublin’s weather allowed me to reconstruct this remarkable sequence of events, which is cast, unlike the remainder of the book, in the present tense.

Still and all, readers, I like to think, will profit from reading the book’s final chapter, entitled “A Note on Legal Sources.” The prose is more analytical, but I use this opportunity to sort out the conflicting legal testimony surrounding Annesley’s efforts to reclaim his birthright—to explain, in short, why I found the arguments in his favor very difficult to refute.

Lastly

From the outset, I resolved to cast the tale as a narrative, an easy decision given its compelling nature. That said, a secondary goal has been to illuminate the contours of Irish society. The sheer density of the legal depositions, many containing richly detailed recollections of both rural and urban settings, is stunning. Though of varying quality and length, they speak not only of the minutiae of everyday existence—the clothing, furnishings, and customs of lords and peasants—but also of the cadences of Irish life. Ultimately, however, this remains a family drama full of unexpected twists and turns—a story about betrayal and loss, but also endurance, survival, and redemption.

© 2010 A. Roger Ekirch

A secondary goal has been to illuminate the contours of Irish society. The sheer density of the legal depositions, many containing richly detailed recollections of both rural and urban settings, is stunning.

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In the book’s last chapter, I try to explain Vladimir’s development, showing how family history shapes people and how parents and siblings interact in complex ways.

The Ulyanov family and its members, like all of us, encountered history and were shaped by it—even though they in turn shaped history more than most families. The wounds created by anti-Semitism forced the family into a false posture. The Ulyanovs’ marginality—part Jewish, Swedish, German, possibly Kalmyk—created special problems. They conveyed the psychological stigmata produced by the surrounding culture’s hatred. In very gifted people—and the Ulyanovs were gifted—the consequences can be large. The small window of opportunity created by the Russian Enlightenment following Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War quickly closed, but not before Ilya Ulyanov had been ennobled by a regime that, for a time, had appreciated enlighteners. Many gifted marginal people came to the fore in the 1860s and 1870s Russia, and many of their progeny became important revolutionaries.

In order to modernize, the Russian regime had to use despised minorities, but when it came to writing history, certain things had to be hidden. The Lenin cult prevented revelations about the family’s ethnicity until the late 1980s and glasnost. Stalin quite cynically suppressed any information that might taint Lenin’s image. While writing Lenin’s Brother, I was mindful of how ethnicity, nationality, group psychology, and individual psychology, produced lethal results in modern history. The small theatre of Lenin’s Brother opens into a much larger one.

Lastly

Lenin's Brother also sheds light on the contemporary theatre of suicide terrorism.

It is often said that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. The story of “The Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will” tells of an asymmetry of power between the Russian security apparatus and a small group of terrorists. It’s a common enough story, but the players differ and so do the stakes. Today’s stakes seem immeasurably higher, but to Ulyanov, human progress was at stake. One of the things that drew him to the narodnik theorist Lavrov was the notion of duty. Marxism downplayed ethics, to a point where one has to work hard to understand how it inspired young people. Some of Sasha’s comrades who chose terrorism did so because of an ethical foundation that they didn’t find in Marxism.

For Marxian true believers the answer lay in history: the dialectic of history would produce a just outcome. Marx and Engels assumed that the requisite consciousness was bound to appear, that revolutionaries would multiply. But they pushed things along in their way, and Lenin did in his.

Sasha, however, thought more like contemporary suicide terrorists, although he had a “scientific” basis for his act of self-sacrifice for the revolutionary cause. He was, after all, a biologist, and looked to Darwin for authority. Sasha got this justification for self-sacrifice and subordination to the group from Lavrov, too. Natural selection worked at the group level, not at the level of individuals. The very best people sacrificed themselves for the group and the group, itself a historical product, in turn produced the next stage of history. The epigraph for Sasha’s junior thesis was “What is real is historical.”

Today, not science and historical progress, but religion and nostalgia justify suicide terrorism. History is full of surprises, not always good ones.

© 2010 Philip Pomper

Marxism downplayed ethics, to a point where one has to work hard to understand how it inspired young people. Some of Sasha’s comrades who chose terrorism did so because of an ethical foundation that they didn’t find in Marxism.

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Throughout Western history, philosophers have suggested that what is human is determined by what we eat. Whether they think that we are what we eat (like Rousseau and Herder) or that we are not what we eat (like Freud and Kristeva), their notions of humanity either implicitly or explicitly maintain that man becomes human by eating animals.

I begin by looking back at eighteenth-century notions of humanity and animality that define man in terms of what he eats in order to set the stage for an investigation into how more recent philosophers from Freud through Kristeva repeat those romantic gestures that abject animals and exclude them from personhood or humanity, or from consideration as thinking or feeling beings. I argue that within the history of philosophy, animals remain the invisible support for whatever we take to be human subjectivity, as fractured and obscure as it becomes in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In Animal Lessons, I distinguish between two types of eating or assimilation that not only speak to our relations with animals, but also our relations with each other. We can, as humans have for centuries, eat animals (and plants) as a sign of our dominion over the earth and its creatures; we can kill for the sake of conquest and mount our trophies on the wall, dissect them, or train them to jump through hoops. Since we need to eat, a more ethical way to eat others might be to eat only what we need and not more; and to eat in ways that nurture and nourish ourselves, each other—including other animals—and our shared environment. We have a fundamental ethical obligation to others and the earth that sustain us.

Lastly

The implications of thinking through our relations with animals are vast. Considering animals releases a menagerie of problems that affect almost every aspect of our lives. On the philosophical level, the very conceptions of animal and human, of rights and intelligence are at stake. On the social level, giant global capitalist enterprises such as factory farming and much of the pharmaceutical industry are ventured. On the personal level, what (or whom) we eat, what (or whom) we wear, and whom (or what) we call friends and family hang in the balance. (Our use of pronouns may need an overhaul depending on whether we conclude that animals are things or persons.)

The stakes of bringing animals into philosophical thinking about ethics and politics are mammoth. Indeed, much of the history of philosophy, particularly in ethics and politics, has been dependent on an explicit or implicit commitment to the man-animal dichotomy that defines man against animals.

I have called on philosophy’s animals to bear witness to the ways in which the various animal examples, animal metaphors, and animal studies that populate the history of Western philosophy have been harnessed in order to instruct and support the conceptions of man, human, and kinship central to that thought. Hopefully, doing so not only tears down fences but also reveals how and why those fences were constructed. Can we imagine a “free-range” ethics that breaks out of the self-centered, exclusionary, and domineering notions of individuality, identity, and sovereignty? Considering animals necessarily transforms how we consider ourselves.

In this era of species extinction and shrinking biodiversity, military occupation and expanded torture, record wealth for the few and poverty for the rest, gated-communities and record incarceration, we need a sustainable ethics more than ever. A sustainable ethics is an ethics of limits, an ethics of conservation. Rather than assert our dominion over the earth and its creatures, this ethics obliges us to acknowledge our dependence upon them. It requires us to attend to our response-ability by virtue of that dependence. It is an ethics of the responsibility to enable responses from others, not as it has been defined—as the exclusive property of man (man responds, animals react)—but rather as it exits all around us. All living creatures are responsive.

All of us belong to the earth, not in the sense of property, but rather as inhabitants of a shared planet.

© 2010 Kelly Oliver

since we need to eat, a more ethical way to eat others might be to eat only what we need and not more

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On page p. 90 of Everything but the Coffee there is the start of a rather long riff on bathrooms that captures the way in which corporate powers, posing as public service providers, have taken advantage of the privatization of life. In other words, this is how larger public voids get turned into private moneymaking ploys.

In many ways, bathrooms are an essential part of Starbucks’s value proposition, especially for urban customers. But this is true because of our atrophied public sphere.

Numerous times while doing field work in New York, I watched as groups of women and men in Northface coats—displaying their upper-middle-class styles—walked into a store. Two went right to the bathroom, two got in the drink line, and two just stood there. When the friends reassembled, they had purchased a couple of lattes and a muffin. Starbucks, then, got eight dollars to rent out its bathroom.

The Northface brigades usually head straight to Starbucks, bypassing McDonald’s and Wendy’s, the bus station and public library. Surely, they know from prior experience that the coffee company keeps its bathrooms generally clean and well stocked. So did the editors of the Portland Phoenix. “We’ll come out and say it,” they wrote in the 2005 edition of the weekly alternative paper’s best of the year awards. “We don’t much like multinational corporations.” But when it came to grime and yellowy funk, they put aside their politics. “Starbucks,” they told readers, “has the cleanest bathrooms for us germaphobes. There’s just something pristine about those Starbucks bathrooms. Hypocritical, but when you’ve gotta go, you’ve gotta go (and sometimes, we don’t even really buy anything).” But sometime, then, they do.

Paco Underhill studies bathrooms, and to a certain extent gender, in retail spaces. Trained by the great city-watcher William Whyte as an anthropologist, he skipped out on academia and largely invented what he calls the “science of shopping.” These days, he gets paid a king’s ransom to watch what people do in stores, how they move, where they stop, and what makes them move on. Bathrooms, he mentions, can be crucial. His research has taught him that most customers, especially women, will pay a premium for products paired with bathrooms “with a clean baby-changing table and a working sink and trash can that isn’t spilling all over the floor.”

Clearly Underhill and Starbucks were on the same page when it came to bathrooms. With its spacious, sparkling clean, and nicely appointed bathrooms, the coffee company informs customers that it cares, even if it costs a little extra to keep these places spick-and-span. In this equation, customers repay Starbucks’ kindness with coffee purchases and word-of-mouth praise.

Once again, Starbucks adds to its business as a result of the tattering of the older social contract. Rutgers University geography professor Wansoo Im maps bathrooms. Great cities, he told a New Yorker reporter, have lots of public toilets. Paris does, and so does Tokyo. And New York did. In the 1930s, officials constructed a wide network of public restrooms. By the 1970s, pushed and pulled by crime and a budget crisis, city leaders cut funding for these bathrooms. But visitors, workers, shoppers, and walkers still need toilets, so they have to search for them in semi-private places, like Starbucks. A reporter once asked New York mayor Michael Bloomberg why the city doesn’t have more public bathrooms. We don’t need them, he responded. “There’s enough Starbucks that’ll let you use the bathroom.”

Starbucks, however, isn’t a public space. While it appears to offer equal access, in reality, it serves the needs of only some—another hallmark of the privatization of daily life and unequal distribution of resources that goes with these changes. People are always saying—often complaining—that Starbucks is everywhere. But it isn’t. Going back to the New York example, a Starbucks store sits on just about every Midtown corner and along every Village square. But there isn’t a Starbucks in the largely African American and Latino areas of the city above 125th Street, and neither is there one close to the projects by the Coney Island Boardwalk. There isn’t one in the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of Brooklyn, either. More than 1.3 million people live in the Bronx, and Starbucks operates less than a handful of stores in the borough. Manhattan, on the other hand, has only two hundred thousand more residents yet has two hundred more Starbucks. It is the better-off Bobos who have the better public bathrooms.

Even inside the stores, Starbucks isn’t so public. In the early years of the century, most Manhattan Starbucks locked their bathroom doors. To use the bolted facilities, you had to ask for a key. This seemed to be no problem for college kids in ski jackets or white college professors like myself. We ask for the key, no questions asked.

But for the homeless and for people of color—especially unattached men—things aren’t so simple and easy. Several times I have seen African American men go up to the counter for the key. Giving the man the once-over, the manager or the shift supervisor hesitates and says, “Have you bought anything? The bathrooms, you know, are for customers only.” Every once in a while, I saw a homeless person walk in and jiggle the bathroom handle. If it was locked, either he waited for the person to come out and grabbed the door before it shut, or he left. He didn’t waste his time asking for a key. Again, no matter what it says in its corporate social responsibility reports, Starbucks doesn’t operate its stores for the public good.

They rent bathrooms to people who will pay four dollars for a latte or fit the profile of someone who can afford to.

Lastly

Everything but the Coffee serves as a critical examination of Starbucks, looking at what it promises and what it actually delivers. Not surprisingly, Starbucks does a better job at fulfilling the need for decent coffee. When it comes to the desire for community, a cleaner environment, and a fairer global trade, what Starbucks customers get is more of a nod, a thin veneer of what they really want. Many have left the brand, therefore, looking for more authentic ways to fulfill their desires.

But even more, the book was meant as a tribute to the classic coffeehouse, to those places where Samuel Johnson hung out a few hundred of years ago. These places were dubbed “penny universities”—as opposed to $4 a pop virtual malls.

The English coffeehouse operated as a place where strangers could talk to one another and debate the issues of the day. Everyday, shopkeepers and bankers, ditch diggers and lawyers, just about anyone, came to these places for coffee. Everyone sat next to everyone else, heard the latest news, and together they talked.

Someone would literally read aloud from the papers. Because the coffee cost only a penny and because the coffeehouse served as an informal place of learning, observers dubbed these institutions “penny universities.” When the newspaper readers finished, the noisy, cantankerous debate started. Intellectuals damned the government. Conservatives damned the intellectuals. And wits spread rumors and gossip and made fun of everyone.

Over time, the coffeehouse became also a sort of classroom—not just for sharing ideas but also for learning how to discuss and debate pressing issues with strangers. “Informed men, some educated and some not,” coffeehouse expert Beau Weston noted, “would come together and talk about stuff”—literature, poetry, the economy, and politics. “Having a place to do,” he explains, “enriches a culture. It takes us out of the cocoon of private life and into the public world. Cafes are important for creating a public life, particularly in a democracy.”

Ultimately, then, I want my book to trigger meaningful conversations—conversations about Starbucks, about buying, and about how to restore and invigorate civic life in this country at this moment when we perhaps need it the most.

© 2010 Bryant Simon

I want my book to trigger meaningful conversations—conversations about Starbucks, about buying, and about how to restore and invigorate civic life in this country at this moment when we perhaps need it the most.

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In my work with business leaders and their organizations, I bring an active counseling psychology perspective into play, working with executives one-on-one. Naturally, I entertain the possibility that highly intelligent professionals have to struggle at times through everyday conflicts and even personal pathology.

My first “executive case” was in the late 1990s when I worked with a senior manager of a Fortune 500 company, both in individual treatment and on site in his organization. Diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the manager brought this pre-existing condition into the company with him, infecting his entire division with the disorder.

I had revealed an ADHD manager and an ADHD organization: This spread of a psychological pathogen to employees via the power and influence of the leader is the essence of the concept of “toxicity.” The destructive behaviors inherit in the individual leader’s personality will undoubtedly spread and take their toll on an organizational system.

Transforming Toxic Leaders opens up a broader dialogue and a more differential diagnosis of complex organizational life. Situated at the apex of their organizations, leaders exert profound influence, possessing the power to heal and to wound, to inspire or to bully, to create or destroy. Only by paying close attention to the darker side of toxicity can one boldly investigate the genius CEO who takes a deviant turn when facing his contested child custody case and divorce, temporarily operating out of fear. The CEO orders a vicious, overnight downsizing when his dark personal tragedy is compounded by a collapse on Wall Street and a plunging market share. What is the antidote? In my book, I provide numerous prognoses and remedies in the form of “leadership detoxification.”

Contrary to much behind-the-scenes corporate strategizing, I take issue with the predominantly authoritarian and bullying leadership style enacted during massive corporate downsizings, rightsizings, and layoffs. For example, a coercive and intimidating approach to requiring employees to participate in extensive overtime following a downsizing is a major source of toxicity. Instead, I propose a dialogic relationship-building approach, which is essential to cushion and lessen toxic impact and fallout from a downsizing. Compassionately and genuinely responding to employees’ anger and fear is critical. Emotionally intelligent leadership techniques elicit far more positive employee responses, lower the incidences of grievance and lawsuits, and provide an antidote to the employee perception of widespread abuse.

Beyond detoxification, the implications of this book lie in the arena of the transformation of toxic leadership behaviors into highly functional and intelligent corporate strategy. When one cannot change the one-of-a-kind renowned mitral valve heart surgeon into a doctor with people skills, what are the alternatives? Does one have to eliminate the master surgeon who is the reason for the company’s ranking as a world center for excellence? Or can he be transformed?

By shifting to dual leadership, I helped a highly toxic heart surgeon transform into a super-functional member of the hospital’s family. The treatment was not performed on the doctor, but rather on the organizational system. The surgeon was allowed to concentrate on his technical expertise and incomparable talents in the operating room. Meanwhile, his new leadership partner, also a master surgeon, was assigned to the human-side of the cardiology division, handling the relations between the people there.

What is the moral of the story? Transformation may or may not require a radical reconstruction of the leader in question. With time, patience, and a differential diagnosis I ascertained that by rearranging a few chess pieces the formerly toxic doctor could be placed in a position where he could shine almost all of the time—while his new partner could simultaneously shine via the utilization of his extraordinary people skills.

Lastly

Without a management fad, a flavor-of-the-month fix, or a purely inspirational ploy, I approach my clients as a professor, a coach and a consultant. I diagnose, intervene and prescribe. The leader or corporation does not always make for a congenial, truthful, or willing patient. Moreover, every chink in the armor of a leader or flaw in corporate policy necessarily points in multiple directions, complicating the picture. A differential diagnosis must replace simple-minded rhetoric and quick-fix leadership schemes. The most dynamic and ingenious of leaders will also have toxic dimensions to his personality and behavior.

Toxicity is a fact of leadership and organizational life. It is little understood but much talked about. It is time to sober up the conversation and take a hard look at human nature, the role of leaders, and the flexibility and resiliency of organizational systems. We must waste less time on the quest for instant fixes, magical surveys and hollow data and metrics. Only by entering the narratives of leadership and corporate life can we walk the road toward positive transformation.

© 2010 Alan Goldman

Emotionally intelligent leadership techniques elicit far more positive employee responses, lower the incidences of grievance and lawsuits, and provide an antidote to the employee perception of widespread abuse.

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Midlife anxiety thrived in other forms of Victorian print culture as well. One good example is soap advertisements. At mid-century, an array of mass produced products were put on display at the Crystal Palace exhibition, and Victorians learned the joys of consumerism. As advertising expanded and national brands began to appear, Francis Pears’s partner, Thomas Barratt, created innovative marketing strategies to sell soap. Advertising Pears for many uses—a gentle cleanser for children, a shaving soap for men—he focused on women as consumers interested in combating age.

Barratt uses a variety of strategies in his advertisements to promote soap as an anti-aging treatment. He incorporates testimony from a “most eminent authority of the skin, Professor Erasmus Wilson,” who promises that “a good soap is certainly calculated to preserve the Skin in health, to maintain its complexion and tone, and prevent its falling into wrinkles.”

Image courtesy of the Library of Virginia.

Scholars have written about racism in his ads that depict black children washed white, but Barratt also conflates race with age. For example, in one ad, a dying Aboriginal man dreams of being reborn with young, white skin, the Pears logo floating on the horizon. In other campaigns, Barratt ran ads featuring youthful, notorious women. Lillie Langtry, an actress and mistress of several prominent men, including the Prince of Wales, appeared in ads promising to “preserve” the skin. The infamous Georgina Weldon, a singer and amateur lawyer who successfully sued her husband for trying to commit her to a madhouse, starred in an 1888 campaign. Looking up demurely from under her bonnet, Weldon claims, “I am 50 today, but thanks to Pears’ Soap my complexion is only 17.” Barratt even suggests that his product is powerful enough to win a woman wealth and peerage. A Pears poem presents Mary Ray, the milkman’s daughter, who wisely washes with this soap and ends up marrying a duke, her skin so youthful that at ninety she’s mistaken for “her own grand-daughter.”

Barratt’s success is evident in other soap manufacturers’ imitations of his style. Sunlight Soap followed his lead with headlines such as “How to keep young” and “Why does a woman look old sooner than a man?” Barratt showed manufacturers how to transform a regional product into a nationally branded and lucrative anti-aging beauty commodity, a strategy that both resulted from and strengthened Victorian apprehensions about midlife.

Lastly

I hope this book not only offers a fresh perspective on Victorian literature but suggests a new way of thinking about age both then and now. Of course, age is a biological fact, but our experiences of it are shaped by our beliefs. To a large degree, these are foisted upon us by culture, by socially-constructed “meanings” that media images and market strategies assign. I want my readers to see aging as a product of culture. Only when we question what we think is natural about aging do we become aware of how our perceptions are formed by societal cues. Only when we are armed with this kind of consciousness, can we overcome ageist stereotypes that cloud our vision and restrict our possibilities.

© 2010 Kay Heath

Older women had long been devalued in Britain, but Victorians added a new twist. With the rise of gynecology, female sexuality was considered delicate and pathological in comparison to the male norm.

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In the Prologue to my book, I offer a summary of my theory of the human self and explain the conceptual linkage between the definition of the human and the theory of what it is to engage the arts in ways that depend on visual perception and on understanding what we read. In the Epilogue, I try to locate the book's contribution, within its niche in the history of Western philosophy.

My thought is that “modern” modern philosophy really “begins” with Immanuel Kant’s introduction of his “transcendental” question—here applied to our perceiving paintings and understanding literature. This proved to be a transformative moment in Western philosophy. Kant's question, “How is ______ possible?” (for instance, scientific knowledge or moral judgment; and now, here, the perception of paintings and the understanding of literature) proves to be surprisingly complex, stubborn, but inescapable. This is a question on which the whole of philosophy, and in a sense every form of rational inquiry, depends.

And yet, Kant's own application of his transcendental question proved to be inadequately examined (by Kant himself) and, ultimately, indefensible in the form he originally advanced. It had to be corrected in a deep way, and was, magisterially, though problematically, by the so-called Idealist tradition that culminates in the work of Hegel, roughly signifying the historicizing and cultural penetration of all our inquiries. This, at any rate, is how I read matters.

The inseparable contributions of Kant and Hegel, interpreted in endlessly inventive ways, provide the largest, most instructive philosophical vision within which all of the most promising questions of current philosophy make their useful contribution. The analysis I offer fits congruently within the most central tradition of philosophical speculation that modern Western thought has as yet produced. The book is a short one; the issue I raise requires a fresh beginning and a clear sense of the philosophical world to which my argument and analysis rightly belong.

Lastly

Viewed in a wider context, The Arts and the Definition of the Human is but a single piece in a larger philosophical venture, one meant to explore the viability and attraction of a picture of the world. This massive undertaking is not a chaos, but a flux, an order of things that is never fixed or changeless, yet regular enough to support all our sciences and inquiries and projects, enabling us to understand our special talents in mapping the world's properties.

There is no completely formulated and developed version of this sort, though there have been brief efforts along these lines both in the ancient world and in modern times. The implications of such a conception are very different from those of views committed to one or another form of invariance or necessity. Suppose, for instance, that the world does not obey changeless and exceptionless laws, or that what we count as a true science, at every point of contested discovery, is itself a construction of our own, provisionally favored in accord with our historied interests, which are themselves bound to be replaced by interests answering to the changing features of the world we know.

I don't pretend to determine whether the world is a flux or depends on some ultimate invariance. I think we must decide for ourselves, however, if the conception of a fluxive world can compete effectively with the usual commitment to invariance. Thinking along such lines could change our picture of the world and our belief that we may rightly judge whether our ventures are rational and defensible or not.

© 2010 Joseph Margolis

I don't pretend to determine whether the world is a flux or depends on some ultimate invariance. I think we must decide for ourselves, however, if the conception of a fluxive world can compete effectively with the usual commitment to invariance.

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I have always been concerned about the role that theory might play as a resource in providing both a language and a context for understanding and addressing important social issues. Many narratives in this book are designed to connect peoples’ everyday lives with larger social issues. By entering the book through these narratives, the reader may connect private considerations to larger public problems, and vice versa.

The transformation of the school from an invaluable public good and laboratory for critical learning and engaged citizenship to a containment site modeled after prisons is made clear in a number of narratives concerning the abuse perpetuated in the name of zero tolerance policies. For instance, in Miami a first grader took a table knife to school, using it to rob a classmate of $1 in lunch money. School officials claimed he was facing “possible expulsion and charges of armed robbery.”

In another instance that took place in December 2004, a fourth-grade student at a Philadelphia elementary school was yanked out of class, handcuffed, taken to the police station, and held for eight hours for bringing a pair of 8-inch scissors to school. She had been using the scissors to work on a school project at home. School district officials acknowledged that the young girl was not using the scissors as a weapon or threatening anyone with them, but scissors qualified as a potential weapon under Pennsylvania state law.

Lastly

Youth in a Suspect Society attempts to provide readers with a language of critique with respect to the crisis facing young people. But it does more. It also offers readers a language of possibility, one that encourages them to analyze critically the role that education, power, and politics might play in providing an alternative and better future for both young people and an aspiring democracy. It is difficult to imagine what it means to fight for the rights of children if we cannot at the same time imagine a different conception of the future, one vastly at odds with a present that can only portend the future as a repeat of itself.

Within this current moment of economic uncertainty and political possibility it is necessary for educators, artists, intellectuals, and others to raise questions and develop rigorous modes of analyses in order to explain how a culture of domestic militarization and economic Darwinism—with its policies of commodification, containment, cruelty, and brutalization—has been able to develop and gain consent from so many people in the United States during the last three decades. And, most importantly, such a challenge suggests developing a new mode of politics and empowering forms of education in which a future of hope and imagination is inextricably connected to the fate of all young people, if not democracy itself.

Under the current insufferable climate of repression and unabated exploitation, young people and communities of color have become the new casualties in an ongoing war against justice, freedom, social citizenship, and democracy. I hope that Youth in a Suspect Society will provide a critical vocabulary by which to understand the current crisis of youth. I also hope that the book convince readers to reject and collectively struggle against a form of biopolitics in which life is considered cheap, markets drive politics, and those who lack resources and opportunities can be considered redundant and ultimately disposable.

At stake here is a set of larger issues: How much longer can a nation ignore those youth who lack the resources and opportunities that were available, although perhaps in a partial and incomplete way, to previous generations? What does it mean when a nation becomes frozen ethically and imaginatively so that it no longer provides its youth with a future of hope and opportunity? And what might it mean for intellectuals who inhabit a wider variety of public spheres to take a stand and to remind themselves that collective problems deserve collective solutions?

What is at risk is not only a generation of young people and adults now considered to be a generation of suspects, but also the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy.

© 2010 Henry A. Giroux

It is difficult to imagine what it means to fight for the rights of children if we cannot at the same time imagine a different conception of the future, one vastly at odds with a present that can only portend the future as a repeat of itself.

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I’d like my fresh reader to read the introduction carefully because it lays out my argument and makes the assertions that the text must back up. Many believe that capitalism was an inevitable development and that it had deep roots in European intellectual soil. In my introduction I explain why I don’t think that either is true. I would like my reader to give careful attention to how the Four Little Tigers of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong became important players in the world market, for their differences underscore my point that capitalism takes different shape in different countries because it is a culture and cultures encompass family mores, religion, politics, and personal values.

Lastly

Capitalism has also been treated as though it were a natural system like aerodynamics with its own laws. The argument against this view runs through The Relentless Revolution. Knowing the fascinating history of how capitalism emerged within a traditional society and succeeded in challenging venerable orders throughout the world, I would hope, would open people to new ways of thinking about their economy.

Capitalism may be a relentless revolution, but it is not a mindless one. Pervasive poverty, global warming, failed states, and oppressive governments still present problems for the world. The wealth-generating capacity of capitalism can help meet all of these challenges. But, first, we must understand it.

© 2010 Joyce Appleby

Capitalism may be a relentless revolution, but it is not a mindless one.

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One of the most revered buildings in Chicago’s architectural history is also one of the strangest. Looming over the intersection of Dearborn and Jackson Streets, Burnham’s and Root’s Monadnock building, completed in 1892, is a massive pile of purple-brown brick rising vertiginously to 16 stories above the sidewalk to a gently curving cornice line above, ornamented only by punched rectangular windows. The Monadnock is famous as the highest building erected with solid masonry walls. Utilizing an ancient method of building construction, but exhibiting no attempt at ornamentation beyond its highly unusual color and the sculpted effect of its brick, the Monadnock seems both archaic and entirely modern at the same time.

By 1889 south Dearborn Street was home to the tallest and most innovative skyscrapers in the world. The Chicago Tribune described the towers rising there as “the finest structures in the city.” The startling effect of the Monadnock was a bold experiment in urban design, one that took its aesthetic cues from its busy context.

In his writing on the design of the tall office building, John Wellborn Root imagined an entirely new aesthetic for crowded Chicago streets. He discussed the possibility of an architecture whose effect depended on color rather than ornament. The business block should be monolithic and plain, he said, since metropolitan dwellers were too busy to appreciate fine detail. Thinking of his audience, those who would pass by the new buildings, he wrote, “each detail in a building goes for little with the general public, and they are more impressed by the use of certain materials, by the general arrangement of masses, by the effect of lightness or solidity” than by the fine quality of its historical references. In other words, the tall office building should not force itself upon the city dweller’s consciousness; it should simply be a dignified subliminal presence, a familiar and unassuming backdrop to the frenzy of activity on the sidewalk.

In formulating his ideas about skyscraper design, Root borrowed liberally from debates about form and color, figuration and abstraction, in contemporary painting. His proposal that tall office buildings rely on the “art of pure color” rather than traditional ornamental scheme, for example, is directly related to his great admiration for the painter James McNeill Whistler’s experiments with tonal harmony. This approach, along with criticism that valued the tall office building as a simple and somber backdrop to the shifting scenes of modern life, provides us with a new category of analysis for the early Chicago skyscraper: the perception of the modern subject.

Lastly

Between the 1870s and 90s the rapid growth of Chicago was interrupted by fierce conflict. Violent strikes and demonstrations over wages and labor conditions were met with brutal responses on the part of business leaders, the police, and local militia. These disputes involved not only class divisions but ethnic divisions as well, since the laborers toiling to build the new city were largely recent immigrants, first from Ireland, then from Central, Eastern, and Northern Europe. Together with an uncompromising war of words in newspapers and broadsheets, these events created an intensely hostile urban environment, an environment that almost succeeded in bringing the city to a standstill. For Chicagoans, mindful of recent events in Germany, France, and Russia, the threat of social revolution was real. It was reflected in all areas of life, including emerging urban form. As much as architects justified the skyscraper as the finest product of the city, socialists and anarchists denounced it as a symbol of class oppression and economic inequality.

At the same time, Chicagoans were forced to confront the environmental consequences of their transformation of the land. Despite the rhetoric of organism, the built environment and the natural world did not operate in harmony. The founding of the industrial city meant radical changes to the region’s natural ecology. The topography was altered to provide adequate foundation for roads and buildings. The river and the lake became polluted. High concentrations of people living in squalid slums led to major epidemics. The magnificent vista of Chicago was obscured by clouds of coal-smoke pouring from the roof of each new building. All of this environmental change necessitated new ways of thinking about architecture and urban design if the city and its citizens were to survive.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the heroic image of the skyscraper city was all but abandoned. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Burnham and Edward Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago presented a new agenda for urban design. The skyscraper, now seen as the expression of laissez-faire capitalism and dangerous individualism, was replaced with a unified and horizontal civic image. The era of the skyscraper, in existence for less than twenty years, seemed dead.

© 2010 Joanna Merwood-Salisbury

John Wellborn Root imagined an entirely new aesthetic for crowded Chicago streets. He discussed the possibility of an architecture whose effect depended on color rather than ornament. The business block should be monolithic and plain, he said, since metropolitan dwellers were too busy to appreciate fine detail.

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The chapter on the American Civil War describes what may have been Lincoln’s finest moment as president. During the summer of 1864, Northern public support for the war was collapsing. If Lincoln did not make a peace deal with the Confederacy, including renouncing the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation which freed the Confederate slaves, he was guaranteed to lose the November presidential election to the anti-war Democrat George McClellan.

But Lincoln refused to negotiate, specifically refusing to budge on the Emancipation Proclamation. The Proclamation had enhanced the Union’s military power by encouraging blacks to fight for the Union and against the Confederacy. Lincoln feared that if he backtracked on the Proclamation, it would inspire the Southern states to break any peace agreement and demand full independence. Such an outcome would, in Lincoln’s mind, lead to the unraveling of the entire Union. Lincoln preferred losing the fall election and sacrificing his political fortune on the altar of freedom to winning a Pyrrhic electoral victory and see his beloved Union become, in the words of his predecessor James Buchanan, “a rope of sand” disintegrating as each state went its own way. Fortunately, General William Sherman’s great victory at Atlanta in September 1864 boosted Union public support for the war, and saved Lincoln’s presidency as well as perhaps the Union itself.

Another fascinating case is Winston’s Churchill’s decision to fight on against Germany in late May 1940. Things looked quite bleak for Britain. France was falling, and Germany was racking up a string of other conquests of Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway. The Soviet Union was at this point a German ally. America was not yet even close to entering the war. Germany appeared poised to invade Britain after conquering France, and Britain’s prospects for fending off such an attack were dim.

Some of Britain’s highest leaders, such as Lord Halifax, urged Churchill to negotiate with Hitler in order to save the country from conquest. But Churchill refused. He thought that Hitler would not abide by any war-ending peace deal. Hitler would demand that Britain hand over its navy and its colonial possessions; after doing so Britain would be at Germany’s mercy. So, because he deeply distrusted Germany, and despite Britain’s precarious position, Churchill decided to take his chances and continue to fight, rather than strike a deal with Hitler.

It was during the months that followed that Churchill gave his most stirring speeches encouraging Britons to fight on: “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” More tersely, he also declared, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Lastly

Singing Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong’s famous song “War,” Edwin Starr declared, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing.” Some people argue that war happens because it reflects fundamental aggressiveness in human nature. Some argue that war happens because two countries or societies simply hate each other. And some argue that technology causes war, that once weapons are invented countries seek reasons to use them.

This book provides a different answer to this question, explaining the political function served by war. I argue that countries fight wars to solve problems of mistrust. This is a longstanding observation, that mutual fear causes countries to launch wars. This book expands on past work, arguing that fear also shapes the way that countries fight and end their wars. When belligerents fear that the other side will not abide by a war-ending peace settlement, this fear pushes them to reject negotiations and instead pursue the absolute defeat of their adversary. Eliminating the adversary solves the mistrust problem.

That being said, though adversaries sometimes try to solve their mistrust problems by fighting wars to the finish, the book also provides caveats as to why this is not always an attractive foreign policy. Certainly, sometimes it is the best and only thing to do—the absolute defeat of Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II being perhaps the best examples. However, sometimes you can inflict total defeat on a rogue leader’s military, but then face a costly insurgency after the conventional war has ended. Think Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes you can use other means to deal with mistrust which are much cheaper than fighting a war, and are sufficiently effective. We mistrusted the Soviet Union, but deterrence kept them from attacking America or its allies for decades. And a state which appears to be untrustworthy and dangerous may actually pose much less of a threat than we had thought, thus the costs of a war to oust the leader would not be worth bearing. Iraq’s lack of weapons of mass destruction or connections to terrorist groups stands out as a clear example of this kind of paper tiger.

© 2010 Dan Reiter

When belligerents fear that the other side will not abide by a war-ending peace settlement, this fear pushes them to reject negotiations and instead pursue the absolute defeat of their adversary.

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Why do experts make better leaders?

I interviewed twenty-six presidents and deans in universities in the US and UK, including Amy Gutmann at U Penn, Lawrence Summers and Derek Bok, former Harvard presidents, David Skorton at Cornell, John Hood at Oxford, Patrick Harker at the Wharton School, and others.

Four reasons why top scholars should lead research universities emerged from these interviews.

First, a president who is a distinguished scholar will have a better understanding of the core business of a university, that of research and teaching. This is central to the idea of “expert leadership,” that in organizations where the core business relies on expert knowledge the leader must first be an outstanding expert in the relevant area of business. This challenges the ideas of managerialism that would appear to promote management skills above expert knowledge. Arguably, top scholars, engineers or lawyers must also have management and leadership skills, and in my dataset of 400, almost all the leaders had progressed through managerial hierarchies in their institutions prior to the top job.

A second explanation raised by interviewees, one that again relates to expert knowledge, is that a scholar-leader will likely demand higher academic standards. Arguably, it is leaders who should set the standards in any organization. This message is articulated by a dean in one of my interviews: “leaders are the final arbiters of quality. Therefore it is right to expect the standard bearer to first bear the standard.”

Top scholars send out important signals to a number of audiences. That was the third explanation from interviewees. They signal a university’s priorities, act as a beacon when hiring other outstanding academics, and, it was argued, are attractive to students and donors.

Finally, it was suggested that scholars are more credible leaders. A president who is a researcher will gain greater respect from academic colleagues and appear more legitimate. Legitimacy extends a leader’s power and influence.

So if the board of a research university wants to improve its performance in what I consider is the “core business” of research and teaching, then they should hire great scholars as leaders. And, as discussed in chapter 7, this is also relevant to heads in law and accounting firms, in R&D, management consultancies and architecture practices, and the creative industries.

Lastly

Universities are among society’s oldest and most respected organizations. If scholars are so bad administrators, why have universities done so well, often against odds like decreasing funds and more than occasional outside interference?

One might think that managerialists have led a sort of conspiracy against experts and specialists. Time and time again whilst undertaking my research I was told that academics do not make good managers or leaders. This opinion, often stated vociferously, came from a number of academics, administrators and those outside universities, including politicians, civil servants and business people. The president of a powerful US university once said it to me, and I have heard it from individuals who have barely stepped foot in a university.

The opinion has reached folklore proportions. When I ask for evidence, academics will often tell anecdotal stories about a former department chair. Among those outside the academy there appears to be a general belief that people clever enough to be academics must lack normal human organizational abilities.

I often respond to these claims by posing a scenario: imagine that 100 nurses and the same number of lawyers, chefs, advertising executives, engineers, journalists and academics are randomly selected. Will we find that one group or profession stands out as natural managers? Is it not more likely that management skills are learned through training and experience? And that, even if leadership may be somewhat different, the propensity to manage is, approximately, evenly distributed across all professions?

Universities could be accused of being poor at training their faculty in management and leadership. In research universities, it is usual for departmental heads to rotate every few years, and it is common for a professor to walk—or be dragged—directly into the job with no prior instruction. But this is a different argument.

So my plea is to bring experts and specialists back into leadership positions in our major public and private institutions.

© 2009 Amanda Goodall

If scholars are so bad administrators, why have universities done so well, often against odds like decreasing funds and more than occasional outside interference?

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In the introduction I draw some close parallels between baroque manipulation of appearances and the control exerted by the Bush administration over the news media. The use of the media to rally support behind policies that would founder without that support is a clear case of a baroque manipulation of appearances for the purpose of political gain. The potential voters and taxpayers who lent their support to "the war on terror" and the war in Iraq in the early years of the twenty-first century did so largely because of their belief in a certain reality projected beyond the appearances.

The Bush representation apparatus, for example, was successful in convincing vast swaths of voters that behind the necessary and lamentable apparatus of representation—the polls and the concocted photo ops, the faked newscasts and the staged “town hall” meetings—President Bush was a man of "character.” Indeed, as was widely reported and fretted about, many Americans cited issues of character and value as the reason they voted for him in 2004.

The paradox is that no one is (or very few are) actually taken in by the performance, in the sense of not realizing that it is a performance; the baroque becomes pertinent when, in the very midst of the performance, the viewer, in full knowledge of its artifice, becomes convinced that the artifice in fact refers to some truth just beyond the camera's glare.

This effect is not limited to outright political representation such as campaign programming or the manipulation of the news media that was so prevalent during the lead up to the Iraq War. The entertainment industry can be counted on to produce content for television and film that coheres with the overall message coming from the centers of political power. As Slavoj Zizek wrote in an article in The Guardian, for instance, the wildly successful Fox series 24, in which Kiefer Sutherland plays a government anti-terrorism agent, abetted in certain, very specific ways the administration's efforts to minimize criticism of its handling of terror suspects.

The show's hook is that it plays in "real" time and that each of the season's 24 hour-long episodes corresponds to an hour of one continuous day in the life of agent Jack Bauer. The show is obviously fiction, and no one among its producers or probably anyone watching it would argue the opposite. Nevertheless, precisely in its function as artifice, Fox’s 24 refers implicitly to a reality that is "out there," beyond representation, independent of its fictitious message. Because everyone can comfortably agree that this is the case, we the viewers end up being force-fed a "neutral" and "independent" reality that is in fact a very specific political version of reality.

In the case of 24, the "real time" of the narrative (which, as Zizek points out, is augmented by the fact that even the time for commercial breaks is counted among the 60 minutes) contributes to the sense of urgency that, for instance, if Jack and his well-meaning colleagues don't get the answers they need—by whatever means necessary—millions of innocent people will die in a catastrophic terrorist attack. Obviously, we have to have some degree of flexibility when it comes to issues like the torture of detainees.

Lastly

I hope this book will awaken readers, reminding them of the persistent potential of aesthetic experiences to shape our thoughts, our political endeavors, and our sense of self. In short, this book is about the power of an aesthetic form in both a distantly historical manifestation and a very contemporary one. It is about how that aesthetic form can transcend media, cultures, and historical moments to make its force felt. Finally, it is also about how artists, writers, and thinkers can deploy such aesthetic forms in different, and politically volatile ways, whether to further subjugation, or to aid in the revelation and critique of repressive and homogenizing norms.

© 2009 William Egginton
This interview includes brief excerpts from The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics (copyright © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University), reproduced here with permission of Stanford University Press and the Modern Language Association of America.

The entertainment industry can be counted on to produce content for television and film that coheres with the overall message coming from the centers of political power.

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Here in the U.S. we read and watch the news of countless deaths in Iraq and other war-torn countries around the world. We briefly take note of the incidents, sometimes we might even read a name or glance at a photo. But it is rare that we ever visualize the death, the moments that led up to it and follow it, the way it ripples out across families and even down through generations.

I myself had this same experience when my brother Haji was killed in Iraq. It was shattering and at the same time remote. It wasn’t until three years later, in the midst of my Domestic Tension performance art project, that the loss really hit me. Take these excerpts from the book:

I can’t hold it in anymore. In a wave of despair, I realize I truly will never see my father or brother again. I crawl over to the desk behind the paint-splattered plexiglass screen so I can cry without them seeing me. I set my video camera, recording everything, on top of the desk aimed up at my face, determined to document myself even as I am sinking into a black hole of grief. I sob. Tears stream down my face and catch in my beard; my face contorts in pain; small moans like a child’s escape from my twisted lips. I haven’t cried like this since they died. With all the physical and mental exhaustion, I can no longer keep up the barriers that had been holding everything back.

To the camera, I say, “This project has allowed me to deal with things I had avoided for a long time, the loss of my brother and my father, my family, I miss them terribly. I miss home!”

My brother had his entire future in front of him. He was only in his mid-20s, and he had gotten married just a year ago. He was supporting the family with the thriving business he had started with a cousin. They sold gravel and sand from our family land in the dry Sea of Najaf to construction contractors. The Bilal family owned a large tract of land in this ancient sea, now a barren flatland too rocky and parched for farming, abutting the famous Najaf cemetery. Our relatives had refused to give our immediate family our rightful share of the land. Haji was so tough and strong, much more so than me and the other brothers. He walked with a swagger and literally had his gun on his hip at all times. So he confronted a top man in the tribe and convinced him to turn over the land. My family lived in a really rough neighborhood, it made the south side of Chicago look like a picnic. Even before the war, you would see people shot and slaughtered on a regular basis. So you had to be tough to survive there, and Haji was one of the toughest.

Moqtada al Sadr’s headquarters were in Kufa and Najaf. As U.S. troops were advancing toward the city, his Mahdi Army put out a checkpoint of tough guys on the other side of the river to stop them. Al Sadr’s people came to the house and put pressure on Haji to man this checkpoint at the Kufa Bridge. My mother and Ahmed said there’s no way you’re going. But there was a lot of pressure on him to go out and man that checkpoint. He was close with al Sadr’s men, and he didn’t want to appear weak. When I had talked to him on the phone he was using words I could tell would lead to no good, talking about the “invaders” – the U.S. – and how he would resist them. I had told him to stay away from al Sadr’s people, but of course he didn’t listen.

Lastly

During and after my Domestic Tension project, the post traumatic stress disorder I had suffered intensely in my early years in the U.S. resurfaced with a vengeance. This is not surprising given the experience of literally being under the gun, confronting the loss of my brother and my father and experiencing the hate and rage—as well as support and care—of viewers and participants. PTSD and its confusing and wide-ranging effects became one of the central themes of my project.

Already PTSD among American soldiers has become a high profile topic and concern, but I know we have only begun to see what will ultimately be a tidal wave of emotional trauma washing back over the U.S. as our troops return home from wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Given my own experience with PTSD, I am deeply afraid of the consequences for individuals, families and society as a whole.

My Domestic Tension project and my larger story provoke readers, I hope, to not only see the ground-level effects of war abroad, but to see Iraqis and regular Americans as victims and pawns in power plays beyond their individual control. People everywhere need to better understand the impacts and results of such wars and foreign policies. I can only hope that through dialogue and collective action, we can do something.

© 2009 Wafaa Bilal

My country is about more than just wars; this book is also about ancient legends, cultures that long precede American involvement—indeed, the very history of the United States.

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Hamsun’s actions in the few short summer months of 1943 define him, clarifying his unreserved support of the Nazi program. He writes an admiring letter to Joseph Goebbels and sends him his Nobel Prize medal as a gift; he delivers a speech at the Press Internationale in Vienna in June of 1943 in which he expresses a worldview consistent with the Nazi politics of the day, his racist rhetoric identical to that of the congress organizers, and his personal voice intertwined with the prevailing propaganda; and he has a personal meeting with Hitler at the Fuhrer’s Eagle’s Nest sanctuary, arranged by high party functionaries after Hamsun’s supportive speech in Vienna. The above facts, for all the mitigating circumstances one would wish to consider, confirm that Hamsun indeed believed in the project of the Third Reich.

Two years later, on the occasion of Hitler’s death, Hamsun wrote a glowing obituary. By extension, it is also interesting how the official 1946 psychiatric report on Hamsun avoided dealing with these facts; for instance, in reference to giving away his medal, the name Goebbels was replaced with “a German.” The question of post-war reinterpretation of Hamsun’s actions and writing thus becomes a relevant one. Hamsun’s last novel, On Overgrown Paths, uses his literary skills to skew the view of his actions and alter the reader’s judgment of him.

Apart from hard political facts, what I want a reader to discover is the more insidious side of Hamsun’s worldview, which is often congruent with the propaganda and reality of the Third Reich. If my book inspires a reader to revisit Growth of the Soil, I hope they approach it with some wonder at how hard it is on women not to be able to control their fertility and the burden they bear from repeated pregnancies. Hamsun’s praise of fertile erotic women as mothers and, in contrast, his demonizing or derogatory portrayal of women who would aspire beyond motherhood are fully fleshed out in his novel. Hamsun aspires to a utopian world where everyone is part of an organic life cycle; women and their fertility are central to this cycle. This organic life cycle should be embraced intuitively, and not be questioned.

At the end of the novel, achievements of modern progress—education, industrialization, mobility, women’s rights, modern medicine—are subsumed into this eternal life cycle. Although the novel is to a certain degree atypical for Hamsun, it expresses the author’s basic values: anti-intellectualism, anti-state and anti-parliamentary democracy, anti-progress, and anti-women’s rights. Hamsun was also against Christian morality and he endorsed natural fertility. However, he tamed women’s sexuality within patriarchal constraints, and warned against miscegenation in his other works. All of these moral values are embedded in a text that is a pleasure to read, not only because of a story well told, but also because of Hamsun’s great skill with language. It easily escapes one that all of these views, especially his view on sexuality, agree so fully with the Nazi ideology.

Lastly

I would like my book to contribute to our understanding of the lives and texts of supporters of dictatorial regimes who unsettle our ethical, moral, and aesthetic judgments. The ensuing unease often results in a convenient division between dirty politics and beautiful art.

The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance is a reminder of the simple fact that so-called great men and artists are not exempt from lending support to repressive ideologies; besides Hamsun, Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and Martin Heidegger leap to mind. We, the readers, should not fall under their seductive spell, but rather should read them critically. Even masterpieces need to be read in context with other texts, and canons revisited. One can read Hamsun’s great literary works without realizing his agenda, his desire to reverse modernity and for society to reject liberal attitudes towards women and Others. Yet to read Growth of the Soil or On Overgrown Paths knowing how Hamsun felt about these issues will yield a different assessment of those works than if one reads them uninformed.

I’d also like to encourage the readers to reflect on the fact that Nazism, even if it obviously operated on intimidation and fear, was supported by small daily decisions of ordinary citizens. It was rooted in deep-seated convictions and traditions that the ideologues deftly exploited. These traditions include the power of the blood and nation, and the sanctity of motherhood and family. Hamsun did not march dressed in a Nazi uniform or display anti-Semitic signs. Yet he was in agreement with many broader premises of the National Socialist party. Other ideologies function in a similar way, and our resistance is crucial in defense of basic democratic rights.

© 2009 Monika Zagar

so-called great men and artists are not exempt from lending support to repressive ideologies

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The aspect of my research which took me most by surprise happened half-way through my writing of the book. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for all his stunning complexity, notoriously dismissed non-Europe as a place where History never happened. In the case of Islam, Hegel insists that it has “forever vanished from the stage of History.” Hegel is seen by many as the Eurocentric thinker par excellence.

Researching Hegel, I was surprised to come across a number of curious facts, the least important being that one of the first things Hegel ever wrote (at 18) was a high school graduation speech on education in Ottoman Turkey. More significantly, in the newspaper Hegel edited in Bamberg for over a year when he was 35 (the Bamberger Zeitung), a large number of articles concerned developments in the Ottoman Empire. In some of the issues, events in Turkey took up over half of the newspaper.

And a surprising number of the articles were quite pro-Turkish, and went into some detail describing events happening in Istanbul, Wahhabi victories over the Ottomans, etc. Hegel, I estimate, would have had to have read well over eighty articles on Turkey and the Turks during his period as newspaper editor. Islam may well have disappeared from the stage of History, but it didn’t disappear from the pages of the Bamberger Zeitung.

For me, this moment epitomized the hidden Other history of Europe— not the official one which is written down, but the unrecorded presence of foreign ideas, non-European texts, and alien influences which is very hard to track down. An absence or omission means nothing in itself until one learns more about the background against which it is set. The disappearance of Hegel’s Islam from the stage of world history, von dem Boden der Weltgeschichte, the fact that Hegel hardly remarked at all upon the Ottomans, means relatively little until the greater store of knowledge Hegel could have drawn on is brought to mind.

Hegel’s non-philosophical interest in the Ottomans would continue long after he finished his newspaper editorship; as late as 1829, we find Hegel remarking in a letter how, reading a newspaper together with Schelling in a Karlsbad coffeehouse, they learnt of the taking of Adrianople and the end of the Russo-Turkish war. In the very last year of his life (1831), Hegel criticised the English treatment of Irish Catholics with the reproach that “even the Turks have mostly allowed their Christian/Armenian/Jewish subjects the use of their churches.” Hegel’s writings may well have been largely Turk-free, but the spectre of an established, sophisticated and distinctly unbarbaric Muslim culture next door to Europe would forever cause problems for the Christian and European bias of his teleology.

Lastly

The significance of this book lies in three directions. First of all, society’s responses to the foreign are irredeemably multiple, even in the individual. And when I say “multiple” I don’t simply mean in that obvious psychoanalytical, fetishism/phobia way we have two names for Persia/Iran, one connoting mystical poetry, exquisite miniatures, and nice carpets, the other a fanatical dictatorship which has to be destroyed. The multiple responses to Islam in German thought reveal a profound polyphony in the human subject, an ideological schizophrenia which could never really make up its mind about what it thought about Islam.

Secondly, the fact that the thinkers I deal with in this book were able to read sophisticated accounts both of and by Muslims and still reproduce the clichés of fanatics, terrible Turks, etc. not only reflects upon the compartmentalization human beings are capable of, but also makes us question what it actually means for knowledge of a foreign culture to reside in society.

In our “awareness-raising” epoch, which is trying to reverse negative representations of Islam and Muslims, we assume that simply providing people with correct information about the Muslim world will automatically remove stereotypes. What my research suggests is that this sort of education is simply not enough—it underestimates the psychic need for a notion of fanatical, barbaric Islam, and the need for a consequent “civilized” notion of Europe to persist. Asking people to acknowledge that these barbaric, backward “others” of the West are as civilized and multi-faceted as we are would be like asking them to talk about incest in their family. It would be asking them to embark upon the dissolution of themselves, and of the grand concepts with which they associate themselves.

Finally, last year I wrote a history of Muslim-Christian military alliances in Europe, to try and show the extraordinary extent to which Islam is involved in the history of Europe. In many ways, History of Islam in German Thought also shares the goal: to bring Islam into Europe, to highlight the futility of talking about Europe without ever referring outside it. Herder understood this simple truth over 200 years ago.

© 2009 Ian Almond

The multiple responses to Islam in German thought reveal a profound polyphony in the human subject, an ideological schizophrenia which could never really make up its mind about what it thought about Islam.

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There are many cases in my book that should be of particular interest to an inquisitive reader wanting to find out what happened, why, and what the punishment might have been: the two cases involving men who killed their own brothers, one over a few pounds of beans beyond what was needed for consumption and another over manure for fertilizing the fields; the neighbors whose frustrations resulted in flashes of anger that caused irreparable damage, one over an outhouse, another over water for irrigation. Or perhaps the reader would happen on a case involving adultery, reading on to find out how the affair began, and how it reached its inevitably tragic outcome—since only those cases that ended in homicide appear in my sample of cases.

There are moral lessons to be learned here, of course (then, as always, alcohol abuse all too frequently led to disaster), but there are greater human truths as well. Not all brothers get along well; there can be jealousy, misunderstandings, hurt feelings from childhood that still linger decades later, and mistreatment that cannot be spoken about openly but that leaves its scars and its acute sensitivities. Adultery can be provoked by more than just sexual desire; differences in power relations between the genders and between people of different status levels led to violence in Qing society just as often as they have in others.

Much is left unsaid in many of these cases. Was the act that spurred the violence really the “last straw,” the last of a series of insults, intended or accidental, that pushed the perpetrator beyond the breaking point? Was the magistrate really interested in the whole truth, or merely what he needed to build a persuasive case? I can not help wishing that more questions had been asked—but the reports are limited to information immediately relevant to the crime. And to what extent should we all be responsible for what happens to our neighbors—or even our brothers? Were there really different obligations to be fulfilled in that very different culture, now 250 years old?

There is no speculation on human values incorporated into these crime reports; however, standards for behavior can be inferred from the penal codes that stipulated a specific punishment for every type of crime, distinguished by the relationships between the perpetrator and his or her victim. This may be a world of the past, but Qing China comes alive through the misadventures of some of its least distinguished subjects.

Lastly

As a reader of fiction, I was drawn not only to how the “stories” here were told, but even more to what those stories had to say about specific individuals and about humanity in general. My hope is that other readers can empathize with these people, relating to them as neighbors from another time rather than representatives of some strange, foreign culture now long gone. If we can view the judicial system of late imperial China as a viable attempt to reach goals that we share today, then we can overcome the prejudiced view of early twentieth-century reformers and we can more objectively regard China’s past as an important segment of our common human experience. By doing so, we can more easily see the common human needs at work then, and we can more fairly judge the accomplishments of that time and place.

In creating this compilation, I wanted to provide my undergraduate students of Chinese literature and culture a means to get beyond the generalizations, the welter of dates, and the names of numerous dynasties and poets through time. I wanted them to appreciate something of the messy reality of lived experience.

Fiction is often seen as a viable means to that end. And it may be a valuable window into a culture. But in the end fiction is made up for a purpose—which in imperial China was never to provide an accurate description of the author’s society or of any particular real person. Legal reports tell the sad stories of real people who got into very real trouble and, at least to some extent, the reasons why they did so. These criminals were not exemplary figures, nor were they either typical or even fully unique. Human mistakes are human mistakes, and that is what is shown by these cases.

I also want to provide people who are interested in law and criminal justice a sample of these hard-to-access materials. Until recently, there were no translations of such case reports. The originals were all in archives in Beijing and Taipei, carefully preserved, but, even for scholars, difficult to reach. My hope is that with a better understanding of alternative visions of working criminal justice systems, specifically of the courts of long-gone imperial China, those of our own time might be better understood, and perhaps perfected.

© 2009 Robert E. Hegel

many cases in my book should be of particular interest to an inquisitive reader wanting to find out what happened, why, and what the punishment might have been: the two cases involving men who killed their own brothers, one over a few pounds of beans beyond what was needed for consumption and another over manure for fertilizing the fields

A close-up

Not surprisingly for a book about consuming authenticity, a lot of the writing revolves around food. Food is the new “art” in the urban cultural experience. This is true not only because of the enormous growth in the number of restaurants during the past thirty years—from standardized fast-food franchises to the luxurious lairs of high-class chefs and diners—but also because of the dramatic rise of food preparation as a pole of cultural creativity in the urban economy.

New entrepreneurs in Brooklyn have reinvented the borough’s late nineteenth century food industries for today’s foodies and hipsters. Micro-breweries and omnivore butchers are not only re-creating a precious kind of artisanal production but also an authentic culture industry true to the borough’s roots.

Readers who open the chapter on “How Brooklyn Became Cool” will trace how the entrepreneurial paths of Pierogi art gallery (named in honor of the area’s Polish residents), L Café, Galapagos Artspace, Brooklyn Brewery, and the clothing company Brooklyn Industries in Williamsburg transformed this old industrial and working class neighborhood on the waterfront into a new center of cultural production and consumption.

In contrast, “A Tale of Two Globals: Pupusas and Ikea in Red Hook” deals with Swedish meatballs and Salvadoran pupusas. The recent much-heralded arrival of the multinational Swedish chain store in New York City contrasts with the trials of a small group of street vendors from Mexico and Latin America who have sold the foods of their countries in this neighborhood for years.

Both Ikea and the Red Hook food vendors fought to occupy their places: Ikea, with an army of executives, publicists, and lawyers who argued for the jobs and shopping opportunities the store would bring to New York City, and the food vendors, with supporters drawn from local foodies, bloggers and elected officials, including U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn resident. Though the vast majority of New York’s street vendors are immigrants who do not prepare native cuisines other than American hot dogs, and lack power to fight their way through the mass of regulations set by the city’s bureaucracy, the Red Hook food vendors mobilized enough support to become a permanent fixture in the ball fields.

A sidewalk café in Harlem, a farmers’ market in Union Square, and a community garden in East New York round out the picture of how important food production and consumption have become to the city’s recent transformation. These are not just trendy consumption spaces, they are new urban terroirs.

Lastly

Naked City argues against destroying the diversity of urban centers by gentrification, chain store invasion, and the kind of upscale redevelopment that makes all places look the same. Both updating Jane Jacobs’s vision of urban life and criticizing its failure to confront the power of investors and developers, the book enters the still-raging debate between those who want to build big, in Robert Moses’s style, and those who want to preserve the “authentic” city of neighborhoods and local identities.

Using “authenticity” to fight for space is dangerous. It risks elevating one group’s interests and visions above all others. But economic arguments in favor of controlling rents and preventing the disappearance of independently owned stores have little political traction. If we organize to protect the cultural value of social diversity, we may have a better chance of enabling people to stay in their neighborhoods, their jobs, and their homes.

The twenty-first century city need not stand on the ruins of older forms of urban life; neither should it displace the twentieth-century urban population. Creative destruction of a certain amount of the city’s physical fabric is inevitable and even desirable. But the city’s social fabric must be nourished and preserved.

© 2009 Sharon Zukin

I have been both exasperated and enchanted by the New York City’s gilt and dross, brutal honesty and flagrant self-promotion and ability to inspire dreams

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The final chapter of Radical, Religious, and Violent examines religious radicalism in a historical context. Having established earlier in the book why religious radicals can be lethal terrorists and especially effective rebels if they so choose, I proceed to examine the sources of religious radicalism.

Adam Smith, the originator of modern economics, was concerned about religious freedom and political violence. “Times of violent religious controversy have generally been times of equally violent political faction,” wrote Smith in 1776.

And Menno Simons, the original Mennonite, railed like a modern Jihadist against the corruption and moral bankruptcy of the established order. Consider Simons’s words in his 1539 Foundation of Christian Doctrine:

“We find in your houses and courts nothing but sparkling pomp and showy dress, boldness and presumptuousness of heart, insatiable avarice, hatred and envy, backbiting, betraying, harloting, seduction, gaming, carousing, dancing, swearing, stabbing, and violence…. The pitiful moaning and misery of the wretched men does not reach your ears. The sweat of the poor we find in your house, and the innocent blood on your hands.”

The Mennonites are pacifists today, though their fellow Anabaptists were often violent in the chaotic period during which both sects first emerged. Anabaptist sects were cruelly repressed in Europe, even when they practiced strict pacifism. Why are some religious radicals benign, like the present day Amish, while others are violent, like Hezbollah, Lashkar e Taiba, or the Münster rebels of 1532?

St. Lambert’s Cathedral in Münster, Germany, reproduced in the book on page 210. Above the clock are three cages where the bodies of Anabaptist rebel leader Jan Bockelson and others were left to rot. The Münster rebellion established a theocracy in the city in 1532. It was violently suppressed in June 1535 (Al Chernov, inset- Rudiger Wolk).

To answer those questions I return to Menno Simons and the sixteenth-century European roots of modern Christian religious radicalism, looking for lessons for how governments should approach twenty-first-century radical Islam.

Surprisingly, Adam Smith and David Hume, the giants of eighteenth-century social science, each had an answer. Hume argued for state religion, as it would transform rabble-rousing clerics into harmless and indolent civil servants. Smith made a classic argument for religious freedom, on the grounds that competition would breed tolerance. In retrospect, countries that have followed Smith’s advice about competitive markets and religious tolerance have created a shared juggernaut of prosperity, technological progress and cultural creativity.

Lastly

This book is freakonomics about terrorism and insurgency, an attempt to apply an economist’s toolkit to these urgent threats. What’s in that toolkit? Behavioral models that assume rational individuals generate testable propositions, which are then exposed to data. We then keep the models that are not refuted (and quietly suppress the rest).

Amazingly enough, this works. We can explain much of the surprising behavior of religious radicals (benign and violent) with economic reasoning. Moreover, that reasoning has testable implications that survive exposure to data. Most importantly, this same logic suggests that religious radicals respond to incentives, so that we can contain the threat posed by violent religious radicals through methods that complement coercive force with constructive, incentive-based methods. Those constructive methods range from rewards for defection to targeted programs to improve governance.

© 2009 Eli Berman

The Mennonites are pacifists today, though their fellow Anabaptists were often violent in the chaotic period during which both sects first emerged.

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The full-bodied, mutual suffusion of film and viewer is illustrated graphically and literally by The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1901). The film begins with a medium-long shot of a gentleman gesturing angrily and shouting (silently, of course) at the camera, presumably because he does not want to be photographed. He moves aggressively closer and closer to the camera until his wide-open mouth blocks the view entirely, seeming to swallow up the camera. An invisible cut to a black background creates a void, into which the flailing cinematographer and his old-fashioned camera pitch forward and disappear. Another invisible cut brings us back to the gentleman’s open mouth, and he retreats from the camera, chewing and laughing at his clever triumph over the cinematographer and the apparatus.

The film’s provocative premise suggests that while cinema has an astonishing ability to “draw us in” to its spectacle, the positions of film subject, viewer, and filmmaker are tenuous at best in this exchange. The film appears to engulf not only the cinematographer and the apparatus but also, by extension, the viewer. The cinematographer is at first unseen, as the man being photographed walks toward the camera, but as the gentleman opens his mouth, the cameraman tumbles with his equipment into the gaping mouth of what had been, just a moment before, the filmed image of the gentleman.

Because of the cinematographer’s absence from the first image, we the viewers share his position; we initially view the filmed man from the same position that the cinematographer does. Thus, when the cinematographer is swallowed up, so must we be. But we are left alive to see the swallowing up, now outside the relationship we’d been part of a moment before, and in the final shot the gentleman grins smugly at the camera despite the fact that he has just been seen to devour said camera in a single bite. The film turns inside and outside itself and back again, swallowing itself up and spiting itself back out, in the space of a few seconds.

The Big Swallow forces the question, where are we in this picture? The ambiguity of Williamson’s film suggests the tactile, corporeal, reversible contact between film and spectator, who embrace or even ingest one other—in both directions—and yet do not disappear into one another entirely. The Big Swallow depicts quite literally and imaginatively the intimate and tactile crossover of the inside and the outside, of the subject and the object of this tactile vision. The film’s final return to the smiling man at the end of the film places the emphasis squarely on the film experience taken as a whole, rather than on subject or object, viewer or viewed. That ambivalent but sensuous tactile contact between film and viewer moves all the way through the skin, musculature, and viscera, so that we are inside the film and outside it at the same time.

Lastly

Film theory and criticism have often described the meeting place of film and viewer as a mirror, a screen, a window, or a door. No one metaphor sticks, perhaps for two reasons. First, the “stuff” of the contact between film and viewer is too permeable and flexible to be described in quite these rigid terms. Second, what keeps us separate from the film isn’t a “thing” at all, but our bodies’ own surfaces and contours.

Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh” (which differs dramatically from literal skin) may be a better metaphor. The material contact between viewer and viewed is less a hard edge or a solid barrier placed between us—a mirror, a door—than a liminal space in which film and viewer can emerge as co-constituted, individualized, but related, embodied entities.

The notion of “flesh” encourages us to see the connection between film and viewer not only as a tactile “interface,” but perhaps even further as a mutual immersion. More than that, it may encourage us toward a new style of historiography, theory, and criticism. Indeed, I am convinced that the (re)invention of moving image studies and the mutual absorption of film and viewer are closely related.

Insightful critical writing about cinema requires a passionate, sensuous approach that respects the passionate, sensuous, and specifically tactile engagement between viewers and films. It’s my hope that The Tactile Eye helps to encourage this embrace of sensual experience not only for the purposes of description, but also as an integral tool for film history and theory.

© 2009 Jennifer M. Barker

That ambivalent but sensuous tactile contact between film and viewer moves all the way through the skin, musculature, and viscera, so that we are inside the film and outside it at the same time.

A close-up

The idea that interiors reveal personalities is such a truism of contemporary culture that it is difficult to imagine that it was not always so. While the well-to-do in previous eras lavished attention upon their mansions and country houses, such refurbishments more often attested to the dynastic ambitions of a family than the inner self of a particular lord or lady. If a few individuals in the Georgian period, such as the architect Sir John Soane, had aimed to transform their dwellings into monuments to their unique sensibilities, their efforts lay far beyond the imaginings or pocketbooks of the vast majority, whose concern was with comfort and propriety rather than romantic creativity.

“Naturalistic” design. A furnishing fabric from 1850 of roller-printed and glazed cotton. The guest who lowered himself onto a sofa upholstered in this fabric had to fear that he might be impaled by a protruding twig.

What changed during the Victorian period was not just the purchasing power of middle-class Britons, but understandings of the self. In the mid-nineteenth century, Victorians had most often conceived of the self in terms of character, a religiously-inflected term that chiefly connoted a moral condition. A man’s character might be built through painstaking instruction and introspection; however, the path to improvement was tortuous.

By the 1890s, there was a new, seemingly secular way of thinking about the self, expressed in the concept of personality. If character was demonstrated by self-control and self-denial, a display of “personality” required individuality. Personality was malleable, creative, and complex; it accompanied a new, psychological conception of the mind. The home was the staging-ground for this new idea of personality.

In an increasingly heterogeneous middling stratum, a personality, expressed in a distinctive interior, became a necessary asset. The consumer boom—combined with this new confidence that possessions could communicate their owner’s individuality—made for a giddy period of acquisitive experimentation. Since furnishings made the person, no decorative scheme was off-limits, and “quaintness,” the quality of being out of the ordinary, was the desired effect. The spinster in Sussex who wallpapered her bedroom with black-bordered In Memoriam cards, the hostess who placed her guests in “spring,” “summer,” “autumn” and “winter” rooms according to their age belong to the human comedy of fashionably eccentric furnishing at the fin-de-siècle. So, too, do the young couples who decorated their drawing-rooms according to the prevailing fashions of pan-Asianism, with Indian-printed textiles cheek by jowl with fancy Japanese fans. Why not a Tess of the d’Urbervilles room, wondered one Thomas Hardy fan, envisioning a décor imbued with the “spirit of the West Country and the gloom of the book.”

Long the cradle of the family, the home became something more in the Edwardian period; the domestic interior literally helped to create the individual. C.S. Lewis was one of many who credited his boyhood home, considered apart from the members of his family, as “almost a major character in my story,” viewing himself as “a product” of its corridors and rooms. Yet the task of communicating one’s individuality would prove a far more perilous undertaking than middle-class furnishers had envisioned. What if one inadvertently broadcast the wrong message? When furnishings made the person, every decision could become a cause for regret.

Lastly

In Britain, the locomotive of Victorian acquisitiveness was powered, in part, by an engine that ran on the unlikely fuel of spiritual striving. My book deals with the pentimento of militant Christianity, the shadowy imprint that remained even after damnation and eternal punishment were no longer preached from the pulpits. Edwardian critics liked to believe a world of difference existed between themselves and their more devout ancestors. But the distance between self-denial and self-expression was perhaps not as great as we might imagine. Most significantly, evangelicalism forced a concentration upon the self which was, in the generations that followed, modified, but not abandoned. While wealth, as Max Weber believed, may well have exercised a “secularizing influence,” that secularization was itself indelibly colored by religious antecedents.

Consumption served to define and to differentiate an extremely heterogeneous middle class. Taste—no less than occupation, religion, or political affiliation—should be considered a crucial ingredient in the making of middle-class Britain. Consumerism has re-oriented the social and political landscape. Writing in 1913, the historian G.M. Trevelyan saw a connection between the diffusion of consumer goods and the extension of the franchise. The right to vote, he observed, only came, “when the coats [that working men wore] were better.”

© 2009 Deborah Cohen

Taste—no less than occupation, religion, or political affiliation—should be considered a crucial ingredient in the making of middle-class Britain.

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In the book’s preface I dive into what I has been much overlooked in the modern period: the importance of friendship, how it seems to differ for women, and not just its importance personally, but also in what I call its civic form.

A central mistake I see repeatedly made by many in the modern West is to think of friendship as merely a personal relation. It actually has important civic analogues. Consider three traits that (I argue) appear to be essential to genuine friendship: a reciprocal liking and awareness of the other as moral equal, a reciprocal wishing that other well for their sake (and not for one’s own), and a reciprocal practical “doing things” for the other. How can these essential traits possibility be applicable when we are dealing with a population, say, of many millions?

In civic friendship (unlike in personal) the above three traits don’t operate directly but via a society’s public laws, social institutions and customs. That is, my “awareness and liking” of fellow citizens is revealed, first, in my being informed and educated about how citizens live in other parts of my city or country. Further, I might wish them well civically by being willing to help them in times of crisis or (at the very least) not begrudging them my tax dollars for basic assistance in education, housing or health care, etc.

Even my personal enemies I can treat as civic friends; this means only that I grant them the respect and rights due any American. Obviously the state, and a set of universal individual rights, play a critical role in regulating our awareness of the facts of other citizens’ lives (e.g. through education and other institutions) as well as in stipulating the minimal duties we have towards them.

No doubt I was first led to the topic of rethinking the foundations of the modern political state by my years studying abroad in the 1970s. I viewed the American state from the outside as the Vietnam War had just ended, and I experienced directly the myriad ways in which social and political institutions may be well organized. Upon returning to the U.S., I eventually came to the conclusion that what was lacking was the value of fraternity, what I now call civic friendship.

The original American founding fathers had hoped to avoid “injurious faction.” But, in the United States, the gap between the haves and the have-nots has grown ever larger since the 1970s—it is already greater than at any point since the Great Depression. We have a ruling corporate culture that is hierarchical and secretive instead of democratic and open. Our electorate is so apathetic that roughly half of eligible citizens don’t even vote. And we may be the most violent of all advanced industrial nations, with gun ownership still enshrined in our Constitution, and with roughly one out of every 32 adults behind bars or on probation or parole. Our military expenditure comes close to outstripping that of the rest of the world’s military powers combined.

Despite all our wealth and power, however, we are one of the most pusillanimous of modern industrial nations in terms of the public granting of welfare or benefits. We are the only major industrialized democracy without universal health care—with 48 million uninsured. Our system of family leave plans is inadequate and our short-term welfare benefits are punitive. Our public schools are failing and our aid to foreign countries has fallen to 0.1 percent! Our awareness—let alone positive concern—for our fellow citizens and the rest of the world is shockingly low.

Lastly

I argue for an economy that recognizes not just productive labor for exchange, but equally ethical reproductive praxis as well. Similarly, our agonistic, two-party legal system actually produces inequality, whereas proportional representation would come closer to expressing a civic ideal give and take. The work of raising children and of reproducing citizens must become a major concern of government if women are ever to become full citizens and equally represented.

Perhaps one of the most radical analyses the book offers is that of our capitalist economy and the institution of “private ownership” from a feminist point of view. John Locke long ago argued that in the natural state man “owns” that with which he has “mixed his labor.” With this claim Locke had the private rewards of agricultural labor in mind, and the metaphor also covers craft production and extends to factory labor owning a private wage. But consider a traditional woman “mixing her labor” with her family, household and children. The woman does not obtain anything in the form of private disposable property—she even “gives” her child away when the child reaches maturity.

My hope is that this work might occasion a novel way of looking at both the strengths and weaknesses of our modern political state—and thereby help provide a new theoretical justification for progressive change. For first must come the theoretical task to conceive how we might transform various economic, social, and legal structures without violating essential individual freedoms.

© 2009 Sibyl Ann Schwarzenbach

I argue for an economy that recognizes not just productive labor for exchange, but equally ethical reproductive praxis as well.

A close-up

In many jurisdictions, the moment a misdemeanor domestic violence arrest enters the system, prosecutors routinely seek a protection order banning the alleged assailant from the home, whether or not the woman wants this step taken. Then, in a standard exchange for a plea to a lesser charge or a plea that leads to dismissal, prosecutors might make that protection order “permanent”—I call this “state-imposed de facto divorce.”

Even if the woman asks her partner to come home, the relationship is illegal. The police may make unannounced visits to check that he isn’t around. His mere presence—even contact through a phone call—can result in arrest and criminal conviction. In fact, that may be the result that the system seeks. It is difficult for prosecutors to prove violence when women won’t cooperate with the prosecution, especially in the case of misdemeanors, which don’t involve serious physical injury. Violations of protection orders are far easier to prove. They become proxy crimes, ways of circumventing the burden of proof.

Some women whose intimate relationships are being criminally prohibited by the state may ask prosecutors to drop the criminal charges that set this in motion. But much law enforcement proceeds on the view that these women do not know or cannot say what is best for them because they are locked in a terrifying dynamic of abuse and coercion. This paternalism may well be justified in serious cases of violence where we can assume that the victim’s autonomy is already worn very thin. But it is troubling when exercised in a mandatory fashion in a world of mostly misdemeanor arrests. This is especially a concern when the definition of what is “violence” has been defined down to include crimes against spouses and partners that don’t even involve physical conduct. These misdemeanors are treated as serious because they are categorized as domestic violence, and law enforcement now wants to distance itself from inaction in the face of abuse that was so routine in the past .

Another problem is the frequent lack of coordination between the criminal system and family courts dealing with issues that sometimes arise when couples are separated. Excluding a husband from the home may mean nobody is left to pay the rent and the bills. So imposing a de facto divorce through the criminal system can be worse for a woman than an actual divorce, where alimony and child support can be set.

Perhaps because of the urgency and magnitude of the problem of domestic violence, much-needed law reform has been rapid, resulting in new developments that we do not yet fully understand. In the book, I try to uncover some important conceptual, practical, and normative consequences of that law reform. The topic is particularly sensitive because of the unique and complex vulnerabilities, interests, rights, and freedoms that inhabit the home. Now that we have had some success in getting domestic violence to be taken seriously as a public issue, it is time to be vigilant that techniques of state control don’t negate an important purpose of that reform—improving women’s autonomy.

Lastly

The transformations I explore in the book have meant substantial changes in the distribution of power and autonomy among citizens and the state. State-imposed de facto divorce accomplished by protection orders, for example, matters not merely because it disrupts inherited conceptions of privacy, but because it essentially shifts decisional power from individual women to state actors, such as prosecutors and police officers.

The contemporary rise of castle doctrine laws authorizing the use of deadly force against home intruders does not only unsettle our vision of the government’s role in keeping the peace. It actually devolves some of the state’s monopoly on legitimate force to private actors whose actions are legally redefined as self-defense.

The construction of certain homes as abusive and therefore not entitled to constitutional privacy protections does not just destabilize the ideal of home as universal. It effectively produces a legal regime in which home privacy provides a screen through which the state may assign citizens to different legal categories for different distributive purposes or results.

Changes in what the home means to us redistribute the rights and responsibilities of home. These changes naturally disturb the conceptual boundary between public and private. The peculiarities that result are accompanied by the redistribution of wealth, power, and legal rights that characterizes the cycle of crisis and response.

The period between 2001 and 2008—the legal moment that this book primarily seeks to understand—is distinctive for having captured the fruition of many earlier developments in a wealthy society where deep fears and ambivalences were focused on home and crime, and where transformative legal reforms were driven by these fears and ambivalences. What is to come will be shaped both by the legacy of this period and by events that are still too inchoate to understand fully.

© 2009 Jeannie Suk

It is difficult for prosecutors to prove violence when women won’t cooperate with the prosecution, especially in the case of misdemeanors, which don’t involve serious physical injury. Violations of protection orders are far easier to prove. They become proxy crimes, ways of circumventing the burden of proof.

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In the wake of 1968, Herbert Marcuse and, by extension, his former colleagues from the Frankfurt School became forever linked with the student protests of that era. While most of the members and former members of the Horkheimer Circle had a deeply problematic relationship with the New Left, Herbert Marcuse’s enthusiastic support of the student movement solidified the connection between the Frankfurt School and student rebels. The press of the late 1960s heralded Marcuse as the “guru” of student rebellion. The evidence among the writings of American student leaders, however, presents a more problematic picture.

Marcuse and his critics were right about the difficulties faced by his readers in the United States. Most were not familiar with the style of rhetoric or the Germanic modes of thought that lay behind his writings for the New Left. At the same time, the student journals and underground newspapers from the era suggest a pattern of reception that is markedly different from what has traditionally been assumed.

Herbert Marcuse, 1955

When examining materials such as New Left Notes, Ramparts, and the wide array of underground newspapers linked to the counterculture, one is struck by how infrequently Marcuse’s name or ideas appear before the dramatic events of 1968. After the spring of 1968, when Marcuse actively sought to inspire and ally himself with the New Left, there is slightly more discussion, but still not as much as the popular press led people to believe. To some extent, Marcuse’s thought struggled to take root within a movement that progressively embraced increasingly extreme actions and enthusiastically touted its own anti-intellectualism.

Marcuse’s most substantial audience were graduate students and scholars sympathetic to many of the ambitions of the New Left. Marcuse and the Frankfurt School reminded them of the importance of social theory, the power of the culture industry, and the dangers of authoritarianism. Such admirers of the Horkheimer Circle emphasized these aspects of Critical Theory to criticize the rise of extremism that had arisen both in reaction to the student movement and within the student movement itself.

Critical Theory flourished amid the ruins of the American New Left after its shocking implosion. This reception of Critical Theory was not in the streets, but rather in the seminar room, a place where Critical Theory has since flourished, but also receded largely from public view.

Lastly

My book aims to challenge what I consider to be some pervasive views about the Frankfurt School during its period of exile in the United States and to reevaluate the implications of this time in America.

First, like Jay and Wiggershaus before me, The Frankfurt School in Exile challenges the myth of a homogenous Horkheimer Circle by complicating the picture of Critical Theory and its theorists. By focusing on the Frankfurt School in exile, we glimpse Critical Theory at a moment of crisis and transformation, an era during which competing visions for the future of the institute and its intellectual program were openly debated. Second, my study dispels the common idea that the critical theorists isolated themselves in the United States, documenting the numerous contacts that emerged between members of the Horkheimer Circle and networks of American scholars and public intellectuals. Third, my project evaluates the impacts that American exile had on the Frankfurt School, as well as the influences that these critical theorists had on various communities of American thinkers.

Recently, intellectual history has been in crisis. It began with the widespread rise of social history; intellectual history increasingly was perceived by social historians as old-fashioned and elitist. Further problems arose as some leading intellectual historians began to take French theory more seriously. As a result, intellectual history became a brief lightening rod among historians for the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

Writing in the wake of all of this, I hope that this book will offer a new path for intellectual historians—and more importantly one that will be appreciated by my fellow social historians. In the aftermath of last fall’s financial crisis, the timing seems right for a Marcuse (and Critical Theory) renaissance. But his ideas regarding the “new sensibility” must be rescued from his celebrity and his reputation as the “guru” of 1968. Only by re-examining Critical Theory’s academic reception during the 1960s can the Frankfurt School be rediscovered by the wide audience to whom it was addressed.

© 2009 Thomas Wheatland

Marcuse’s thought struggled to take root within a movement that progressively embraced increasingly extreme actions and enthusiastically touted its own anti-intellectualism

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Capital growth begins with borrowing for investment. For all economic activity is limited by the supply of money: there is always so much more that could be done, if only more money were available. As Samuel Butler put it, “It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.”

If money can be created in the form of loans for the purpose of profitable activity, then effective limits to economic growth are removed. There is no shortage of money when it can be replaced by credit, and repaid at a profit. The consequence was nothing less than Karl Polanyi’s “great transformation”: production for the sake of profit rather than use became the dominant motivation for social activity and interaction.

Capitalism, its growth and its globalization, is explained by banking. Economic activity, formerly a limited segment of social life, came to predominate over all other aspects of social life, including religion. The preachers’ declamations against the evils of usury and the love of money were unheeded by those who saw the evidence of prosperity brought about through profit.

Prior to the modern world, the economic sphere was bounded by the finitude of the production of value through human labour, on the one hand, and the finitude of money in circulation, on the other. In the modern world, however, the finitude of production has been partially overcome by harnessing energy stored in fossil fuels and the elements. At the same time, the finitude of currency has been overcome by treating signs of monetary value as themselves valuable, ensuring the value of newly created money by issuing it in the form of loans, attached to debts. Rates of production and rates of interest escape finitude by compound growth. Production for the sake of profit replaces production for the sake of use.

It is easy to observe how such an activity naturally leads to secularization and a direct opposition between God and money. Where God promises eternity, money promises the world. Where God offers a delayed reward, money offers a reward in advance. Where God offers himself as grace, money offers itself as a loan. Where God offers spiritual benefits, money offers tangible benefits. Where God accepts all repentant sinners who truly believe, money may be accepted by all who are willing to trust in its value. Where God requires conversion of the soul, money empowers the existing desires and plans of the soul. Money has the advantages of immediacy, universality, tangibility, and utility. Money promises freedom, and gives a downpayment on such a promise of prosperity.

Lastly

This is a prophetic and apocalyptic book, not only in its dire predictions about the immediate future and its pessimism about the demonic hold that debt has over our lives, but also in its attempt to explain and judge the entirety of modern life.

No one can remain neutral in regard to the book’s central thesis. So I expect it to be deeply divisive at best, or else regarded with such scandal and outrage that it must be denounced, marginalised or ignored.

The book calls into question an entire modern worldview shared by religious and non-religious alike. It does, however, give an explanation for the perverted balance of priorities in our society that many ordinary people feel deeply uneasy about.

My hope is that it will be a provocation for thinking, and that it may set up the terms of the problem so that new institutions can be devised that liberate human evaluation and cooperation from the constraints of debt money in a future era of our civilisation.

© 2009 Philip Goodchild

Theology must become a critical engagement with the actual fundamental forces and structures that shape our lives, rather than simply a reflection upon past traditions. A rather tentative proposal for institutional reform of money, banking, credit, and evaluation is part of the new theological agenda.

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In the section On Location, I recount the opening of the New Yorker Book Store with Pete Martin and Austen Laber. Pete was the co-founder, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, birthplace of the Beat Movement and of the literary magazine City Lights, of which five issues were published that included Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, David Riesman, Pete Martin and Parker Tyler. Our bookshelves were built by Manny Farber. The bookstore showcased young neighborhood writers, carried poetry, art books, little magazines and a line of newspapers. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who lived in the neighborhood, came daily to pick up the Forward.

The section “Cinephiles” describes our patrons. The theater became a hangout for film buffs from all walks of life: Columbia students Phillip Lopate and Morris Dickstein; critics Vincent Canby, Pauline Kael, Manny Farber, Richard Schickel, Eugene Archer, Andrew Sarris (proponent of the auteur theory), Jonas Mekas, Parker Tyler, Stanley Kauffmann, Peter Bogdanovich, Dwight Macdonald, and Susan Sontag; future film critic James Hoberman, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus; the musical archivist Miles Kreuger; Jules Feiffer and Bruce Goldstein. Jules Feiffer did a mural that hung in our vestibule. But most were ordinary moviegoers.

Dan Talbot & Alfred Hitchcock.

I devote sections of the book to Sarris, Farber, Kael, Bogdanovich, and Canby, and to directors with whom we formed close relationships: Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ousmane Sembene. And I describe the genesis of Point of Order, made by Dan and Emile de Antonio, on the Army McCarthy hearings, and of Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s eight-and-a-half hour work on the Holocaust.

Lastly

Peter Bogdanovich says the New Yorker Theater is where he got his education. Bruce Goldstein, repertory program director of New York’s Film Forum, who now devotes his career to getting better 35mm prints of classic films, was first made aware of that era with a screening of Gold Diggers.

As distributors, we launched seminal films and directors: Ousmane Sembene, now regarded as the father of African cinema; independent filmmakers Shirley Clarke, Jim Jarmusch, and John Cassavetes; Cinema Novo’s Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Carlos Diegues; Chris Marker; Jacques Rivette; Jean Eustache; Werner Herzog; Nagisa Oshima; and Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet.

We had the good fortune to participate as distributor and exhibitor in a score of memorable films: Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalogue, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Berlin Alexanderplatz, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy, the Dardenne Brother’s La Promesse and Le Fils, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Afterlife, Werner Herzog’s The Land of Silence and Darkness, and the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Theo Angelopulis’s The Traveling Players, Ousmane Sembene’s Borom Sarret and Moolade, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sancho the Bailiff.

At film festivals we were not on the lookout for blockbusters but for innovative works. We pursued works of human resonance that inform and perpetuate the art of cinema, touchstones to re-see over and over and learn from. The New Yorker Theater became a barometer to critical and popular taste, it helped to shape the sensibilities of a new generation.

© 2009 Toby Talbot

We pursued works of human resonance that inform and perpetuate the art of cinema, touchstones to re-see over and over and learn from.

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I hold that to be ignored and rejected by others means psychological death. Around page 225 in the book, I illustrate this idea by what I understand to be the tragic life story of abstract expressionist and action painter Jackson Pollock.

Pollock is an influential artist who is recognized as one of the major tenors on the mid-20^th Century North American art scene. In the 1940s and 1950s he was at the origins of a new movement and a radically new style in painting by which he tried to leave on the canvas direct traces of inner feelings via gestures of pure vitality. Pollock died after producing a series of large paintings that he covered with energetic drips of paints, his most famous paintings or “drip paintings.” Obviously, this new style was revolutionary and highly controversial, derided by most, but admired by a few clairvoyant, avant-garde connoisseurs.

Pollock was from the rural South of the United States. Unlikely, he left his hometown, driven by his art to live in a very different community of artists and gallery owners in New York City where things were hopping and happening. During his lifetime and unlike many other highly successful artists, Pollock got very famous and received much recognition in terms of money and public exposure, for better or worse. He had a serious drinking problem that got worse and eventually killed him at the pinnacle of success and recognition. Life magazine had a cover story on him and a film documented his art. His work was shown in major museums and galleries. He was highly regarded and supported by rich collectors and respected art critics. So what happened? I will submit that it is all about the issue of authenticity. With success comes expectations and social pressures, the risk of disappointing others and the feeling to have maybe reached a ceiling. This is what probably killed Pollock.

Lastly

Others in Mind deals with a universal and overarching psychological phenomenon that all people should relate to and should be intrigued by. This phenomenon is self-consciousness as constitutional element of the human psyche. I have tried to answer where self-consciousness does come from, and what consequences it has on the way we experience our life.

© 2009 Philippe Rochat

With success comes expectations and social pressures, the risk of disappointing others and the feeling to have maybe reached a ceiling. This is what probably killed Pollock.

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On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell issued a dire warning to the United Nations Security Council in an effort to convince the international community that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in violation of Security Council resolutions. He stated: “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.”

As we know now, these conclusions were not based on solid intelligence. In fact, after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, investigation of Iraq’s WMD programs has shown that every single U.S. allegation regarding Iraqi biological weapon activities was wrong. How did the United States get so much so wrong about Iraq’s biological warfare program?

Although the severity of this intelligence failure was a shock, intelligence agencies have a long track record of either underestimating or overestimating their adversaries’ BW capabilities and intentions. The United States also encountered serious problems assessing the Iraqi BW program before the 1991 Gulf War and the Soviet BW program throughout the cold war—although our intelligence on these programs was better than commonly understood.

States developing biological weapons have strong incentives to keep their plans and capabilities secret due to legal, normative and strategic reasons. As a result, these states engage in extensive deception-and-denial operations to conceal the existence and capabilities of offensive programs. Properly assessing the information that is collected is complicated by the multiuse nature of biotechnology; the overlap between offensive, defensive, and civilian activities; and the lack of easily detectable signatures for offensive programs. As a result, biological weapons are a notoriously difficult target for intelligence agencies.

Good intelligence is the first line of defense against biological weapons. Conversely, poor intelligence complicates efforts to develop and deploy defenses, engage in diplomacy, conduct inspections, and undertake military operations. Chapter 4 of the book describes the challenges in collecting and analyzing intelligence on biological weapons, examines the reasons for successes and failures in the Iraq and Soviet cases, and provides recommendations on how to prevent such intelligence failures in the future.

Lastly

In his announcement in 1969 that the United States was terminating its offensive biological weapons program, President Richard Nixon stated, “Mankind already carries in its own hands too many of the seeds of its own destruction.” Over the past sixty years, the world has avoided the worst consequences of biological warfare. World War II ended before the United States perfected its ability to mass-produce bombs filled with anthrax spores for use against Japan. The revolution in biology and biotechnology blossomed in the United States free of any military interest or influence because the country had already abandoned its offensive program. The Soviet Union, which aggressively sought to apply advances in biotechnology to biological warfare, collapsed before it was able to significantly achieve this objective. Will the world be so lucky at the next turning point? Maximizing the benefits that can be derived from advances in biotechnology and biomedical research while minimizing the risk of these advances being misused for hostile purposes will be one of this century’s most enduring challenges.

© 2009 Gregory D. Koblentz

Good intelligence is the first line of defense against biological weapons.

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This book intervenes in one of the long-standing issues in Middle Eastern studies regarding the shape and analysis of the Arab city. Urban scholars agree that the conception of the Arab city as a uniform and distinct spatial type with consistent features is inherently flawed, over-essentialized, and drawn from limited examples—the product of the limitations of early Orientalist scholarship.

The Merchant Houses of Mocha was written with the understanding that the Arab city is an evolving concept that must be understood through a diversity of cases and with a focus on the historic and regional specificity of each example. But the goal, particularly in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, was not just to present a counter model to long-standing ideas of a uniform and standard Arab city, but also to provide new avenues to analyze the shaping impulses behind the construction, use, and meaning of urban form in Arab and Islamic cities.

As a key port city on the southern fringe of the Arab world, in communication with the Indian Ocean, Mocha presents an important set of spatial and architectural principles that contribute to our understanding of historic urbanism in the Middle East. It should be added that these regions, the Indian Ocean littoral and the Arabian Peninsula, are often excluded from the scholarship on urbanism in the Arab and Islamic world, which usually focuses on key well-known examples from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

My treatment of Mocha looks to the ways in which this city was shaped over time to accommodate the practices of the trade, which included the everyday exchange of goods, but also the social activities of merchants and the representation of status and creditworthiness as necessary attributes for merchants who worked in foreign lands. To that end, the city was laid out in a diagrammatic manner, which was read differently by those who arrived from land and by sea.

Surprisingly, Mocha lacked traditional public structures of trade, caravanserais and funduqs. Houses, which are often cast as the protected private domain of the family, became sites for trade transactions for major merchants. Additionally, while the city was divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Somali and Jewish communities settled in quarters outside of the city wall, Baniyan merchants were exempt from spatial segregation because of their centrality in the trade.

While Mocha should not be taken as a paradigmatic example of an Arab city, a port city, or an Indian Ocean city, it does present a fascinating case of how the processes of trade shape city form and intersect with the politics of urban functionality in coastal regions.

Lastly

In the age of the early modern Indian Ocean, Mocha was at the center of a vast maritime network, with a number of cross-regional spheres overlapping in and around the port. Some of the city’s main necessities, such as water and firewood, came from across the Red Sea. Some members of the city’s elite, such as the famous Indian shipping magnate Abd al-Ghafur, never even set foot in Mocha, but were known locally through their ships and ship captains that frequented the port. Commodities that left Mocha were destined for Basra in Iraq, the port city of Surat in Gujarat, Dutch Batavia in Indonesia, and even St. Malo on the coast of Brittany. This was an era when the merchants and officials of Mocha communicated and traded with their cohorts from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and even Central America, directly and indirectly.

The Merchant Houses of Mocha appears at a time when the lines that divide global spaces appear to be less rigid and more porous than ever before. New technologies allow us to traverse vast spaces that in the past required the commitment of extended and arduous journeys to cross. In this age of globalization, we often marvel at the ways in which geographic space has been compressed by technologies of communication and transportation.

With the emergence of these new networks, however, Mocha and also Yemen have lost their centrality in global matrices of trade, exchange, and interaction. Mocha’s trade migrated to other neighboring ports and Yemen, after losing its global monopoly on the coffee bean in the eighteenth century, has not discovered the oil riches of its neighbors. Mocha’s contemporary geographic marginality is underscored by the decay that the city has experienced over time.

Although its ports played a key role in cross-cultural trade networks since antiquity, Yemen has been peripheralized and left out of the story of contemporary global interconnectivity, with all of its perceived achievements. With this contemporary context in mind, it is increasingly important to redraw the historic international vectors of maritime movement and cultural exchange to represent a moment in time when Mocha and Yemen were major players in the global sphere.

© 2009 Nancy Um

the goal was not just to present a counter model to long-standing ideas of a uniform and standard Arab city, but also to provide new avenues to analyze the shaping impulses behind the construction, use, and meaning of urban form in Arab and Islamic cities

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A reader of this book would probably be most struck by the many instances of commonplace accidents that one seldom or never thinks about. Human error is everywhere. Workers try to bypass safety devices. Vigilance is often hard to maintain, as when a tram operator was distracted by an attractive woman and did not see the drunk who had fallen asleep on the tracks. Even in large systems, operator error can occur.

Most striking about accident proneness, however, is the fact that a pattern of excess accidents per given individual had been widely recognized, particularly as populations and technological environments grew. But only when a label was applied to the phenomenon did proneness to accident make sense to people. Repeatedly, supervisors would say that they had noticed that some few people were the source of a large proportion of the accidents in the plant or on the rails or roads. When those supervisors heard the term “accident proneness,” they recognized the classification immediately and started to use the idea and anything they heard or learned about it. There was early such testimony from rapid transit executives in Germany and the United States, from manufacturers in Britain and other English-speaking countries. The idea spread because it worked for people.

Not all managers were initially convinced. A British industrial psychology group reported this incident: “Our investigator had obtained accurate records of all accidents for a considerable period, and he found one instance of a boy who had already sustained five minor accidents during the period. As the boy was working in a particularly dangerous job, he was selected, together with several others who also showed high susceptibility, for transfer to other work. Before the transfer could be made, however, he was caught and lost his hand in the machinery he was cleaning. Up to this point, there had been considerable doubt on the part of the managing director as to the need for such a detailed accident survey. Needless to say, those workers who sustained multiple accidents in future were quickly removed from the danger zones.”

Those who worked with groups of children were particularly quick to see the validity of the idea. Commented Helen Ross of Chicago in 1952, “Years ago, before I knew the term ‘accident proneness,’ I recognized in my summer camp [for girls] the tendency among certain children to have more than their share of accidents. ‘There goes Jane again,’ or ‘Who do you suppose fell out of the boat? Mary, of course.’”

Lastly

The rise of the idea of accident proneness has many striking aspects. The slow death of the idea in the later decades of the twentieth century, however, speaks to more subtle social changes.

Because there was some validity of the idea, it has persisted as part of folk knowledge, referred to in novels, cartoons, and newspaper stories. Some celebrities and even a U.S. President were noted for being accident prone. It was a way of labeling people but not holding them personally responsible for their unfortunate trait. That is, accident proneness was different from carelessness.

Most striking, however, was not the end of accident proneness but the fact that new social conditions brought forth a new approach to accidents and safety. Identifying and stigmatizing accident prone people was appropriate in an age when noticing individuals, particularly out of a commodified labor force, was enlightened. Discriminating against them for employment and driving, however, troubled increasing numbers of experts.

The engineers solved the discrimination problem in large part by applying their safety measures to all people indiscriminately. Moderns will recognize the social style. We all have to put up with inconveniences so that all variety of citizens can have equal protection. So the engineers designed automobiles so that even a drunk would have trouble killing himself or herself. There are rails and other protective devices to protect shaky old people, no matter how much the devices get in the way of more nimble younger people. Or everyone struggles with safety caps on medicine bottles, which save the lives of many thousands of toddlers.

What nobody talks about is the radical egalitarianism underlying the engineering of safety. It certainly was never the conscious intention of the engineers who were creating safe environments and devices to make everyone equal in terms of safety, regardless of gender, social status or identification. The new age of technology in the late twentieth century has social implications that have as yet not been fully explored.

Accident Prone is thus an opening to unexpected insights from attempts to deal with a terrible problem no one likes to talk about, either historically or currently: the unintentional destruction of bodies and property by technology.

© 2009 John C. Burnham

What nobody talks about is the radical egalitarianism underlying the engineering of safety. It certainly was never the conscious intention of the engineers who were creating safe environments and devices to make everyone equal in terms of safety, regardless of gender, social status or identification.

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The book offers a systematic explanation of the changes in role-expectations that scientists who participate in environmental policymaking will face. It is rocky terrain that, for some scientists, is difficult to negotiate. To substantiate the argument, I rely on a mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis.

To get a flavor for this, one might look at the section in Chapter 3 where I present the different strategies scientists have employed in presenting their arguments during congressional hearings. Perhaps because political science, as a discipline, has tended to dismiss the role of scientists in policymaking, there has been almost no empirical work on scientists as a distinct type of witness in a congressional hearing.

The data here are fascinating. They make clear that scientists do have to wrestle with the idea that their participation is predicated on their objectivity. This issue arises repeatedly: members of Congress first invoke scientific objectivity and then try to lure scientists into making explicit policy recommendations. Here, we meet “boundary observers,” those scientists who will not make policy statements no matter how hard legislators push them, the “unapologetic boundary crossers,” those who readily offer a policy position, and the “apologetic boundary crosses,” those who tend to preface their policy positions with a statement like, “well, since that is not a scientific question, I can give you my opinion as a citizen.”

The chapter goes on to present findings from an in-depth content analysis of witness participation in acid rain and climate change hearings. Here, quantitative data bolster our understanding of scientists’ role in the hearings. These data establish that scientists are sought after as witnesses in both acid rain and climate change debates. Scientists, as a group, stand out from their non-science counterparts. Moreover, professional affiliation shapes their behavior. The pattern of their responses that I outline comes out most strikingly in the early years of congressional hearings on climate change. During this period, witness panels were dominated by academic scientists.

Lastly

Undeniably this research gets far down into the intricacies of environmental policymaking. I discuss witnesses in congressional hearings decades past, code subtle distinctions in their policy positions, worry about models of the policy processes debated largely by scholars in isolated camps, and pay painstaking attention to trends and context over time.

Yet normative arguments about the role of science and technology in society can mislead if they are not closely tethered to empirical investigation. By searching for a monumental answer to the role of science in policymaking—science either is always or is never influential—existing scholarship fails to grapple with how scientific expertise can be harnessed to forward both technical and democratic ends.

By contrast, the book showcases the tensions scientists face in supplying neutral expertise to a political system in search of ideas and solutions that, fundamentally, can neither be fully neutral or fully expert. It also shows a marriage of convenience between scientists and policymakers that allows scientists to participate as advocates in some policy venues and then restricts them under the banner of scientific objectivity. This settlement masks the subtle and often time-consuming negotiations involved in drawing normative conclusions from scientific research. Where scientists may face too little scrutiny in agenda setting, they may be so constrained in later stages of policymaking that we lose valuable input of intelligent, dedicated participants.

The book strives to expand our collective understanding of the science / policy interface. As governments increasingly find themselves managing complex scientific and technological undertakings, citizens should be keenly interested in assessing the role of science and expertise in the political arena.

© 2009 Ann Keller

Where scientists may face too little scrutiny in agenda setting, they may be so constrained in later stages of policymaking that we lose valuable input of intelligent, dedicated participants.

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Schloss Friedenstein, the seventeenth-century palace that Ernst the Pious of Gotha built, is a good place to do research: on one side, in the east wing, the old research library; on the other side, in the west wing, the secret archive of Ernst the Pious. It is an impressive physical space. Day by day, as I ate my lunch under Pious Ernst’s statue and walked up the steep hill from town with his palace looming over me, the presence of the place—its vaults, fortifications, chambers, and halls—had an impact. I started wondering about spaces and rooms, and about the treasury; not the abstracted treasury of administrative history, or the idealized treasury of the cameral sciences, but the specific room where the duke met in council with his officials.

In the conclusion I describe a large tabular chart that I found in the Schloss Friedenstein. This “table of duties” dictated every aspect of behavior for the duke’s officials; it was hanging in Pious Ernst’s fiscal chamber when a famous cameralist named Seckendorff worked there. Initially, the chart struck me as a perfect example of early modern social discipline, a case study in Foucauldian mechanisms of control and surveillance. By subdividing space and time to provide transparency and visibility, it was a cog in the machinery of control that characterized early modern Europe.

Fragment from the 1655 Fürstlichen Cammerordnung, a table of duties for state officials (Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Gotha). It appears in the book on page 135.

I eventually decided that this was wrong. The table of duties was really an example of wishful thinking, because the people it aimed to discipline and control did not exist. Seckendorff’s imagined bureau had no meetings, no votes, and no timetables. He was pretty much by himself. The elaborate table of duties corresponded only to the fantasies of its author.

I focus on this episode here because it serves as a microcosm of my larger argument. Historians have been conditioned to look for certain things in archives and libraries, so that research becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We find what we expect to find. There is no simple way out of this trap, unless you believe in the myth of the objective historian.

Lastly

In the eighteenth century, German political economists repeatedly promised that they could harness science to improve the common good. These claims later reappeared as evidence for the connection between science and economic development during the Enlightenment. Some contemporary social scientists have even suggested that the cameralists present a “third way” for economic development, an alternative model to both Marxist and neo-liberal approaches.

The sources that historians have used to link Enlightenment science with material progress are not transparent. Professors and state officials, desperate for employment and keen for promotions, created the fiction of well-ordered police states through their regulations, books and treatises. They argued that science, properly cultivated, created prosperity for princes and their people. When these author-administrators tried to put their ideas into practice, however, the results were usually disastrous.

History is only as good as its sources, and the cameral sciences, which pretended to speak publicly about the most secret affairs of state, were deeply dishonest. We cannot trust them, and we cannot trust narratives built on them. I hope that my book adds a note of skepticism to current debates about science and economic development. We don’t know as much as we think we know.

If the history of state building and state finance is about progressive models of development, about the relentless march to us, then it makes little sense to study the petty principalities of early modern Germany, those Galapagos Islands of state building. But if we suspend our judgment about the inevitable destiny of the world’s political and economic dodos, replacing categories of hierarchy with difference, perhaps we can begin to understand what these forgotten states actually produced instead of how they failed. Release the past and you release the future.

© 2009 Andre Wakefield

It seems obvious now that a powerful mix of science, technology, discipline, and bureaucracy created our particular cocktail of modernity. In fact, it seems so obvious that we routinely project this narrative back onto the past, displacing it onto histories where it does not belong. This is how imagined pasts become justifications for the present.

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I would hope that readers “browsing” would first look at the book’s cover. It is a dreamy image of water taken on the Hudson River by artist Ellen Kozak. I would want them to allow themselves to dream and wander and then to read the Prologue, which is called “Wandering Monks and Peripatetic Birds.” It begins,” Thinking in Place: Art Action and Cultural Production is the result of the past decade of wandering.”

If people read that and then go on to read about the range of places I have visited—Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, India, Africa, Germany and sites such as the Wannsee House (where the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question” was determined), they would know a lot about me and how deeply place affects me, how everything begins in sense and then becomes response. Response then translates into ideas that then become philosophical constructs that then seek to be written. They then would know how much process matters to me; I think about writing as artists think about art making.

The readers would come to understand that the book is also about them, about how they think, and they could then reflect upon their own method of thinking in place as I have reflected on mine.

Lastly

Because I was educated to be a literary critic and came up during the time of modernist and postmodern theory, I have had to find ways of writing that communicate how I think in ways that are translatable to others. I want the writing to be elegant, poetic, seductive, because deep within it there are ideas, which, if adopted, believed, cherished, could transform consciousness.

These are not my ideas alone; they are the ideas of centuries of utopian thought. I want these ideas to permeate people’s consciousness—ideas about the importance of art for human well-being, the end to war as a solution to conflict, the importance of community and the public sphere to a democratic society, and so forth.

These ideas are not presented as political messages; they are presented as the struggle for humanity’s survival. I want these ideas to saturate people’s desire as they have mine. And I want the writing to be so engaging that people remember why they love this world and therefore want to protect it and its inhabitants across national and international boundaries.

Simply, I always write for people—not for the art world, literary world, sociological world and so forth. I hope the book can cross many boundaries. This is not easy since all books are “shelved” somewhere, whether physically or virtually.

But thinking does not fit easily into such categorizations. And the problems of the 21^st century will not be solved by “disciplines” but by ideas and by the willingness of people to extend beyond themselves and their own culture, to recognize themselves in the Other, as part of a species whose evolution should be considered, whose future can be consciously determined.

© 2009 Carol Becker

everything begins in sense and then becomes response. Response then translates into ideas that then become philosophical constructs that then seek to be written

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One of the most dramatic bubbles of the 2000s occurred in the art market, above all in contemporary art. For fine art overall, the most widely quoted index, the Mei Moses index, showed an annual rise of around 20 percent over a five year period. Art suddenly appeared to be an excellent investment, and art fairs and auctions proliferated.

This particular bubble demonstrates very clearly the link between monetary values and other values. Art became important at the same time as a speculative asset, and as a statement about taste. The capacity of art possessions to make a statement about the owner’s capacity for discernment was at the heart of the appeal of art as an investment category.

In the middle of the financial meltdown of September 2008, a cultural event occurred in London. While the City of London was shaken by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the run on HBOS, Sotheby’s staged a record-breaking auction for the works of the artist Damien Hirst, which produced a gross take of around $200 million. Compared to the values that were being destroyed on Wall Street, this was small change; but it was a remarkable vote of confidence in the work of one artist. He was increasingly over-extending himself as a result of the appetite of the market. Indeed, a few days after the September sale, Hirst stated that “I don’t have enough time at the moment. I don’t even do my own paintings.”

Why did so many buyers want to acquire the works of Hirst at such extreme prices, and why was the extremity of the reputational bubble such an additional source of attraction? Financial bubbles, like the one that was just definitively bursting at the time of the Hirst auction, are intimately related to the world of art. Renaissance Florence depended on the patronage of the Medici. Sixteenth-century Venice turned the wealth of the spice trade into the canvases of Titian and Tintoretto. The world’s next great commercial center was Amsterdam, where again the successful burghers pushed for a new style of art and produced the age of Rembrandt. The great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century financiers, men like J.P. Morgan, Henry Frick, and Andrew Mellon, spent a large part of their fortunes on art.

Financial judgment, by contrast, is not by its nature open to inspection. It depends on inside deals, on moving ahead of the market. It is impossible to tell who is making good bets and who is gambling recklessly. It is unwise to rely solely on the charm or persuasive capacity of the financial intermediary. Consequently, it is helpful to have a proxy activity that enables outsiders to see that the process of discernment and valuation really occurs.

Of course art is not the only way of revealing supposed financial skill: it might also be a taste in fine wines (which developed also as an asset class), or skill at card games. Much of Wall Street was gripped by a poker mania in the 1980s, while the senior management at Bear Stearns was apparently appointed because of sustained skill at playing bridge. Art collecting similarly reveals a capacity for precisely conducting long-term valuations.

The recent era of global finance—maybe we can already possibly speak of it as being past—differed from the financial surge of a century ago. Its cultural manifestations also appeared to be novel. It was playful, allusive, edgy, in short post-modern. It treated tradition and history not as a constraint, but as a source of ironic reference. A post-modern neglect or disdain for reality generated the sense that the whole world was constantly shifting and malleable, and might be as transient and as meaningless as stock quotations.

Lastly

Globalization depends on being able to achieve and maintain trust over long distances, between strangers, in situations that are full of legal uncertainty. The financial crisis has already produced an increased emphasis on the state and its role in regulating business activity. The renationalization of financial and business life is likely to produce new conflicts and clashes, and to heighten the level of uncertainty.

In the world of globalization, many people make assumptions about common values, but these are often not articulated fully, and when they are articulated, they frequently provoke a fierce reaction. The only way of dealing with a collapse in values is to rebuild values. Regaining trust is a long and arduous process. That is why when globalization is broken, it is not easy to put it together again. We will look for “communities of virtue,” but inevitably we will not find them at once. The globalization cycle will start again, but it will not start up immediately.

© 2009 Harold James

art is not the only way of revealing supposed financial skill: it might also be a taste in fine wines, or skill at card games

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If I had to select at random a section to commend to a reader, I think I would choose the section of Chapter 5 that deals with the history of the martial law regime in Hawaii. I think this is my most original contribution, because it tells a story that most Americans are not aware of, yet has direct parallels with the present.

After Pearl Harbor the U.S. Army commander pushed through a declaration of martial law in what was then the Territory of Hawaii, suspended the U.S. Constitution, dismissed the elected government, and declared himself military governor. The Army meanwhile threw the judges out of the courts and created instead a set of military tribunals to judge all criminal cases, even those involving American civilians. Defendants had no due process or legal protections. Virtually all those accused were found guilty, and often given harsh or arbitrary sentences (for instance, they could reduce their felony sentences by agreeing to donate blood).

Eventually these military tribunals were challenged in court. The Army and the Justice Department, knowing that they had no possible chance to prove that there was any real military emergency or threat of imminent invasion from Tokyo, instead based their case for martial law on the threat of Japanese Americans. Eventually the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court as Duncan v. Kahanamoku (1946). In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court said clearly that military tribunals to judge civilians are unconstitutional, and the opinion of the Court contained some very strong language denouncing the Army’s action as tyrannical.

So the events in Hawaii not only present an interesting counterpoint to what happened to Japanese Americans on the mainland, but they also tell a kind of prehistory that we should be thinking about when we look today at Guantanamo and the military tribunals there. Yet the story of martial law and Duncan v. Kahanamoku is really absent, not just from popular discussion but also from law and American studies classes, the study of constitutional law, and legal briefs. It deserves to be looked at much more closely.

Lastly

I have learned to restrain myself from trying to anticipate too much what consequences or implications a book will have. My first book, By Order of the President, came out only a few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Though I wrote the book long before the attacks took place, my message about the perils of overreacting in a climate of uncertainty and fear gained a special resonance and timeliness from them. As a result, the book was reviewed and featured in places where normally such a work would not appear. It has remained ever since the work that I am best known for. I do not know whether A Tragedy of Democracy will speak as much to the issues of the moment, or exactly what people will make of it.

Most probably these two books will be compared, especially since both cover the removal of Japanese Americans. Still, they are very different works. By Order of the President was largely an executive history, which brought Franklin Roosevelt and the White House into the well-trodden existing narrative of the camps, and it had little to say abut the Japanese Americans themselves. I made heavy use of the existing literature and available published documents, and was mortified when reviewers either praised or castigated me for my discussion of the larger history of the camps, as that part of things was mostly not original with me.

A Tragedy of Democracy is a more ambitious work, which attempts to synthesize a great deal of new information on the experience of Japanese Americans at the same time that it brings together histories of confinement in different countries—histories that have only been studied in isolation. What I hope people take away from it is a sense of how fragile our liberties are—not just those of US Americans, but of people in democratic societies throughout the continent—and how easy it is in time of emergency to suspend judgment and give excess power to military authorities with a plausible claim of national security.

The case of the Japanese Americans underlines most strongly the wise words attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

© 2009 Greg Robinson

Duncan v. Kahanamoku is really absent, not just from popular discussion but also from law and American studies classes, the study of constitutional law, and legal briefs. It deserves to be looked at much more closely

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For me, the most fascinating parts of this story took place outside the stores: in a stadium of college students cheering for capitalism, a theme park about free enterprise with singing dollar bills, a grade-school classroom that hosted a giant dancing pencil promoting monetarist economics.

When we try to explain the rise of free-market fundamentalism, we usually wind up talking about electoral politics—how the Young Americans for Freedom mobilized for Barry Goldwater’s campaign, for example, or how the Moral Majority used direct-mail technology to empower white evangelicals as a voting block. But these explanations can’t get at how a particular economic vision, hatched in rarefied preserves like the Mont Pelerin Society or the University of Chicago’s economics department, became common sense for most of the country even while it failed to deliver prosperity and security. To understand how deregulation, privatization, and globalization displaced the mid-century vision of industrial democracy, we need to give some credit to the dancing pencil.

From the author’s collection

And the giant free-enterprise pencil in the grade-school classroom was a Wal-Mart project. In the mid-eighties, the company’s philanthropic foundations adopted a struggling project called Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE), headquartered in Wal-Mart’s backyard and connected, like Wal-Mart, to many of the region’s small Christian colleges. SIFE attracted donations from corporations like Dow Chemical and Coors to establish teams of pro-capitalist college students competing to spread the good news of free enterprise. In practice, the young people often wound up fronting industry propaganda—Dow’s fight against liability, for example—to children, church groups, and their host communities. Wal-Mart’s support turned it into an international network for recruiting future managers and extending free trade around the globe.

When we look for alternative “grassroots globalization” movements and find Seattle’s turtles and Teamsters, we’re missing the biggest transnational success story of the last half-century—Christian missionaries, often linked directly to the free-market gospel.

Lastly

To Serve God and Wal-Mart shows how a Christian pro-capitalist social movement grew from the bottom up as well as the top down.

For many people in the old agricultural periphery, the book argues, the gospel of free enterprise answered some of their most pressing needs. It compensated for the loss of the yeoman dream of self-sufficiency; it sanctified mass consumption; it raised degraded service labor to the status of a calling; it offered a new basis for family stability and masculine authority even as neoliberalism undermined both; for some whites it eased the dismantling of official white supremacy. The generation that moved from the farm to the store, and their children who filled the marketing classes at Christian colleges, crafted an ideology of Christian free enterprise from their experience of a particular historical moment, a particular geography, and a particular religious heritage. To Serve God and Wal-Mart tells this story, often in the words of the people who experienced it.

Their unlikely blending of free market economics and evangelical religion resolved a contradiction at the core of neoliberalism. Since its only unit of analysis is an autonomous individual seeking his own maximum utility, capitalism cannot provide for the regeneration of the very virtues it depends upon. Market logic renders merely irrational the very concerns we put at the center of our existence—art, justice, love, friendship, democracy, even worship itself. The ideal of Christian service washed commerce in the blood of the lamb.

As much as my own economic ideals differ from the ones Wal-Mart promotes, I came out of this work very hopeful about the potential for common ground. The historical actors imbued with Christian free enterprise were willing to claim economics as a moral issue rather than a technical one. The left has been brow-beaten into timidity about its own tradition of economic justice, trying to deflect the spittle of a Glenn Beck by making small, neutral, technocratic claims where the issues merit real moral courage. The much broader public that pollsters call the “Wal-Mart Moms” agrees with the American majority on key issues--that the minimum wage must be raised, for example, or that health care should be universally available. If we quit dismissing the areas of disagreement as cultural distractions, we might find much to respect in their underlying motives.

© 2009 Bethany Moreton

For many people in the old agricultural periphery, the gospel of free enterprise answered some of their most pressing needs. It compensated for the loss of the yeoman dream of self-sufficiency; it sanctified mass consumption; it raised degraded service labor to the status of a calling; it offered a new basis for family stability and masculine authority even as neoliberalism undermined both; for some whites it eased the dismantling of official white supremacy.

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International courts have appeared in the news lately. The public seems vaguely aware of their existence and in some quarters there seems to be an expectation that they can try various bad guys around the world for their crimes. For some people, this means members of the Bush administration or Israeli generals; for others, this means dictators and human-rights abusers in Sudan, Iran, and North Korea.

My book discusses the history of international adjudication and its prospects for today. The bottom line is that although states have successfully relied on courts to resolve disputes from time to time in narrow circumstances, there is little reason to think that they will support a court that seeks to take on the hardest problems of international justice.

Lastly

The Nobel Prize awarded to Barack Obama has crystallized doubts about how much progress his administration has really made over the Bush administration, which was widely perceived as an international scofflaw and bully. Obama has pledged to close Guantanamo Bay and has abjured torture, but it has adopted most of the Bush administration’s other counter-terror policies and the legal theories that underlay them.

Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan and advanced it into Pakistan without congressional or UN authorization, and he has continued the policy of detaining people without charging them and launching targeted assassinations, policies which are also in tension with domestic and international law.

Rather than being disappointed with Obama, one might rethink the criticism of the Bush administration. In the anarchical international environment, legalistic thinking can easily to be taken too far. It is better to evaluate Obama’s policies in terms of international politics and morality; their lawfulness will always be, to a large extent, in the eyes of the beholder.

© 2009 Eric Posner

although states have successfully relied on courts to resolve disputes from time to time in narrow circumstances, there is little reason to think that they will support a court that seeks to take on the hardest problems of international justice

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Field Notes lends itself to browsing, starting and stopping here and there. One of the interesting things about early responses to the book is that people’s interests and concerns draw them to different sections. Instead of trying to summarize various sections that might attract different people, it is possible to get a better sense of the book by reading the chapter from which the book takes its title, “Elsewhere.”

I have been elsewhere. The distance is short though its crossing takes a lifetime. Elsewhere is not far – it is near, ever proximate, never present. It is a place or placeless place that is strange because it is so familiar. Rather than beyond, elsewhere is between the places I ordinarily dwell or think I dwell. When journeying elsewhere, you do not leave the here-and-now; it is as though elsewhere were folded into the present in a way that disrupts its presence. The everyday world does not disappear when you linger elsewhere – all you care about approaches from a distance that increases as it diminishes. Gradually you begin to realize that nothing is merely itself –everything, everybody is always also something else, someone else, somehow else, somewhere else.

When you are elsewhere, vision, and with it awareness, doubles and, as you recognize this doubling, doubles yet again. Far from confusing, this doubling and doubling of doubling clarifies by disclosing an elsewhere that is always there by not being there – like a looking-glass world into which you can always slip but can never leave. The mind is split, divided, torn not between consciousness and the unconsciousness but within consciousness itself. Two in one, one in two – neither separated nor unified, neither many nor one. Just as the everyday does not disappear when you are elsewhere, so elsewhere does not vanish when you attempt to come back. Once you have been elsewhere, you can never come back because elsewhere always returns with you.

Lastly

I hope Field Notes will find a wide audience with diverse backgrounds. People’s age and experience will influence how they respond to this book more than to others. Moreover, the response to the book will change over time.

Who, then, can I imagine reading this book? Perhaps

A mother coping with the birth of a deformed child.

A son dealing with the raging grief of a father who has lost his wife of fifty years.

A young woman responding to the news that she has inoperable brain cancer.

A young man sitting at the bedside of his friend suffering DTs from heroin withdrawal.

Parents struggling with the problem of what to give and what to withhold from their children.

A father playing baseball with his son.

A middle-aged man consoling his lifelong mentor as he struggles to deal with his wife’s Alzheimer’s disease.

A mother dropping off her daughter for the first day of school.

A man looking back over a failed career.

A student trying to understand the betrayal of her teacher.

A couple burying their dead child.

A melancholy youth learning to laugh.

In the chapter titled “Night,” I write:

There is not one night; there are two. The first night is the night that is the opposite of day and is familiar to all of us. At the end of a long day, we welcome this night and look forward to the renewal it brings…. The other night is different; it is, paradoxically, within as well as beyond what we ordinarily know as day and night. Far from familiar, it is forever strange; never reassuring, it is endlessly fascinating…. This night gives me no rest even when I am asleep.

We all know this night even if we do not give it a name. If Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living helps people get through this night beyond night, it will have accomplished its purpose.

© 2009 Mark C. Taylor

People’s age and experience will influence how they respond to this book more than to others. Moreover, the response to the book will change over time.

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A browsing reader might find the chapters on craft production and trade most revealing. The archaeology shows us that even small communities during the so-called Dark Ages belonged to complex and extensive networks through which goods, technology, and ideas flowed. Craft products ranged from everyday utilitarian items such as the pottery that people used to prepare and eat their meals, to spectacular brooches and belt buckles of silver and gold, with inlay of brilliant red garnet.

The archaeological evidence enables us to identify the places where such things were made, the locations from which the raw materials were obtained, and to say how widely such products were distributed in society. Small trade centers all over Europe were actively engaged in both local and long-distance commerce. For example, the wind-swept cliffs of Tintagel on the coast of Cornwall was the site of a commercial center that imported large quantities of fine pottery from northern Africa. The island of Helgö near Stockholm in Sweden was home to a trade center that acquired goods from as far off as India.

These are just a few examples of the surprises that await us in examining the archaeological evidence from this period in Europe’s early history.

Lastly

My intention in writing this book was to show an interested reading audience that our ideas about the human past are often very different from what was actually going on at that time.

Until recently, people tended to readily accept written texts as reliable information about the past, even when they were written by members of different societies from those that they were describing. The so-called Dark Ages are a particularly good example, because at least since the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, peoples of this period, including those whom we know by names such as Alamanni, Franks, Goths, Huns, and Saxons, have regularly been considered “barbarians.”

By looking closely at what those peoples were actually doing, and not just at what Late Roman commentators said about them, we get a very different picture.

© 2009 Peter S. Wells

The island of Helgo near Stockholm in Sweden was home to a trade center that acquired goods from as far off as India.

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This morning, October 1, 2009, I picked up the New York Times to notice a full-page ad on the back of the news section. It was prepared and paid for by “The Center for Consumer Freedom.” The group, going by the motto of “Promoting Personal Freedom and Protecting Consumer Choice,” opposes taxes being considered by New York City and elsewhere on soda and junk foods. The ad begins, “Are you too stupid…to make good personal decisions about foods and beverages.” Arguing against the “campaign to demonize soda” the advertisement blasts “food cops and politicians” for “attacking food and soda choices they don’t like.” Another of their ads warns about “Big Brother” in the “Big Apple.” The group’s print ads (which can be seen here) provide a present-day example of the language of what I call “conservative populism,” whose origins I trace in my book.

The final chapter of Buying Power examines the battle for, and ultimate defeat of, a Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), a cabinet-level department, which came tantalizingly close to becoming a reality several times in the 1970s. The CPA was defeated by a powerful lobby of various business organizations, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. But, in the end, the bill was, as the Wall Street Journal observed in 1978, “killed by words,” that is by the language of conservative populism that was invented by opponents of consumer protection and still lives on.

Beginning in the 1960s, this lobby successfully popularized the idea that consumer protection was a form of government coercion sufficiently frightening that it was best understood as “Orwellian.” This, I argue, was the opening wedge in what became a rhetoric of describing the broader liberal project as one that promoted unfreedom.

The specifics have changed in the last forty years, but the fundamental accusation has not. Currently, the same criticism is being used against President Obama’s proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. (I outline the argument that consumer protection is an important element of modern liberalism in a brief piece titled Consumer Protection Redux.)

Lastly

In the late 1990s, I began to research a book on consumer activism in the twentieth century. Several years into my research, I realized that I could not tell this story without showing what had come before. Consumer activism in the years before 1900 turned out not to be merely prehistory to the “real” story of consumer activism but an essential part of it.

Although historians, especially T. H. Breen, had highlighted the importance of Revolutionary era consumer politics, very little work had been done on the nineteenth century. For this reason, I most enjoyed researching the chapters of Buying Power that cover relatively unknown consumer campaigns—including those by abolitionists and Southern nationalists in the antebellum era, and by labor and African American activists in the postwar years. These campaigns, I believe, helped invent the vocabulary and the underlying philosophy that continue to guide contemporary boycotters. The core principles of boycotting–such as the use of the modern sounding phrase “conscientious consumer” and the concept of long distance solidarity—were firmly in place by 1880, the year that the word “boycott” was coined.

From page 117: Announcements of boycotts in a newspaper created by boycotting printers. (New York Boycotter, Nov 14, 1885, 3.)

Despite the importance of this nearly continuous history, one of the most striking characteristics of consumer activism is the lack of knowledge that boycotters generally have had about their predecessors. I tried to understand why, compared with most other social movements, boycotters have tended so quickly to forget their history. At the same time, although they may not have been able to name their forebears, boycotters have almost always drawn on the methods and philosophies of those who came before them. I’m conflicted about whether this process of forgetting is part of what has accounted for the prevalence of boycotting. Since most boycotts throughout U.S. history have failed to achieve their goals, perhaps those who remembered the past would have been disinclined to try a seemingly ineffective tactic.

Writing this book made me acutely aware not only of the genealogies of consumer activism and its rhetorics (both for and against) that continue to inform the consuming practices of the present but also of the artificial nature of our theoretical approaches, especially to the standard periodization of U. S. history that takes the Civil War to be the defining divide.

Defying the conventions of academic departments, the history of consumer activism was neither strictly antebellum nor postbellum; it was both. I would like to see more work that traces concepts and practices over the course of our history. Such works can shed new light both on the concept being traced, and can also, as I believe Buying Power does, provide a way to reframe U. S. history more generally.

© 2009 Lawrence B. Glickman

The core principles of boycotting–such as the use of the modern sounding phrase “conscientious consumer” and the concept of long distance solidarity—were firmly in place by 1880, the year that the word “boycott” was coined.

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I use the example of Copernicus, who literally picked up from Arabic texts almost all of the mathematical theorems he needed for the construction of his astronomy; these theorems were not found in the classical Greek texts.

When you mention Copernicus everybody gets a little jumpy, because we attribute to him the discovery of the earth moving around the sun. That Copernicus did not get from any Islamic astronomer that I know of. No Islamic astronomer I know of would believe in heliocentrism, or would allow a cosmology that is heliocentric. None of them, including Copernicus, had the ability to explain the physical structure of the universe—that explanation depended on an essential law that was yet to be discovered by Newton, a hundred years after Copernicus.

Yet, to explain how a planet moves around the sun, Copernicus needed the mathematical mechanisms that accommodate the movements of the planets. He needed a predictive model, to tell where the planet would be seen from the earth, at such and such a time. If you ask the question of where the planet will be seen from the earth, then you are already solving the problem for an earth-centered universe. And all of those answers were already found in the Islamic domain.

The question remains. Why did Copernicus do that? There are many people who answer that in so many different ways. But none of them is really cosmologically convincing. Because you would have to account for the force that holds the planets attached to the sun. Even Kepler, who comes after Copernicus, who should really be called the father of modern astronomy, even he was thinking that planets are attracting each other like magnets. Kepler used magnetism as a metaphor of that attraction because he still did not yet have Newton’s universal law of gravitation.

On the other hand, if you only think of it mathematically, it is irrelevant whether the center of the universe is at the sun or at the earth. This is how all the mathematics that was developed in the Islamic domain could be simply turned around and made heliocentric by Copernicus.

Lastly

Why did this scientific activity not continue in Islam? I say a few things in the book about this concept of “decline.” People speak of rise and fall, of cyclical movement, for example about the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire, or of the Roman Empire. I don’t give much credence to this view. Yes, the Roman Empire did end, but after one thousand and five hundred years. Decline is not about a cycle as such. It is when the historical conditions change that all things change—including the fortunes of empires.

If you look at the map of Europe in the year 1400, all of the trade routes crisscross right to the heart of what was called the Islamic domain. No European trader could conceive of making any money without paying part of it to a tax collector somewhere in an Islamic port or Islamic city. That map looks very different in the year 1550. All trade routes have shifted: they now go over the Atlantic. It was with the accidental discovery of the New World that the Islamic domain literally lost the primacy of trade.

So the silly questions of what “went wrong” in Islam and why did the Muslims who had the science “miss it” are answered by another question, “Why and how did Europe actually produce science?”

That will be my next book. In the same way I addressed the mechanism of producing science in the early Islamic civilization, now I want to address the mechanism that translated that wealth, and the economic conditions, on the ground, into the production of science in Europe. How did the Europeans produce science that could not be imitated by the Islamic civilization—as well as by the civilizations of China and India, which are not Islamic?

© 2009 George Saliba

If you ask a contemporary scientist about what was said in physics fifty years ago, the answer would be that all of that is obsolete. Today’s scientists do not read what was written in their fields fifty years ago. They only go for the latest. Why should a Renaissance scientist go for a text written in Ancient Greece a thousand years before, when the same had been discussed, criticized, updated, in the Islamic domain?

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Some people have told me that the most interesting part of the book was the chapter on Rudy Giuliani and his decision making. I don’t agree. I think the chapter on Mayor David Dinkins is the most interesting and the most challenging to write because Mayor Dinkins faced a fiscal crisis that was as severe and difficult as the 1975 fiscal crisis. And, in my judgment, the fiscal policies of Mayor Dinkins were outstanding. Time and again Mayor Dinkins placated the bankers while keeping his public policy goals in the forefront - the “safety net” of social services to the city’s poorest citizens. However, he failed to convince the city’s citizens that he was a capable leader, and thus only served one term.

Another example of the extraordinary power of the state government over the city was the struggle between Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor John Lindsay. Time after time the Governor blocked attempts by the Mayor to increase taxes to deal with the city’s growing deficit. Both the Governor and State Legislature were quick to add to the city’s spending through giveaways to the unions but at the same time the state government refused to agree to increases in city taxes. Eventually, the debts became too enormous and the city came close to bankruptcy.

Lastly

Follow the Money is significant because so little is written about banking and its influence on the rest of society. With the latest fiscal crises facing the country, it could be that the pattern will change and the banking influence on the rest of us will be more closely examined.

The book shows that, by and large, the financial elites won on most occasions, whenever times were hard. Yet, even in fiscally hard times, mayors clearly had some discretion and achieved some of their goals – whether it was Koch demanding and finally winning the right to control the MAC surpluses, or Dinkins who insisted on money for “cops and kids” not just “cops,” or Giuliani who was determined to spend dollars on public safety and education regardless of what the financial elites said, or Bloomberg who claimed that an increase in property taxes was the only sound choice. Although private power usually dominated public policy during hard times, New York City mayors did have some wins.

© 2009 Lynne A. Weikart

Follow the Money explores the choices facing mayors La Guardia, Beame, Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, the current mayor. Each of them faced fiscal difficulty, and all were pressured by financial elites to give up their own priorities and agree to the priorities of the financial elites.

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Two chapters might provide some real surprises to readers.

Chapter five deals with activist networks. Today, networks are a common feature of the political landscape. Non-governmental organisations, labour unions, social movements, women groups, and faith-based organisations often come together to focus on one particular issue and campaign collectively. A particularly successful one in recent years was Jubilee 2000, to stop third world debt. The varied organisations within a network might have a whole host of political differences (think of the radical and alternative yet also reformist and even conservative advocates of climate change). Yet they are willing to cast these aside in order to focus on the issue they have in common.

What is not so well known is that the organised consumer activist movement played a crucial role in pioneering networks at the global level. In 1979 the global consumer movement launched the International Baby Food Action Network to campaign against the sale of breast milk substitutes. In 1981, Health Action International was created to campaign against the inappropriate marketing of dangerous or useless pharmaceuticals. And in 1982, Pesticide Action Network was formed to tackle the issue of extensive pesticide use and to seek alternative forms of agricultural production.

In all of these cases the consumer movement was joined by what have become more well known activist groups (e.g., Oxfam). Yet it was the consumer movement that initially inspired the networks, provided the secretariats to keep them going and the freedom to go on to become prominent players in global civil society. In doing so they provided the forms of global co-operation among NGOs that would later manifest itself at the World Social Forum.

Chapter six also explores unfamiliar but intriguing territory—the opposition faced by the consumer movement. Purchasers of Consumer Reports hardly come across as a revolutionary vanguard seeking to destroy the fundamental structures of our economy and society. Yet the opponents of consumer groups would have us believe otherwise. The original Consumers Union, founded in 1936, long provoked the ire of business groups who disliked their products being criticised. Consumers Union leaders had repeatedly to fend off charge of communism during the McCarthy era. But the wrath of big business was maintained with every success of the consumer movement. Ralph Nader was a constant thorn in their side, so much so that they—comically and disastrously—hired private investigators to ensnare him in a ‘honey trap’.

The opposition to government regulations in the consumer interest became much more serious once the global economy faced up to the challenges of the 1970s. Then, various rightwing think-tanks were either founded or revitalised through huge corporate donations. Neoconservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute ensured that American citizens would never enjoy the same sort of consumer protection agencies as their European counterparts. And once Ronald Reagan was elected to power, the anti-consumer, anti-regulatory agenda dominated foreign policy too. The various attempts to control multinational corporations’ less responsible actions that the consumer movement had inspired were rolled back and a new system of global trade regulation was eventually put in place (i.e., the World Trade Organisation) that gave little room to the concerns of consumer activism.

Lastly

I hope that the book will inspire a broader debate about the meaning of consumer society. Since the credit crunch, the liberal guilt complex has become more prominent. Affluent commentators, concerned about their own luxurious lifestyles, have seemed to welcome the contractions in the economy as some sort of cure for western affluenza. This is such a shame, especially since many of those who are concerned with western over-consumption are also worried about global poverty. But the approaches to poverty are now dominated by philanthropy rather than politics.

I hope Prosperity for All will help reintegrate debates about poverty with debates about under-consumption. That is, we recognise the poor around the world have legitimate desires to share in a life of plenty and that there is much to recommend the world of goods. Yet we must see consumer society as a political subject that affects us all; not simply a moral dilemma facing those who pretend they’d like to downsize.

We need to consider how wealth might be better distributed around the world so that we can all be consumers – perhaps not consumers who all drive Hummers, but consumer who all have access to a decent standard of living.

© 2009 Matthew Hilton

we must see consumer society as a political subject that affects us all; not simply a moral dilemma facing those who pretend they’d like to downsize

A close-up

In order to illustrate the way that a black dandy can embody complex and even competing notions of blackness, meet “Dandy Jim, from Carolina,” a theatrical figure made famous by nineteenth-century America’s most popular entertainment, blackface minstrelsy. His song in the minstrel show begins:

I’ve often heard it said of late
Dat South Carolina was de state
Whar handsome niggars bound to shine
Like Dandy Jim from Caroline

I went one ebenin to de ball
Wid lips combed out and wool quite tall
De ladies eyes like snowballs shine
On Dandy Jim from Caroline.

Narcissistic to a fault, Dandy Jim was certainly one of those characters whose self-aggrandizing attitude, accompanied by outrageous dress, titillated with equal parts threat and appeal. “Going black” in the blackface minstrel theater means much more than blackening up; the minstrel show was a world in which anxieties about the inter-relation between race, gender, sexuality and class seemingly had free reign.

“Dandy Jim, from Carolina.” Published by Firth and Hall, 1843 (New York). Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

While largely overshadowed by the character Jim Crow, a denizen of the plantation, the blackface dandy was a particularly potent force in the antebellum minstrel show. In particular, Dandy Jim and his dandy predecessors, Long Tail Blue and Zip Coon, provided a way for working class, immigrant white performers to ask questions plaguing nineteenth-century Americans. What if blacks were free? What if they had money, access to education, unchecked social, cultural, and economic mobility? The blackface black dandy costume, often an elaborate misquotation of elite fancy dress, and pretentious, loud-mouthed, ridiculous (yet funny and provocative) behavior answered these questions, or at least attempted to represent them.

Although the early minstrel show presents the dandy in slightly different guises, what remains constant about its portrayal of blacks in fancy clothing is the figure’s association with sexual threat and class critique. In the case of the blackface dandy, the donning of elite clothing images a desire for social mobility—and for the most extreme form of integration, interracial sex.

What is surprising about blackface dandies is the degree to which they succeed at their plans—for example, when Dandy Jim’s fellow, Long Tail Blue, has his long blue coat split by a watchman in his song, a clear assault on his phallic power, it is very quickly repaired. Even though Long Tail Blue does not complete a conquest of any white “galls” at the end of his song, which is his intention, he is still very much in the chase.

Dandy Jim is involved in similar antics: a narcissist intending to cut a figure at the ball, and, in some versions, woo “lubly Dine” into providing him with “eight or nine/ Young Dandy Jims of Caroline,” Dandy Jim boasts of a sexual prowess that is definitively linked to his appearance as a “handsome nigga [who is] bound to shine.”

Unlike that of Long Tail Blue, Dandy Jim’s lust remains within his own race and social conventions: “Lubly Dine” is a fellow black who Jim actually marries in the song. However, despite the placement of Dandy Jim’s excessive sexuality within an intra-racial family structure, his quest to populate the world with as many little dandies as he can, “ebery little nig she had/ Was de berry image ob de dad,” is nevertheless threatening. The (white) anxiety of black freedom and equality that black dandies embody is not just one in which social equality leads to miscegenation (as in the case of Long Tail Blue) but one which seems to equate miscegenation with the threat of mere black presence and visibility.

Long Tail Blue, Zip Coon, and Dandy Jim menace even as they amuse, revealing the affinity between effeminacy associated with extreme attention to dress and appearance, and a hyper-masculinity linked to a sexual rapacity that exceeds racial boundaries.

Despite the fact that blackface dandy’s sexual threat is almost always figured as heterosexual, the figure has a queer effect because of the way in which his racialization is so bound up in his sexuality and vice versa. This is not to say that the blackface dandy himself is queer; to do so would be anachronistic and to limit, in some ways, the total force of his boundary crossings. Instead, the figure’s excesses allow us to see from a contemporary viewpoint the way in which the minstrel show worked hard to express anxieties about blackness in terms of the other markers of identity and vice versa.

When looking at the show, we forget that the “galls” being pursued here by white men in blackface are themselves white men in blackface and drag. From this perspective, the blackface dandy’s antics signal the intriguing possibility and threat of both interracial and same-sex liaisons that have to be pursued and are often realized through blackness. The blackface minstrel show featuring the black dandy was not, in any way, an arena in which the anxieties attending race, class, sex and gender were contained. In fact, the dandy on stage, a white performer in blackface, often cross-dressing in terms of race, gender and class, comes alive in the pursuit and performance of these anxieties, in the production of a queerness that lingers after the curtain goes down and the burnt cork removed.

Lastly

While I do not directly investigate contemporary “dress debates” such as Bill Cosby’s call for young black men to hitch up their pants, or what it means for P. Diddy to be nominated for “Designer of the Year” for his Sean Jean line while employing “butler” and stylist Farnsworth Bentley to carry his umbrella in St. Tropez, or even why Andre 3000 of Outkast frequently dons a straw boater in homage to the older black men in his Atlanta neighborhood, it is my hope that the history and case-studies that I do provide in the book give readers a sense of how and why dress matters for black people.

Whether practiced on the streets of metropolitan Europe or America, seen on the colonial or blackface minstrel stage, textually illustrated in novels hoping to define New Negroes and race men, or experienced visually in photographic exhibitions in the galleries of Chelsea and London today, black dandyism is a strategy of survival that has a long and multifaceted history.

Black dandyism is, above all, an investigation of the use and abuse of image. As Iké Udé, an artist/aesthete whose self-portrait is my book’s cover, says, “In the end, a dandy’s style is not just about form and substance. It is also about the luxurious deliberation of intelligence in the face of boundaries.”

© 2009 Monica L. Miller

Though often considered fools, hopelessly caught up in the world of fashion, dandies actually appear in periods of social, political and cultural transition, telling us much about cultural politics through their attitude and appearance.

A close-up

In truth, the best place to start is the beginning. The book is carefully structured and non-repetitive, so it is best to read the Introduction first, and keep going. Whether the dream-sending spell on page 1 works, I leave to readers to discover.

The next-best place to begin a non-fiction book is often the index. In this case the index starts with Abraham and ends with Zulus. On the way the index-reader will meet plenty of expectable items – anxiety dreams, Freud, Homer – and some possibly less expected ones – Chartres, demons, Scipio Africanus.

You will find in this book hardly any descriptions of my dreams, mainly because other people’s dream descriptions easily become tedious. But I have sometimes kept a dream diary – a narcissistic habit, and also in my opinion a waste of time, unless you are writing a book about dreaming.

As for where to dip into the book, it depends who you are: if you know psychology, I guess that I probably want you to read the chapter about naturalistic explanations of dreaming offered by the Greeks and Romans. And let me know what you think.

If you know the classics, it might be good to start with the most “scientific” chapter, which (aside from the Introduction) is Chapter 2. If you are simply interested in dreaming, you might start with the epiphany dreams (Chapter 1). If you want to read some bizarre dream-descriptions, try for example page 50 or page 97 or 111 – in fact there are a few more.

Lastly

I am looking forward to some debate, since some readers will certainly not agree with my conclusions.

It would also be wonderful if this book somehow managed to get people to cross the divide that separates psychologists from historians and social scientists. I am not optimistic about that, even now when it is so easy for a reader to explore in fields adjacent to the ones that s/he knows about. But, as I have implied already, I hope Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity is a symptom of a spreading willingness on the part of historians to study human psychology in a systematic fashion.

© 2009 William Harris

I have sometimes kept a dream diary – a narcissistic habit, and also in my opinion a waste of time, unless you are writing a book about dreaming.