Rorotoko

In a nutshell

An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910.

Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has determined exactly what took place during Twain’s final years and how those experiences affected him, both personally and professionally. Writers have speculated on whether his final decade was ruled by a growing misanthropy or whether he retained his keen sense of humor as he made his incisive social commentary.

The public version for nearly a century has been that Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American, undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges. However lives are complicated, Twain’s extraordinarily so. Long intrigued by the vagaries of Twain’s life, I sensed that there had to be more to the story than the carefully cultivated, homogenized version that had been intact for so long.

The key that turned the lock and helped reveal the answers to these questions and many more was Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. For almost one hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon has been the mystery woman in Mark Twain’s life. After the death of his wife, Olivia Langdon, in 1904, Twain spent the last six years of his life largely in Isabel’s company. To free himself from having to deal with professional and business matters, he willingly delegated the management of his schedule and finances to her. She was slavishly devoted to Twain: running the household staff, nursing him during his various illnesses, arranging amusements to keep boredom at bay, managing his increasingly unmanageable daughters, listening attentively as he read aloud what he’d written that day, acting as the gatekeeper to an enthralled public, and overseeing the construction of his final residence, “Stormfield.” And then something happened that led to the dramatic breakup of that relationship.

Mark Twain’s Other Woman is an exploration of those events. After Isabel had been summarily “fired,” Twain lived one last year, full of malice and terribly lonely. Mentally and emotionally he could never let her go. He finally delivered his coup de grace in a letter sent to his daughter Clara, branding his former companion “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction.”

Yet despite the inordinate attention Twain gave her before his death, Isabel has remained a friendless ghost haunting the margins of Mark Twain’s biography. I wrote this book 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. Indeed my account directly contradicts the well-established, genteel and genial image of one of America’s literary icons. This is a story that Mark Twain was determined no one would ever tell.

The wide angle

Mark Twain biography remains rooted in an outworn tradition that too often rewards pedantry and tortured prose. 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.

Nearly forty years ago, Twain biographer Hamlin Hill railed that it was time to challenge and change the entrenched trademark “Mark Twain” while wondering if it was not already too late. After all, people who mess with a folk savior who wrote “both a best-seller and an accepted masterpiece” and is still revered as “a hero, a prophet, a legend, a demigod,” present a tempting target. Right now, and for too many people, Mark Twain is either an animatronic statue at Disneyworld or the practiced Hal Holbrook.

A large part of the problem for interested readers is that Mark Twain is a major scholarly and commercial industry. Even during his life “Mark Twain” was recognized as a brand name as well as a pseudonym. Books about Mark Twain sell, much like books about the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, fly-fishing, and vintage wines. My challenge as a biographer was to find a way to present new material about Twain without pandering to devotees or exploiting his commercial appeal.

Twain has been variously portrayed by past biographers as the damaged son of a castrating mother, a split personality, a womanizer, a gay man, an impotent man, a child-molester, a hypochondriac, a gold-digger, an abusive spouse, a neglectful father, a misogynist, and an alcoholic. With such a rich dysfunctional pedigree, if Twain had sung professionally, he’d be a ripe subject for one of VH1’s “Behind the Music” episodes.

With extensive archival research and many hundreds and notes, this biography will hopefully prove the exception. Yet, my goal has been to write for the public at large. Particularly for those individuals in the secular population who think that Twain is removed from their lives, or made of white marble, or (worse) boring. After thinking about Twain for over twenty years, my view is that he was a genius, the most gifted American writer of his or any era, and a man who led an enormous life full of unthinkable success and unbearable failure. In the end, he was ruthlessly human.

Writing biography is a challenge in that the talented biographer follows where the life leads her, not where she would like it to go. The evidence I uncovered about Twain’s final years took me places I could not have imagined. After all, the difference between fiction and fact is that fiction has to make sense.

Twain would not have wanted this story told and would have been litigiously furious if he were alive. After all, Twain understood that to last meant remaining an enigma and he wanted to influence (even from the grave) outcomes in all efforts to see him more clearly. Twain commented about those who would tell too much in a 1879 speech: “I don't mind what [they] say of me so long as they don't tell the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about me I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage.”

Writing this biography took me a very long time, sixteen years. The reason: that is how long it took me to figure out the truth behind the fictionalized story Twain left about his life. After all he was our best fiction writer and it was hard to unravel his tale. What really happened the last decade of his life was a story he was determined no one would ever figure out. But I did.

Writing biography is a challenge in that the talented biographer follows where the life leads her, not where she would like it to go. After all, the difference between fiction and fact is that fiction has to make sense.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Lost to the Collective is an exploration into both the history of suicide and the elusive promises of Soviet socialism and the modern social sciences.

Suicide unsettled the Soviets because it raised practical and theoretical questions about the individual and challenged the regime’s transformational aspirations. To them it represented unbridled individualism and a remnant of bourgeois life whose continued presence threatened the revolutionary project. To contain and eventually eliminate this social disease the Soviet state sanctioned a variety of scientific and political efforts that sought to clarify, categorize, and control self-destruction. These included forensic-medical investigations into the body, nationwide statistical mappings of society, and a distinctive set of political practices that treated suicide as a sickness that was above all ideological.

Suicide was therefore much more than an existential drama during the formative years of the Soviet Union. It became deeply implicated in the broader project of creating new types of men and women to populate the socialist order. It became a medium for debating politics and the course of the Bolshevik Revolution. It opened up a space for imagining the ideal relationship between individuals and society. It was a tool for evaluating social health. And it functioned as a catalyst for promoting new social bonds and self-identities.

In talking about Soviet suicide my book tells the larger story of the modern social sciences and their implication in the Soviet project. The Soviet Union can be read more broadly as a social science state that was seeking to overcome the alienating effects of modern life. Viewed through the lens of suicide the Soviet Union no longer appears simply as a product of Marxist ideology but also the product of modern beliefs in expertise and broadly shared understandings of government.

Suicide continued to haunt the Soviets, even after the regime proclaimed its disappearance in the 1930s. Ironically, their very attempts to control suicide actually deepened anxiety. Almost obsessive explorations into the human body and body politic constantly revealed new pockets of disease and exposed the Soviets’ inability to access the individual soul and see into the population. In this sense, Lost to the Collective asks us to consider Soviet socialism—given its intense concern with the individual and its quest to build an integrated society—as part of the broader history of the search for human unity.

The wide angle

I first became interested in the problem of Soviet suicide after reading a footnote about a dramatic spike in suicides among Bolsheviks (or Communists) during the 1920s. Such an outburst of despair among the faithful was both jarring and puzzling. It clashed sharply with the triumphal and expectant image of the Bolshevik Revolution. Further investigation confirmed the trend and revealed that concerns about rising levels of suicide extended beyond the Bolshevik Party. In fact, I found that the debates about suicide reflected widespread anxieties about moral, physical, and ideological health, particularly among Soviet youth. This spurred me to continue my research and to refine my approach.

Suicide is an ideal object for studying social, political, and cultural change. In the last few decades a growing number of scholars have made the history of suicide into something of an academic subfield. Some of these researchers have attempted to reconstruct patterns of suicide in order to measure the social effects of industrialization, urbanization, and other historical processes. Others have pursued a cultural studies approach in order to reconstruct belief systems and everyday life among men and women.

These investigations emphasize the fact that suicide cannot be treated as a static phenomenon across time and space. Despite its universality, self-destruction has meant and continues to mean different things to different people. As one scholar puts it, the act creates a “black hole” of meaning that begs to be filled in by others. The historian’s job is to understand the way that a society ascribes meaning to the act, the ideas and forces that shape this process, and in turn how these beliefs and practices influence the thoughts and actions of individuals.

In Lost to the Collective, suicide is treated as a problem of government. This approach reflects my training in the history of medicine and my broader interest in the history of statistics and the social sciences. It also came from reflecting on my sources. The very fact that I could write such a book is evidence of the Soviet regime’s definition of self-destruction as a public matter that demanded the attention of scientific and political experts. In addition to published materials, the archives contain “top secret” political reports, statistical data, forensic-medical protocols, and the results of official investigations. The history captured in these materials provides a window into the Soviets’ unrelenting efforts to access the individual soul as well as the social environment.

There is a degree of universality to the Soviet experiment of the 1920s. The way the Soviets responded to suicide looks very familiar to us even today. Their assumptions, language, and methods were not unlike those of social scientists in Europe and the United States. In contrast to the Russian autocracy, the Soviet regime opened up enormous possibilities for the application of these practices to the population. My book emphasizes the fact that the modern social sciences were not only compatible with Bolshevik dictatorship but also an essential feature of the revolutionary project. The theories of Emile Durkheim and other European moral statisticians were as relevant as those of Karl Marx.

Lost to the Collective also highlights the distinctive features of Soviet social exploration. Soviet studies of suicide were infused by revolutionary politics. They were not simply about capturing objective information but also about transforming lived experience. This melding of intentions is best captured in the work of investigators inside the Red Army.

Concerned primarily with ideological health, Bolshevik Party officials and Red Army political instructors routinely gathered information about all facets of life, including each and every act of suicide. As a form of epidemiology, these data provided the political leadership with the ability to trace patterns of suicide, speculate about causes, and identify pockets of disease within the military population. However, it also made the prevention of suicides a function of total transparency or what I call “mutual surveillance.” This meant that Soviet citizenship was premised on the willingness to open up oneself to scrutiny and in turn to keep an eye on others. In this way, suicidal and other deviant individuals would be identified before they acted on their impulses and threatened the social order.

The centrality of the individual thus emerges as a core theme of the book. Although the Soviets rejected liberal ideas of autonomy, suicide raised troubling questions about individual agency and reinforced the country’s incomplete transition to a collectivist society. Medical investigations into the brains and glands of suicides were part of an effort to break down the personality in the hopes of reconstructing it along different lines. Similarly, the growing insistence that officers and party activists devote more attention to the lives of individual members recognized individuality while seeking to contain it. By intruding into the Soviets’ revolutionary dreams, suicide reinforced a key truth: the individual was at once the collective’s greatest resource and its greatest threat.

By intruding into the Soviets’ revolutionary dreams, suicide reinforced a key truth: the individual was at once the collective’s greatest resource and its greatest threat.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

When you hear the words “Great Depression,” certain images pop up: a mother hugging her child on a windswept plain, a hand clutching a tin plate, unemployed men standing in a breadline. We remember the Depression like this in part because of the New Deal cultural projects that turned poor people (especially rural whites) into celebrities of a sort, symbols of the crisis that bourgeois consumers of magazines, exhibitions, newspapers, films, and plays could immediately comprehend, thus seeing, however imperfectly, the outlines of a crisis whose causes were often inscrutable.

My book examines the “documentary books” that were one of the Depression’s most conspicuous cultural forms. Documentary books combined photographs and text to create an intense, vicarious encounter with social problems. Since the pioneering work of William Stott in the 1970s, many critics have shared his judgment that these books succeed because they “make the reader feel he was firsthand witness to a social condition.” As I engaged these texts, however, I began to feel that the “witness” metaphor, with its assumption of a smooth transmission of meaning from documentarian to readers, was misleading. These books were much stranger than they initially seemed.

In my readings of several examples of the genre—Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941)—the documentary book is not so much an act of witness as a deconstruction of witness. These texts confront their readers not with a unitary and authoritative representation of problems with clear solutions, but with a multitude of perspectives and voices scattered widely and bewilderingly.

As such, the Great Depression’s documentary books are part of the modernist aesthetic that coalesced in the interwar period. In recounting the various traumas at work on the body politic, often in places geographically remote from cultural centers, artists confronted their audience with techniques borrowed from modernist literature and art—discontinuity between word and image, unannounced shifts in narrative perspective, and shockingly grotesque representations of otherwise familiar people, places, and things—in order to jolt readers into fresh ways of perceiving social problems and new frameworks for imagining their betterment.

The wide angle

A central argument of my book is that the modernist element within Depression documentary was not merely aesthetic but intimately related to the turbulent politics of the Depression era. Perhaps the greatest legacy of the New Deal era is its intense focus on, in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous phrase, the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” This focus accompanied a robust effort to integrate those imagined as “left behind” by a technologically advanced and materially abundant modernity.

But New Deal discourse also depended upon a polarity, in which the “forgotten” are the passive, silent objects of social planning conceived and administered by a technocratic elite. The modernist strain of Depression documentary, while sharing the broad commitment to ameliorating poverty and oppression, radicalized the focus on the margins of society and thereby challenged the dominant New Deal rhetoric regarding “the people.”

The outlines of this challenge come into clear view through a comparison between two quotations from the period that both use the metaphor of vision, but in radically opposed ways. The first comes from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second inaugural address in January 1937, in which he reflects on the unfinished business of the New Deal amid the ongoing depression:

I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of natural resources. . . .

I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago. . . .

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

The chain of parallelisms positions Roosevelt as the possessor of a continental gaze, and his vision is implicitly linked to a technocratic ideology in which a passive and disempowered “one-third” awaits the intervention of experts to meet its needs. Through his act of witness, the president’s audience also “sees” not only the problem, but its solution in the form of various administrative measures.

Compare Roosevelt’s magisterial vision to the very different perspective conveyed by the opening passage of Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941):

Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or upon the hard pavement of the city streets, you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.

Our outward guise still carries the old familiar aspect which three hundred years of oppression in America have given us, but beneath [this] garb . . . lies an uneasily tied knot of pain and hope whose snarled strands converge from many points of time and space.

In this passage, Roosevelt’s I has given way to Wright’s you. No longer does seeing issue from a transparent eyeball, a site of unquestioned power and knowledge. Instead, it is lodged in a spectator whose vision is partial in both senses of the word. More unsettlingly, the object of vision is no longer in the third person, a “one-third of a nation” that both speaker and audience examine from a distance. Instead, Wright situates the narrator as the object of vision, as an obscure object that is only dimly visible from across a racial divide.

There is much more to say about the contrasting logics of these verbal-visual performances. But for the moment I simply want to evoke some of the ways in which modernist documentaries short-circuit habitual modes of perception and thereby raise crucial political questions. Throughout my book, I emphasize the ambiguous role of documentarians as they move between modern metropolises and hinterlands seemingly left behind by modernity. On the one hand, their cultural work can be likened to that of the engineers and laborers who built new infrastructure in the 1930s—dams, parks, and power lines. In fact, the metaphor of the intellectual as an “engineer” of culture was ubiquitous in the period on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the other hand, documentary books often emphasize the potential violence of modernization projects and especially their ignoring or silencing of the voices and desires of precisely those subjects they presume to help. Thus, for example, You Have Seen Their Faces pairs a generally progressive and reformist narrative with grotesque images of faces, bodies, and landscapes damaged by historical forces that manifestly overwhelm the sunny optimism of New Deal rhetoric. Furthermore, at several crucial points, the text ventriloquizes the most illiberal, paranoid, and racist voices in the cultural landscape by way of demonstrating the clash between local people’s perceptions of social problems and remedies and those of government officials and credentialed experts.

The result, in this text and in other examples of the genre, is a subtle psychogeography of an unevenly modernizing territory, in which things look remarkably different depending on one’s cultural location and the relation between those observing, participating, and being observed is constantly shifting. For this reason, Depression documentary is an important legacy for us today as we think through how collectivities are formed and maintained amid all manner of social antagonisms and what kind of cultural work is involved in articulating a “people” with political agency.

Great Depression’s documentary books are part of the modernist aesthetic that coalesced in the interwar period. In recounting the various traumas at work on the body politic, often in places geographically remote from cultural centers, artists confronted their audience with techniques borrowed from modernist literature and art—discontinuity between word and image, unannounced shifts in narrative perspective, and shockingly grotesque representations of otherwise familiar people, places, and things.

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.

In a nutshell

In The Urban Spectator, I look at how practices of media spectatorship, from the handheld camera to radio and television and the digital computer, have influenced the way Americans have experienced and ultimately designed their cities.

Taking photographs, viewing movies, listening to radio, using a computer, doing a Google search on a mobile phone, these are all methods of seeing the world by collecting artifacts of the world. I call this possessive spectatorship. And the American city, developing late in the 19th century and in parallel with new technologies such as hand held photography and cinema, has, from its beginning, been influenced by this spectatorship. The American city, I argue, is a product of possessive spectatorship such that its history is entangled with the history of media consumption.

The Urban Spectator is not meant to be a history of the American city. Instead, it identifies moments of clarity where media practices and urban practices overlap, where seeing and possessing the city inform being in the city, and in some cases, the design of the city. The Urban Spectator is a series of vignettes, assembled to produce the semblance of a whole, just as media representations possessed by the spectator are assembled to produce a legible experience of the city. It is a poetic reflection on urbanism and spectatorship that seeks to make connections where before there were none. Looking at the city and looking through media are intimately connected phenomena.

The wide angle

I started writing this book as part of my graduate work in media studies. I was interested in cities and found myself attracted to how cities were represented in films. But the more I examined the topic, the more I questioned the relationship between cities and their representations.

Most scholarship on the topic explored how film and television could capture representations of cities and shed light on their meaning. But I wondered if cities could capture representations of media and tell us something about them. I wondered how film, television, radio, or the Internet influenced the physical layout of cities. I wondered how these media affected the nature of experience in cities. And I wondered how these connections were culturally specific to American urbanism.

I was inspired to ask these questions after reading the French sociologist Michel de Certeau’s essay, “Walking in the City.” It begins with a description of a spectator standing atop one of the 1,370-foot high towers of the former World Trade Center and looking down upon the New York streets below. That view “makes the complexity of the city readable,” he argues. The view from on high is a fiction or facsimile of the city, like those drafted by planners or cartographers, but it does not communicate anything about what it is actually like to be in the city. Perhaps the view from on high was like watching a film, I thought. And just as the view from atop a building would influence how one actually experienced the street, so, too, would a media representation.

When I walk down the street, enter a shop, talk with neighbors, I do not need, at the forefront of my consciousness, an understanding of the city as a whole, or what de Certeau calls the concept-city. I do not need to remind myself that I am in New York City each time I enter a store. However, despite the fact that I do not need to consciously contend with the idea of New York, it does influence my everyday interactions in very important ways. Each of the people on a typical Manhattan street corner, for instance, is interacting with their immediate urban spaces while their understanding of those spaces is framed by the evolving concept-city.

Whether directly mediated or not, each practice of the city is embedded within some articulation of the concept-city. A man, brand new to New York, lifts up his arm to hail a passing taxi (an action he has seen again and again in movies); a woman photographs the Empire State Building contemplating the age of Art Deco that produced it; a tourist gets her bearings in the crowded city by calling up a map on her phone. In each of these examples, the concept of Manhattan (understood through mediation) influences the practice of its spaces.

De Certeau demonstrates the interaction between urban practices and the concept-city, but he does not address how each of the elements is composed. What shapes the concept? What organizes practice? My book begins from the dialectic he provides, and offers possessive spectatorship as an explanation of how practices and concepts are structured around a complex assortment of media technologies and urban representations. How did the handheld camera change the way people walked through the city, while simultaneously changing the shape of the city walked through? How did film spectatorship influence the meaning of urban movement, and how did that new meaning get worked into the development of the concept-city? Each chapter in this book explores these and similar questions in order to renegotiate de Certeau’s urban dialectic in light of possessive spectatorship. Images, interfaces, and protocols shape urban experiences, structures of urban desires, and plans for urban spaces.

The Urban Spectator is a series of vignettes, assembled to produce the semblance of a whole, just as media representations possessed by the spectator are assembled to produce a legible experience of the city.

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.

In a nutshell

My book, as is probably obvious from its title, is a history of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, which began in 1920 as a local criminal case in which two Italian-born resident aliens, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were arrested and tried in Massachusetts for the robbery and murder of a factory paymaster and his security guard in an industrial suburb of Boston, and which turned within a few years into an unprecedented international cause célèbre.

Because Sacco and Vanzetti were revolutionary anarchists as well as working-class immigrants, because the case against them seemed relatively weak, and because they impassionedly and eloquently insisted on their innocence, their case came to be seen by many, both in the United States and around the world, as an injustice that had its roots in the “Red Scare,” the anti-immigrant, anti-radical, and isolationalist sentiment and policies that swept the U.S. in the aftermath of World War I.

By 1927, even while languishing on death row in a dismal Massachusetts prison, they had become two of the most famous people in their world, on a par with Charles Lindbergh or Charlie Chaplin. In spite of—perhaps because of, the book suggests—the gamut of national and international support for their cause—including people as disparate and unlikely as H. G. Wells, Benito Mussolini, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, and Joseph Stalin—the two men were put to death by electrocution in August 1927.

There have been many books published about Sacco and Vanzetti over the years, but most of them have focused largely on their 1921 trial and on the perennial (and in my view, unanswerable) question of whether they were innocent or guilty of robbery and murder (the first question I am always asked is “So, did they do it?”). I tried to do something completely different, while trying also to capture a sense of the dramatis personae that helped make the story so flamboyant. Rather than write about Sacco and Vanzetti’s trial, I wanted to show how in essence it was the United States (and Massachusetts specifically) that came to be put on trial. The book shows how and why the shift from obscure case to worldwide affair took place, and what the affair meant, and still means, to Americans as well as non-Americans.

In one sense, The Sacco-Vanzetti Affair is about America’s changing relationship with the world. In another sense, it’s about how politics came to function in the modern era. Ultimately, I hope, the book tells a compelling story with some relevance for our own day.

The wide angle

The book started as an attempt on my part to combine my interests in modern American and European history. I was trained in both fields but didn’t want to write on just one or the other; I felt that the kind of historical issues I wanted to focus on were transatlantic in nature. I settled on the idea of writing about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair—as opposed to their case—because it represented a story of how American, European, and other international concerns intersected at a particularly combustible and fascinating moment in history.

The period after the First World War was marked by the rise of the United States to global power, while the European powers went into decline. At the same time, many Americans retreated in the wake of the war into an isolationalist, often virulently anti-foreigner mindset. Europeans, in turn, were increasingly nervous about American power and the way the United States wielded that power internationally as well as domestically. The central and dominating place of the United States in the world, a fact of life that we have been taking for granted for decades, was a new development back then, and I wanted to examine what kind of reactions and responses it triggered as it was unfolding. This was really a world in flux.

What I found in the course of my research was that the Sacco-Vanzetti affair came to symbolize a new (and to many, disturbing) transatlantic relationship. Sacco and Vanzetti, who were themselves Europeans, were seen by many other Europeans as stand-ins for all of Europe in a future America-dominated world. The Sacco-Vanzetti affair exploded the way it did partly because of this unique timing and political context, and I wanted to see how its ramifications, which were extensive on both sides of the Atlantic, differed from place to place, and also what they had in common.

When I first embarked on my research, around 2002, historians of the modern United States were beginning to talk at length about the need to study American history in global context. Particularly after the shocking events of 9/11, my cohort felt that more than ever we needed to examine the roots of how American power in the world has worked, and how people in the wider world have responded to and been impacted by it. But I found myself unsatisfied with the way many of these histories were being written. There were excellent new studies coming out every year about the ways in which America exerted its influence abroad. But I felt that the story would not be complete without looking closely at the ways in which Americans themselves responded to their country’s newfound international power.

In researching Americans’ involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, I found that one of the major catalysts for its becoming a critical issue domestically was the extent of protest and debate over the case abroad, particularly (but not only) in Europe and Latin America. Americans became divided not only over Sacco and Vanzetti’s guilt or innocence, but also over how to respond to the intervention of foreigners—even just the interest of foreigners—in supposedly internal American affairs.

In the end, 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. Ultimately, I concluded, the authorities in question, both at the state level and the national level, were not prepared to spare Sacco and Vanzetti’s lives and thus appear weak in the face of foreign “subversives” and radicals, or “terrorists,” as foreign protesters were often called.

In this sense, writing the history of the United States in the world means looking at the ways non-Americans responded to goings-on in the United States, and certainly at how their lives and societies were impacted by the spread of American power, but also, no less important, at the ways Americans themselves responded to these non-American responses to American power. I think that is where and how and why the Sacco-Vanzetti affair achieved its unique volume and drive.

I settled on the idea of writing about the Sacco-Vanzetti affair—as opposed to their case—because it represented a story of how American, European, and other international concerns intersected at a particularly combustible and fascinating moment in history.

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

In a nutshell

The monumental core of Washington, D.C. is a great axis of public space, almost two miles long, stretching from the Grant Memorial below the U.S. Capitol building to the Lincoln Memorial overlooking the Potomac River. With the mammoth obelisk of the Washington Monument in the center, anchoring its formal geometry, the National Mall looks like it has been there forever. It has become almost a work of nature: in the words of Paul Goldberger, “as essential a part of the American landscape as the Grand Canyon.”

Few visitors to the U.S. capital realize how recent, fragile, and contested this achievement actually is. The monumental core of America is a modern invention of the mid-twentieth century. Realized amid ecological destruction and public controversy, the National Mall is part of a larger transformation of the memorial landscape of Washington and of the nation. Monument Wars tells the story of this sea change in national representation.

Detail of the Grant Memorial; photo by the author.

Public monuments emerged in the nineteenth century in a loosely connected system of “public grounds”—a decentralized landscape of heroic statues spread out in traffic circles and picturesque parks. The twentieth century witnessed the birth of “public space.” In Washington this resulted in a new spatial system that concentrated authority in an intensified center and demanded a novel psychological engagement from the citizen. In the process, the very idea of the monument changed profoundly, from an object of reverence to a space of experience.

The shift from public ground to public space has had unforeseen consequences, introducing tragedy and trauma into the memorial landscape and leaving Americans now with multiple paradoxes of national identity in an era of increasing global insecurity.

The wide angle

Washington, D.C. may be the most studied national capital in the world. There are dozens of guidebooks to Washington’s monuments and countless specialized studies of individual projects, landscape plans, and designers. But during my twenty years of research on the city and its monuments, I became convinced that a wider conceptual lens was not only possible, but necessary.

It was plain to see that even over my own professional lifetime, much had changed. The increasing prominence of war memorials on the west end of the Mall and a new attention to historical trauma brought on by the nation’s increasingly fraught engagement with the rest of the world were reshaping the monumental core. In order to understand these changes it became necessary to go back to their origins and examine how and why the landscape had changed so fundamentally.

The basic monumental framework of the capital was laid out by a French artist, military engineer, and polymath, Pierre L’Enfant, working under George Washington at the end of the eighteenth century. His plan, steeped in the language of military conquest and occupation, established symbolic possession of the city and the continent with a grandiose scheme of multiple centers and public monuments spread across the far-flung grid of the city. Almost none of his specific ideas came to fruition, but the general idea of a dispersed monumental landscape did take hold in the multiple public grounds that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century.

A parade of individual heroes, typically military commanders, standing or riding on high pedestals, spread out across the developing city, dotting its many tree-lined squares and circles left over from L’Enfant’s street layout. Often renaming the grounds they decorated, these heroic statues began to create a kind of cognitive map of the city and the nation. Even at the center, the Mall became a polyglot arrangement of grounds: gardens, greenhouses, woods, and the occasional statue (though to relatively minor figures, like a surgeon and a scientist). But just as the capital was becoming world famous for its statues and its trees, this landscape fell victim to modern systems of spatial thinking and design.

I first noticed years ago that the term “public space” hardly ever appeared in the nineteenth century, while “public grounds” were ubiquitous. With the advent of full-text search engines, I was able to demonstrate more convincingly that the change from ground to space was not just a linguistic shift, but a conceptual and psychological one as well. Space, which had been thought of as mere emptiness in the nineteenth century, acquired a positive agency in the twentieth.

Conceptually, space became a force to impose order and to control perception and experience. Consider the clearing of the national Mall, a massive project involving the devaluation and destruction of acres of carefully nurtured grounds. Thousands of trees and hundreds of homes were sacrificed to make room for an axis of space lined with miles of new roads.

This project is often misunderstood as a reactionary return to the classicism of L’Enfant and Baroque garden designers, when it should be seen instead as an early example of modern urban renewal. The transformation of the monumental core from local grounds to national space, against decades of opposition from Washington residents, revealed the nation as a mysterious organizing force, rivaling nature itself.

At the same time the devaluation of the old memorial landscape in favor of a highly charged central space had some unintended consequences. The creation of the Lincoln and Grant memorials, intended to unify the Mall around a Civil War narrative of national rebirth, introduced notes of suffering and tragedy into what had been an exclusively triumphal landscape. Grant and Lincoln emerged as complex figures, both heroes and victims of history’s vicissitudes. The monuments themselves turned from objects on pedestals to integrated spatial designs. Physical space thus became psychological space, engaging its viewers in a new experience of historical complexity and trauma.

Ultimately the entire Mall turned into a space of national conscience, as its large open areas and architectural platforms became the premier public stage for democratic protest. These developments eventually gave rise to the modern victim monument, brilliantly implemented in Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and to counter-reactions such as the World War II Memorial, which nostalgically reasserts the old triumphalism of the nineteenth century.

The creation of the Lincoln and Grant memorials, intended to unify the Mall around a Civil War narrative of national rebirth, introduced notes of suffering and tragedy into what had been an exclusively triumphal landscape.

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

In the simplest terms, this book is about Russia’s first female terrorist. On January 24, 1878, a young woman named Vera Zasulich posed as an ordinary petitioner to gain admission to the office of the governor of St. Petersburg, Fedor Trepov. Then she pulled a gun out of her large grey shawl and shot the governor point blank.

This one act propelled Vera from obscurity into worldwide fame, especially after her celebrity trial was covered by all of the major newspapers in Russia and abroad. By the end of 1878, Vera was one of the best-known women in the western world. European journalists and authors rushed to write about a peculiar brand of Russian “nihilism” that was intoxicating the young men and women whose radical violence threatened to undermine the Tsarist state. Oscar Wilde was inspired to write his first play on Vera, and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Karl Marx felt compelled to comment on her case. Even the celebrated Sherlock Holmes encountered a female “nihilist” in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries. In Russia, imitators of Vera sparked a “turn to terror” that cost the lives of several government officials and culminated with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.

My book tells Vera’s story—and, in the process, the story of nineteenth century Russia. From Vera’s young life on a genteel country estate, to her years in a dank Tsarist prison, to her months spent dressed as a peasant preaching socialism in a Russian village, the book details the contradictions of a rapidly modernizing, superficially European, but still impoverished and traditional Imperial Russia. Angel of Vengeance reveals the roots of Russian terrorism in a quasi-religious radical socialism, whose atheist proponents perpetually dreamt of martyrdom for the cause.

The wide angle

From the instant I read about the trial of Vera Zasulich, I knew that I wanted to write a book about her. The bare facts of her case were so compelling and out of the ordinary—it was a story that begged to be told. As a professionally-trained historian, I was always taught to place analysis first. But in my historical endeavors I have always found myself drawn to biographical anecdotes, unexpected historical details, and all of those forgotten stories that often conceal within them a much larger narrative about the spirit and temper of a historical period.

So it was with Vera. At first, I was only planning to write about her assassination attempt and trial. As I delved into her biography—her personal papers, the memoirs of her comrades and friends, the books she read—I began to envision a much wider canvas and conceived of the book as a portrait of an era. Through Vera, I could write about how it was possible for nineteenth-century Russian children of privilege to rebel against their own class and take up the cause of the peasants; I could explain how a Tsar’s partial reformism turned out to be his undoing; I could show how a dissatisfied Russian society could applaud revolution as protest, especially when revolution came in the form of a modest female assassin.

It may surprise my readers to learn that I originally had no intention to write a book about a terrorist. At first, Vera’s story seemed quite separate from the history of Russian terrorism. My research, however, showed me otherwise. Vera was often referred to as the “first female terrorist,” and I soon believed it was my task to elucidate all of the implications of this label. In the process, I learned much about the intellectual, cultural, and psychological impulses that can lead a person to terrorism.

The most striking of the insights I gained is that the roots of Russian radical socialism lie in a deep Christian soil. Today, we often speak of the great difference between anarchist or progressive terrorism and the terrorism inspired by traditional religions such as Islam. I discovered that this distinction explains little in the Russian case. Socialism can be a faith like any other—with saints, martyrs, and even a vision of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Vera and many of her comrades were fervent believers as children (whether Jews or Christians) and later wrote about their early faith with nostalgia. Vera’s childhood dream of martyrdom was born of reading the Bible, and lived on even after she had become an atheist. Vera was firmly convinced that to die for one’s faith was the highest aim toward which a person could aspire. She and others like her sought a socialist movement that would provide them with a dream of a radiant future, for which they would gladly kill, and gladly die.

Oscar Wilde was inspired to write his first play on Vera, and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Karl Marx felt compelled to comment on her case.

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

“Conservative” means different things in different times and places. This book describes and explains the different types of conservatism in American history, from the Constitution to the end of the twentieth century. In writing it I tried to avoid taking sides, so that readers from all points on the political spectrum can read the book and learn from it. The Conservatives does not make the case for or against conservatism. Instead, I explain who was conservative, why, and how their beliefs informed their actions.

Before about 1930 few Americans described themselves as conservatives but they often used the word as an adjective (as in “I have a conservative view of this problem”). For various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures, accordingly, I have made the argument that they can be thought of as conservatives, but with the important proviso that it’s not a word they used about themselves. Often I say, in effect: think about George Washington (or Daniel Webster, or Henry Adams) as a conservative, and see how that can help you understand him.

I argue that conservatism is contextual and reactive. Conservatives believe that civilization is complex, precious, and delicate, always vulnerable to threats from external enemies and from impetuous reformers within. As the threats have changed over the decades, so has the nature of conservatism.

The wide angle

The U.S.A. was the product of a successful revolution so it may seem paradoxical to regard many of its leading figures as conservative. However, they recognized their achievement as fragile, knew that it might be destroyed, and dedicated their lives to conserving it.

Despite differences over the question of whether the federal government should be big or small, whether American foreign policy should be proactive or isolationist, and whether conservatives should support or criticize capitalism, they all shared a broad streak of anti-utopianism. Human nature will not change, they believed, and a healthy skepticism about human self-interest and corruptibility is preferable to a credulity that cannot stand the test of experience.

The first half of the book sketches the conservative outlook of the Federalists in the 1790s and the Whigs in the early 19^the century. It makes the argument that the American Civil War was a conflict between two types of conservatism: that of the slave South that wanted to preserve its threatened labor system, and that of the Republican North that wanted to preserve the Union. The second half of the book looks in more detail at the history of conservatism after the Russian Revolution, one of whose effects was to transform the U.S.A. from the world’s most revolutionary nation into the world’s most counter-revolutionary nation.

One chapter explores the conservative opponents of the New Deal in the 1930s. Led by ex-President Herbert Hoover, they feared that the Federal Government was becoming much too powerful and that President Franklin Roosevelt might be turning himself into an American version of the dictators then rising throughout the world (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin).

Subsequent chapters explore the New Conservative movement of the 1950s that brought together free-market libertarians, anti-Communists, and traditionalists at a new journal, the National Review. Led by William F. Buckley, Jr. they helped launch the Goldwater Campaign in 1964. Despite its defeat they continued to move the GOP in a consciously conservative direction and succeeded in electing their candidate, Ronald Reagan, in 1980. By then they were enjoying the support of the Neoconservatives, former liberal intellectuals who had been dismayed by the upheavals of the 1960s.

The book’s last chapters examine conservatism in power during the 1980s and the way the movement began to unravel after the end of the Cold War.

I came to this project over the course of twenty years’ work on other topics. My first book was a study of just one aspect of the conservative movement in the Cold War era, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950-1985 (1993). I then wrote several other books on religious history but kept alive an interest in conservatism. When I realized that no one had attempted a general history of American conservatism since Russell Kirk’s 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, I decided to try it, despite the daunting scope of the project.

the American Civil War was a conflict between two types of conservatism: that of the slave South that wanted to preserve its threatened labor system, and that of the Republican North that wanted to preserve the Union

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.

In a nutshell

The book is about the experience of the historical moment called “1989,” lasting somewhere between an instant and a few years. More specifically, it’s about a set of feelings, intuitions, sensations, that I think arose in that moment. These are nuanced, elusive and contradictory enough to defy easy description. The book’s suspicion is that the material of culture exists in part to register, capture, and preserve these sensations, these encounters with the stuff of history itself.

The books’ cultural lens is that of popular music, but it’s not really a music book. Those who come looking for the pleasures of pop, not wanting to be vexed by philosophers and political theorists, may be disappointed. The first four chapters detail ways in which pop music in the Anglophone West underwent remarkable changes, in a moment of immense historical change: genre births (acid house and grunge), sea changes (from Black nationalist to gangsta rap), high-water marks (the Hot 100). As fascinating as I find these developments, they serve as empirical studies for the book’s two parallel arguments that follow.

The first is that all those changes in popular music share a single logic. It concerns the vanishing of any sense of intergroup conflict, any sense of challenge or confrontation. This plays out differently within each genre, but finally organizes them into a unity: Antagonisms are internalized wished away, limits avoided or ignored. The second and more significant argument concerns exactly how this dynamic correlates to the sudden disappearance of the century’s great antagonism, a vanishing act we have learned to call “the fall of the Wall.”

When we see that this is what culture was puzzling over, we see also that it is not a purely celebratory occasion—even in the victorious West. The antagonism which had oriented our political thought for decades can no longer do so. We encounter a sense of loss, bewilderment, even emptiness. I am hardly alone in insisting that history didn’t end, despite Francis Fukuyama’s famous claim. But it’s not unreasonable to suggest that the capacity to think historically took a beating. And this has dismaying consequences. Foremost among these consequence is the way in which we lost the ability to imagine that the arrangements of daily life—commodity capitalism, let’s just speak its name, so immiserating and inegalitarian for so may—that this could ever again be open to debate, criticism, or real change.

The wide angle

1989, in the most basic terms, is a synthesis of cultural criticism and political science, toward an understanding of a complex and important social convulsion.

There is a lot of Public Enemy and Nirvana in the book, Roxette and the KLF. There is also a fair amount of Fredric Jameson, Carl Schmitt, Francis Fukuyama. James Joyce and Hegel make cameos, along with Luce Irigaray and Slavoj Zizek. No less are there meditations on the excellence of Neneh Cherry, George Michael, Rakim, and Scorpions. These figures from the realms of theory and pop culture are set loose, together, on the stage of history: Berlin as the Wall falls; the sequence of revolutions across Europe that shattered the Soviet bloc; the resistance and bloody repression in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The radios and televisions and imaginations of America.

Such a mixture is in some way inevitable, I suppose. I was a professional music journalist for a few years, a senior writer at both Spin and the Village Voice. I quit very specifically because I felt, finally, like I couldn’t talk about music in the true language of my political and intellectual commitments. (There was, as I’m sure you could guess, plenty of encouragement to engage in pseudo-political posturing, especially in the glossy nationals. But serious politics, serious ideas, had to be at all costs ironized and denatured).

So in some sense this book is the completion of a trajectory that began quite some time ago, but couldn’t come to rest within the profession. Of course now I’m a academic, and most of my colleagues may think it’s a bit odd—looking from the other side—to be writing about (and enjoying), say, teenpop as something worth approaching with the finest critical technology. I always feel too serious or not serious enough.

However, it’s important to say that I am not smashing together the high (theory) and the low (pop culture) just because I can, just to see if anything interesting happens. I think if you look at the Jesus Jones song that gives the book its subtitle—the chorus, “watching the world wake up from history”—well it’s obvious that the 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. It’s all there—there’s no need to impose the high and low on each other.

Indeed, they are collapsing toward each other at accelerating speeds. This is a secondary argument of the book. Pop, which openly lives and dies by the logic of the commodity, is compelled to reduce everything down to bite-sized, easily sellable morsels. History itself increasingly drives toward this condition: toward the single image, the single instant. The end of the Cold War seems like a kind of acme of this, where this incredibly elaborate and unfinished historical process can be reduced to one image, five words: “the fall of the Wall.” And so history becomes pop, just as pop becomes the main purveyor of historical thought.

But what do we lose by that condensation, compression, that amputation of complexity? A lot, of course. And I think the songs know this: not just the thrill of the instant, but the redaction of everything else. They know they have blind spots, missing limbs. They feel the loss, the sense that something has become unspeakable, invisible, but is still there. I think we knew this, and cached this knowledge everywhere. We sensed it would be useful knowledge later, when we return to the great antagonisms that I’m sure are still before us.

If history has in fact ended (as Francis Fukuyama famously claimed), or if the capacity to think historically has disappeared, this has dismaying consequences. Foremost among them is the inability to imagine that the arrangements of daily life, so immiserating for so many, can ever again be open to debate, criticism, or real change.

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.

In a nutshell

Clash of Extremes presents a new interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. If the prevailing explanation can be summarized in one word, “slavery,” the argument in my book comes down to “economics.”

I tackled the Civil War because I felt slavery just didn’t explain why the sections clashed. For example, the Republican Party, which emerged in the 1850s, made clear it would not disturb slavery where it existed. Nor did Abraham Lincoln’s party oppose the Fugitive Slave Law or call for emancipation when war broke out. In the South, most whites reviled abolitionists, but opposed secession during the winter of 1860 and ‘61. The Border States would remain in the Union, while the Upper South left only once fighting erupted in April 1861. Even in the Deep South, perhaps half the whites resisted immediate secession. A focus on slavery also does not shed light on the earlier period; between 1820 and 1850 the North and South cooperated with each other, although Northerners denounced bonded labor and Southerners defended the institution.

The evolution of the Northern and Southern economies better explains the events of these years. Between 1820 and 1850 the national economy kept the sections together despite disagreements over slavery. The Mississippi River and its tributaries formed a powerful north-south axis. High returns from cotton, fresh soils, and the assistance of the federal government in obtaining new territories persuaded Southerners to value the Union. The two great parties that formed in this era—the Whigs and the Democrats—divided along lines of wealth while sharing a belief in a unified nation.

After 1850 this picture changed. The rapid growth of a transportation system based on the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal reoriented the trade of the northern part of the North. The spread of antislavery only heightened sentiments in that area. In the South, the declining profitability of cotton and diminished prospects for new land led many to question the value of remaining part of the United States. The opposition to further compromise was greatest at the extremes: the northern part of the North and the southern part of the South. Hence the book’s title: Clash of Extremes. In contrast to the Deep South, the slave states more involved in the growing overland trade with the prosperous North proved reluctant to sever ties.

The changing economy, along with the growth of antislavery, fostered new political alignments. Voters living near the Lakes and in New England came together to form the Republican Party. This party was more concerned with promoting economic development than with fighting slavery. In the South a new militant Democratic Party emerged and in 1860 ran its own candidate, John C. Breckinridge. After the outbreak of war, as before, the Republicans focused more on their economic program than on helping African Americans. This imbalance—economic development, first; assistance to blacks, second—continued during Reconstruction.

The wide angle

Several principles shape the book. First, the story of the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath is told with a focus on individuals. Readers will encounter lawmaker Thaddeus Stevens, hobbled by clubfoot and with his red wig askew, frantically trying to stop the disenfranchisement of blacks in the Pennsylvania legislature. They will meet Dixon Lewis, who weighed over 400 pounds, campaigning for states rights at Alabama crossroads towns. They will also get to know women like Abigail Kelley, who had to harden herself to the abuse she received as she went door to door in Lynn, Massachusetts, collecting signatures on antislavery petitions. Clash of Extremes also highlights African-Americans, like Frederick Douglass, and common folk, like Woodson May, an Alabama shingle maker.

There is no contradiction between a book that examines trends in the economy and society and a focus on individuals. Just the opposite. Any explanation of broader changes makes sense only if it also works on the personal level. Lincoln remarked (in discussing his decision to favor emancipation), “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.”

Individuals did more than reflect larger developments; they also helped shape them. John C. Calhoun’s forthright defense of Southern rights influenced his many followers. Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act precipitated divisions within the North and the formation of new parties. A focus on individuals illuminates the society in which they functioned and the conditions that made their accomplishments possible. Many in the Deep South eagerly embraced Calhoun’s views because they too feared that the cotton economy could not secure new soils within a Union dominated by the North. Douglas’s initiative brought into the light divisions within the North that had been present for several years.

Second, while Clash of Extremes concludes that economics was the most important single concern shaping politics, it also examines a broad range of other factors. The growth of antislavery had a noteworthy impact on the outlook of Northerners. Religion, place of birth, and national origins were also significant. For example, New England Congregationalists who settled in the Midwest often favored antislavery parties. By contrast, those who moved from the slave states to the North remained more sympathetic to the Southern cause. Similarly, settlers who migrated from the Appalachian highlands to the Deep South supported the Union more than did their neighbors who hailed from South Carolina and Georgia.

Finally, in examining the impact of economic self-interest on individuals, Clash of Extremes emphasizes the mediating role of ideology rather than short-term calculations. Few individuals chose sides in the sectional dispute simply to put dollars in their purses. For the elite, ideology might have involved elaborate treatises. But for the common folk, ideology often meant a party platform that spoke to their broader interests.

the Republican Party was more concerned with promoting economic development than with fighting slavery

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

In a nutshell

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, alias Le Corbusier, borrowed, plagiarized and instrumentalised the ideas and symbols of Swiss and French Freemasonry and trade guilds, the compagnonnages.

The ruling elites of La Chaux-de-Fonds (where Jeanneret lived for the first thirty years of his life before moving to Paris), as well as those of the Third Republic in Paris, belonged to Masonic lodges. So this was for him a clever way of getting in on the act and of obtaining commissions. After all, architects want work and celebrity status. But, unlike other artists and intellectuals such as Juan Gris and Paul Dermée, who did belong to Masonic lodges and were devoted to their rituals and ideas, Jeanneret operated their ideas and symbols instrumentally. Jeanneret believed in one thing only: Le Corbusier!

But my book is about several other related things too. Let me explain.

First, it has always been said, and is indeed still said, that Le Corbusier’s architecture is so incredibly complex that the only thing we can do is to individually track each one of the infinite meanings and sources that make up its eclectic nature, without relating them to each as a coherent whole. It is always repeated that to do so would be reductive. It is thereby implied that Le Corbusier’s work is the inexplicable creation of an inscrutable genius. Now, this is of course exactly what they all—from Frank Lloyd Wright to Le Corbusier via Cézanne, Jackson Pollock and so forth—wanted us to believe. It is in the very nature of modernist originality to want to hide its trail and make us believe in individual geniuses beyond analysis.

Le Corbusier was a master of the trade of public relations and deceit. He set up and vetted his own archives. He made sure to make friends in powerful places to insure the preservation of his key buildings by heritage legislation. He hustled museums to make sure his paintings would be in public collections. And so on. He was not always the mighty Le Corbusier from the Parisian City of Light but indeed a little provincial from an obscure Swiss town who had a lot of trouble being taken seriously in Paris.

My book shows that Jeanneret’s work is not an impenetrable, unpredictable and ad hoc assemblage, but a carefully structured opus that in-depth research can crack open. My book sets out to find the structures of the multiple references, meanings and sources of Jeanneret’s art and architecture. Indeed, when you check in the dictionary exactly what the word “eclectic” means, you find “multiple references according to a structured system.” I am arguing that Jeanneret’s work is not heteroclite, as is implied by people who say his work is incomprehensible, but coherently eclectic—serious research can describe the ideological and symbolic structure that runs through it. And that is what I set out to do.

But I am arguing something else too, which is important to understand. I have been accused of being cynical because I assert that Jeanneret did not believe in these ideas. I do not know if Jeanneret believed in the ideological and symbolic ideas that underlie his art, architecture and his books, because I do not have access to his brain. Also, he was a strategic and manipulative self-publicist in his obsessive search for the modernist holy grail of becoming an “original genius,” so he used ideas to ingratiate himself to get commissions and publicity as well as in the hope of becoming an historical legend. In that respect, the creation of his legend is the true mark of his genius!

So, to get back to the point: Did he believe in the main ideas that structure his eclectic art and architecture? Perhaps sometimes he did and sometimes he did not, as the wind blew. There is no way of knowing. The evidence is contradictory. I can only look at material outputs (art, architecture and publications) and recorded behavior in order to observe recurring patterns in his life and work. My book is not some imaginary psycho-sexual biography. Le Corbusier and the Occult seeks to understand symbolic and behavioral structures as a way towards understanding architectural and spatial qualities.

In order to do so, I had to devise investigative research methods. This is probably more interesting to researchers then to general readers. But chess-players might appreciate the joys of devising tactics within the rules of the game in order to beat the opposition, which, in this case, is the Jeanneret legend’s claim that he is wholly original and as good as gold.

The wide angle

I have had some enraged responses from knee-jerk modernists. Their reaction relates to the actual ideas that this book is about, which is that in order to understand Jeanneret we have to step outside the Anglo-Saxon frame of mind and get under the skin of francophone Swiss and French culture. So, Le Corbusier and the Occult is also about the importance of understanding other people, other ways of being, other cultures.

When Jeanneret was in shorts and until he definitively moved to Paris at the age of 30 in 1917, La Chaux-de-Fonds was the world’s leading watch-making town, selling watches to America, Russia, Latin America, etc. La Chaux-de-Fonds, for example, had the contract for supplying watches to the Russian army. There were enormously wealthy watch-factory owners in La Chaux-de-Fonds. They were often Jewish. Not only were they rich, they were also intellectual, interested in art, architecture, literature and music. They bought paintings from Jeanneret’s best friend, Charles Humbert. They commissioned interior designs, furniture and architecture from the young Jeanneret.

The commercial, political and administrative ruling classes of La Chaux-de-Fonds also included Catholics and Protestants and Muslims. La Chaux-de-Fonds was an ethnic and cultural melting-pot. (As well as a socially explosive place with strikes, riots and military interventions; Lenin and Bakounin were there.) At the same time, La Chaux-de-Fonds had hundreds of civic clubs and societies and circles, from skiing via knitting and Esperanto to politics. There was, however, one exclusive club which crossed religious and ethnic boundaries within the ruling and bourgeois classes: the Freemasonic lodge, La Loge L’Amitié. Across political, religious and ethnic divisions, businessmen and politicians and administrators could talk to each other inside the Masonic lodge. The municipal City architects, whom Jeanneret tried to cozy up to, belonged to it, as did the municipal City engineers. Everyone in La Chaux-de-Fonds knew about the lodge since it played a very important role as a source of charity (the first daycare centre for the children of poor working mothers; soup kitchens; funding for hospitals) and of funding for the arts (the art museum and the elegant Italianate theatre, both of which still exist today).

Jeanneret was friends with key lodge members such as Léon Gallet, whom he praises in his autobiography (Le Corbusier lui-même, ghostwritten by Jean Petit). The watch-enameling atelier of Jeanneret’s father was in the building next to the Masonic lodge. His aunt, Tante Pauline, lived next to the lodge too. Jeanneret wrote to Charles L'Eplattenier about becoming a member. His father, who was President of the Club Alpin Suisse (loosely comparable to the National Rifle Association), was invited there to speak at banquets. Jeanneret’s uncle, Sully Guinand, who played a key role in the finances of the Jeanneret family, was a lodge member.

Now, there is something that Anglo-Saxons find really difficult, or impossible, to understand. French and Swiss lodges were not stuffy establishment institutions. They were often radical, socialist and atheist. A friend of Jeanneret, Edouard Quartier-la-Tente, who was an internationally respected Freemason, was known for his extreme, outspoken and revolutionary ideals about equality and education. Another local Freemason, Elie Ducommun, was in receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize (1902). Lodge members were often intellectuals and politically engaged.

So, which ideas and symbols did these Masonic lodges operate with? They used the traditional Masonic symbols of the right-angle and the compass. (Think of Jeanneret’s poem, The Poem of the Right Angle. Can you see right-angles and compasses in it?) They worked with the smooth versus the rough, which were symbols of how humans should work on their own personalities to become more tolerant and better people—in Masonic language, “to polish your stone.” (Remember the importance of smooth and rough textural surfaces in Jeanneret’s architecture, from the smooth International Style to béton brut?) Le Corbusier and the Occult documents many other such symbolic features too.

But—and this is fundamental—a central francophone Freemasonic tenet is that of eclecticism. Their symbolic rituals and images are deliberately and intentionally eclectic, which is part of a belief in the importance of encompassing other traditions, cultures and ways of being. And eclecticism, of course, is part of the very structure of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s art and architecture. Thus 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.

But how did I come across these ideas? Why am I the first researcher to be granted access to the archives of the Masonic lodge in La Chaux-de-Fonds? Or to discover the hitherto un-researched archives of his friend, Janko Cádra, in the Slovak National Library?

Factors related to my own multinational and multicultural upbringing and multidisciplinary education are probably relevant. And I believe very strongly that art history, architectural history and cultural studies should all be linked together—as they are in the work of Jacob Burckhardt. Perhaps Marc Bloch’s classic book, The Royal Touch, is my model for Le Corbusier and the Occult. As Marc Bloch wrote: “We have so far been following the age-long vicissitudes of the royal miracle as far as the documentary evidence permits. In the course of our research, we have done our utmost to throw light upon the collective ideas and the individual ambitions which blended in a kind of psychological complex and led the kings of France and England to claim this wonderworking power, and their subjects to recognize it.”

Jeanneret’s work is not heteroclite, as is implied by people who say his work is incomprehensible, but coherently eclectic—serious research can describe the ideological and symbolic structure that runs through it

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social constructivism and genetic determinism by claiming we inherit a minimal human nature that gets fine-tuned by culture. In a formula, our human nature has evolved to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature.

I get to my notion of human nature as “body politic” by putting the “embodied mind” school of cognitive science together with the post-structuralist French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What attracted me to the embodied mind school (e.g., Hubert Dreyfus, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and the late Francisco Varela) is the critique of the standard computer metaphor of cognition as information processing and its alternate vision of cognition as an organism directing itself in its environment. Such embodied cognition is inescapably affective; the old division of reason and emotion needs to be rethought as “affective cognition.”

What Deleuze brings to the table is a wide-ranging materialist ontology, so that we can use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the “politic” to the “body,” to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.

Political Affect starts by laying out the theory of politically inflected affective cognition, bringing Deleuze together with dynamical systems theory (a.k.a. “complexity theory,” or the theory of self-organizing material systems), and a number of positions in the affective, cognitive, and biological sciences, including “developmental systems theory,” a biological perspective that emphasizes epigenetic (cellular, organic, and even extra-somatic) factors as well as genetic factors in inheritance and development.

I then compare Aristotle, Kant, and Deleuze on the interchange of theology, biology and politics that has always haunted the philosophical treatment of the organism. Finally, I provide three case studies where the social-somatic connection that constitutes human nature results in the bypassing or at least the attenuation of consciousness. That is, I investigate instances where biologically inherited basic emotions, which have received in cultural experience different triggers and thresholds, result in, if not outright “takeovers” of behavior, at least strong unconscious biases. The three case studies are the Terri Schiavo case (empathy), the Columbine High School massacre (rage), and Hurricane Katrina (fear).

The wide angle

What I wanted to do in Political Affect was write a book on advances in the sciences that would use a continental figure (Deleuze) as part of its theoretical basis, and yet still be readable by both analytic and continental philosophers. This was something of a challenge, because for much too long philosophers have tolerated a harmful division in our profession, the infamous divide between “continental” and “analytic” philosophers. It’s impossible to avoid clichés in discussing this divide, for it was instituted and lives on via the power of cliché, unexamined presupposition, mutual distrust, and ignorance. So, the cliché is that the continentals study and model their inquiries after art and literature, while the analytics study and model their inquiries after the sciences.

Of course there are exceptions—analytic aesthetics and continental philosophy of science are subdisciplines on either side—but there is a sad kernel of truth in the cliché. The problem for my project is that continental philosophy of science looks at scientific practice as its object of study; it doesn’t incorporate scientific findings in a continental investigation of philosophical problems—in my case, the concept of human nature.

The opening to this project—a continental philosophy not “of” science, but “with” science—was provided by the way in which the embodied-mind scholars use the classical phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—as their philosophical resources in their reading of the cognitive sciences. Insofar as these phenomenologists are an important part of the training of any continental philosopher, there was the chance here to get continental philosophers to read cognitive science by following the trail of the embodied-mind thinkers and their use of phenomenology.

On the other hand, I wanted to nudge the embodied-mind school along one more step in their reading of continental philosophy, from the phenomenologists to the post-structuralists—in this case, Deleuze. While the turn to an embodied subject by means of phenomenology is a great advance over the computer model, we need to pay attention to the feminist (Simone de Beauvoir) and anti-colonialist (Frantz Fanon) criticism that the embodied subject of the phenomenologists had abstracted from racialized and gendered subjectivity. But such abstraction only serves to hide an implicit masculine and empowered subject benefiting from its social position, as Iris Marion Young shows in her essay “Throwing Like a Girl.” So instead of “the” (abstract) embodied subject, I propose Deleuze’s emphasis on interwoven natural and social systems to think about how multiple subjectification practices produce a distribution of affective cognitive traits in a population of subjects.

Continental philosophy of science looks at scientific practice as its object of study; it doesn’t incorporate scientific findings in a continental investigation of philosophical problems.

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.

In a nutshell

One of the most notable developments in international trade after the end of the Cold War has been the explosion of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). In 1990, there were about two dozen. Today, we are looking at several hundred, with many more under negotiation. PTAs come under various names and guises—free trade agreements, economic partnership agreements, regional integration agreements—but they have in common that they liberalize trade barriers between their members only. They are also the only legal exception to the rule of non-discrimination in the World Trade Organization (WTO), the legal principle that is supposed to put all members on equal footing.

Just as striking as the rapid growth of PTAs is that the majority today are North-South agreements. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was the first of this kind of trade deal that spanned the North-South divide.

Yet “trade agreement” is actually a misnomer. Investing in Protection argues that North-South agreements are much less about exports and much more about foreign investment. In fact, negotiators from the North often go to great lengths to exclude large shares of trade between the partners. They also try to delay the reduction of their own tariffs as much as possible, especially for goods from the developing country partner that threaten jobs in the North. In contrast, barriers against foreign investment and the trade closely related to it are eliminated rapidly.

The actors behind this story are multinational firms. In manufacturing industries, they move production into developing countries where labor costs are lower. In the services sector, they buy up recently privatized assets in order to enter markets. Because they provide jobs in both countries, they have greater influence over politicians than labor, consumers, and even conventional exporters.

Politicians and multinational firms therefore strike a bargain. Given the differences in wage levels, any North-South agreement is politically difficult: It threatens to move jobs offshore, and it might open a backdoor to competitors to enter the home market. For example, during the NAFTA negotiations, many US firms were afraid that European and Japanese competitors would build factories in Mexico and sell into the US market. Most PTAs are therefore written to include various barriers against outsiders, from obscure “rules of origin” to different standards and regulations.

This in turn has an unintended consequence: Those who are excluded lobby for their own agreements to level the playing field. Following NAFTA, the European Union and Japan moved to establish trade agreements with Mexico. North-South PTAs create a competitive dynamic that draws in ever more countries into the trend toward discriminatory trade.

The wide angle

The idea for the book was born from a conversation with Noboru Hatakeyama, a former top official in Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry—the (in)famous MITI—in the fall of 2002. I had just arrived in Japan with a completely different research project in mind, but found that the foreign policy establishment was wholly occupied with the free trade agreements that Japan had just started to negotiate. Hatakeyama was one of the key figures in promoting the new policy.

Since the end of the US occupation, Japan had relied on multilateral trade institutions, avoided any preferential agreements, and only reluctantly negotiated bilaterally with the US, which were worried about the strength of Japanese exports in the 1980s. Now Japan turned its policy completely around, engaging in a flurry of bilateral negotiations. The driving force behind this change was a realization that Japanese firms were strongly discriminated against in their activities abroad. Seen from Japan, NAFTA appeared almost purposefully designed to make it hard for the likes of Nissan and Panasonic to operate in Mexico.

It was an exciting time to be in Tokyo, and I spent the next six months running from meetings with trade officials to workshops with academics to interviews with company and trade association representatives. Some of the work was more like investigative journalism than social science research. In Japan, the private sector prefers to let the government take the lead; getting the unofficial version of a policy is often hard.

Because of this reluctance to discuss views publicly, especially with foreigners, and because the English-speaking, urbane, elite bureaucrats are much more accessible, many at the time thought that Japan’s trade agreements were a government-driven project. But once I scratched the surface of this new strategic policy consensus, I came upon a fierce battle between different interest groups whose strategic priority was their own material gain. In short, despite a different institutional and cultural context, it was a way of policymaking that any observer of US politics would immediately recognize.

This allowed me to extend the study into large, comparative framework. It turns out that North-South PTAs follow a similar pattern, whether the powerful party is Japan, the US, or the EU. The developing country usually swallows whatever is offered in return for the promise of more foreign investment, or the veiled threat that others are standing in line ready to sign their own deal. In the book, I analyze the cases of NAFTA, the EU-Mexico and Japan-Mexico FTAs, the agreements that the US and the EU have negotiated with Chile, and the “Economic Partnership Agreements” that Japan has sought with Thailand and Malaysia.

Approaching the analysis through such qualitative case work has its risks. It seems almost a universal rule of human behavior that whenever we pursue our naked self-interest, we justify it with reference to the greater social good. Politicians and lobbyists have mastered this to the point where they believe their own words—turning them into what Marx called “character masks.” For the researcher, this means that we can never take statements at face value and must avoid asking for motivations, and instead trace decisions and identify critical junctures. In short, we must objectify our subjects, and ask if our theories predict their actions rather than their words. But doing so also gives us a much deeper insight into the policy-making process than looking for statistical correlations.

North-South agreements are much less about exports and much more about foreign investment

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.

In a nutshell

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is about the messy, uncertain process of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule, and the quasi-judicial ritual that South Africa used to help accomplish such a transition. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was an attempt to draw a line in the sand, to say, “that was then, this is now.” The TRC tried to separate the massive atrocities and gross violations of human rights so routinely perpetrated during forty years of apartheid from the country’s new dispensation post 1994—a multi-racial democracy with one of the most progressive constitutions in the world.

This is the first book to examine a unique and defining feature of South Africa’s TRC: its public iteration in front of audiences. Prior to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which began in 1996, there had been sixteen other truth commissions in the world, in places ranging from Uganda to Argentina. Yet South Africa’s truth commission had the distinction of being the first to transpire overtly in the public eye. Hearings happened on raised platforms and stages throughout the country, with spectators attending in person, and radio and television broadcasts transforming the commission into a media event in which thousands participated.

How did the TRC’s performative conventions, modes of address, and expressive embodiment shape the experience for both participants and spectators? By what means did people experience the hearings? Through what levels of mediation, of telling and retelling? How did medium shape the message? How did the public storytelling—which was conveyed by witnesses, governed by commission protocols, mediated by simultaneous language interpreters, journalists, and television—influence public perceptions?

I argue that the TRC’s public enactment before an audience had a unique potency—one that its written record does not capture. When seeing the TRC as a live, affective, kinetic, sonic, and visual event that relied upon interpretation by linguists, the media, and audiences in order to reach a larger South African public, one understands the power of performance—to express both the magnitude of the TRC’s ambitions as well as the inevitability of its failure to achieve closure.

Yet a failure to achieve closure does not mean the TRC itself was a failure. A careful and nuanced analysis of the public enactment of the TRC shows that state transition can be validly and meaningfully experienced as an ongoing process with many stages.

The wide angle

Once at a dinner party, when I described my book as being about the performative dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an attorney who was there quipped, “Well, that must mean you take a very dim view of the truth commission.” I responded by saying that, rather, his comment suggested he took a very dim view of performance.

Words like “theatre,” “performance,” “spectacle” and “show” are often used pejoratively when applied to politics and the law. It was precisely the conflation of theatricality and justice that made Hannah Arendt so uncomfortable with Adolph Eichmann’s trial. Justice “demands seclusion,” she said. In a similar vein, South Africa’s Inkatha Freedom Party leader Mangaqa Mncwango dismissed the TRC and its Chairperson, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, by saying, “The TRC has become a sensationalist circus of horrors presided over by a weeping clown craving for the front stage spotlight.”

In looking at the TRC through the lens of performance I neither see the commission negatively nor do I valorize it with romantic notions about the miraculous, cathartic, healing potential of performance. I simply assert that the commission was a performance—and that we need to understand how its performative dimensions operated.

The book’s point of entry is somewhat unusual. I examine several major political trials from the late 1950s and early 1960s, all of which included Nelson Mandela among the accused. While the field of transitional justice out of which the TRC arises usually focuses on state transition from authoritarian rule to democracy, I argue that we must also look at how the law is used as a performative space by a regime that is becoming totalitarian.

The apartheid state used trials to make a show—both to the people of South Africa and the world. Anti-apartheid activists also manipulated these trials, both inside and outside the courtroom, to create a counter spectacle. These early political trials were as much a part of the performative genealogy of the TRC as were both the Nuremburg and Eichmann trials and the sixteen truth commissions that preceded the TRC.

The book then examines several layers of mediation that were inherently part of the commission’s telling and performing of apartheid’s stories. To give testimony meant, inherently, to interpret and to be interpreted. This is evident in the rest of the book: I examine the language of interpreters who translated all the hearings from within a phalanx of grey booths that always lined the hearing halls, a weekly television documentary program that covered the TRC, and retrospective views of the TRC in the media and art that were produced ten years later, in 2006. I see all of these iterations as valuable and meaningful reverberations emanating from actions of atrocity that were narrated, not performed, before the TRC.

I believe that, aside from being the first book to analyze a unique and defining feature of the TRC—its public enactment—Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission is notable in a number of other regards. The book is based upon rich empirical research, including interviews I conducted with journalists, commissioners, and language interpreters; close analysis of public testimony; and a comprehensive review of TRC Special Report, an important television news program on the commission that aired weekly for two years. I assert that the “completeness” of the vision of the apartheid past, which was mandated in the commission’s authorizing act, can be discerned as vividly through in-depth analysis of performed testimony as through macro-narratives that calculate in quantitative terms apartheid's national dimensions, which the commission’s own final report attempted to do.

My book diverges from much existing literature on the TRC: I use a humanities-based approach that moves beyond the evaluative mode. Rather than celebrating or criticizing the commission, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission analyzes the rich archive it left behind. Regardless of one’s opinion of the commission’s efficacy, the TRC’s archive demands our analytical attention.

My last book, Ghana’s Concert Party Theatre, narrated how a particular popular theatre in Ghana, the concert party, served as a kind of living newspaper through which a largely non-literate population discussed, represented, engaged, and criticized changes wrought by colonialism and the early years of independence.

Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission represented for me a radical shift of geographic focus from west to southern Africa. The project was also a shift because rather than studying theatre per se, I used theories from performance studies to analyze something that wasn’t framed as theatre or art. What connects these two projects is a consistent focus on how 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 failure to achieve closure does not mean the TRC itself was a failure. A careful and nuanced analysis of the public enactment of the TRC shows that state transition can be validly and meaningfully experienced as an ongoing process with many stages

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

Mexico emerged as a modern nation in the 1860s, after half a century of civil war, foreign invasion and political instability. In a new nation divided by ethnicity, class, religion and differing views of sovereignty, even the basic rules of political culture had to be sorted out. The right to speak in the name of public opinion was not automatically granted to a selected few, but was the object of constant debate. Who could speak or write in the name of Mexican society? What gave him, or her, the authority to do so? Historians have explored this struggle in terms of ideology (liberals against conservatives, republicans against monarchists) or class (the elite and the subaltern). But honor was the category generally accepted, even across gender divides, as the foundation for the interactions among Mexican citizens, and between Mexico and other nations.

In Mexico, honor mutated drastically with the end of colonial domination. Whereas in the past honor was the visible marker of status and formalized the interactions between people divided by class, color and gender, after independence all Mexican citizens, regardless of color or ethnicity, had a rightful claim to honor. Honor was the point of reference to build a modern masculinity, it gave men the right to use reason publicly. This book looks at the first century of Mexican history as a simultaneous struggle to protect honor and empower public opinion.

Multiple press codes set out to guarantee, and at the same time limit, freedom of speech. Honor and freedom of speech were intertwined because republican honor meant the intimate connection between one's reputation, its external dimension, and the inner domain of conscience and self-esteem. When a citizen spoke, it was tacitly accepted that he or she was speaking his or her mind. Without sincerity there could be no public debate. As a result, the limits to freedom of speech most commonly legislated were those intended to protect the honor of interlocutors.

Journalists, principal actors in my book, were sent to jail for libel more often than for inciting rebellion. Mexican newspapers, particularly since the 1860s, provided the field in which personal honor was tested and measured. Following romantic notions of sincerity and heroism, journalists challenged each others' reputations and defied men of power. I examine other terrains as well: Mexico City streets, where parliamentarians, students and the plebs protested in 1884 against the negotiation of the debt with British bondholders; the personal disputes in bars, commerce, and tenement houses that drove people to sue each other for defamation or insults; the secretive, yet very public, field of honor, where elite men used the duel to solve their least treatable conflicts.

The wide angle

We tend to assume that freedom of speech naturally accompanies other democratic rights. But the construction of the virtual and physical spaces where modern individuals could publicly and freely use their reason involves a historical process full of contingencies and diverging paths. In Spanish America, the development of what we now call the public sphere started even before independence, and encompassed moments of great tolerance for free speech and moments of repression and violence. Public men in modern Mexico used honor to build an egalitarian, if restrictive, space where they could publicly apply their reason to matters of common interest while limiting, or at least ritualizing, the need to defend their opinions with violence.

The Tyranny of Opinion focuses on the generation of public men that emerged in the 1870s because of the first opportunity to build a public sphere with some institutional stability under the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). These men had not participated in the wars against conservatives, Spaniards, the United States and France. Seeking to speak in the name of the nation, they had to invoke the heroic legacy of the older generations. This they did sometimes against their will, revealing deep anxieties about their own masculinity. They successfully used the formalities of the dueling codes to limit interpersonal violence and justify their claim to have a pure consciousness, above the threats or co-optation of the Porfirian regime. In doing so they laid out the foundations of the public sphere that continued to evolve in Mexico even after the 1911 revolution: a public sphere in which, for women and the less educated, the right to speak was severely limited, but one that otherwise allowed for a free press even under the authoritarianism of Díaz and of the post-revolutionary single-party regime.

The story is also that of the transition from a romantic notion of the self in which honor meant the individual’s transparent unity of self-esteem and reputation (thus a constant struggle against misunderstanding), to positivist ideas about the state’s obligation to protect honor as a juridical object (a valuable and objective personal good that could be defended by penal legislation). The book shows how Mexican public men’s honor shifted from being the object of polemics and duels between romantic journalists and orators to serving as the justification for judges’ interventions against opposition writers. This, however, was not only the product of the strong hand of the dictator: people from all backgrounds, even working-class women and journalists, supported the penal protection of honor and used courts to defend their reputation when they had been the objects of insults or defamation.

I came to realize the importance of the link between honor and the public sphere following two paths. First, my previous book City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900-1931 had revealed the importance of implicit notions of honor in regulating interpersonal violence among people in Mexico City. Cases of battery, homicide and sexual violence documented life as a constant struggle to control reputation. Violence played an expressive role by showing that men could sustain their words with deeds, while demonstrating that women could not fully exercise their right to be free and secure in the city. In the process of the research, I learned how to read judicial sources not only as the record of the modern state’s attempts to establish social control and “civilize” Mexicans, but also as records of dialogues in which parties in conflict could express their ideas about what constituted a legitimate use of violence, particularly in the context of disputes triggered by hurtful words or gestures in public settings.

The second path to this book had started earlier with my interest in parliamentary politics during the revolutionary era. Trying to place the neglected history of congress in a broader historical perspective, I found that Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere offered a theoretically productive way to understand the modern history of the public use of reason. The model, however, had to be used critically, because Habermas saw that transformation as a product of the intellectual changes associated with the Enlightenment. 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.

Habermas and other authors provided a way to think historically about reason as a dialogue, and about the bourgeois spheres of intimacy and publicity. My work, and that of other historians of Spanish America, suggests the importance of revising that model with an eye for gender, ethnic and class exclusions. In The Tyranny of Opinion, my contribution to this revision is the incorporation of violence and masculinity as components of the public sphere that not only served to exclude certain groups from politics, but also determined the rules of free speech.

This book looks at the first century of Mexican history as a simultaneous struggle to protect honor and empower public opinion.

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.

In a nutshell

I want a reader to enter a truly bizarre world: America in 1979.

It was a period of disco and disco demolition, cocaine and divorce, an Iranian revolution and oil embargo plus the Three Mile Island nuclear power crisis. It was a time when intellectuals feared America’s power was in decline to the Middle East and we were becoming a nation of narcissists. It was a time when Americans murdered one another on gas lines. It was a time when the Vietnam War had been over for four years but Americans hadn’t really come to terms with the war’s implications. The first popular movies about Vietnam start to appear at this time—including Coming Home, Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now (the latter was actually shown at the White House during 1979, an event I talk about in the book).

I recreate that world of America in 1979 for the reader. And then I place Jimmy Carter into this context and explain how he decided to give one of the toughest speeches in the history of presidential speeches. We still erroneously call it the “malaise speech”—the word “malaise,” in fact, never appeared in it. The speech is at the heart of the book, and it is about the country’s decline, about the energy crisis, and about what Americans can do to pull themselves out of these and to chart a path towards energy independence.

This is a story about one president worrying a great deal about the psychic state of America and wanting to address that problem head-on. Much of the book deals with how Jimmy Carter, pushed by an array of advisors behind the screens, decided to make the speech.

The wide angle

The book addresses broad questions of American national identity. Who are we as a nation: selfish individualists or citizens and members of a commonwealth? Can America be a nation with a sense of humility and “limits” in the face of the emerging crisis in the Middle East—the Iranian revolution and the dawn of Islamic fundamentalism and a resulting oil embargo?

Carter tried to explore these questions by reading numerous social observers from the time. He read Reinhold Niebuhr as well as the writings of Christopher Lasch and Daniel Bell, two leading social theorists who pondered if consumer capitalism destroyed civic virtue. He also went to the heart of one of our most pressing problems—one that still exists today: our over-reliance or dependency on fossil fuels imported from abroad, and how this makes us susceptible to a whole range of problems.

To this question Carter offered a solution that we ignored—I believe, to our peril—when we elected Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Much of the story is about the rise of the conservative revolution during Jimmy Carter’s presidency—the formation of the Moral Majority (Jerry Falwell’s organization), the rise of conservative think tanks, the arguments made by “neoconservatives,” and the increasing popularity of Ronald Reagan.

What led me to want to examine this issue was teaching undergraduates this speech in contemporary history classes. My students were always amazed by the speech’s tough message. So I wanted to explain how Carter came to conclude he needed to give a speech that had so much political risk behind it. I remember quite distinctly one student who said to me, when I taught Carter’s speech during George W. Bush’s presidency: “I wish we had a president who told us difficult truths.” I remember being shocked by that, and inspired. The speech’s story deserved to be told.

Who are we as a nation: selfish individualists or citizens and members of a commonwealth?

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.

In a nutshell

Coyote at the Kitchen Door: Living with Wildlife in Suburbia is about what the relatively recent phenomenon of wide-scale urban and suburban development means to the landscape, to wildlife, to people, and to our planet in general. Based on my personal and professional experiences, the book is simultaneously a memoir, a textbook, and a personal philosophy.

As a professional wildlife biologist, I have worked on a variety of wild animals in natural settings throughout North America and in a few other places around the world. It is only recently that I have developed a focus on those animals that live among us in our towns and neighborhoods. Society’s response to these animal neighbors has been as varied as the range of human emotions: admiration, fear, love, hate.

Perhaps no other species triggers a wider array of emotions and behaviors from people than the North American coyote. Before European settlement, the coyote was restricted to the central prairies and plains of western North America. But as the continent was settled and changes, such as the extirpation of wolves, took place, the way was opened for coyotes to disperse. Coyotes now occupy every state in the U. S., except Hawaii, and they are one of the most successful species in North America.

Each of the book’s 12 chapters is divided into three separate but interrelated parts. I chose to include a variety of approaches in the discussion of the topic of urbanization—or sprawl, as it has been called. The chapter opens with a narrative that describes experiences I have had with wildlife away from suburbia. These introductory passages serve a few purposes: to provide a contrast between wild and built environments, to explore the similarities that may exist between the two, and to simply take the reader away from urban/suburban settings for a while to experience nature in the wild.

The main portion of each chapter then explores and describes issues related to urban/suburban living: cities and towns as ecosystems, the growth of human population and resource use, the impacts to and responses of wildlife, and human-wildlife relationships, as well as traffic, noise, and artificial lights. Each chapter ends with the life and times of a female coyote as she navigates both wild and human environments.

In each section I strive to explain the interrelatedness of wildlife, humans, and the environment, and what that might mean to our collective futures.

The wide angle

In much of the world, cities are expanding and growing to astronomical sizes. Along with the growth of cities comes the spread of suburbs. Suburban areas now dominate the perimeter of most cities and extend out into rural areas. Farmland, ranchland, forests, and deserts in private ownership are being “parcelized”—tracts are subdivided into smaller and smaller parcels for single family homes, shopping centers, and the like. This process of urban and suburban sprawl affects the landscape, wildlife habitat and populations, and human society.

Wildlife responds to human development of the landscape in different ways. It depends on the species. Some large carnivores, for example, decline and disappear with increasing development. Others, notably ecological generalists, non-native species, and species that can exploit human environments, can do quite well in urban and suburban areas. Among the latter are birds such as robins, starlings, house sparrows, house finches, crows, blue jays, and cardinals. And there are mammals too—house mice, opossums, squirrels, deer, raccoons, skunks, and coyotes. Similar processes are at work for other taxa (amphibians, reptiles, and even invertebrates).

In Coyote at the Kitchen Door I address the issue of urbanization and sprawl, and both the impact it has on wildlife and the response of wildlife to these rapid changes in the landscape. Although I try to cover issues related to urban areas, as well as rural country and even wilderness, I focus on suburbia because that is where much of the interface between wildlife and people takes place.

Of interest are those species whose populations diminish in the face of increasing development, but perhaps more compelling, from a human perspective, are those animals that actually exploit human resources (food, water, shelter) and flourish within our neighborhoods. And the North American coyote is perhaps the master of adaptation in the face of continued human domination of the landscape.

While cities and towns throughout North America represent wonderful places to live, their unbridled growth threatens wildlife habitat, open space, biodiversity, and the resources upon which we depend. Many such dichotomies are evident in our relationship to nature. The case of the coyote embodies one: an incredible, adaptable, beautiful animal that many people admire, and at the same time a predator that many people fear, capable of threatening livestock, family pets, and even humans.

Coyote at the Kitchen Door tells the story of urbanization from my own perspective as a wildlife biologist—while I weave in the book the biology and life history of the coyote, through following a female coyote’s travels and life among humans.

I focus on suburbia because that is where much of the interface between wildlife and people takes place.

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.

In a nutshell

Pistols! Treason! Murder! describes the short, disturbing and unprecedented career of a Venetian spy, Gerolamo Vano, who was executed for perjury in 1622.

In the years immediately preceding his death, Vano wrote hundreds of surveillance reports, based on material compiled from a revolving cast of suborned informants. Vano submitted these reports to his nominal employers, the Venetian Inquisitors of State, who were dedicated to protecting state secrets—that is, to counter-intelligence in modern parlance. Vano’s targets were the embassies of powers then hostile to the independent Venetian republic, principally Spain and her Hapsburg allies. In working against these targets, Vano was one of a number of competing suppliers in what we might describe as a deregulated free market of information (indeed, a black market); one whose invisible operation on capitalist principles was unique in the guild economy of early seventeenth-century Venice.

The Inquisitors of State did not directly employ informers (although they could directly reward them); rather, they delegated this task to independent intermediaries like Vano, whose reports are distinctive among those submitted by his contemporaries for their professional focus. They are also crudely melodramatic and obviously mendacious, even if it is virtually impossible to catch Vano outright in any specific lie. Nonetheless, these reports resulted in the arrest, imprisonment and/or execution of several of Vano’s protagonists. But since the Inquisitors’ final statement on the matter was to execute Vano for perjury, his reports clearly present unique interpretive problems.

Pistols! Treason! Murder! is therefore about Vano as a storyteller, but it is also more generally about the role of stories in historical analysis. To do justice to Vano, it was necessary to experiment with several devices that have no direct equivalent in his surveillance reports, but that illuminate them by analogy, such as original illustrations drawn in the style of seventeenth-century woodcuts and a dialogue between myself and two other historians.

The wide angle

Venice in the 1610s and 1620s was the first European state to undertake systematic surveillance of private individuals, and to entrust the supervision of such surveillance to a permanent committee, the Inquisitors of State. Vano was one of the first people involved in this process to fashion himself as a professional spy—as Venice’s “General of Spies,” no less. Thus Vano’s career is not only an invitation to rethink historical storytelling, but an invitation to rethink the place of the spy within the genealogy of modernity.

Jacob Burckhardt, in his groundbreaking study The Civilization of the Renaissance, first published in 1860, concentrated on architects, artists and the princely despots who transformed political life by treating the state as if it were also a work of art, which meant that it could be remade and transformed according to its ruler’s wishes. Since Burckhardt wrote his book, modernity has lost much of its shine. The alienated, protean figure of the spy, whose existence is defined by bad faith and duplicity, seems more representative of contemporary disillusionment than Burckhardt’s heroic geniuses do. Baroque cynicism has replaced sunny Renaissance optimism.

The major issue for seventeenth-century Venetians was not how to assert their individuality so much as how to reconcile competing claims on their loyalties. Nonetheless, this problem itself contributed to the “birth of the individual.” People became aware of who they were not only by meditating on their own uniqueness, but by outwardly pretending to be someone they were not. They began to define identity in terms of what separated them from other people. The origins of this way of thinking lie in the careers of men like Vano as well as those of courtiers and Burckhardt’s artists.

Gerolamo Vano was therefore a kind of performance artist; less idealised and more democratic than the traditional modernist hero, he lived in a compromised, complicated world, rather than existing on some higher, Olympian plane of Truth and Beauty. In his mind, as much as in that of the princely despot, the state became a work of art, but his art was ephemeral, improvised, and personal. He left no monuments to his genius except a pile of neglected, handwritten notes, but he explored the relationship between the private and the political in highly original ways. He was not above the moral obligations of mere mortals. Rather, he paid for the choices he made with his life—and those of others.

The major issue for seventeenth-century Venetians was not how to assert their individuality so much as how to reconcile competing claims on their loyalties. Nonetheless, this problem itself contributed to the “birth of the individual.” People became aware of who they were not only by meditating on their own uniqueness, but by outwardly pretending to be someone they were not.

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.

In a nutshell

For most of us, the central issue of animal ethics is our treatment of animals. We believe that animals have some moral value but that we are morally justified in using them as long as we treat them “humanely” and do not impose “unnecessary” suffering on them. Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation is a collection of essays that attempts to shift the paradigm from one that focuses on treatment to one that focuses on use. The book argues that we cannot justify using animals as human resources, irrespective of whether our treatment is “humane.” Animals as Persons presents the abolitionist theory of animal rights.

In the opening chapters of the book, I discuss this distinction between treatment and use. We recognize as a non-controversial matter that all humans, irrespective of their particular characteristics, have the right to be treated as persons, which is another way of saying that they have the right not to be treated as property. We cannot justify denying this one right to nonhuman animals; we cannot justify using nonhuman animals for food, clothing, hunting, entertainment, biomedical experiments or for other purposes.

As a historical matter, we have tried to justify our animal use by pointing to the supposed cognitive differences between humans and nonhumans. Any such differences between humans and animals may be relevant for some purposes but are simply not relevant to our treatment of animals as our property, as things that exist exclusively as means to our ends.

I also argue that animal welfare reform has, as a practical matter, failed because animals are chattel property and we generally protect animal interests only to the extent that we derive an economic benefit from doing so. Moreover, these meaningless reforms are characterized as significant by animal protection organizations that promote them in fundraising campaigns; as a result, reforms make the public feel more comfortable about continued animal exploitation.

Animals as Persons presents a theory that goes considerably beyond Peter Singer’s utilitarian view and is highly critical of the animal protection movement. I reject the idea that is currently promoted by all the large animal groups that the solution to the problem of animal exploitation is to develop a market for “happy” meat and animal products that have supposedly been produced “humanely.”

The book also contains a discussion of vivisection, or the use of animals in experiments, which I regard as morally unjustifiable (irrespective of any benefit) but as raising different and more complicated questions than the use of animals for food; an extended response to a critique of my theory by Cass Sunstein of Harvard Law School, presently Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; and a critique of feminist theory as applied to the issue of animal exploitation.

The wide angle

Animals as Persons can be understood as a reaction to and rejection of the paradigm of animal welfare that has dominated our thinking about the moral status of nonhuman animals for the past 200 years. This paradigm, which maintains that it is acceptable for humans to use nonhumans in ways that no one would regard as acceptable to use any humans as long as we treat nonhumans “humanely” and do not impose “unnecessary” suffering on them, is problematic in at least two respects.

The first problem is that we purport to justify using nonhuman animals on the ground that they are cognitively different from humans; that nonhumans have different and inferior sorts of minds. Welfarists—from Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century to Peter Singer today—maintain that animals, unlike humans, are not reflectively self-aware and they have no interest per se in continuing to live. They have no future plans or desires that would be frustrated by their death. Animals do not care about whether we use them, but only about how we use them. The cow does not care about whether we kill and eat her; she cares only about how we treat her while she is alive and how we kill her.

In Animals as Persons, I reject the notion that, as an empirical matter, animals do not have an interest in whether or not they continue to exist but only have an interest in being treated well. Nonhumans may have a different sense of what it means to have a life than normal human adults do. But this does not mean that they have no interest in continuing to exist, or that they are not self-aware, or that they are indifferent to whether we use them and kill them for our purposes, or that death is any less a harm for them than it is for us.

The position that nonhumans must have minds that are humanlike in order to be morally significant begs the question from the outset. Why is the ability to do calculus morally better than the ability to fly with your wings? Why is the ability to recognize yourself in a mirror morally better than your ability to recognize yourself in a scent that you left on a bush?

Moreover, there is no logical relationship between differences in cognitive characteristics and the issue of animal use, although these differences may be relevant for some purposes. Consider the case of a severely mentally disabled human. We may not want to give such a person a driver’s license because of her inability to drive. But is her impairment relevant to whether we use her as an unwilling subject in a biomedical experiment or force her to become an organ donor? Many of us would argue that her particular disability means that we have a greater moral obligation to her; it certainly does not mean that we have a lesser one. Similarly, the fact that a dog’s mind is different from ours means that we do not give the dog a driver’s license, but it does not mean that we can use the dog for purposes for which we would not use any humans. I conclude that we cannot rely on any cognitive differences between humans and nonhumans as a basis for using animals at all, however “humanely” we do so.

Second, the welfarist position assumes that we can exploit animals in a “humane” way. I argue that this is not the case and, under the very best of real-world circumstances, animals will be treated in ways that could never coherently be described as “humane.” Animals are property—they are economic commodities with only extrinsic or conditional value—and the level of “humane” treatment required under animal welfare laws will, for the most part, be limited to what is required to exploit animals in an efficient manner.

We generally protect animal interests only to the extent that we also derive an economic benefit from doing so. Although there are laws that require “humane” treatment, courts often defer to those who engage in the animal use because we assume that animal users are rational economic actors who would not impose more pain and suffering than is required for a particular use. The result is that even the most “humane” nations treat animals used for food in ways that would be considered torture if humans were so treated.

In certain respects, the regulation of animal exploitation is similar to the regulation of human slavery in North America. Although many laws supposedly required the “humane” treatment of slaves and prohibited the infliction of “unnecessary” punishment, these laws offered almost no protection for slaves. In conflicts between slave owners and slaves, the latter almost always lost.

Although I have been an academic for 25 years, I have also been involved as a lawyer in a variety of legal cases and administrative matters concerning animals. Observing the legal system as an insider, I learned that animal welfare simply does not work.

I reject the notion that, as an empirical matter, animals do not have an interest in whether or not they continue to exist but only have an interest in being treated well.

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.

In a nutshell

Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a cultural biography of Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859). The eclipse of his reputation may suggest that there’s nothing deader than a dead empire. Once as inescapable as England’s, which he helped to build and popularize, his name is now known only to liberal arts graduates of a certain age and to students of nineteenth-century culture.

But do great empires ever entirely die? Today Macaulay’s legacy flourishes in South Asia, where he detested living but relished power. When you hear the voice of a fluent English-speaker in a call center in what was recently Bangalore (Bengalooru), consider that in 1835 Macaulay was instrumental in launching English as the subcontinent’s shared language. If this weren’t enough, the penal code for India that he almost singlehandedly drafted remains in force there and elsewhere in the late British Empire.

Macaulay was also long a cultural power wherever English was spoken or read. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt recommended his History of England to American historians as a model, and TR wrote the kind of history that he preached. The tenacious veneration of Macaulay as a sage is as telling about the underside of the history of the English-speaking peoples during the last two centuries as it is about his prodigious talents.

Like every successful imperialist, Macaulay possessed a myopic emotional sensibility: a highly selective, narrow—even exclusive—awareness of other human beings. His father Zachary was a heroic evangelical abolitionist and an ineptly domineering parent—imagine Charles Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, global in her charity but heedless at home, but Mrs. Jellyby with sharp teeth.

Zachary’s heedless parenting taught his first-born to view human relations as essentially a business of domination and submission, always regulated by the steely calculation of self-interest. He was an emotional cripple. Honors, wealth, and power intensified his self-absorption. Only a handful of people were completely real to him. All the rest were, in the end, “not necessary” and thus expendable. Macaulay’s life became a tragedy: a great man devastated by a flaw.

The wide angle

The interaction of modern religion and its surrogates interests me. It’s often misleadingly called “belief versus unbelief.” In fact, all of us believe a lot. For centuries intelligent people, both religious and non-religious, have been engaged in a conversation, sometimes become a mindless shouting match. Seven years ago I was trying to write a probably unwriteable book on how, between ca. 1800 and 1950, a confidently modern, religiously emancipated elite derived spiritual sustenance from the ancient Greek and Latin classics.

Because Macaulay was both an omnivorous classicist and an eminent post-Christian, I began reading his published works and letters in chronological order. A few pages into Sir William Temple (1838), much concerned with the classical mania of that seventeenth-century English diplomat and writer, he seems to digress on Oliver Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland in 1649. Macaulay misrepresents Cromwell’s slaughter of thousands of “aboriginal Irish” in wartime as a farsighted program of empire-building—regrettably never completed—and a model for later progressive, modernizing projects. Macaulay declares that, “it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations.”

The sentence was a thunder stroke. Far from being edgy satire or a lapse, Lord Macaulay’s endorsement of what I call “civilizing slaughter”—“genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” are twentieth-century words—was occasionally rephrased but never suppressed. His essay on Temple remained in print until 1974, and you can now read it as a Google Book. Nobody seems to have commented on its “luminous and terrifying” vision—perhaps even cared—until the 1990s, and then only in a couple of confused footnotes. Instead Macaulay was widely praised for championing “the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics, and Negroes.”

Macaulay explores what in his life and our culture made him both the first responsible European publicly to advocate civilizing slaughter and an icon into the second half of the twentieth century. The vast silence about his sinister prophecy during his lifetime and beyond resulted from indifference, acquiescence, and sometimes complicity.

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, and upheld the English empire as the progressive engine of modern civilization.

By 1871 Charles Darwin, a humane man and fairly consistent liberal, restated what Macaulay helped to make conventional imperial wisdom as a law of evolutionary biology: “Extinction follows chiefly from the competition of tribe with tribe, and race with race . . . When civilized nations come into contact with barbarians the struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.”

Until the day before yesterday and from both the Left and the Right, various luminaries have envisioned schemes of mass slaughter and the slaughter itself as driving the forward march of modern civilization. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s adjunct, was not alone in viewing history as “about the most cruel of all goddesses,” leading “her triumphal car over heaps of corpses.”

Like every successful imperialist, Macaulay possessed a myopic emotional sensibility: a highly selective, narrow—even exclusive—awareness of other human beings.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

My book is about that loosely defined cultural phenomenon known as “the recovery movement”—an agglomeration of self-help groups and practices that have grown out of Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding in 1935. Although most people know someone who is or has been “in recovery,” most people are also a little vague about what that means. That vagueness has allowed critics—both conservative and progressive—to caricature the recovery movement as narcissistic, banal, and apolitical. The Language of the Heart is intended to show that recovery is a diverse and evolving phenomenon whose complex history reflects the shifting ideas about gender and power that characterize contemporary America.

I’ve used recovery’s print culture to narrate the story of its evolution from AA—which began as an alcohol-focused, evangelical Christian, and resolutely masculine sub-culture—to Oprah Winfrey, a self-proclaimed “food addict” and survivor of childhood sexual abuse who espouses a healing metaphysical spirituality to millions of women around the globe. Most recovery publications come from the margins of polite print culture. Rather than the products of professionally credentialed authors writing in the pages of esteemed journals, many of recovery’s central ideas appeared first in obscure pamphlets, self-published tracts, and the textbooks of the addiction treatment industry. None of these are usually considered “serious” literature. But both the writing and the reading of such materials is an extremely serious matter for many recovering people.

The wide angle

Two phenomena led me to this project. A number of people close to me are recovering addicts of one sort or another, and when I attended meetings with them I noticed that books featured prominently in their meetings. Alcoholics Anonymous, written by one of AA’s co-founders and usually called “the Big Book,” was the most prominent. But people also carried with them daily devotional readers published by AA, Al-Anon (the organization for friends and families of alcoholics), and treatment centers like Hazelden.

That’s not something you often see in depictions of AA or NA (Narcotics Anonymous) in film or on TV; there, a 12-Step meeting is only about people talking. But in the meetings I attended people often referred to their books as they talked, highlighted and annotated passages that mattered to them, and engaged in long debates over what a passage or a phrase might mean. As a literature teacher, these are habits I try to inculcate in my students (not usually with much success), and I wanted to find out how and why people in recovery were so intense about their reading.

At the same time that I was thinking about reading within 12-Step groups, I started to notice an increasing number of popular novels aimed at women that seemed to offer some version of recovery’s central ideas. Powerlessness, forgiveness, the importance of self-love and of “keeping it simple”; these were all values that I was hearing espoused in meetings, and they were also popping up in mid-list fiction—not only Oprah books, but “serious” titles like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and bestsellers like Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. This made me curious about how recovery ideas had migrated out of the church basements where meetings were held and into the popular imagination.

There’s a lot at stake in that migration, I think. When a person goes to AA, declares, “I am powerless over alcohol,” and reads daily from the Big Book to get instructions on how to live so as to remain sober, she has made a conscious decision to adopt a set of mental habits—a worldview, if you want to call it that—because she wants to change her life. Few people sit down with a novel thinking, “I want to get some lessons in how to change my life from this book.” But the novels I was seeing had a powerful didactic streak. Through traditional sentimental plots involving mothers and children, they were urging readers not so much to quit using alcohol or drugs (though a few of them made that case in passing), but to quit demanding satisfaction from contemporary consumer capitalist American society, to admit they were powerless over their own lives.

There’s something very Zen in such an admission, and that spiritual equilibrium is what many people in recovery are striving for. At the same time, as a feminist, I just couldn’t get comfortable with powerlessness and “acceptance” as the paths to happiness for women in the aggregate. When taken out of the context of the individual pursuit of sobriety, recovery ideas seemed profoundly non-liberatory. This puzzled me: how and why did these ideas move from one context to another, and what was it about that changed context that gave them such a different valence? To answer those questions, I decided to write the book that became The Language of the Heart. Fortunately, as I wrote I got the opportunity to revise this fairly simple binary into a much more complex and multi-faceted picture.

recovery is a diverse and evolving phenomenon whose complex history reflects the shifting ideas about gender and power that characterize contemporary America

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Birthright sets out to recount, for the first time, the real-life saga of James Annesley, which not only captivated eighteenth-century Britain but inspired five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure tale, Kidnapped.

In 1728, at twelve years of age, “Jemmy” was kidnapped from Dublin and shipped by his uncle to America as an indentured servant. Uncle Richard, his blood rival, usurped the boy’s inheritance of five aristocratic titles belonging to the mighty house of Annesley, together with sprawling estates in Ireland, England, and Wales. Only after twelve more years, in the backwoods of northern Delaware, did James successfully escape to Jamaica, then to England, and, finally, to Ireland, where he set about reclaiming his birthright, all the while defying accusations of being a “pretender,” the bastard son of a maidservant, in addition to repeated attempts on his life.

How, after such a long absence, in an age without DNA laboratories, fingerprint records, or photographs could an impoverished prodigal prove his identity, let alone his legitimacy? At stake during the epic trial held in Dublin in 1743—the longest in memory—was the greatest family estate ever put before a jury. Still, the trial was just the beginning of a tortuous quest on the road to redemption. Bursting with an improbable cast of characters, from a brave Dublin butcher and a wily Scot to the king of England, Birthright evokes the volatile world of Georgian Ireland—complete with its violence, debauchery, ancient rituals, and tenacious loyalties.

With any luck, readers will find this family drama as engrossing as I have over the course of six years of research and writing. It is an astonishing story to which I hope that I have done justice.

The wide angle

Although the inspiration for five novels, Annesley’s ordeal has attracted scant attention from historians, in part because the principal primary source associated with his abduction is a volume, first published in 1743, entitled Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman, Return’d from a Thirteen Years Slavery in America. . . .Upon my first encounter twenty-five years ago with this text, of which Annesley was not the author, my own reaction was much the same as that of other historians— to dismiss it out of hand as fiction, and bad fiction at that. A reprint, in fact, appeared in 1975 as part of Garland Publishing’s “Flowering of the Novel” series.

More recently, a stray reference to Annesley’s tribulations in an obscure English diary in Oxford’s Bodleian Library caused me to probe further, only to discover transcripts of court proceedings held in London as well as Dublin. And, too, along with newspaper reports, I was fortunate enough to locate nearly four hundred legal depositions, wholly pertaining to Jemmy’s youth, in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and in the National Archives outside London. Although few scraps of personal correspondence have survived, members of the Annesleys, an English family who over the course of the 1600s achieved wealth and fame in Ireland on a grand scale, left a vast trove of legal documents in their wake.

My aim has been to use this small mountain of evidence to relate the fascinating story of Annesely’s life with as much attention to accuracy and historical detail as possible. There is next to no reliance upon literary theory, nor is the book highly analytical apart from the occasional paragraph in which I endeavor to expand upon the broader context of events, whether it be the kidnapping trade, childrearing, or the issue of attorney-client privilege. In this regard, two models, which I aspired to emulate, were Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm and Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea. Both relate gripping stories, all the while paying scrupulous attention to the larger historical milieu.

My aim has been to use this small mountain of evidence to relate the fascinating story of Annesely’s life with as much attention to accuracy and historical detail as possible.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Lenin’s Brother tells the tragic story of a brilliant young scientist and his turn to terrorism, and the history of the family that his actions devastated.

During his senior year at St. Petersburg University, Alexander Ulyanov joined a small group of terrorists with a hard core of suicidal young men, all of them, like him, students at the university. Ulyanov joined their plot to assassinate Alexander III less than a year after he received the university’s highest award for his junior thesis. Sasha (like his older sister, Anna, I often call him “Sasha,”) had just turned twenty-one when he was hanged with four other members of “The Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will” in May 1887.

A large part of the book is about student radicalism, the psychodynamics of a hastily organized group of young terrorists, their bomb-building and planning, the discovery of the plot by the Tsar’s security apparatus, the botched assassination attempt, and the trial that followed. This narrative engages the phenomenon of suicide terrorism. The other main narrative is about the Ulyanov family.

The patriarch of the family, Ilya Ulyanov, a beneficiary of Alexander II’s Great Reforms, inspired in his children a love of science and a service ethic. Ilya had risen to the post of Director of Schools in Simbirsk Province. The reaction under Alexander III ended his career and probably hastened his death in January 1886. The effect of Ilya’s death on the family is an important part of the story. It precipitated a crisis and aggravated the already strained relations between Sasha and his younger brother, Vladimir.

Four years Sasha’s junior, the teenager who would become Lenin had at first worshipped his older brother, but their relationship took an ugly turn during the summer of 1886. As senior male in the family, Sasha reluctantly had to play the role of disciplinarian; when Sasha returned to St. Petersburg for his senior year, he left behind an angry and depressed Vladimir. Sasha’s hanging at this critical moment in their relationship changed the course Vladimir’s life.

The wide angle

Lenin’s Brother follows my earlier work on Lavrov, Nechaev, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. The book allowed me to revisit Lenin’s entry into the revolutionary movement—a fateful moment. Most historians agree that without Lenin, the October Revolution would probably not have occurred. In Lenin’s Brother I suggest that without Sasha there might not have been a Lenin.

I began to study radical thinkers early on in my career. I discovered that their personalities and emotions affected their thought, even the most elevated theory. Leopold Haimson’s 1955 work on the early phase of Russian Marxism, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, had illustrated the effect of personality on theory and suggested a psychological approach.

But I found psychoanalytic thinking especially useful. This is the angle from which Lenin's Brother addresses the condition of the Russian Empire during the counter-reforms of Alexander III and the revolutionary ideologies, old and new, that animated Sasha and “The Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will.”

Russia’s 1880s were a transitional moment. The nihilist thinkers of the 1850s and 1860s and the narodnik theorists of the 1870s and 1880s still had great influence, but students were already reading Marx and Engels and creating hybrid doctrines. The nihilist exaltation of natural science and socialism made it quite easy to move to the theories of Marx and Engels, who offered scientific laws of history. However, the narodnik theorists had added something quite important: the belief that the most “developed” people, the students and practitioners of science, owed a debt to the tens of millions of peasants whom the regime had sacrificed for the sake of its power elite. The regime had unintentionally created an intelligentsia, a stratum of critically thinking individuals. Peter Lavrov wrote in an influential tract that precisely the most “developed” people owed a debt to the peasants, whose toil had paid for their education.

This sense of debt to the people, to the narod, had inspired small-scale efforts to educate the poor, but also a large-scale movement into the villages by student propagandists and agitators in the mid 1870s. Like the nihilists, Lavrov taught that socialism was scientific and that the intelligentsia could pay their debt by teaching the peasants about socialism and bringing about a socialist revolution. Other less scrupulous socialists emphasized science less and immediate action more. Michael Bakunin and Sergei Nechaev, for example, had written the notorious “Catechism of a Revolutionary.” They eschewed the need for scientific preparation and believed that agitation and terrorism might produce a vast peasant uprising.

The thousands of revolutionaries of the 1870s inspired by Lavrov and Bakunin had little success, partly because the peasants were less receptive than they thought, but also because the Tsarist police and gendarmes cracked down. This played into terrorism and the notion that in order to get their message to the people, socialists needed to force a constitution that would allow free speech—in effect, freedom of socialist propaganda. The assassination of the Tsar presumably would serve this purpose—hence the terror campaign of the People’s Will during 1879-1881. They successfully assassinated Alexander II on March 1, 1881, but suffered the almost total destruction of their organization. A few émigrés, most notably, Lavrov, sustained the theoretical orientation of the terrorist party in safe havens abroad and somehow managed to preserve the ethical orientation that attracted Alexander Ulyanov.

The assassination of Alexander II cut short the slow movement toward a constitution and produced instead the severe reaction under Alexander III. During the reign of Alexander II, despite the attempts to curb the growing and increasingly revolutionary nihilist subculture in the universities, students had emerged with their mutual aid organizations intact and the universities with their autonomy. Even during the 1870s the Great Reforms had continued and produced, among other things, a liberal bar. That, too, suffered from the acquittal of Vera Zasulich, who had wounded the Governor General of St. Petersburg in 1878, but liberal defenders remained for the trial of “The Terrorist Faction of the People’s Will.” Political assassins now had to face closed Senate tribunals. Alexander III ratcheted up the attack on student and faculty autonomy and produced the “prison-house” atmosphere described by Anna Ulyanov in her memoirs.

This was an era of counter-reforms, opposing the Enlightenment trends that had begun in the eighteenth century, trends that had survived the Napoleonic Wars, the reaction against the Decembrist rebellion in 1825, and the Westernizing efforts of Alexander II, who remained committed to a species of constitution even while he was being hunted down by the People’s Will. Although Alexander III had to modernize and to seek alliances in the West, he created a backward-looking regime and reinforced existing Russophile tendencies. The regime’s powerful security apparatus, with spies seeded throughout student bodies in universities, successfully thwarted efforts to recreate a strong terrorist network. In this unpromising setting, only the most desperate and suicidal students, most of whom came to the universities already radicalized, would form a terrorist conspiracy.

Many gifted marginal people came to the fore in the 1860s and 1870s Russia, and many of their progeny became important revolutionaries.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Animal Lessons is about how philosophers throughout Western history have used animals to make the case that humans are special. Philosophers have argued that humans are so unique that they have transcended their animality and become something entirely other. In this book, I show how the animals “bite back” and betray the very service into which they have been corralled in the name of humanity. Our concepts of the human, of kinship, of language, and even of human rights are borne on the backs of animals, whose importance to philosophy goes unacknowledged. Philosophers unthinkingly use animals to develop their theories of the human subject and human nature.

What philosophers have called “man” learns to be human from those very animals against which he defines himself. It is not just that the concepts of human and animal are intimately and essentially related in these texts, but also that animals themselves show man how not to be one of them. It is not just that animals and animality remain excluded from the concepts human and humanity, or that they are the debased others against which what is properly human is defined and maintained, though this is certainly the case. What is striking in these texts is the ways they rely on examples, illustrations, metaphors, and studies of animals that belie their central theses about the human subject and humanity. It seems that the more adamantly these authors insist on an absolute distinction between man and animal, the more dependent their arguments on animal pedagogy become.

In spite of the explicit message of these texts—that humans are radically distinct from animals—animals function to teach man how to be human. Not surprisingly then, this animal pedagogy goes unacknowledged. To acknowledge the dependence of man and humanity on animal and animality is to undermine man’s sense of himself as autonomous and self-sovereign, and to deny what he has considered his rightful place as lord over the creatures of the earth.

The wide angle

Animal Lessons engages with, yet radically departs from, discussions of animal rights and animal welfare that dominate philosophical conversations about animals. I move away from the framework of animal rights because the history of this discourse and the notion of rights are bought at the expense of animals. We need to do more than merely expand our concept of rights to include some animals. Rather, we need to rethink what it means to be animal and what it means to be human. We need to acknowledge how our conception of ourselves as superior to animals is dependent upon those very animals that we disavow.

The concept of rights originated with property rights as people began to own and keep animals. They needed laws to insure that their “property” was protected, particularly because large animals needed space for grazing. Property rights eventually spread into human rights, a notion that is also intimately related to, and dependent upon, animals.

As we know, torture and genocide are usually justified by comparing the victims to animals who deserve such treatment. I argue that we need to explore why our conception of the animal or the beast justifies mistreatment. Our concern to rethink the animal and animality beyond debasement and abuse extends not only to animals, but also to humans who are treated “like animals.” What does it mean to “treat someone like an animal” or to “behave like an animal?” Certainly, it is time to leave behind these archaic notions of animals as mere objects or beasts deserving the whip.

I argue that only when we give up these ideas of animals as objects, or brutes, or our servants, or property, can we begin to treat other humans with dignity rather than relegate them to the subhuman category animal. In other words, our inhumanity to man is both physically and conceptually a direct result of our abuse of animals.

My point is not to argue that in the end animals are like us. Rather than look to qualities or capacities that make them the same or different from humans, I am interested in the relationship between the human and the animal, between humans and animals.

To insist, as animal rights and welfare advocates do, that our ethical obligations to animals are based on their similarities to us reinforces the type of humanism that leads to treating animals—and other people—as subordinates. Consideration of animals makes it more pressing than ever not to repeat exclusive gestures that justify our treatment of animals based on what we take to be salient about their nature or behavior.

Can we learn to appreciate animals for their differences from us and not just their similarities? If recent philosophies of difference are any indication we can acknowledge difference without acknowledging our dependence on animals, or without including animals in ethical considerations. We can talk about both identity and difference without examining the relationship between them.

What we need is to move from an ethics of sameness, through an ethics of difference, toward an ethics of relationality and responsivity. Animal ethics requires rethinking identity and difference, by focusing on relationships and response-ability. An ethics based on response-ability must acknowledge that all creatures on earth are blessed and cursed with the ability to respond.

This project started as a work of mourning for my beloved companion of eighteen years, Kaos. Friends sometimes warned me that I should quit thanking Kaos and Wizard in the acknowledgements of my books; they said that scholars would not take my writing seriously if I continued to thank my cats. Now, they are probably convinced that I have gone to the dogs (except those who know that I am a cat person).

Recently, at a small symposium where I presented some ideas for the first chapter of this book, friends and strangers alike challenged my turn to animals; some of them even said that they had followed my work up to this point, but could not follow the animals. Certainly, in the face of domestic violence, endless war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, racism, sexism, and all of the other forms of violence humans inflict on each other, the ethical treatment of animals seems secondary; indeed, focusing on animals in this context may seem unethical, a way of displacing the injustices inflicted on human beings and distracting us from the history of oppression, slavery and torture whose bloody reach continues to mar what we call humanity.

It is legitimate to ask, why turn to animals at a time when our inhumanity to man continues unabated? Yet, following animals through the history of philosophy, particularly recent philosophies of difference, has shown me that the practices of oppression, slavery, and torture are historically inseparable from the question of the animal. Tracking the animal through the writings of three centuries and more of philosophers has taught me that our concepts of man, humanity, and inhumanity are inherently bound up with the concepts of the animal, animality and animals.

The man-animal binary is not just any opposition; it is the one used most often to justify violence, not only man’s violence to animals, but also man’s violence to other people deemed like animals. Until we interrogate the history of this opposition with its exclusionary values, considering animals (or particular animals) like us or recognizing that we are also a species of animal does very little to change “how we eat the other,” as Jacques Derrida might say.

our inhumanity to man is both physically and conceptually a direct result of our abuse of animals

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

Obviously, this isn’t the first book about Starbucks. But Everything but the Coffee is first to examine the company’s rise and fall and look ahead to its uncertain future in the wake of the onset of the Great Recession. This book is also the first to see Starbucks not just as a good story or as an enviable business model, but as emblematic of broader and more disturbing cultural trends in the United States. And it is also the first book to explore what Starbucks really offers its customers and how it frequently promises way more than it delivers—from building a third place to ethically sourcing its beans.

Using Starbucks as a focal point and based on five years of probing the company and its customers in more than 450 stores in 10 countries, Everything but the Coffee looks at the larger and more troubling reach of everyday buying—of the entire branded consumer landscape—in America. What does this tell us about the United States at this critical moment? And what does buying do to us?

Buying, of course, is never a one-way street. What do our purchases take from us? How do our lattes consume laborers (and their bodies), our sense of place, our environment, and even our politics? Toward the end of the book, readers hear stories from shoppers striking, leaving, and avoiding the brands in favor other companies, often independents, that do a better job at fulfilling the things and desires Starbucks initially promised it would provide. But is this really a revolt or just more buying?

The wide angle

Starbucks is not really all that special or unique. Despite its claims of good deeds and better works, the company, at the end of the day, is typical—typical of how business increasingly works and consumers increasingly consume.

Companies no longer sell products, at least not principally; they sell experiences and even more promises. That is what we pay for—we pay extra for things that makes us feel better and look better, things that communicate something about ourselves and meet our personal and collective desires.

For much of the first decade of this new century, Starbucks thrived by identifying and then marketing the broad desires of the American upper middle-class, David Brooks’ bobos and those who wanted to look like them. Like most groups, Bobos bought things—again not for their physical qualities—but so that they could distinguish themselves from others; so that they could not just keep up with the Joneses but separate themselves from the Joneses.

Starbucks, then, sold lattes as emblems of education, sophistication, and discernment. Its greatest business trick was to turn its drinks into symbols of taste and wealth, concern for the environment and the less fortunate. Mostly, it made lattes into everyday forms of conspicuous consumption. Who else had the money and good taste to waste $4 or $8 a day on coffee?

Turning coffee into an emblem of class standing and global concern translated into big business for Starbucks. Over the first five years of this century, the company opened a new store somewhere around the world every five or six hours. By 2007, it served over 45 million customers a week and generated $10 billion a year in revenues.

But Starbucks’ growth, and really the growth of promise making economy in general, was helped by another more far-reaching and troubling transformation in American life. The Seattle latte peddler’s hold on many in the United States grew out the nearly wholesale replacement of nonmarket civic society by a rapacious consumer society. Community has been usurped by buying, belonging with shopping. Without neighborhoods or clubs or unions or political associations to push back against the marketers, brand-induced consumption spread, really oozed, into every aspect of daily life.

Hefty doses of buying, advertising, and marketing were not new to America in 1995 or 2005. Neither was the branding of everything from fun-runs to urinal covers to rock concerts. Nor was the commodification of consumers’ deepest anxieties, desires, and aspirations all that new. It wasn’t even that Americans suffered, in the words of business writer Lucas Conley, from “obsessive branding disorder.”

What is new—and what makes our world both more alienating and more susceptible to the seductions of buying—is the withering of nonmarket relationships and the public institutions that in the past had pushed back against the market and brands to challenge them for people’s allegiances and identities.

The pullback of community, the state, and other binding agents allowed brands like Starbucks to sell more goods and garner greater profits by reaching deeper into our lives and consciousness and claiming spaces that civic institutions, including government, occupied in the past.

But while Starbucks occasionally talked and acted like an NGO or a political party, it never existed for the larger good; it worked for Wall Street and for shareholders. From the posters about health care for workers to the brown java jackets that promise to save the planet to the oversized drinks that invoke notions of extravagance, everything is there to get us to buy more.

By making claims to serve the larger good while lining their own pockets, the corporate players made it even harder for our already hampered civic institutions to reclaim legitimacy as vital actors in domestic reform and foreign policy. This corporate takeover of state functions carried with it costs well beyond the Starbucks premium.

We might consume Starbucks, but as we do, Starbucks consumes part of us—part of our environment, our culture, and even our politics.

In many ways, bathrooms are an essential part of Starbucks’s value proposition, especially for urban customers.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

In my new book Transforming Toxic Leaders I speak from behind closed corporate doors to provide a unique view into the dark side of leadership. Based on executive coaching and consultations I tell surprising stories of companies struggling to understand and remedy what goes wrong. I reveal how the behind-the-scenes fears, hostilities, and internal warfare disclosed by sometimes brilliant leaders require highly personalized and confidential coaching and treatment. I get called in after grievances, acts of sabotage and plunging productivity threaten the very existence of once marquee organizations.

Transforming Toxic Leaders calls attention to the high incidence of leaders who bring pre-existing psychological and emotional disorders into their workplace—and how crises eventually bring out the toxic tendencies that were in remission. By telling the true stories of destructive behaviors and agendas I show how leaders turn toxic due to poorly conceived downsizing and abrupt overnight restructuring. The cost of toxic leadership is quite high and the longer it is allowed to germinate the costlier it becomes. Bringing a background in counseling psychology into my coaching and consulting, I train companies to sharpen their toxin detection and toxin handler skills.

I build on a strong theoretical foundation, grounded in research undertaken over the past few decades, and provide tools for action. These are in the form of stories that I’ve selected from my wide repertoire of cases, such as the heart surgeon’s operating team crisis at Eisenhower Heart Institute and the “savage downsizings” at Bentley Pacific and Jarling-Weber. These cases demonstrate ways to better handle problems that may unfold in readers’ own workplaces.

These narratives culminate in a chapter providing a diagnostic list of 125 dimensions of toxic leadership and 125 corresponding strategies for detoxification. Human resource professionals, business managers, and executives seeking to resolve troublesome leader behaviors, hastily conceived restructurings, and employee uprisings will find a wealth of strategies in my book.

The wide angle

I argue that a single-minded concentration on positive leadership alone is one-sided, skewed, and unable to address the psychology of high-level leaders and extremely complex organizational systems. A failure in leadership lies at the center of our current economic debacle. When consistently bad behavior and long term patterns of impoverished planning and strategy emanate from the top—metastasizing like an organizational cancer—dysfunction, pathology and collapse follow.

The inability to manage workplace relationships and the human side of enterprise strike at the very heart of business. While leaders may achieve a level of brilliance in their areas of expertise, it is not uncommon to witness the same renowned figures falter and stumble, exhibiting extreme arrogance and narcissism, and directing abuse toward important colleagues and customers.

The high cost of bad behavior in corporate circles surely brings to mind the most unethical and downright diabolical leaders and companies, whether they are Bernie Madoff or Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling of Enron. Cases such as these can serve as a wakeup call, reminding us of the potentially destructive reach of leadership. But one should not overlook the fact that Madoff, Lay, and Skilling were also exceptionally intelligent and privileged leaders who excelled in their areas of expertise, even while carrying out insidious and malicious strategies against employees, colleagues, and clients.

Decadent organizational policies surely create toxic leaders, much as an executive with a personality disorder or a CEO with a long-term history as a psychopath may infect his or her executive board and management team with a virulent psychological disease. But brilliance itself knows of the dark side of human behavior.

Toxic leaders and organizations can in effect be both “patients” and “clients” who undergo highly pointed forms of “detoxification” and guided, positive transformation. Both individuals within an organization and the organization as a whole become “sick” and “toxic” by virtue of their leader spreading his or her own affliction like a contagion.

Also consistent with the medical model is the assumption that the illness can be treated and the individual, divisional, or corporate patient can be nursed back to health. Even a previously toxic leader can be transformed, becoming more functional and effective, even ultimately emerging as a figure marked by enlightened, authentic, and even super-functional leadership skills.

An understanding of psychological dimensions allows for a more accurate assessment of leaders who fall within the “toxic category.” Since toxicity is a fact of company life, it is better to speak of it in terms of levels. Lower levels of toxicity must be distinguished from the higher. For example, a leader diagnosed with only several symptoms from narcissistic personality disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, or antisocial disorder indicates a “normal pathology” and falls short of high toxicity. Curiously, leaders with lower levels of toxicity and a mild dose of hyperactivity, narcissism, or antisocial behavior may exhibit some extremely positive and super-functional behaviors, such as extraordinary levels of energy, elevated passion, and a tendency to be highly innovative. The very disorders that implode leaders and destroy organizations may also provide, in “lower doses,” a creative, innovative, and obsessive edge to those who fall on the milder side of the spectrum of toxicity.

Leaders with lower levels of toxicity and a mild dose of hyperactivity, narcissism, or antisocial behavior may exhibit some extremely positive and super-functional behaviors, such as extraordinary levels of energy, elevated passion, and a tendency to be highly innovative. The very disorders that implode leaders and destroy organizations may also provide, in “lower doses,” a creative, innovative, and obsessive edge to those who fall on the milder side of the spectrum of toxicity.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

In an 1852 Punch cartoon, a middle-aged man looks in a mirror and says, “Good gracious! Is it possible?—No! Yes! No!—Yes! Yes, by Jupiter, it's a grey hair in my favourite whisker!” Jokes like this might be routine to us, but in Victorian England they represented a new way of thinking about age.

Middle age had been considered the prime of life since Aristotle, an idea evident in “steps of life” drawings that were popular from the medieval era into the nineteenth century. They feature a fifty-year-old man—or less commonly a woman—who stands proudly on the top of an arched set of steps depicting the decades of life from ten to ninety. In the eighteenth century, concern about aging remained on the elderly. Longevity texts, describing elaborate techniques and rituals for living into a "green” or healthy old age, became the rage.

Though scholars usually discuss midlife anxiety as a product of the twentieth century, I argue that age anxiety was expanded in Victorian Britain to include the middle of the life course. The word “midlife” itself first appeared in an English dictionary in 1895 to designate this developing idea. In Aging By The Book, I demonstrate that concern about midlife became common during the Victorian era, that we inherited our obsession with being “over the hill” from the nineteenth century.

The wide angle

I became interested in writing about age as a “non-traditional” graduate student in my early forties. Not just self-conscious about being older than my classmates, I also couldn’t help but notice that sometimes I was older even than the professor. As we discussed race, class, and gender as key aspects of identity, I began thinking about age. My fellow grad students were finding life partners and wondering whether to have babies, but I was parenting teenagers and dating after the end of a twenty-year marriage. My life stage seemed just as important as my middle-class, white femaleness. I became fascinated with the ways midlife was portrayed—and overlooked—in the texts we were reading. I began researching this topic and found midlife anxiety in a wide variety of nineteenth-century publications: conduct books, medical texts, and advertisements, but especially in novels.

When did midlife occur for Victorians, and why were they so anxious about it? Though average life expectancy in 1801 was thirty-six and by 1901 had increased only about fifteen years, adults knew they might live into their eighties and beyond. The 1871 census defines middle age as thirty to fifty for both sexes, but novels demonstrate a clear gender difference: fictional women begin middle age at thirty while men remain “young” a decade longer.

Midlife anxiety developed due to a number of changes in a more industrial, commercial, and scientific Britain. Darwin’s theories created a sense that life is brief and time is short. Many people moved to the city from farms, their lives no longer determined by cycles of daylight and seasons but scheduled around clocks and railway timetables. Physicians began to specialize in the elderly and diagnosed aging in terms of disease. Degeneration theory, a belief that modern life was causing evolution to turn backward, became popular at the end of the century. Eminent authority Max Nordau warned that “the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life” lead to accelerated and earlier aging.

Changing ideas about gender also increased age anxiety. Early in the century, masculinity was understood in terms of gentlemanliness. Manly men in Jane Austen's fiction, for example, are gentlemen. As middle- and working-class men got the vote, however, labor gained new respect. Professions and trades became an important aspect of identity, and manliness was earned, rather than inherited and cultivated. The rise of organized sports put new emphasis on youthful muscularity, and Britain’s growing empire required tough adventurers. Pension plans were invented, suggesting that men could age out of the ability to work, and the new science of sexology studied how virility wanes with age. As the masculine ideal transformed from upper-class gentleman to hard-working, physically fit man of business and builder of empire, aging men were hard-pressed to compete.

Victorian novels are filled with male age anxiety. Dickens’s men in their forties and fifties often worry about whether their “time of love has gone by.” In Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, midlife gentleman Roger Carbury struggles in a corrupt industrialized nation and loses the girl to a younger man. Both George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Trollope’s final novel, An Old Man’s Love, serve as cautionary tales about the inadequacies of fifty-year-old suitors. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray goes a step further, equating aging with evil, as Dorian’s sins appear on a painting in terms of grotesquely advanced age.

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. At menopause, women were devalued even more for losing fertility. Physician J. Braxton Hicks (now known for the uterine contractions named after him), argued that a post-menopausal woman enters "the neutral man-woman state,” and, "losing sexuality," she becomes “useful.” Midlife women were urged to exchange sexuality for service as they helped the next generation find mates.

This expectation is evident in many Victorian novels. For example, Dickens portrays amorous forty-ish matrons like Mrs. Nickleby and Miss Sparsit, and the lovelorn fifty-year-old Miss Havisham as absolutely outside any possibility for romance. They are either comic or abusive for dwelling on their own amorous lives instead of helping arrange marriages for younger women. In contrast, Charlotte Brontë’s Mrs. Pryor is the ideal matron—reluctant to appear attractive and eager to assist her daughter’s romance. Widows who remarry can be exceptions to this rule, however, especially in Trollope’s novels that empower midlife women. In Can You Forgive Her?, the Widow Greenow is satirized for husband-hunting in her forties; by the end, however, she’s a beautiful, sexy woman who admires “a well-made man” and remarries for love.

The 1871 census defines middle age as thirty to fifty for both sexes, but novels demonstrate a clear gender difference: fictional women begin middle age at thirty while men remain “young” a decade longer.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

I show how looking at paintings and reading literature depend on how sensory perception and understanding are formed and transformed by the way in which we ourselves are first formed, culturally, as selves, and how an adequate account of our ability to engage with the arts (and other selves) requires a quite distinctive theory of what it is to be a self or person—what I call a philosophical anthropology.

The theory I sketch characterizes the human self as a culturally emergent, hybrid transformation of the native biological powers of Homo sapiens effected by the human infant’s ability to internalize and master the language of an environing society and whatever other abilities that makes that transformation possible. The underlying idea, that the human self is (in this sense) a “natural artifact,” has quite radical possibilities; however I apply the idea to familiar but quite ordinary puzzles regarding our interest in the fine arts.

The wide angle

Looking at paintings and reading books, I suggest, are abilities to “penetrate,” culturally informed and culturally transformed by our mastery of language and our sense of the practices and history of some formative home society. They are learned skills adjusted to our distinctive interests regarding artworks, not simply the same as our perfectly ordinary ability to see and read. In my opinion, prevailing theories of philosophies of art have not sufficiently grasped the full complexity of this condition, especially in the Anglo-American philosophical literature.

I examine a number of prominent accounts of how we perceive paintings and understand literature drawn from the best-known, current philosophical theorists of art, and demonstrate how prevailing views actually produce insuperable paradox and contradiction. I began, quite early in my career, with the profound puzzles posed by what we call interpreting artworks. I realized that interpreting artworks must be very closely related to interpreting the language, behavior, history, social practices, and the careers of human beings. It is even akin to the anthropological study of physical phenomena: for instance, attempting to determine the “meaning” of the rock formation of the Olduvi Gorge in dating the fossil remains of early man.

I was at once struck by the failure of prevailing views to come to terms with the radical informality, open-endedness, and tolerance for divergent and even incompatible and incommensurable interpretive options that critical practices seem to support; hence, also, with the failure of much of current philosophy to formulate a congruent conception of human “nature,” intelligence and reason, culture, history, and, most importantly, what sort of being the human self must be to have mastered the kinds of artistic and interpretive puzzles I pose, both here and elsewhere.

So the present book addresses, in an accessible way, an essential piece of the general question that ramifies through the whole of the human world: namely, what is the nature of a human being and how does he function in the physical and cultural world he inhabits? Here, I've restricted myself to certain intuitively familiar puzzles regarding what we claim we see in viewing art and what we claim to understand in reading literature. The running argument of the book focuses on the easily isolated questions of seeing and understanding (artworks); the opening and closing materials provide a fairly brief but wide-ranging account of “the definition of the human,” informing my answers to the questions posed.

The present book addresses, in an accessible way, an essential piece of the general question that ramifies through the whole of the human world: what is the nature of a human being and how does he function in the physical and cultural world he inhabits?

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

In many ways, Youth in a Suspect Society is motivated by a sense of outrage and a sense of hope.

While youth have always represented an ambiguous category, they have within the last thirty years been under assault in unprecedented ways. The book identifies a number of forces—including unfettered free-market ideology, a dehumanizing mode of consumerism, the rise of the racially skewed punishing state, and the attack on public and higher education—that have come together to pose a threat to young people. The combined threat of these forces is so extreme it can be accurately described as a “war on youth.”

Since the late 1970s, young people have been transformed from a generation that embodied hope for the future to a generation of suspects in a society destroyed by the merging of a market-driven corporate state and the increasingly powerful punishing state. Central to this claim is the idea that the current generation of young people is no longer viewed as an important social investment or as a marker for the state of democracy and the moral life of the nation. Youth are now under assault by a number of forces, the most widespread and insidious of which are market-driven forces and pedagogies of consumption that increasingly penetrate every aspect of young people’s lives so as both to commodify them and to undercut their possibilities for critical thought, civic responsibility, and engaged citizenship.

Moreover, as the welfare state has been gradually dismantled, youth have also become the objects of a more direct and damaging assault waged on a number of political, economic, and cultural fronts. Young people are increasingly subject to modes of governance, education, punishment, and control largely modeled after prisons and the dictates of a youth-crime-governing complex that increasingly subjects them to harsh discipline, while criminalizing more and more aspects of their behavior. From the schools to the streets, poor minority youth are subject to modes of control based on crude and degrading forms of punishment, including random drug tests, locker searches, racial targeting, surveillance, and zero tolerance laws.

Youth in a Suspect Society argues that only by understanding the unique merging of casino capitalism and the punishing state—and the reach of this new social formation in shaping everyday life—does it become possible to grasp the contours of a new historical period in which a war is being waged against youth.

The book also considers the role that academics and institutions of higher education may take in addressing the crisis of youth and its relationship to politics and critical education. A particular focus is on how intellectuals and other cultural workers can intervene to stop this assault on youth through a politics that both rejects the equation of capitalism and democracy and connects youth to a future that embodies the promises of an aspiring democracy.

The wide angle

Youth in a Suspect Society takes as its major organizing idea the notion that youth are under assault in ways that are entirely new. My assumption is that young people now face a world that is far more dangerous than it was at any other time in recent history. This assault is developed through the related concepts of “soft war” and “hard war.”

The soft war analyzes the changing conditions of youth within the relentless expansion of a global market society that punishes all youth by treating them largely as markets and commodities. This low intensity war is waged through the educational force of a culture that not only commercializes every aspect of kids’ lives but also uses the Internet, cell phones, and various social networks along with the new media technologies to address young people as markets and consumers in ways that are more direct and expansive. The processes of creating market-driven values, desires, and identities bypass adults, families, and traditional modes of mediation and enter into an intimate relationship with young people.

The hard war is more serious and dangerous for young people and refers to the harshest elements, values, and dictates of a growing youth-crime complex that increasingly governs poor minority youth through a logic of punishment, surveillance, and control. For example, the imprint of the youth-crime complex is most evident in the increasingly popular practice of organizing schools through disciplinary practices that closely resemble the culture of prisons. In this instance, even as the corporate state is in financial turmoil, it is transformed into a punishing state, and certain segments of the youth population become the object of a new mode of governance based on the crudest forms of disciplinary control.

The book also analyzes neoliberalism (or free-market capitalism as it is called in some quarters) not merely as an economic system, but also as a mode of education in which market values supplant civic values, and the obligations of citizenship are reduced to the practice of consuming, the accumulation of capital, and the endless disposing of goods and people rendered as redundant and excess.

Central to Youth in a Suspect Society are the concepts of biopolitics and disposability, which suggest a new form of politics and a more vicious element of market-driven cruelty. Biopolitics suggests that, as the social state has been gutted, politics is no longer about the dream of securing a better life, but is now primarily centered on fighting to survive. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman, and other theorists, Youth in a Suspect Society focuses on a form of economic Darwinism that has fundamentally transformed the meaning of politics. Politics is no longer understood as participating in and shaping those institutions and values that are central to both the promise of democracy and the possibility of living a good life. Instead, matters of life and death are now the central issue of politics.

Furthermore, neoliberal biopolitics, with its attack on all things public and the viability of a social state, now views entire populations as disposable, human waste products that are either rendered invisible or subject to the dictates of the criminal justice system. This is especially true for many young people who are considered marginal because they are poor, black, unemployed, or flawed consumers. Poor minority youth have not just been excluded from “the American dream,” but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that no longer considers them of any value. Under such circumstances, matters of survival and disposability, life and death, become central to how we think about and imagine politics.

Over a decade ago I realized that while progressives had a great deal to say about class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, they had almost nothing to say about the crisis of youth and its enormous significance for the analysis of the effects of market fundamentalism, the rise of the punishing state, and the crisis of democracy itself. Similarly, progressives had very little to say about the crucial nature of pedagogy and education in providing a critical and formative culture for talking about the rise of neoliberalism and its culture of disposability. I have tried over the last few years to correct this theoretical and political absence. My books focus on the related crisis of youth and democracy, while at the same time also on the role that academics, public intellectuals, and other cultural workers might play in challenging it.

The book also analyzes neoliberalism not merely as an economic system, but also as a mode of education in which market values supplant civic values, and the obligations of citizenship are reduced to the practice of consuming, the accumulation of capital, and the endless disposing of goods and people rendered as redundant and excess.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

The Relentless Revolution begins with the puzzle of why it took so long for capitalism to emerge. Defining capitalism as a cultural system based on a particular economy, I show that capitalism was never just an economic system. Its focus on enhancing production through private initiatives impinged on every facet of life and was itself affected by every institution that shaped its participants.

Capitalism created new cultural forms, stimulated new tastes, and introduced a whole new vocabulary for discussing the impact of private enterprise on the welfare of the society as a whole. In time, traditional ways of acting and thinking lost their controlling power.

Neither inevitable nor predictable, capitalism began with a few innovations. In 17^th century England, new ways to produce food made possible reducing the number of men and women required to feed the society. Capital too was released for investments in things like the steam engines that were revolutionizing mining and manufacturing. The new science promoted an unending succession of technological advances. Over the next century the percentage of population devoted to farming dropped from around 80% to 40%. This was a first in world history.

Once capitalism’s amazing power to generate wealth was detected, most countries, at least in the West, wanted part of the action. In the 18^th century, it was relatively easy for other countries to copy English innovations. The United States and Germany overtook England by the end of the 19^th century.

Following the trajectory of capitalist expansion, The Relentless Revolution shows why capitalism is a cultural system. Where commerce could live within the interstices of society with its customary mores and aristocratic habits, the capitalist system forced widespread social and political change because its momentum involved more and more of society’s population. For this reason, there are in today’s world many variants of capitalist culture as different nations align economic restructuring with the basic qualities of their people.

The wide angle

A history does more than narrate events—it also reveals the decisive moments that give shape to a life or country. It permits consideration of turning points and alternative directions for the course of action. This is particularly the case with capitalism whose roots have been obscured.

Economists analyze capitalism with mathematical precision, but their models screen out the messiness in economic relations. Without studying the market’s entanglement with society and culture, we have difficulty penetrating the logic of capitalism. There is also imbedded in economic theory a notion of human beings as constantly striving to maximize their benefits in economic transactions. This stripped down view of human nature makes universally applicable what is actually conditional and contingent.

As the 2008 meltdown in the centers of finance demonstrated, the human element in markets is much more problematic. Risky behavior is integral to decision-making in the market. When capitalism is approached historically instead of analytically a fuller account of its inner workings emerges.

Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, captured the dynamic in capitalism with the telling phrase “creative destruction.” While the creative side has brought the world a succession of wonderful inventions, the destruction has torn up whole communities and ways of life, and continues to do so. The job of monitoring, guiding, and regulating the complexities of our global economy depends on our having an inclusive picture of the economic system that lies at the base of our culture. Public debates that either demonize or idealize capitalism frustrate sound policies.

The history of the homelands of capitalism has too often been tied up with invidious comparison with nonwestern countries. Scholars have distinguished the “rest of the World” from the West in unflattering ways. In part this is because the prosperity that capitalism ushered in was closely associated with the heroic story of securing political freedom and participatory government in Western Europe and the United States. Modernity, in these accounts, has been contrasted not only with premodern Europe but with contemporary “backward” societies as well. The notion of backwardness assumed that history was the story of progress.

The pervasiveness of human inventiveness demonstrates that no country, race, or continent has a lock on it. The Arabs and Chinese made critical advances in sciences long before Europeans. They also developed complicated hydraulic systems. In sub-Saharan African craftsmen skillfully mined and made artifacts in gold, copper, tin, and iron. Pre-Columbian Mayans, Incans, and Aztecs constructed impressive buildings without the benefit of iron or wheels. All developed rich and complicated cultures. What they didn’t do was focus upon innovations that would improve their productivity. It was not superior intelligence that led to the Industrial Revolution in England, but rather the propitious linkage of technological curiosity to economic opportunities within a society that offered incentives to those who could improve production processes.

Copying capitalist practices proved a necessity for England’s European rivals. The rest of the world took a more circuitous route to the market economy. Changes that came gradually to England arrived abruptly for its neighbors across the Channel. Men and women who had been a part of a settled agrarian way of life were quickly drawn into a new proletariat. Factories became scenes of oppressive labor conditions, provoking reform movements and hostile analyses of capitalism. In Russia, revolutionaries installed a communist regime in the early 20^th century. Instead of a market economy, communist nations instituted a command economy with government officials in charge.

Because material advantages enhanced military prowess, European nations began to invade the countries of Africa and Asia to exploit their resources and labor. By the end of the 19^th century few peoples in world remained untouched by the West’s intense application of money and workers to produce more goods. These imperialist impositions of power provoked strong reactions, particularly after World War II when colonial subjects rebelled and formed independent countries of their own. Throughout the 20^th century, the sustained success of capitalism to generate great wealth lured a succession of nations to replace their traditional or socialist economies with private enterprise and open markets. This globalization has brought a new round of “creative destruction.”

My own curiosity about capitalism began with a question about changing conceptions of human nature. In the beginning of the 17^th century human beings were depicted in sermons and literature as fickle, impulsive, and prone to self-destructive behavior. Yet at the end, English writers started talking about the predictability of people’s actions in their market relations. Soon this economic definition became the dominant one.

Wanting to find out how this fundamental transformation of the understanding of human nature took place, I read the hundreds of pamphlets, broadsides, and books examining England’s expanding market relations. I discovered where the new definition of human nature came in and learned how central to capitalism are the ways people have analyzed their economy—first in puzzled awe, then in critical assessment, and finally through the expertise of specialists.

There is also imbedded in economic theory a notion of human beings as constantly striving to maximize their benefits in economic transactions. This stripped down view of human nature makes universally applicable what is actually conditional and contingent.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

This book is about the first skyscrapers in the world, those built in Chicago in the 1880s and 90s. The unprecedented sixteen-story buildings lining La Salle and Dearborn Streets gave the world a spectacular image of the future of the modern city: dense, crowded and vertical. Amongst architects, these buildings are famous for the way in which they incorporated and expressed new building technologies (steel-framing, elevators), and rejected traditional ornament in favor of startling simplicity.

My goal in writing this book, however, was to examine these buildings not as icons of architectural history, but in cultural and social context. What did they mean to the people who designed and built them, worked inside their walls, and gazed up at their façades?

Researching the book I uncovered a fierce debate about the meaning of the first skyscrapers in the popular press and in professional journals. While architects and property owners saw these pioneering structures as manifestations of a robust American identity being formed in the Midwest, labor activists viewed them as symbols of capitalism’s inequity, and social reformers worried about their potentially negative effects on public health.

The wide angle

Although I was trained as a professional architect, I am principally an architectural historian, drawn especially to the social and political context of architecture and urbanism in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. My aim is always to investigate buildings not as autonomous aesthetic objects, but as the physical manifestations of culture and society. In this way my research ranges far from the traditional approach that focuses on individual architects and aesthetic analysis towards a more inclusive understanding of the meaning of buildings, not only for architects and critics, but also for the people who build and occupy them.

Chicago 1890 reflects this approach. The book is firstly a reinterpretation of some well-known architectural masterpieces by Chicago architects Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, Daniel Burnham, and John Wellborn Root, notably the Monadnock (1885-92) and the Reliance Building (1889-95). I examine these buildings not only as important artifacts in architectural history, but also as sites for a contentious debate about the future of the industrial city.

Chicago’s defining events, including the violent building trade strikes of the 1880s, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and Burnham and Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago— feature large in the book as the context in which the skyscraper, at the turn of the twentieth century, was imagined, built, and finally repudiated. This approach to architectural history provides a new way to look at the work of important American architects, understanding their designs as specific responses to modern urban phenomena.

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.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

How Wars End starts with Carl von Clausewitz’s famous insight that war is politics by other means. War is not just an exercise in martial engineering, two waves of soldiers and war machines crashing against each other. Rather, war is a fundamentally political act. States start wars to accomplish political goals.

But, a state will only use the tool of war to accomplish political goals if the costs of fighting do not exceed the expected gains, and if the state is confident that it can accomplish its goals. As the costs of war escalate and its confidence in winning declines, a belligerent will try to end its war.

There’s a big catch to the idea that rising costs and declining prospects of victory will push a state to end a war. That portrayal assumes that belligerents are confident that once war ends, each side can return to peace. Sometimes, a belligerent doesn’t trust its adversary to abide by a war-ending peace settlement. The belligerent fears that the adversary might bide its time after peace is struck and launch a surprise attack when the opportunity presents itself. A belligerent fears an adversary who will pose this kind of long term threat to its security. Under these circumstances, belligerents may ignore the costs of war and doubts about ultimate victory, and instead pursue the decisive defeat and unconditional surrender of the adversary. Accomplishing this kind of total victory allows the belligerent to annex the adversary, occupy its territory, and/or impose regime change. Doing so solves the distrust problem, as the adversary wouldn’t be able to break a war-ending peace agreement.

So this book provides a general explanation of how wars end. It is also the first book to answer the big historical question: When do belligerents agree to end a war before one side has been completely defeated, and when do belligerents try to achieve absolute victory and inflict unconditional surrender?

The wide angle

I started thinking about this book in the early 2000s. On the policy side, in 2002 the George W. Bush administration announced the National Security Strategy, sometimes called the Bush Doctrine, which declared, among other things, that the United States could not trust rogue states to abide by their international commitments to eschew weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Facing these new threats, the U.S. would reserve the option of attacking and overthrowing these regimes. This policy was the intellectual foundation of the 2003 decision to invade Iraq. The assumption was that Saddam Hussein had violated and would violate United Nations Security Council Resolutions to abandon weapons of mass destruction, and so the only solution was to oust him from power.

In the book, I develop a general argument which helps put the Bush Doctrine into a larger context. I also talk about whether or not the American national interest is served by launching wars which seek to unseat dictators who support terrorists or who seek nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction.

On the scholarly side, several political scientists around that time talked about this idea that war is political, and were crafting arguments about how leaders end wars when the costs of fighting escalate or the perceived chances of winning diminish. But I noticed that there were lots of wars which seemed to drag on and on even as the costs of war escalated. Furthermore, some belligerents refused to negotiate even as they were clearly losing. These wars struck me as historical puzzles worth exploring.

How Wars End contains case studies from the American Civil War, World War I, the 1939-1940 Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland, World War II, and the Korean War, offering solutions to several of the historical puzzles in which belligerents fought on even when the costs of war were mounting and the likelihood of victory seemed to be decreasing.

For instance, why didn’t the Confederacy accept President’s Lincoln’s February 1865 peace deal when the war was clearly lost? In early 1918, why didn’t Germany accept peace and a prewar status quo with Britain and France after it had defeated Russia and conquered huge swaths of territory in the East? During World War II, why did Japan refuse to negotiate for years, even though many in the Japanese leadership knew the war was lost as early as the 1942 Guadalcanal campaign? Why, after the North Korean invasion of South Korea, did President Truman decide to pursue the conquest of North Korea before the military tide had turned in the favor of the U.S. and South Korea? Why did Truman then abandon that goal after China intervened in fall 1950? And why did the Korean War drag on in bloody pointlessness for two more years after the front settled into stalemate in 1951?

War is a fundamentally political act. States start wars to accomplish political goals.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Socrates in the Boardroom argues that it is experts, not managers that make the better leaders. This is a message that, recently, has been almost unfashionable. I go a step further: using quantitative and qualitative data, I show that in universities it is the best of the experts and scientists who make the best leaders.

I use the example of university leadership to try to communicate that managers have been given too much power—not just in organizations such as universities and hospitals, also in the corporate sector. Specialists, experts and scientists should lead our institutions if we want to boost our economies through innovation and entrepreneurship, and solve problems like climate change.

In the last half of the 20th century the importance of management training became recognized. As society moved away from predominantly family-owned businesses and employment through entitlement to a more meritocratic and efficient approach to enterprise, good management was crucial. Business schools took off, as did the MBA degree.

But this move has gone too far. At present, managerialism feels preeminent—as if expertise is not important. Could the banking crisis have been somewhat averted if bank CEOs were great technical experts instead of good managers? They might have better understood what was going on in the belly of their organizations if they were banking specialists, but many were not.

My main message is that leaders should be experts in the core business of the organization they are to lead. This is not to say that management is unimportant. Of course it is. But I believe we need to get back to basics. There has been a trend for CEOs to float around different sectors—as if a head’s success when in charge of a retail business automatically means that the same individual can lead a manufacturing company. I find that a hospital should be lead by a doctor and an automobile company should be led by someone who knows the industry and the technology intimately. This might indeed mean that the CEOs who are accountants and marketing specialists return to their fields of expertise—accounting and marketing.

Though the main focus of my book lies with the research universities, I also look at other sectors. In chapter 7, for example, I look at professional service firms such as law, management consulting and architecture practices, as well as at arts and sports. Here, including evidence from a co-authored paper, I show that teams perform substantially better in the NBA if they are led by a coach who was, in his day, an outstanding player.

The wide angle

There are literally thousands of books on leadership on the market. And one of the common criticisms about them is that they are often anecdotal and lack convincing evidence.

Also, various disciplines have researched leadership. Historians tend to focus on the “great man” perspective. What can we learn from the actions of Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln? These accounts make interesting stories but they are not generalisable. Psychologists have tended to focus on individual characteristics such as traits, and sociologists have stepped back into the wider context; in my view, the former get too close, and the latter too far. Critical management authors believe that leadership is elitist so they ignore it. MBA students, on the other hand, often look to the “charismatic leader” for solutions. The head of a US business school told me that all MBA students want Jack Welch to be dean.

Arguably, the success of a leader will be due to many immeasurable factors. And unlike in the experimental sciences, we social scientists cannot randomly assign a CEO to an organization. But despite the cloudy conditions, I believe it is essential that empirical researchers try to establish the effectiveness of heads. Leaders have the most power in organizations, and substantial resources are invested in their recruitment and pay.

The approach that I adopt to this topic is partially drawn from economics, and I also include interview evidence. So the book includes lots of data, both quantitative and qualitative, but it has been written to be accessible.

The statistical analyses demonstrate two main findings. First, that the best universities in the world are overwhelmingly led by outstanding scholars. Second, that if a top scholar comes to preside over a research institution, the performance of the university will improve some years later. To get to the issue of causality I use time lags—I look at the leader some years before I look at university performance. I also have some control variables (in other words I hold some things constant)—for example the size of a university or the discipline of its president and their age.

It may be helpful to mention the influence of my personal background. I worked in university administration before switching to research. I worked closely with university leaders as part of the top management team. One of the presidents I worked with was Anthony Giddens. Giddens is an outstanding scholar, well known across the social sciences, and I noticed that his behavior and preferences as an administrator were different from those of other presidents I worked with—those who left research early in their careers to become administrators. So the hypothesis I raise in this book—that better scholars make better leaders of research universities—came out of real life.

the best universities in the world are overwhelmingly led by outstanding scholars

A close-up

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?

In a nutshell

The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)baroque Aesthetics argues that seventeenth-century baroque and twentieth-century neobaroque aesthetics have to be understood as part of the same complex.

Rather than a return to the stylistic practices of a particular time and place, the neobaroque should be described as the continuation of a cultural strategy. It is produced as a response to a specific problem of thought that has beset Europe and the colonial world since early modernity.

This problem, in its simplest philosophical form, concerns the paradoxical relation between appearances and what they represent. The aim of this book is to explore a series of expressions of this problem in the art and literature of the Hispanic Baroques, new and old.

In seven chapters, I build up a thesis concerning the relation of two baroque strategies, a "major" and a "minor" one, how these strategies emerged in the political and social world of the Spanish Empire, and how they continue to be deployed in the cultural politics of the present.

In short, The Theater of Truth is a book for those interested and engaged in the debates around baroque and neobaroque aesthetics. It offers a unified theory for the relation between these terms and a new vocabulary for distinguishing between their ideological values.

The wide angle

The baroque, as I theorize it, be it as a stylistic marker or period in art history, may be difficult to recognize for those who thought they knew it well. When used in the way I do here, has not the baroque burst out of its boundaries in such a way as to diminish its descriptive value and hence its usefulness as a concept of either criticism or periodization? Indeed, when the concept seems simultaneously to engage with periods after the traditionally recognized historical baroque and to encompass phenomena lacking the traits commonly associated with the term, what remains of it at all?

I argue that the principal theoretical value of the term "baroque" derives from its relation as an aesthetic category to the historical period we call modernity. The historical baroque, I claim, owes its distinct fascination with certain aesthetic traits—in particular those of anamorphosis, mise en abîme, and trompe l'oeil, but also the juxtaposition of disparate terms (coincidentia oppositorum), the proliferation of décor, and a conscious embrace of artifice—to its privileged position at the dawn of the modern age. The organizing logic of that age is a theatrical one, in which the space of representation is severed into a screen of appearances and the truth presumed to reside behind it. It is this basic problem of thought that underlies the multiple strategies that baroque aesthetic production puts into play.

A problem in recent criticism has been to distinguish the apparent ideological value of these various techniques, both during the historical baroque and in the more recent manifestations of baroque style that have come to be identified as neobaroque. One tendency has been to identify the historical baroque with a state-organized attempt to deploy spectacle for the purpose of constructing pliable citizens, while associating the more recent Neobaroque as an opposing tendency, born of the periphery, that works to undermine traditional colonial power structures.

The trouble with this tendency is that it overlooks both subversive tenets in seventeenth-century European cultural production and aspects of contemporary baroque style that do not display any such critical value. Lois Parkinson Zamora's and Monika Kaup's designation of New World Baroque in place of neobaroque does much to correct the historical imbalance of the traditional terminology, but is not intended as a way of clarifying the ideological difficulties that nestle in both terms.

In response to these issues, I came to propose the central terminological distinction in this book. As many have also argued, I see baroque and neobaroque aesthetics as historical bookends to the modern period. For negotiating between their old and new world manifestations, I happily accept Parkinson Zamora's and Kaup's distinction. What I add here is a new distinction between modalities or strategies of baroque aesthetic production.

In that sense, and against José Antonio Maravall, for example, I do not believe one can generalize about the ideological value of the baroque period in its entirety, although one can certainly identify tendencies, as I do. Instead, we need to see baroque aesthetics on all fronts as engaging with the problem of thought endemic to modernity, and doing so through a deployment of at least one of two strategies: the major or the minor.

This distinction frees us to examine both historical baroque and neobaroque phenomena in their full complexity, without, on the one hand, confounding historical periods and geographical tendencies or, on the other hand, confusing centralizing ideological discourses with others that work ironically to undermine those same discourses.

The concept of major and minor strategies, then, is key to a non-reductive historical understanding of both baroque and neobaroque aesthetics. This historical understanding, in turn, should grasp the aesthetic production of the baroque, both new and old, in relation to modernity's core problem of thought: the theatrical dissociation between appearances and the truth they hide. For it is ultimately the theater of truth—both the truth that theatrical appearances claim to hide, and the theater that truth depends on for its appearance—that makes sense of the baroque, both old and new.

it is ultimately the theater of truth—both the truth that theatrical appearances claim to hide, and the theater that truth depends on for its appearance—that makes sense of the baroque

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

I live in two worlds. I fled my native Iraq in 1991 during the Gulf War, and after almost two years in horrific refugee camps in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, I started a new life in the U.S. as an artist and professor. My consciousness and my reality are now split between my current life with all its relative luxuries and mundanities, and my home country, which has continually been torn by war and strife.

The 2004 death of my brother in a U.S. bombing, followed closely by the death of my father, brought this duality into stark relief. I had to do something to address the schism between the conflict zone of my home country and the comfort zone of my new life. I also wanted to provoke dialogue and raise awareness of this schism among the people of my current reality—everyday Americans who largely go about their lives with little awareness of the violence being waged in their names.

So I sequestered myself in a gallery for a month with a robotic paintball gun aimed at me that people could shoot over the internet, 24 hours a day. The project was called Domestic Tension, or informally, Shoot an Iraqi. The experience provoked unexpected and stirring emotional reactions and discussions—within my own mind and also among the tens of thousands of people who ultimately participated in the project.

The book is about this story—my journey from the conflict zone to the comfort zone, and art, and all the gray areas in between.

The wide angle

For Americans following media coverage of the past two Iraq wars, Saddam Hussein was something of a cliché, a ridiculous megalomaniacal figure whose very existence provided cover for two wars waged for oil and other geopolitical reasons. For me and my peers growing up in Iraq, Saddam Hussein was very much a reality, a man both pathetic and terrifying who defined our daily existence, shaped our routines, determined our futures and invaded our dreams.

Especially for an individualistic, expressive and anti-authoritarian artist like myself, life became a game—but a deadly serious one—of double entendres, hidden meanings, unspoken thoughts, furtive efforts. Most of my childhood and youth were defined by war and violence, from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s to the first Gulf War and following uprising, not to mention the violent repression of the regime against its own people. This naturally took a steep toll on my own family; I lost numerous relatives to war and political violence and our daily lives and relationships were determined largely by political realities.

But even so, regular life went on, something that many Americans forget when they see Iraq only as a chronically repressed and war-torn country. There was humor, beauty, love and mischief in my life and the lives of my friends and family. And we lived in a land steeped in history and natural beauty – Babylon. We grew up feeling ourselves in a historical epic, physically connected to the heroism of our Shia martyrs and the winding streets of the ancient city of Kufa.

Shoot an Iraqi is in many ways a universal story of loss, tragedy, guilt and hope. But it is also a story specifically about Iraq, and how the long arc of history and current geopolitical realities in Iraq play out in the life of an ordinary family. Readers will be forced to confront the impact of U.S. aggression and foreign policy in the Middle East, and see first hand the effects on everyday Iraqis of two wars, broken promises and devastating U.S. sanctions.

But I hope that readers will also gain an understanding of Iraq as a whole—through one man’s eyes and experience. 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.

The 2004 death of my brother in a U.S. bombing, followed closely by the death of my father, brought this duality into stark relief. I had to do something to address the schism between the conflict zone of my home country and the comfort zone of my new life.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance explains how and why the extraordinary Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun supported, enthusiastically and to the bitter end, the German occupation of Norway during World War II (1940-1945). Hamsun was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, respected and revered by broad audiences and critics alike in Europe and beyond. At home, Hamsun was a literary and cultural persona par excellence, helping establish the visibility of the new nation of Norway in 1905 after the dissolution of Norway’s union with Sweden.

In spite of the fact that in December 1947 he was tried and convicted by a municipal court in Norway for collaboration, the debate about Hamsun’s genius, crime, and punishment continues. It is this fascinating mix, in one man, of brilliant art and repugnant politics that has compelled me to write this book. I wanted answers to one simple question: how can a literary genius of his stature fall so low as to become a political collaborator with the National Socialist regime? The numerous books written on the topic up to 2000 did not satisfy my curiosity.

My book analyzes the relation between Hamsun’s writing and his support for the politics of the Norwegian National Socialist party and, by extension, for the expansion of the Third Reich. This goes against the mainstream Hamsun scholarship, in which Hamsun’s politics are dismissed as his private opinion, something separate from his fiction, or are proclaimed an enigma that will ultimately remain unanswered.

The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance starts out by situating Hamsun’s writing broadly within the identity politics of the newly independent nation of Norway. Political independence led, in some circles, to an intensified glorification of the white Nordic race. However, my book emphasizes Norway’s long history of interactions with other peoples at home and abroad, and establishes the discriminatory descriptions of other races in select Scandinavian and European texts—in the sagas, religious texts, letters from Scandinavian immigrants, missionary accounts, anthropological and medical articles, and in popular fiction—that influenced Hamsun’s own ideas about foreigners. I show that Hamsun’s derogatory portrayal of other races in his texts is a crucial component of his distinct worldview that ultimately led him to believe in and support the expansion of the Third Reich, based as it was on the supremacy of the Aryan nation.

The early impetus for the present book emerged from my astonishment over the reception of the 1996 film Hamsun, which professed admiration and compassion for the frail old writer in spite of his support for the Third Reich. This rather apologetic view of Hamsun was heavily indebted to Hamsun’s own version of the post-1945 events as he described them in his last book, On Overgrown Paths. The movie essentially transforms Hamsun’s own obfuscations and silences into pure truth. It is here, with Hamsun’s own text as the underpinning, that fiction takes over and becomes truth, pushing historical facts into oblivion. As so often before, Hamsun’s collaboration was reduced to a regrettable misstep by an old deaf man, a writer isolated in his ivory tower. His eloquence and his modernist art still reigned supreme, and the ways in which his personal political philosophy is reflected in his writing ignored.

The wide angle

While searching for answers to Hamsun’s support for the Third Reich, I was struck by several things. First, I felt that the critical texts about Hamsun were too narrowly focused on his standard set of novels, that is, on Hunger, Mysteries, Pan, his so-called August trilogy, and Growth of the Soil. Hamsun wrote so much more: not only other novels, but also plays, travel narratives, poems, articles about contemporary events, book reviews, and six thick volumes of letters. The following themes drawn from his work—investigated and mapped in my book—reveal some of Hamsun’s pre-occupations that are pertinent to a study of his character and the works he created: modern life and contemporary changes; women’s sexuality; children and families; racial or religious differences; life in the newly independent Norway.

Second, I found that Norway was treated by most of these studies as if it existed in isolation and not as part of a modern global world. I wanted to explore how increased mobility during the last decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries affected people’s lives, including Hamsun’s. As a seafaring nation, a nation of immigrants, Norway had long been in touch with other peoples. There existed folklore, travel reports, immigrant letters, colonial stories and novels—even Viking sagas—that recounted interactions with such peoples as the Sami, the Inuit, Native Americans, and Africans. Hamsun, an avid if unsystematic reader, certainly came across many of these accounts, which then became part of his intellectual baggage even before he traveled to the United States in the 1880s. He wrote disparagingly about other races; his descriptions of blacks and their allegedly animalistic sexuality were especially repulsive.

Lastly and most importantly, women’s growing demands for economic, political, and cultural power, and for independence and control over their own pregnancies, became a hallmark of the same period. For Hamsun, women became the scapegoats for everything that went wrong with modern progress. While he created a vast array of strong and interesting women protagonists, his ideal remained a woman tamed in marriage, a mother with many children. Hamsun, as an advocate of natural fertility, consistently lobbied against women’s rights in the modern enlightened sense. In his novels he imagined a vision of an erotic woman who is ultimately fulfilled only within a relatively simple and basic family life—as a mother. The racial and cultural foreigners he invented as lovers brought to light and reinforced the raw disruptive force women possess by virtue of being women.

In Hamsun’s opinion, it was women who were the primary contributors to modern social disintegration, especially those who refused to have children, who fled the farms and found jobs in the cities, who became educated, who embraced modern fashion, or who deviated from the patriarchal norm in some other way. Modern life had replaced an ideal organic universe where every family member has an indispensable place and role. Hamsun advocated such an ideal organic universe in several of his articles and in his Nobel Prize-winning novel, Growth of the Soil. His novels can often be read as portraits of the state of affairs after the collapse of the organic community.

These feelings and opinions, including those concerning the dangerous non-European races as well as healthy sexuality, were axiomatic in Nazism. These commonalities drew the Nazis to Hamsun and Hamsun to the Nazis. Nazi-produced propaganda treated Hamsun’s masterpiece Growth of the Soil as an integral part of their education campaign.

Hamsun considered the post-World War I Versailles Treaty, which changed Germany’s borders and lost its overseas colonies, extremely unfair to Germany. In his view, the Third Reich would revitalize Germany and the New Europe. Indeed, he understood the Nazi takeover as a positive Cultural Revolution. The Nazi expansion into the fertile steppes of the East was a legitimate move to neutralize the Bolshevik threat and to secure territory for future German generations. In this project, women were extremely important. The Nazi expansionist policies mandated increasing birth rates by the master race and prohibited miscegenation.

Hamsun’s hatred of the Anglo-Saxon worldview and his gratitude towards Germany, where he enjoyed early literary success, certainly contributed to his stance. Yet Hamsun’s broader cultural worldview, one that rejected the accomplishments of enlightenment and modern progress, reveals so many contact points with the Nazi ideology that it is no wonder that Hamsun openly embraced Hitler’s call for a New Europe. Thus my book is offered as a corrective to studies that treat Hamsun's Nazi support as a peripheral and unimportant detail in an otherwise illustrious literary life.

While searching for answers to Hamsun’s support for the Third Reich, I felt that the critical texts about Hamsun were too narrowly focused on his standard set of novels. Hamsun wrote so much more. He wrote disparagingly about other races; his descriptions of blacks and their allegedly animalistic sexuality were especially repulsive.

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

This book is about the reception of the Muslim world in the works of eight major German thinkers, but differs from other histories of ideas on two points. First of all, it does not consider each of these thinkers as a clear and consistent Self, a single author who had a single response to Islam. On the contrary, I treat each author as a collection of multiple selves, each of whom had very different things to say about Islam at different times.

In the chapter on Gottfried Leibniz, for example, you will really read about three Leibnizes: Leibniz’s response to Islam as a Christian thinker, as a political theorist, and as a philologist. Leibniz, in all of these modes, had very different things to say about a faith he sometimes saw as a monster, a political rival, a corrupted version of a natural theology, and as a useful source of historical information.

The second central argument tries to show how much more German thinkers knew about the Muslim world than they let on, and how they were all-too-familiar with a sophisticated picture of their Ottoman neighbours, even if they never allowed this to impinge upon their writing. There is a truly remarkable disconnect between the kind of information mainstream intellectuals had about the Turks and the clichés and stereotypes they chose to perpetuate in their writing. It would be like living next door to a family of poets and teachers for years, and yet still holding to the conviction that they were farmers and manual labourers.

The wide angle

My book takes issue with a number of positions, the first of which being that a complete and coherent history of European thought can be written without reference to non-Europe. What emerges in my book is how central the idea of a nicht-Europa was for German thinkers. This is as true for critical free spirits such as Herder, Marx and Nietzsche, who saw Muslim countries as offering different alternatives to Judaeo-Christian modernity, as it is for Kant or Hegel who wished to celebrate or consolidate Europe.

Secondly, the book takes issue with the received idea that thinkers in 18th and 19th century Europe held to stereotypes about Muslims because they had no access to “real” knowledge of the Muslim world, or that any knowledge they had was deformed and contaminated by the misrepresentations of Big Bad Orientalists.

I show that figures such as Hegel, Goethe, and Schlegel were fully aware of the complexity and relative tolerance of the Muslim Ottoman societies which were their neighbours. But they compartmentalized this awareness in order to be able to continue drawing from a vocabulary of bloodthirsty, savage Turks and fanatical Arabs. German thinkers read newspapers for news of the Turkish wars all the time, and were surprisingly familiar with the particularities of their Ottoman neighbours.

With all due respect to Edward Said—the postcolonial thinker whose work I try to qualify, not contradict—there were a number of German Orientalists such as Friedrich Christian Diez and Johann Jakob Reiske who were genuinely trying to communicate a sophisticated and nuanced view of Islam and the Ottomans. Mainstream philosophers read these experts and carefully sifted them for what they wanted, selecting the nuggets they found useful and filtering out anything which too flatly contradicted the idea of a civilized, Christian Europe surrounded by a Slavic/Muslim non-Europe, steeped in barbarism and ignorance.

Thirdly, the book explodes the idea of philosophers as autonomous, stable, coherent beings who thought X about A and Y about B. What emerged in my research was how truly wild, bizarre, and contradictory the attitudes towards Islam were in each thinker I studied. Often there was no strict sense of chronological development in what a particular thinker thought about Islam from the beginning of his life to the end of it; rather a bewildering flurry of positive and negative remarks interrupted and competed against one another. That a thinker such as Herder could call Arabs a savage people one year, and then praise the sublimity of their poetic thought the very next, made me realize that I had to refashion my entire concept of what an author is. How else to make any sense of such inconsistencies?

That a thinker such as Herder could call Arabs a savage people one year, and then praise the sublimity of their poetic thought the very next, made me realize that I had to refashion my entire concept of what an author is. How else to make any sense of such inconsistencies?

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

My book presents a sample of crime reports from eighteenth-century China in English translation. All are capital crimes. Since all capital crimes might carry the death penalty, detailed reports of all levels of investigation had to be forwarded to the Emperor for his final decision on sentencing. Capital crimes required investigation and review at local, prefectural, provincial, and central levels of the imperial Qing period (1644-1911) administration. These reports include information about the victims and what happened to them, testimony from the accused and various witnesses, and official correspondence between judicial officials about the crimes.

They are not fiction, but they make for interesting reading for modern readers in two ways. First, they document all too common human mistakes and weaknesses—most seem like the kinds of crimes we might read about in our daily newspapers. (Only the political crimes appear to be unique to their time and place.)

In addition, these cases show how justice was sought through the art of writing: certain information was emphasized and other information was downplayed in order to support the verdict reached by the magistrate after his investigation. There was no jury; the interpretation of the evidence was left up to the local magistrate. But he had to convince a series of judicial reviewers—including the Emperor in Beijing—that he had fulfilled his obligations to get all the facts and to judge them fairly and accurately. If a perpetrator later recanted testimony that he or she had been wrongly forced to make, or if the magistrate had not discovered the whole truth, the magistrate could be punished by losing his position, being forever barred from holding office, or being physically punished and fined. All of the judicial reviewers were also regularly examined for any dereliction of duty; they, too, could be severely punished for interfering with justice.

These cases demonstrate the workings of a judicial and legal system very different from that of modern Western nations. But the administration of justice in imperial China also sought fairness, just as we do today, and the system incorporated many levels of safeguards for the accused. Like our own jury system, this system relied heavily on the basic goodness of individuals to make it work. I hope that my readers will get a better sense of how a common human problem—the punishment of perpetrators of major crimes—has been understood and dealt with in another culture, in another time, with unfamiliar concepts of law and criminal investigation.

The wide angle

The history of China’s interactions with Western cultures is fraught with misunderstandings, especially on the part of the West. Based on information supplied by pioneering Jesuit missionaries in China at the end of the 16th century, enlightenment figures such as Voltaire and Leibniz saw China as a model secular state administered by the learned. The Jesuits were trying hard to penetrate elite Chinese society—the stratum from which the administrators were drawn—and so devoted tremendous energies to learning about the subjects tested in the imperial civil service examinations and talked about in polite and learned conversations. Consequently, such figures as Matteo Ricci sent back accounts of Chinese refinement and courtesy of manners, advances in such technologies as book printing, and the glories of their ancient culture. The views they presented of Chinese ideals and social practice were generally positive.

Within the next two centuries the British had become tea drinkers, paying dearly for huge amounts of Chinese tea. In order to correct their trade imbalance, British merchants began to import opium into China and peddle it. When the Chinese authorities impounded and destroyed this product, the British, along with their allies, carried out the Opium Wars to force China to accept trade and, among other impositions, free movement of European missionaries in China. Many of these foreigners reported the backwardness and poverty of China’s rural people, as China’s population had rapidly outpaced economic growth. By 1900 both foreigners and China’s intellectuals alike were convinced that there was nothing of traditional political or social value that was worth preserving, and that all must be destroyed. This last attitude has shaped most Chinese-language scholarship on imperial China, and for decades in the twentieth century, foreign scholars and travelers alike also tended to agree that the only “good” China of the past was the culture of high antiquity.

Only during the last two or three decades have revisionist scholars begun to look in detail at the mass of information left from China’s last empire, much of it preserved in the imperial archives in Beijing. The crime reports I translate in this book were all stored in imperial archive collections. The reports are final copies of comprehensive and detailed summaries of each case that had been prepared for personal review by the emperor, who did so whenever a sentence of execution was proposed for any criminal.

My collection contributes to this revisionist reading of China’s past by demonstrating the human problems that the judiciary system faced and the means by which the system had to be used to guarantee what conscientious judges felt to be just. The reports also reveal the magistrates’ frustrations with an inflexible system and their efforts to bend the system to prevent injustice. I bring to these materials an extensive study of Chinese fiction of the late imperial period, the Ming and Qing, spanning roughly from 1500 to 1900. As a student of literature I have had to be very careful to check my interpretations with legal historians to ensure that I have not over-read these documents. But as a scholar trained to read what is implicit in a text, seeing these magistrates as creative writers seems to be an easy and natural exercise.

This approach is useful, I feel, because most historians who have used such archival materials have done so with an eye for data, often accumulating information on problems such as adultery and other sex crimes, struggles over land and water resources, or official worries about popular religious movements. Even though the reports are decidedly not fictional, nor have they been “fictionalized” by making them more readable (magistrates faced strenuous penalties for tampering with the facts of a case) seeing how each case was presented reveals a deeper level of meaning than is gained from simply noting what each case concerned. Without attention to these matters, concepts such as fairness, justice, attitudes toward authority, and personal moral standards for these people at that time would be much harder to ascertain.

I came to the study of these judicial reports to see whether regional styles of language were used in writing nonfictional narratives. But crime reports are written in the languages of official communication, classical Chinese for the documentary portions and the standard vernacular dialect (known as “Mandarin” in English) for testimony; they do not reveal local expressions or manners of speech to any great degree. However, as products of the same educational system that produced China’s novelists and story writers, the magistrates who wrote these reports had a similar sense of careful composition and the ability to make texts mean more than they say. These features of the crime reports are what attracted me.

as products of the same educational system that produced China’s novelists and story writers, the magistrates who wrote these reports had a similar sense of careful composition and the ability to make texts mean more than they say

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

Are cities losing their soul? Stroll around the center of the world’s great cities, and you see the same gentrified neighborhoods, certified historic buildings, spectacular skyscrapers and new modern art museums. On the waterfront you find deserted warehouses next to loft-apartments. Cafés and boutiques are standout destinations in shuttered factory districts that now represent the epicenter of cool. This Destination City is attractive to tourists, calmed by shopping and secured by private guards. But it’s a city that has lost its edge of difference, its authentic character, what some people call its “soul.”

Like other cities from London to Shanghai, New York has gone through these identity changes during the past thirty years. Despite a chronic fiscal crisis and the current economic recession, the city has filled the uneven gap between grit and glamour, sprouted manicured public parks controlled by private business districts and brought white residents, mostly college graduates, to neighborhoods that used to be dangerous and unappealing.

A chain store invasion has turned the city into a continuous network of Starbucks, Chase Bank branches, Rite-Aid stores, and H&Ms. Declining crime rates and rising careers in finance and media encourage new people to make all of New York their own. In the process, though, many longtime residents have vanished and much of the city’s authentic character has been transformed.

My book focuses on the power of authenticity as an urban ideal. Naked City visits Greenwich Village, Harlem, and the Brooklyn waterfront to show how New York’s working-class neighborhoods and “dark ghettos” have been transformed by entrepreneurial hipsters, gentrifiers seeking their roots, aggressive real estate developers and mayors, and government grants. But we also uncover new terroirs where cultural identities are forged: public ball fields where Latino immigrants sell the foods of their homelands, a locavore farmers’ market, and a community garden in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

This journey poses two big questions. Is the idea of authenticity only a means of preserving a city’s elite cultures? Or can it be used to ensure everyone a right to stay in the place where they live and work?

The wide angle

These broad questions of authenticity and displacement challenge the political, cultural, and economic habits of city dwellers all over the world. But Naked City is also a very specific book about New York. I argue against both sides of a power struggle that has shaped New York City during the past half-century: the struggle between the corporate city and the urban village.

The corporate city is identified with the slash-and-burn urban renewal policies and massive highway construction overseen by New York’s public-sector urban builder Robert Moses from the 1930s to the 1960s. Moses was notorious for imposing his plans on a captive public through his adroit use of an overbearing bureaucracy and government funds.

The urban village refers to a different experience: the small-scale social life of neighborhoods and community autonomy. First described in a study of the West End of Boston, an Italian-American working class community, by the sociologist Herbert Gans, the urban village is closely connected with the writer and activist Jane Jacobs, who worked with community groups in Greenwich Village to defeat Robert Moses’s last big plans in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Revered for her common sense vision of the city, Jacobs wrote about “the ballet of the sidewalk” and the intimate life among strangers on the streets—local residents, store owners, and workers. Radical at first, in contrast to Moses’s power, Jacobs’s view has gradually become more influential. In fact, this is the lifestyle vision of both gentrifiers and contemporary city planning commissioners, an aesthetic ideal of authenticity that consumes both the neighborhood and its longtime residents.

Of course the corporate city and the urban village are idealized landscapes, tropes for opposing “good” and “evil” values. Nevertheless they inspire real aspirations and behavior, and these become ways of using the city to promote one group’s advantage over another’s.

I think I have always had a passion to discover the “authentic” city. And it has been honed by living in New York during the period Naked City describes.

First coming to New York as a college student, and remaining through three decades of teaching and writing, I have been both exasperated and enchanted by the city’s gilt and dross, brutal honesty and flagrant self-promotion and ability to inspire dreams. I don’t want to be nostalgic for a city that never was. But I find a more attractive modernity in the noir image of the city, the post-World War II, black-and-white street scenes of Weegee’s photos and Jules Dassin’s film Naked City, with its diners, tenements, taxis, and even offices. Can city life be better without displacing the poorest residents and turning the streets into an urban shopping mall that looks like every other place on the planet? Can we consume the city without destroying it?

I know that “authenticity” is a chaotic concept. Many people say you cannot even talk about cities as authentic because they are constantly changing. New York especially has been tearing down and building up at a rapid rate at least since the 1850s. But the idea of authenticity has an undeniable cultural power. It has a real effect on our attachment to our neighborhood, on the stores where we like to shop, on the way we see some places as interesting and others as unworthy of our attention as cultural consumers.

Is the idea of authenticity only a means of preserving a city’s elite cultures? Or can it be used to ensure everyone a right to stay in the place where they live and work?

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

In a nutshell

Why are the Taliban such a threat in Afghanistan? And why are violent radical Islamists such resilient terrorists? You won’t believe this but the answer is communism. I’m not kidding. Not capital C Communism, the discredited ideology of the Soviet Union, but mutual aid, as practiced in communes. This might sound like a joke from The Colbert Report—but stick with me.

Religious extremists such as the Taliban are incredibly successful rebels. The Taliban controlled Afghanistan, and we now know how hard that is. Their success cannot be solely due to the Taliban’s theology, which is shared by many rebel groups, most of which are flimsy organizations that quickly crumble.

So what is the Taliban’s secret? Well, the single biggest threats to terrorist organizations are leaks and defection. Radical religious organizations tend to succeed because they can select recruits carefully to create defection-resistant organizations. How do they resist defection? Communism. Religious radicals, such as the Amish, Hutterites, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, are masters of mutual aid, creating tight-knit communities that are incredibly supportive of their members.

Yet economists (like me) know that mutual aid shouldn’t work in large communities, since individuals pursuing their own self-interest will shirk their responsibilities to the commune, which will then unravel. In fact, mutual aid communes generally do unravel. But not those run by religious radicals—they carefully select new members and monitor the behavior or existing members through sacrifices and prohibitions. The latter are surprisingly similar among religious radicals of vastly different religious traditions. (Economists call that structure a “club,” and Larry Iannaccone of Chapman University is responsible for the insight.)

One more logical step: Once the shirking problem is solved in the mutual aid community, controlling defection is much easier in the violent sub-group—since members have been screened for loyalty and are well-monitored.

What’s the evidence for this communist conspiracy? Religious radicals with a social-service provision base, such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Sadr’s Mahdi Army, and the Taliban, are much more effective at violence than groups that share the same theology but lack a service provision base, such as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The wide angle

My book offers a fresh way of understanding insurgency and terrorism. I outline a constructive approach to confronting localized insurgencies like those in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the international terrorism that now threatens most Western countries.

The threat is limited to a very small number of organizations, only those capable of sustainable violent acts without leaks and defection. The U.S. State Department lists only 39 such organizations—less than half are radical Islamists. So why not concentrate on undermining the benign organizational bases of these few organizations? This is best done by helping host governments compete directly in the provision of the benign services that radical Islamists provide to their members: security, education, health care, justice, welfare services, and political representation.

Has this approach ever worked? Gamal Abdul Nasser managed it in the 1950s when he confronted the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the prototypical modern radical Islamists. Nasser’s arresting of thousands of leaders is pretty standard—but he also nationalized the vast social service provision network that the Brotherhood had developed, successfully suppressing them for over two decades.

This constructive tactic has additional advantages. It carries no ideological baggage; allies, local governments, and NGOs can wholeheartedly sign on. It also plays to the strengths of western democracies: our resources and capacity for strong governance and economic growth.

If improving governance works, then why is Afghanistan going so badly? Perhaps because we misunderstand the enemy. In Iraq the insurgents may have been less a club, and so succumbed to a more standard “hearts and minds” governance and security enhancement approach, in which noncombatants rat out insurgents. The Taliban in Afghanistan may be more defection-proof, leaking less information. Undermining their organizational strength would require competing directly with their organizational base, which is currently outside Pakistan, in North Waziristan and Baluchistan.

Is this all just a liberal rant? No. It’s based on peer-reviewed empirical research published in scholarly journals. It is also informed by my own experience as a counterinsurgent and by conversations and consultation with current practitioners.

Radical religious organizations tend to succeed because they can select recruits carefully to create defection-resistant organizations. How do they resist defection? Communism. Religious radicals, such as the Amish, Hutterites, and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, are masters of mutual aid, creating tight-knit communities that are incredibly supportive of their members.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

In Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep (2006), Gael García Bernal plays a frustrated artist with a penchant for quirky handmade objects and stop-motion animation who falls in love with an artsy woman. He explains, “I love her because she makes things with her hands. It’s as if her synapses were married directly to her fingers. Like this,” he says, staring at his own waggling fingers in amazement, “in this way.”

That line perfectly describes the spectator—not just of this film but also of moving pictures in general. I argue that synapses and fingers are married (as are mind and body, and vision and touch more generally) in the experience of cinema. I also argue that to think, to speak, to feel, to love, to perceive the world and to express one’s perception of that world are not solely cognitive or emotional acts taken up by viewers and films, but always already embodied ones that are enabled, inflected, and shaped by an intimate, tactile engagement with and orientation toward others—things, bodies, objects, subjects—in the world. If these things are married in the experience of cinema, then this book describes exactly how so: “like this, in this way.”

That the film experience is a tactile one is without doubt; one need only chat up one’s fellow audience members to hear an action film described as a “visceral rush,” or an art film described as “lush” or “sensuous.” But how does one reconcile sensuous film experience with film theory? My answer was to design a book that is itself a tactile experience. I employ a descriptive vocabulary and method, infused with the sensuousness of the everyday, embodied film experience, in a study organized not around historical periods, genres, or modes of production, but around bodily dimensions, sensations, rhythms, and gestures.

Throughout the project, I describe “touch” in a way that extends beyond the fingers and the skin. The book’s three central chapters explore three locales that I argue are lived both humanly and cinematically: the skin, the musculature, and the viscera. These categories guide us through a complicated terrain, but their boundaries are pliable and permeable. Sensations and behaviors constantly bleed, vibrate, dissolve, spread, cut, or muscle their way from one dimension into the next.

I explore these dimensions of tactility through a series of brief but detailed readings of specific films, which I call “textural” (rather than “textual”) analyses. I cover a wide range of genres, nations, and directors, juxtaposed in unpredictable ways—Buster Keaton and Wile E. Coyote share the space of a few pages, as do Eraserhead and Toy Story—that elicit underlying haptic, muscular, and visceral patterns shared by film and viewer and that offer a useful approach for the study of other film experiences.

The wide angle

The Tactile Eye emerged as a response to my own craving for what anthropologist Paul Stoller calls “sensuous scholarship.” I was inspired by certain film and art history scholarship in the mid-1990s that took up an interest in the non-visual senses, including work by Vivian Sobchack, Tom Gunning, Giuliana Bruno, Laura Marks, and Elena del Río. These writers, alongside others working in philosophy and anthropology, informed my own thinking about phenomenological film theory and issues of embodiment.

The book takes up two concepts in particular: “body genres” and the “film’s body.” In writing about horror, melodrama, and pornography, Linda Williams defined as “body genres” those genres in which viewers identify with certain characters’ embodied on-screen behavior in complex ways. The Tactile Eye argues that all genres are “body genres” in the sense that viewers identify not solely with characters’ bodies but also, and more importantly, with films’ bodies.

I also expand on the notion of the “film’s body,” developed substantially by Sobchack. When we watch a film, we’re seeing the film seeing; we see its own (if humanly enabled) process of perception and expression unfolding in space and time. Camera movements, fluctuations in sound, and degrees of intensity, attention, distraction, etc.—these are embodied behaviors and/or attitudes of the film’s own lived body, which is unified in time and space and which performs its own perception (of the world) and expression (to the world) in embodied ways that are muscular, tactile, and distinctly cinematic.

I’m especially intrigued by the carnal resonance between the film’s body and the viewer’s. Watching a film, we are certainly not in the film, but we are not entirely outside it, either. We exist and move and feel in that space of contact where our surfaces mingle and our musculatures entangle. This sense of fleshy, muscular, visceral contact seriously undermines the rigidity of the opposition between viewer and film, inviting us to think of them as intimately related but not identical, caught up in a relationship of reciprocity and reversibility, rather than as subject and object positioned on opposite sides of the screen.

The Tactile Eye broadens the definition of “touch” in a literal but imaginative way, to include not only haptic but also muscular and visceral modes of touch that shape the encounter between films and viewers. For example, the film has a skin in the sense that it has a surface that is at once porous—impressionable, prone to contagion, and yet capable of transmitting its own qualities to others —and firm—a boundary, a container, and a shield against the world but also a source of contact with it. The press of skin against skin, both within the film and between film and viewer, can provoke an intersubjectivity that entails pleasure, horror, and many things in between.

Haptics are the most immediately apparent form of touch, and the only one for which there are precedents in film scholarship, but cinematic tactility is more than skin deep. Indeed, if the film has a body, it must have body language, and for this I devised the category “musculature”: films and viewers express themselves through movement, comportment, gesture, and the arrangement of the body in space. Here I turn to perceptual psychology to discuss proprioception, psychic blindness, phantom limbs, and the notion of embodied empathy.

Drawing upon medical phenomenology, I develop the notion of “viscera” as a means of discussing both the resonance and the tension between the internal rhythms of the human body and those of the film’s body. I describe the way film and viewer suffuse one another with their respective textures, temperatures, intensities, rhythms, gestures, and contours in a way that encompasses surface, middle, and depth. The embodiment of emotion, an idea that permeates the entire book, comes to the forefront here.

I develop the notion of “viscera” as a means of discussing both the resonance and the tension between the internal rhythms of the human body and those of the film’s body.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Household Gods is a history of the British love-affair with the domestic interior from the age of mass manufacture to modernism. In no other country was domesticity so celebrated and studiously cultivated. Money fed house-pride: between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War, Britons enjoyed the highest average standard of living in Europe.

Though we have in so many ways inherited the world the Victorians made, we know surprisingly little about how they responded to their unprecedented prosperity. How did the legendarily duty-bound middle classes of the nineteenth century reconcile moral good with material abundance? How can we explain their apparently insatiable, and to our eyes quixotic, demand for things? Why, to put it simply, did they stuff their houses full of objects? When—and why—did people first begin to believe, as many of us do, that our homes reflect our personalities?

In Household Gods, I argue that our modern consumer society has its roots in early nineteenth-century religious fervor. Over the course of the Victorian era, consumerism shed the taint of sin to become the pre-eminent means for the expression of individuality. The manner by which the Victorians reconciled their newfound prosperity with moral good is a crucial step in the making of modern materialism.

Unlike previous histories of British interiors, which have concentrated on opulent rooms or avant-garde developments, this book delves into the realm of middle-class self-fashioning—what critics have often dismissed as bad taste. Victorian luminaries such as critic John Ruskin and designer William Morris had less influence than we have assumed. I draw upon a wealth of untapped sources to explore the much broader set of forces that shaped consumer desires.

Religious and moral qualms figure in this story, as do anxieties about the regard of neighbors and friends. The temptations of shopping vie with the constraints of the pocketbook; the urge to differentiate oneself from others confronts, time and again, the desire to fit in. In a wide-ranging account that ventures from musty antique shops to London’s luxurious furnishing emporia, from suburban semi-detached houses to aestheticism’s leading lights, from married men who fretted about the appearance of mantelpieces to women who embraced home decoration as a feminist cause, Household Gods asks how people made and re-made themselves in a country in which the question was no longer merely “who are you” but “what have you.”

The wide angle

My book began as an inquiry into the origins of consumer demand. In the past two decades, economic historians have established that consumer demand provided an important catalyst for industrialization. However, we still don’t know very much about the reasons why people wanted things. Pioneering scholarship on the so-called “consumer revolution” assumed either that demand was an intrinsic, ever-present force, or that (following Thorstein Veblen) the middle classes spent money in order to ape their social betters. Research on the eighteenth century has done much to revise that narrative, pointing to, among other factors, a peculiarly modern form of hedonism. Nonetheless, the literature on consumer demand in the later period of mass manufacturing is far less well developed.

This omission is all the more striking given significance contemporary scholars accord to questions of demand from the 1840s through the 1930s. In the aftermath of the Great Exhibition, consumer taste (and, specifically, the public’s purportedly bad taste) became a matter of political and moral import in Britain. Design reformers—among them, Ruskin and Morris—sought to improve the quality of British goods by educating consumers, impressing upon them a preference for more tasteful products. Nonetheless, though the efforts of Ruskin and Morris have been exhaustively chronicled, we know almost nothing about their intended audience. We don’t know why people originally embraced the objects that reformers deplored, nor do we know how they responded to campaigns to improve their taste.

Understanding why people wanted things, especially in the case of the Victorians, requires us to grapple with the relationship between consumerism on the one hand, and religion and morality on the other. Religious strictures had, at various times in early modern European history, served to regulate consumption. Here I’m thinking of Simon Schama’s seventeenth-century Dutch, torn between the rigors of Calvinist discipline and the consumerist pleasures of the Golden Age, and of Max Weber’s capitalist entrepreneur, whose manner of life, as Weber famously described it, “was distinguished by a certain ascetic tendency.”

However agonizing these conflicts had been in the past, the nineteenth century put forth the issue with new urgency, for the Victorians were both richer and by some measurements also decidedly more religious than their eighteenth-century forebears. The evangelical revival of the early 19th century exercised a profound influence upon the British middle classes, who were, at least through the First World War, notoriously concerned with questions of faith and morals. But if Victorianism was synonymous with morality, the British were also, from the mid-nineteenth century on, the beneficiaries of Europe’s first real consumer boom. In Britain, the average per capita income rose from a marginal 25% above subsistence in 1850 to a comfortable 150% above subsistence in 1914.

With a few notable exceptions, the relation between religion and consumerism is an issue that has largely been ignored both in the literature on consumption and in scholarship about religion. But given the evangelical underpinnings of the Victorian period, what needs to be explained, at the outset, is the long co-existence of consumerist impulses and moral concerns—“the conciliation,” as George Eliot put it, of “piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass.” How that reconciliation was achieved—and what its effects were—is the subject of Household Gods.

The manner by which the Victorians reconciled their newfound prosperity with moral good is a crucial step in the making of modern materialism.

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.

In a nutshell

Historically speaking, theorizing the nature of the political state from a feminist point of view is in its earliest stages. So my book offers a novel feminist account of the foundations of the (just) modern state.

On Civic Friendship also offers a new vision of constitutional democracy. Rather than conceiving of women and their traditional roles as mere afterthoughts to a conception of the citizen that remains primarily male, I view women’s traditional work and activities as situated at the heart of this distinctive governmental form.

Central to my argument is that women, throughout history and across the globe, have continued to perform the vast majority of reproductive labor and praxis in society—that form of ethical activity that reproduces not merely biological beings but educated, reasoning, and mature persons.

In contrast to the traditionally male citizen role of soldier (which aims to defend against or kill the other) or to that of provider (where the modern focus is on the production of things and exchange value), traditional female reproductive praxis aims at the reproduction of human relations – in the best case, at relations of friendship or philia for their own sake. I use the Greek term philia for its scope is broader than the English friendship; philia includes the good relations between parents and children, siblings, lovers and even fellow citizens.

Aristotle already recognized the importance of women in reproducing relations of personal philia (far more complex then simple “care”). He also argued that a political version of friendship (politike philia) is a necessary requirement of justice for any polis or state. Unless there is an institutionalized background of good will in a society—a reciprocal friendly attitude, trust and rough maintenance of equality, visible and embodied in a state’s constitution, its laws, customs and social institutions—citizens can (and often will) perceive themselves to be unjustly treated.

In a general context of enmity and ill will, that is, or in one of pure competition or indifference, and given our natural and often unreasonable propensities to favor ourselves, citizens will be unable to recognize and accept in practice the burdens of justice. In such an unfriendly, hostile or indifferent environment, the poor will have little motive to follow the laws, the well to do will refuse to yield their unfair advantages, and only a sham justice of the powerful can reign.

The wide angle

Despite the major transformation of consciousness occasioned by the 20th century women’s movement, and on a scale that suggests powerful historical forces are at work, the modern political state is amongst the last and certainly among the most powerful of institutions that needs not only to be transformed, but in the first instance reconceived.

This nation-state has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the most “male” of all our institutions. Particularly in the United States, the state persists in signifying raw physical power and the monopoly of organized force (as Max Weber viewed it) and it continues to possess the power to legislate laws with the penalty of death (John Locke’s definition). So too, the state’s primary functions are still conceived in terms of the male roles of “protection” against both external enemies (a powerful military and preparedness for war) as well as internal foes (a strong police and internal security force, extensive prison system, etc.) coupled with the regulation and policing of economic competition (production and finance).

These crucial and central functions are reflected in the individual duties expected of “the citizen”—the duties of soldier in times of war, and of producer and taxpayer in times of peace, with occasional voting and jury duty thrown in. None of these roles was traditionally a woman’s. And thus, not surprisingly, for the vast majority of the history of the political state, both ancient and modern, over half of the population characteristically remained “passive,” residing outside of the political state narrowly conceived.

Even in recent years, the tendency of feminist political theorists has been towards exploring the realm of “civil society” and those many private associations, social movements, and forms of public communication that constitute it. This tendency to focus on civil society, however—and the propensity to view it as the primary locus of liberation—runs the risk of leaving the powerful state largely unattended and its nature only marginally placed into question.

My own aim is to expose the heavily biased and gendered foundations of the modern political state, in order to help transform this powerful and deadly apparatus into something else—an institution more fundamentally in the service of human and other needs, and with a primary duty of furthering relations of friendship among citizens, and, internationally, among states.

women, throughout history and across the globe, have continued to perform the vast majority of reproductive labor and praxis in society—that form of ethical activity that reproduces not merely biological beings but educated, reasoning, and mature persons

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

At Home in the Law argues that the past 40 years have witnessed important transformations in the legal idea of what the home is. For centuries the familiar adage, a man’s home is his castle, was central to our legal system’s view of the relation between the state and the home. One much-noticed effect was that the law often did not find it appropriate to interfere with what went on inside the home. This respect for home privacy dovetailed with the traditional legal doctrine of marital privacy, wherein the state’s policy was to leave alone matters between husband and wife.

The feminist movement opened our eyes to the ways that respecting home privacy had the effect of allowing women to be violently harmed by their husbands. My book argues that, today, the concept of home that most powerfully shapes the law is that of the home as a place of potential violence where men subordinate women. Forget home sweet home or home is where the heart is. Home is where the crime is.

This big shift in the common sense of our legal system is felt not only in the enforcement of criminal domestic violence laws; it goes deeply to basic concepts of privacy that shape the legal relation between the state and the home. It informs a vast range of still-developing law and policy that actually increase state regulation of intimate life. The effect is to redistribute actual and symbolic power among citizens and the state.

It is time to take stock of the legal reforms we have had under the aegis of protecting women from violence, and evaluate whether the extent and kind of state regulation of the home we now have, and will likely continue to see more of, are indeed what we desired, in light of the valuable privacy and autonomy that are affected.

The wide angle

The image of the home as a place of coercion and abuse has gained ground in our culture. The notion that the home shields subordination within its walls is becoming a kind of legal default understanding. Here, the standard worry is about government failure to intervene in the home.

By the same token, the imperative that the police should protect the home no longer primarily refers to protection from intruders but rather to protection from family members. It becomes increasingly natural to expect police presence in the home—or at least in the homes of poor minorities, on whom the impact of the greater police presence disproportionately falls. Its purpose is to prevent insidious closed-door harm from husbands, boyfriends, and fathers.

In the book, I consider five different specific contexts in which the meaning of privacy is being transformed in the wake of the domestic violence revolution. Chapter 1 focuses on the common law crime of burglary, the archetypal home crime, showing how courts have translated domestic violence into the paradigm crime of home invasion. Chapter 2 considers practices in everyday misdemeanor domestic violence enforcement whereby the criminal law reorders and controls intimate relationships in the home through what I call “state-imposed de facto divorce.” Chapter 3 explicates the expansion of self-defense law propelled by a powerful social movement, led by the National Rifle Association, that marries the traditional notion of the “castle” with protecting women against violent subordination, often using the metaphor of homeland security. Chapter 4 takes up home property and explores the relation between several recent Supreme Court decisions on takings and due process, under the rubric of state deprivation of the home. Chapter 5 reflects on the figure of the woman in the legal imagination of home privacy, interpreting the judicial articulation of privacy in relation to the shielding of women from men.

I first encountered some of the problems explored in the book when I served briefly as a prosecutor working on domestic violence misdemeanors in 2004, just after I had finished clerking on the United States Supreme Court. Observing the juxtaposition of the highest and lowest courts in our legal system made me reflect on how routine practices in current domestic violence prosecution grew out of profound conceptual and social changes of the last generation. These practices have deep implications for constitutional ideas of privacy in ways that we have not yet come to terms with.

My background prior to becoming a lawyer was in literary studies, the subject of my doctorate. As a result, this book works at the crossroads of legal studies and the humanities. It takes as its object of study the cultural discourses of the law, the revealing ways in which legal actors use language to describe and perform the law’s rationales and justifications.

Ideas that find expression in legal texts do not inevitably cause particular legal results; nor do they coherently match predictable political agendas. But regardless, legal language and legal practice are filled with embedded conceptions of who we are, what we think is important, and how we should live. These are the constructs through which the law regulates our lives.

the imperative that the police should protect the home no longer primarily refers to protection from intruders but rather to protection from family members

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.

In a nutshell

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 re-evaluate the implications of this time in America. By rigorously examining the institutional and intellectual networks that the Frankfurt School sought to navigate (and sometimes join) in the United States, I cast the well-known history of Critical Theory into a new and unfamiliar light.

Typically, we see the members of Horkheimer’s Circle as classic exiles—marginal men because of the lonely territory that they staked out between Germany and America. In fact, members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor W. Adorno, highlighted their de-centered status ironically as an empowering tool for observing and critiquing contemporary society. Nonetheless, the experiences of the group in exile were more typical of a classic immigrant’s tale. Although the shock of forced relocation and all of the traumas that accompanied their departure from Germany never left their minds, the Critical Theorists rapidly had to establish new professional and intellectual lives for themselves, a task that included assimilation and adaptation.

With the inspiration of the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu, Michelle Lamont, and Randall Collins, I have mapped the major academic and public intellectual networks that the Frankfurt School encountered, traversed, and sometimes entered in exile. Thus my book is a hybrid between the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas—a combination that I have called the social history of ideas.

The wide angle

In a letter of June 29, 1940, Max Horkheimer eloquently developed one of the metaphors that became central to the history of Critical Theory in America. Writing to the actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel, Horkheimer despaired, “In view of everything that is engulfing Europe and perhaps the whole world our present work is of course essentially destined to being passed on through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle.”

This trope of the message in a bottle, the Flaschenpost, has been adopted by many of the historians and scholars of Critical Theory and has helped to reinforce the illusion of the Frankfurt School’s “splendid isolation” in the United States. The traditional account further proclaims that if Critical Theory was cast (like a message in a bottle) into a dark and angry sea during the 1930s and 1940s, it was spectacularly found and uncorked on the beaches of the U.S. by New Leftists, hippies, and flower children in the 1960s.

The image of the message in a bottle underplays the interactions between Critical Theory and American intellectual life during the Frankfurt School’s years in exile, and it simultaneously helps to overplay the relationship between the Horkheimer Circle’s legacy and the American New Left. That is why this metaphor of the Flaschenpost, as much as I find it poetic and powerful, needs to be broken and discarded.

A vast literature about both the Frankfurt School and its individual members exists and continues to grow. Nonetheless, as I began my own research, there remained substantial questions about the actual encounters that took place between members of the Frankfurt School and the American scholars who had contacts with the exiled Institute for Social Research. While both Martin Jay and Rolf Wiggershaus touched on this topic in both of their books, it was not a major focus for either. Thus, the theme of exile appeared to me as a vantage point that could perhaps help me to see Critical Theory, as well as the intellectual history of the United States, in a new way.

The realities of exile for a scholar are challenging enough, but the fact that the Frankfurt School arrived in the midst of the Great Depression made their situation more hazardous. Horkheimer could be ruthless with some of his associates, but he also proved to be a slick and successful operator. How strange to see these famous critics of advanced capitalist society and the culture industry being forced to participate and accommodate themselves to both in order to survive. Or perhaps it wasn’t particularly strange at all; perhaps they could only see these socio-cultural developments not by simply viewing them from the margins of American society, but by traveling into the belly of the beast.

my book is a hybrid between the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas—a combination that I have called the social history of ideas

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

While the paradigm frequently offered for understanding our society is freedom of the market, the reality of most people’s experience of economic life is one of constraint. Why is this?

It is hard to identify where ‘the market’ is, but it is simple to observe where the transfer of money takes place. We all need money, not only for buying and selling, but for the payment of taxes, rents, wages and interest. Modern money is created by banks when money is loaned in excess of reserves. Money is essentially credit, a belief system, in which we participate in practice so long as we treat money as valuable. This means that money is also debt. Every time we handle money, we handle someone else’s debt or obligation.

Modern money is valuable because someone else is promising to pay, and they are trusted. What are they paying, and to whom? They promise to pay back the loan with interest, and pay it back in the form of money. They promise to acquire money, perhaps through investment, or labour, or the sale of assets, or speculation, to pay off their obligations. So they pay with the obligations of others.

Then modern money is not simply a belief system because we treat paper tokens or sight deposits as valuable – it is also a system of obligations. Economic life is constrained by the perpetual need for acquiring money.

This has enormous implications. Modern economics and politics—and even, to some extent, sociology—are based on the idea of human freedom. And they intend to advise us on the choices that we make. But they are ill-equipped for understanding money because transcendent obligations are put aside from the start, and confined to the sphere of ‘religion’ or ‘superstition.’

This book analyses the ‘theology of money.’ The title is ironic, for the method is philosophical. This is not an account of the history of Christian views on money. The point is to comprehend the way in which money as a supreme value and transcendent obligation shapes the conduct of our lives and institutions. Debt has replaced God as the guarantee for human cooperation, and our modern globalised world is driven by the religion of money.

The wide angle

I am a philosopher of religion by training, but one shaped by a radical tradition of European philosophy, being influenced especially by Spinoza, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze.

My first two books were on Deleuze, and my previous main work, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety, was an attempt to stage an encounter between philosophy of religion, with its concern for belief in God as a basis for reason, ethics and metaphysics, and critical theory, with its attempt to look behind ideological beliefs to the social, psychological and economic forces and interests that structure thought.

I discovered that just as the social form of empire is intimately related to monotheism, the social form of money is intimately related to the objectivity of truth sought by reason. This is especially true in the modern world where money replaces God as the guarantee of value, the highest good to be sought, and it lends its structural form to the way in which truth is conceived.

Where European philosophers have often sought some decisive term that gives shape to the ways we think and act, such as being, truth, difference, the sublime, the void, time, or even God, it seems to me that money actually plays the decisive role in our society. For money is at once an object that can be handled, an institution which is the basis of all our cooperation, and a structure of thinking. We unwittingly have a theology of money.

I wanted to discover how money actually constrains and structures our evaluations, so I largely put aside ontological considerations. I tried to produce a philosophy of money, with the work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Georg Simmel as my primary exemplars. In each case, I found fundamental disagreements with their approaches, which made extended discussion unfruitful. While I found fellow travelers among environmentalists, feminists, monetary reformers and some exceptional sociologists, my ideal was to produce a pure philosophical treatise, like French philosophy in its classical style. This now forms the central body of the book, Part Two.

Instead of asking what money is, I wanted to understand what effect money has on the process of production and wider society—an ecology of money. I also wanted to understand how money shapes power relations in relation to states and classes—a politics of money. I also wanted to understand what effect money has on its own nature as a record of debts, an accounting practice, which is nothing more than a moral self-discipline for preserving credit—a ‘theology’ of money.

Part One of the book challenges the modern presumption of human freedom and rational mastery over both nature and religion. Freedom is undermined from both sides when the natural order is no longer compliant to our will in the ecological crisis and when human freedom is constrained by money.

Economic forces have priority over political considerations. The modern restructuring of nature and society has always left chaos in its wake, but its hope for finally imposing its own order has also lent it a partial order up until now. While writing the book, I took it for granted that the limits to oil production would lead to inflation, a rise in interest rates, and a collapse in the overheated debt bubble by which the entire global economy is driven—all before most readers would see the book.

I see 2008 as the first shock in the terminal collision between economy and ecology, with a major depression to follow in the coming decade due to an ongoing crisis in energy supply. The hope upon which the modern world is based will soon collapse, and competition for increasingly scarce resources will significantly undermine the moral and political cooperation to which we currently aspire.

Part Three of the book turns towards the fundamental questions of the nature of being, of power, and of credit. Once evaluative questions are merged with ontological questions, and one seeks for a source of truth and value to ground our thought and attention, then these are theological issues.

An implicit agenda of the book is to propose that 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, or an impotent recommendation of ideals that itself presupposes humanism as the power to realise such ideals. In this respect, a rather tentative proposal for institutional reform of money, banking, credit, and evaluation is part of the new theological agenda.

Debt has replaced God as the guarantee for human cooperation, and our modern globalised world is driven by the religion of money.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

This memoir is an inside account of the New Yorker Theater that my husband Dan and I opened on March 17, 1960. An Art Deco relief of Diana the Huntress and her hound hung above its marquee, announcing our first program of Henry V, starring Lawrence Olivier, and co-featured with The Red Balloon, a fantasy by the French director Albert Lamorisse. Olivier and a chorus advise the audience to ”eke out our performance with your mind.” What better counsel for the rapture of art? What better counsel for a fledgling art-house on the scruffy Upper West Side? The New Yorker ran from 1960 to 1973.

The New Yorker began as a revival house. Our second program was Carl Dreyer’s Day of Wrath and Marcel Pagnol’s Harvest, followed then by Fritz Lang, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Orson Welles, and films of the thirties and forties. Double bills of classics, screwball comedies, Westerns, gangster movies, and musicals were “mis-matched”—Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine got paired with Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Before we knew it, theaters around the country were copying our programs. Two years later, our distribution company was born with Before the Revolution, by a 21-year-old unknown Italian director, one Bernardo Bertolucci, and Pull my Daisy, a quirky Beat generation riff by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, narrated by Jack Kerouac. Now we would also play first-runs.

The New Yorker Theater was what Bertolucci called a kind of wild cinema university, like Henri Langlois’s cinematheque in Paris. It came at a ripe moment—when audiences came to view film as an art form and not just popular entertainment. Moviegoers flocked to the New Yorker not only from the neighborhood and nearby Columbia University but from the five boroughs. They could see Murnau, Eisenstein, Griffith, von Sternberg, Lubitsch, Rossellini and Renoir—what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the frenzy on the screen.”

What started as a “venture” became an adventure. In his Forward to the book, Martin Scorsese writes that The New Yorker and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies is “a book about the love of cinema.” Love of cinema was evident on every page of our ledger, listing all of our programs, the source of the films, and attendance. In our youth, we had cut our teeth on Open City, The Bicycle Thief, Symphonie Pastorale, and I Know Where I’m Going. Now we had the privilege of playing what we loved: John Ford’s The Searchers, Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1932, Satyajit Ray’s The World of Apu, Yasojiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story.

In that first decade of the New Yorker, no program was repeated.

The wide angle

The sixties was a golden age in cinema, turbulent in politics, transitional in urban change. We were lucky, there at the hub where time and place converged: French New Wave, ‘68 uprisings at Columbia University, the emergence of the Upper West Side as a desirable neighborhood.

Dan had previously been the Eastern Story editor for Warner Brother, and had edited Film: An Anthology, an essay collection including Erwin Panofsky, James Agee, and Pauline Kael, which is used in classrooms to this day. He became the film critic for the Progressive Magazine, a liberal political monthly. I was teaching Spanish literature at Columbia University and witnessed first-hand those volatile events. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) declared our New Yorker a “liberated zone.”

Running a movie-house goes beyond flashing a film on the screen. Struggles and obstacles abound. Where to find the print? Will the projectionist arrive on time and be alert to reel change? How to cope with a powerful projectionist union? Do the bathrooms have enough toilet paper? How to apprehend pickpockets? How to meet labyrinthine city regulations? How to confront things that bug an exhibitor—whisperers, snorers, commentators, pigeons on the marquee? Such are the nitty-gritty details. Our theater was a family store: Dan the programmer, I the matron (legally required), my mother at the candy-stand, my father lobby vigilante. You had to pay attention to detail.

On Monday nights we started a film society with special programs. Silent films—D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, Fritz Lang’s The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari—were accompanied on the piano by Arthur Kleiner, a full-time pianist at the Museum of Modern Art. We had Special Series of one-week bills: Emil Jannings, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Bette Davis, Mae West. Program notes were written by aficionados and movie mavens such as Bill Everson on The Golem, Jonas Mekas on Shor, Jules Feiffer on Gold Diggers of 1933, Jack Gelber on Foolish Wives, and Jack Kerouac on Nosferatu— program notes are included in the book.

The most successful film in our series was Triumph of the Will, which had not been shown in the United States for years. On the evening of June 27, 1960, a line formed around the theater, students from Columbia University eager to see that legendary film of the 1934 Nazi Part rally, shot in the Nuremberg stadium by Leni Riefenstahl.

From the outset patrons began filling our 300-page Guest Books in the lobby with their names and miscellaneous remarks—some of these pages appear in the book. There was an obvious hunger for film, thousands of film requests in several hundred ledgers. Susan Sontag asked for Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, Pagnol’s Les Lettres de Mon Moulin, Visconti’s Senso and La Terra Trema, and Tod Browning’s Freaks. P. Adams Sitney, avant-garde critic, wanted Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’Or, The Great Dictator, and more Chaplin. W. H. Auden put in for Les Visiteurs du Sol, City Lights, any Carole Lombard film, any Jean Harlow, and early Marilyn Monroe. John Simon groused: “Improve the sound system and fix the seats.” And Dan replied, “Right on both accounts.” But on the very next page, a patron shot back: “Can anyone stop John Simon from mumbling during the show?” No one could.

The New Yorker Theater came at a ripe moment—when audiences came to view film as an art form and not just popular entertainment.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Others in Mind is a book about self-consciousness: how it originates and how it shapes our lives. Self-consciousness is arguably the most important and revealing of all psychological issues. Why are we so prone to guilt and embarrassment? Why do we care so much about how others see us, about our reputation? What are the origins of such afflictions? The book deals with the issue of self-consciousness as a unique feature of the human psychological condition.

It is because we are members of a species that evolved the unique propensity to reflect upon the self as object of thoughts—and one that is potentially evaluated by others. But, the argument goes, this propensity comes from a basic fear: the fear of rejection, of being socially “banned” and ostracized.

From this simple premise, I look at young children and their development, but also at many other intriguing human propensities, to see what they have to tell us about the social origins and nature of human self-consciousness.

The main idea I develop in the book is that human psychic life is predominantly determined by what we imagine others perceive of us. We exist and gauge the worth of our existence primarily through the eyes of others. More importantly, others also determine whether I am right to feel safe, in particular, safe of not being rejected by them. Feeling safe is part of the “good life” and it is inseparable from the feeling of being affiliated. The argument I propose is that it all depends on the recognition and acknowledgment of self by others.

The wide angle

Other in Mind is neither just another dry academic book, nor a self-help book. It is about sharing what I see as a crucial aspect of what makes us part of a self-reflective species. It is an invitation to explore what it means to be human, alive in this world, and how we construe our being in relation to others.

I have meant the book to be more than an academic concoction for the few initiated specialists. Based on empirical observations, primarily developmental observations of children, Others in Mind is a book of ideas, taping into both developmental and anthropological phenomena and guided by strong existential intuitions regarding the human condition. At the core of these intuitions, there is the idea that human psychic life is predominantly determined by what we imagine others perceive of us.

I write in the book that “the struggle for recognition is the struggle for existence itself.”

I look at young children and their development, but also at many other intriguing human propensities, to see what they have to tell us about the social origins and nature of human self-consciousness.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

The proliferation of biological weapons—BW for short—to states or terrorists is one of the most pressing security issues of the twenty-first century. At a time when the United States enjoys overwhelming conventional military superiority, biological weapons may be one of the more attractive means of waging asymmetric warfare by less powerful states hoping to challenge the status quo.

At the same time, the considerable overlap between the equipment, materials and knowledge required to develop biological weapons, conduct civilian biomedical research, and develop biological defenses creates a multiuse dilemma. This dilemma limits the effectiveness of verification, hinders civilian oversight, and complicates threat assessments. In addition, advances in the life sciences have the potential to heighten the lethality and availability of biological weapons.

My book, Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security, provides a comprehensive analysis of the unique challenges that biological weapons pose for international security from the perspectives of arms control, deterrence, civil-military relations, terrorism and intelligence. To understand the strategic consequences of the proliferation of biological weapons, I draw on insights from theories of international relations and security studies. The book uses case studies on the American, Soviet, Russian, South African, and Iraqi biological weapons programs to enhance our understanding of the special challenges posed by these weapons.

I also examine the aspirations of terrorist groups such as Aum Shinrikyo and Al-Qaeda to develop these weapons and the obstacles they have faced. I argue that biological weapons will continue to threaten international security until defenses against such weapons are improved, governments can reliably detect biological weapon activities, the proliferation of materials and expertise is limited and international norms against the possession and use of biological weapons are strengthened.

The wide angle

Biological weapons are the least well understood of the so-called weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs. Despite the growing awareness of the threat posed by biological weapons, the history of biological warfare and the unique security challenges posed by biological weapons remain unfamiliar to much of the public, academia, and government.

During the cold war, the focus on nuclear weapons was understandable. The destructive power of nuclear weapons had been established with horrific results during World War II, and postwar advances generated even more powerful weapons. Nuclear weapons formed the core of the superpowers’ strategic arsenals and were integral to maintaining the “balance of terror” between them. In addition, these weapons were deployed or under development in zones of potential conflict stretching from Europe to the Middle East to Asia.

In contrast, biological weapons have never been used openly on the battlefield and their development has always been conducted under the strictest secrecy. In addition, in 1969 the United States abandoned its offensive BW program, and in 1972 biological weapons became the first class of weapons to be completely outlawed by an international treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). Thereafter, biological weapons, never high on the list of priorities, slipped even lower. Biological weapons, however, did not disappear with the signing of the BWC.

The international security implications of the biotechnology revolution and the spread of biological weapons began receiving increased attention in the 1990s following revelations about the Soviet and Iraqi BW programs, continued advances in the life sciences, and the emergence of more lethal terrorist groups interested in weapons of mass destruction. This renewed attention, however, has not always translated into a greater understanding of the dangers posed by biological weapons. Government officials and academics frequently lump biological weapons together with nuclear and chemical weapons under the category of WMD or discuss the “chem-bio” threat.

Terms such as WMD and “chem-bio” have hindered our understanding of the international security implications of biological weapons. The widespread use of these labels has obscured important differences between these different weapons and the strategic consequences of their proliferation.

Unlike nuclear and chemical weapons, biological weapons are composed of, or derived from, living organisms. This unique characteristic of biological weapons is at the heart of many of the security challenges posed by them. The diversity of pathogenic microorganisms and toxins that can be used as weapons provides the attacker with flexibility in planning its attack. The sheer number of potential biological warfare agents complicates the task of the defender. The ability of pathogens to replicate themselves inside a host enables an attacker to use only a small amount of a biological weapon to inflict mass casualties. The overlap between the equipment, knowledge, and materials required to develop biological weapons and to conduct civilian biomedical research or develop biological defenses limits the effectiveness of arms control and verification measures and complicates intelligence collection and analysis.

The study of biological weapons reveals a number of paradoxes and dilemmas. Biological weapons are widely feared, yet rarely used. Biological weapons were the first weapon prohibited by an international treaty, yet the proliferation of these weapons increased after they were banned in 1972. Biological weapons are frequently called “the poor man’s atomic bomb,” yet they cannot provide the same deterrent capability as nuclear weapons. One of the goals of my book is to explain the underlying principles of these apparent paradoxes.

In 1969 the United States abandoned its offensive BW program, and in 1972 biological weapons became the first class of weapons to be completely outlawed by an international treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention. Biological weapons, however, did not disappear.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Most people associate the word mocha with coffee. For some it may be a type of coffee bean with a rich deep taste, usually from Yemen or the Horn of Africa. It may also refer to a sugary concoction of coffee mixed with chocolate. For espresso aficionados, a moka is an hourglass-shaped stovetop coffee maker that percolates the beverage upward through the use of steam pressure.

This book brings the term Mocha back to its historical root—a port city on the Red Sea coast of Yemen that the Ottomans cultivated in the early sixteenth century. Known in Arabic as al-Mukha, this small but vibrant port bustled with activity through the nineteenth century. Merchants and pilgrims arrived at Mocha’s jetty from South Asia, the Persian Gulf, the East African coast, other cities in the Middle East and Europe.

The Merchant Houses of Mocha considers the social structure, the key personalities, the urban shape and the architecture of this vibrant city during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, an era when merchants flocked to it in search of valuable commodities such as coffee, but also spices, bulk metals, Indian textiles, aromatics and dyestuffs.

My main contention is that the practices and the protocols of cross-cultural trade were not just economically significant to the city’s livelihood. Rather, the social, cultural, and even spatial dimensions of the trade played a shaping role in determining Mocha’s societal structure, its urban form and layout, the character of its institutions, and its architecture. Furthermore, the effects of the Indian Ocean trade, as filtered through the city of Mocha, penetrated into the heartlands of the southern Arabian Peninsula, reaching even its most inaccessible and remote mountain fortresses.

The wide angle

I embarked on the first stages of research for this book over ten years ago as a graduate student at UCLA, where I was doing my PhD in Islamic art and architectural history. The vibrant, multicultural and migratory population of Los Angeles sparked my interest in the movement of people and the diverse and itinerant urban communities that result from these migrations.

But, such urban diversity is hardly singular to the contemporary moment. The Indian Ocean facilitated the transit of people and goods across extended sea journeys that have connected continental masses fluidly since antiquity. Thousands of miles away from Los Angeles on the Pacific, the early modern city of Mocha on the Red Sea adjacent to the Indian Ocean, with its diverse, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual and itinerant population, emerged as a prime site for such an inquiry.

When I first visited the city of Mocha in 1996, I found that its historic core had been largely destroyed, partially as a result of historic acts of aggressions against the port. For instance the French bombed it in 1737 and the Italians in 1911. Additionally, the trade of the port definitively declined in the nineteenth century when other neighboring ports were chosen to replace Mocha’s prime status, such as Aden by the British and al-Hudayda by the Ottomans.

As any recent visitor to the city will attest to, the present port city is quite impossible to decipher because so few buildings from past centuries remain today. Unlike other historic cities where modern building has been inserted within the earlier fabric, in the case of Mocha, the historic heart has been largely abandoned. The majority of Mocha’s current residents live outside of the previous limits of the city wall, which has been reduced to small and sparse mounds of crumbled brick and rubble ruins.

As a result of this urban decay, my work turned to the spatial reconstruction of the site, relying mostly on texts, both published and archival, but also other types of visual materials, such as historic maps, photographs, and prints. The Merchant Houses of Mocha offers a reconstructed image of this now-ruined city during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. By identifying the locations of earlier residential quarters and the city’s major institutions that no longer stand, such as the retail market and the prison, I put Mocha’s pieces back together.

Beyond architectural reconstruction, I endeavored to capture the social dimensions of port city life. Again, this brings us back to Los Angeles, which, while emblematic as a diverse city, is marked by extreme social stratification. A fixed social hierarchy also dominated Mocha’s urban order. Unlike the traditional social structure of other parts of Yemen, where one’s status was tied to family lineage, tribal affiliation, religious identity, and occupation, this coastal hierarchy privileged the maintenance of the trade as its key prerogative.

The governors of Mocha came from the interior regions of Yemen and oversaw the trade in the interest of filtering its revenue back into the center of Yemen. Ship-owning merchants from the northwestern Indian province of Gujarat and their nakhudhas, or sea captains, were considered to be the city’s main elite. The Baniyans, Hindu and Jain commercial brokers who served as translators, intermediaries, and moneychangers in Mocha, were perhaps the most interesting and least understood of Mocha’s communities. While they were socially marginalized according to their dhimmi (protected religious minority) status, they received certain advantages from the local government because of their economically central role in the maintenance of the trade.

On the quintessential questions about the relationship of the port city to its hinterland and foreland, which have long occupied port city studies, I moved beyond the expected analyses of the economic flows of revenue and assumed fiscal imbrications between center, port, and overseas. The cultural effects of the wider Mocha trade network stretched into the mountains of the Arabian Peninsula and across the Indian Ocean to South Asia, often becoming visible through built nodes—houses, mosques, cisterns, and charitable structures—which were constructed in Mocha, but also in the highlands of Yemen and the port city of Surat in Gujarat.

While the tight and age-old maritime relationship between Yemen and India has been acknowledged duly by previous scholars, the role that the Indian Ocean trade played in penetrating the most remote areas of the southern Arabian Peninsula has not been studied. These areas are often featured as entirely cutoff from external contact, an image that persists even today.

The cultural effects of the wider Mocha trade network stretched into the mountains of the Arabian Peninsula and across the Indian Ocean to South Asia, often becoming visible through built nodes—houses, mosques, cisterns, and charitable structures—which were constructed in Mocha, but also in the highlands of Yemen and the port city of Surat in Gujarat.

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

Everybody knows the idea, now usually humorous, that some people have more accidents than other people. Accident proneness was once a technical term, used to separate some people, identified as accident prone, from dangerous situations. The idea rose and fell from the early to the late twentieth century. It moved from Germany and Britain largely to the United States. But the story of accident proneness also reveals an ugly underbelly of technological development: accidents as humans encountered machines. Accident Prone is a book about technological change, about damage to bodies and property, about implicit social systems. It is a work pioneering the field of the history of accidents.

Technology demands uniformity. People, however, differ individually. From this disjuncture came “misfits of the machine age,” who did not adapt to the machines. The idea of accident proneness for decades helped to identify those people. But in the post-industrial age, engineers and psychologists together worked on technology to make the devices and systems reduce risk. They did not see that they were part of a grand social shift that, as this book points out, has now become obvious.

The wide angle

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, worldwide 1,200,000 people died in traffic accidents alone. A hundred years earlier, industrial accidents were already being counted in the millions. Economic costs were enough to generate corps of experts and social leaders who believed that humans could prevent accidents, and they launched the safety movement. They were joined by many well-meaning people who were appalled by the personal as well as economic costs of the mismatch between humans and machines. But for the most part, the problem of injuries and damage remained little recognized.

Then psychologists noticed that a large percentage of industrial accidents were coming from just a few employees, and the search for accident prone people who could be moved or protected or fired was launched. These psychologists and a number of alert supervisors found that they could use individuals’ accident records to identify accident repeaters and so lower accident rates. Eventually, statisticians cast doubt on the idea of accident proneness as an enduring personal trait. Meanwhile all of society was affected by an insurance model of thinking. In that model, only groups, not individuals, became the objects of concern. At the most, accident prone people became part of a “risk group.” So young, and particularly male drivers paid more for insurance without regard for individual differences.

The most striking change, however, came as engineers began to approach safety by engineering the environments of humans so that they could not get hurt or cause damage. Highway design was the most obvious way to prevent accidents—for example getting rid of certain roadside poles that took out hundreds of cars each year. Psychologists and physiologists began working with engineers to design workplaces, walkways, airplanes, and recreational equipment to fit people instead of worrying about trying to change or isolate the accident prone ones.

Little did the late-twentieth-century engineers, safety experts, and human factors psychologists realize that they were part of a general social shift as technology came to be the dominant social framework, determining styles of thinking and problem solving. If there was a series of accidents in a work site, supervisors did not target particular employees. Instead managers introduced safety guards or equipment changes or environmental changes. Over the years, in advanced economies, it became more and more difficult to press the wrong control or move so as to injure oneself.

Trying to get accident prone people away from dangerous technology did persist in a few areas—but not under that name. The most obvious case was the driver point system, introduced by the state of Connecticut in the 1930s, in which drivers who accumulated a history of traffic errors were denied the right to operate a vehicle. Likewise, airline pilots who made too many mistakes did not last as pilots.

But for most people, accident proneness became a part of folk wisdom, not a technical concept. Accidents had gone from being “acts of God” to matters of individual carelessness and blame. With modern psychology, accident proneness became a trait for which a person was not blamed, but a mark that a person had to have special treatment. With engineering, however, no stigmatizing was necessary—safety resided with the equipment and environment, not the people.

The history of the concept of accident proneness contains two unusual aspects. First, it furnishes a transparent example of simultaneous or multiple discovery in the history of science. As psychologists, factories, and statistics all became conspicuous in Westernized societies around the time of World War I, the idea of accident proneness appeared spontaneously and independently in Germany and Britain. Not until 1926 did developers of the idea become aware of each other. Second, as a pattern of behavioral deviation, the trait of accident proneness should have become a psychiatric syndrome. Despite the widely remarked tendency of physicians to medicalize patterns of behavior, accident proneness never became medicalized and so stands out to show that not all behaviors that could have been, were in fact medicalized in the twentieth century.

Little did the late-twentieth-century engineers, safety experts, and human factors psychologists realize that they were part of a general social shift as technology came to be the dominant social framework, determining styles of thinking and problem solving.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

In this book, I examine the awkward position that scientists find themselves in when they enter environmental policy debates. In such debates experts try to square their appeal as objective, neutral participants with the necessary currency of the policy process—i.e. advocacy and persuasion. To learn about how scientists negotiate this difficult terrain, the book follows policy debates in the United States surrounding acid rain and global climate change. I argue that we cannot understand scientists’ participation without paying close attention to the specific context in which they engage in policy debates.

The book studies scientists in three distinct settings defined by recognizable stages of the policy process—agenda setting, legislation, and policy implementation. The analysis demonstrates that the norms governing scientists’ participation shift as each policy issue evolves.

What is striking, when comparing the nature of scientists’ participation across each stage of the policy process, is the extent to which scientists are allowed to act as advocates during agenda setting. As agenda setters, scientists have a role in placing issues on the formal policy agenda and framing those issues in ways that shape subsequent debate. Such behavior in later stages of policy making is both less likely to occur and more likely to spark conflict.

For example, during congressional testimony about climate change during the particularly hot summer of 1988, renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen declared with “99 percent confidence” that the observed warming trend was attributable to climate change. His statement drew intense criticism from other scientists who felt that Hansen was overstating scientific confidence in predicting climate change.

The scrutiny Hansen faced over this episode, while typical in legislative policymaking, is almost never found in agenda setting. The book points to increasing formalization over the course of the policy process to explain the change in norms governing scientists’ participation. Agenda setting is a fairly informal and unstructured process while legislation and, to an even greater degree, policy implementation are characterized by explicit rules and procedures.

This increase in formality has consequences for scientists who participate in policymaking. Scientists enjoy quite a bit of leeway in deciding how they will balance the need for advocacy in policy settings with the notion of scientific objectivity. In the more formal policymaking settings, scientists face increasing pressure to appear objective.

The wide angle

I came to this subject with a longstanding interest in the role of scientists in US policymaking. Growing up as the daughter of a climate scientist, I gained early exposure to the dual roles that many climate scientists play. On the one hand, they are researchers striving to advance scientific knowledge. On the other, they find themselves bearing the responsibility of raising public awareness about a truly global problem that is beset with uncertainty.

In graduate school, I sifted through thirty years worth of research on the role of science in policymaking and found that scholars had come to a stalemate over the question of whether scientists’ role in policymaking mattered at all. To over-generalize, political scientists tend to downplay the role of scientists and the role of expertise in policy processes. Social scientists who work under the heading of science, technology, and society (STS), on the other hand, argue that science profoundly shapes modern politics, though perhaps not in obvious ways.

As if to emphasize the point that these somewhat calcified positions needed further wrangling, two early reviewers of the book both dismissed the question about scientists in policymaking as old and settled. Luckily for me, each came down on a different side of the putative “settlement”—one reviewer argued everyone knows scientists have no role, and the other contended that scientists’ influence is well established.

These views persist, in part, because studies that ask what role scientists play in policymaking tend to rely on case material drawn from a single setting and do not seriously evaluate the generalizability of their findings. In this longstanding debate, I take a close look at the role that setting plays in shaping scientists’ participation.

My research design has a longitudinal component that tracks changes over time—we see an evolution in the policy debates for both acid rain and climate change. In addition, the research allows for a cross-sectional comparison that highlights common features of the two cases and calls out their respective idiosyncrasies.

The approach is relatively novel and contributes to theories of policymaking by showing the extent to which scientists’ role in agenda setting has been overlooked. While prior studies place agenda setting in the hands of prominent elected officials like presidents and senators, the evidence here suggests that these actors rely heavily on scientists’ framings of policy issues in the environmental domain.

In addition, the book challenges political scientists to consider the specific role of scientists in legislative policymaking. It includes an in-depth analysis of the witnesses participating in congressional hearings on acid rain and climate change. The book also speaks to constructivist approaches to the study of science in society by showing that, although ideas about science and objectivity in policy settings are often contested, not every claim about science and objectivity becomes the subject of debate. In fact, claims about the content of scientific research or who should speak for science are often broadly accepted during environmental policy debates.

The book should appeal to political scientists, STS scholars, those with a general interest in sociopolitical theater, scientists who participate in environmental policy processes, and anyone interested in the legislative and political histories of acid rain and climate change.

As agenda setters, scientists have a role in placing issues on the formal policy agenda and framing those issues in ways that shape subsequent debate. Such behavior in later stages of policy making is both less likely to occur and more likely to spark conflict.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

The narcissistic present forever seeks itself in the past. Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations. But in a world where extinction, not survival, is the rule, the history of failed possibilities and forsaken paths dwarfs the stingy determinism of the linear past. My book is about lost and forgotten things.

Among the casualties of history is an extinct species of professional bureaucrat called the “cameralist.” There’s nothing sexy about eighteenth-century German bureaucrats, but in their day these self-appointed scientists of the state imagined that they were in the vanguard of history. The Disordered Police State is about them.

Most people today, even in Germany, have never heard of cameralists, but they were a big deal once, members of a budding professional class, like doctors and lawyers. Universities, catering to these new administrative professionals, hired professors, who in turn developed elaborate curriculums to train them. The textbooks, lectures and treatises that these professors wrote have come to be known as the “cameral sciences.” The books published by cameralists—and there are thousands of them—rest largely forgotten on the shelves of German libraries. That does not mean, however, that these sciences of state have been without effect. On the contrary, they have served to sustain some of our most robust narratives about science, state building, and modernity. Scientific administrators, rationalizing and bureaucratizing the backward lands of central Europe, appear in our histories as the shock troops of modernity.

The Disordered Police State cuts against the grain of these histories. In it I argue that we cannot take the sciences of state at face value, because they often served as fiscal propaganda for treasuries and governments. Cameralists, on the hunt for salaries and positions, served as public relations men for the territories in which they lived and worked. Their writings painted rosy pictures of princes dedicated to the common good; but behind closed doors, in the secret spaces of princely chambers, they dedicated themselves to fleecing the people.

In the guts of the book I demonstrate how it all worked, tracking my protagonists through the fields, forests, mines and universities of early modern Germany. I examine what they published, and I compare it to what they did. In case after case, scientific administrators wrote one thing and did another. They wrote about the general welfare while defrauding the state; they published on scientific agriculture while mismanaging farms; and they painted beautiful pictures of well-ordered police states even as they benefited from a disordered world. We have mostly taken their writings at face value, as if their “descriptive” and “practical” sciences reflected actually existing things. By questioning the status of these sources, my book suggests that many of our histories about state and science in the Enlightenment have been built on rotten foundations.

The wide angle

I was trained in the history of science, a field much concerned with the relationship between discourse and practice. This influenced the course of my research, which was driven by one simple question: what did these scientific administrators actually do, and how did it relate to what they published?

It is common knowledge that some of the most prominent cameralists had careers as state officials. Historians, political scientists and sociologists have thus mostly assumed that the sciences of state reflected administrative practice. But hardly anybody has bothered to check on that. So I spent years traipsing through Germany and pawing through local archives.

What I discovered was surprising: the secret discourse of the treasury contradicted the public discourse of state administration. In other words, scientific administrators said vastly different things in secret than they did in public. Many of their published writings were meant not to rationalize the state, but to make the prince and his government look good.

So who cares if a group of largely forgotten author-administrators misled the public once? I care because our larger narratives about science, economic development, and the Enlightenment rest on the foundation of stories like this one. It may be, for example, that a certain scientific culture, incubated in the European Enlightenment, helped spark the Industrial Revolution. But I don’t believe it, because the sources are suspect.

Admittedly, it can be daunting to revisit the sources: there are a lot of them, and they can be very dull. Faced by walls of obscure history books at the library, or forced to listen to some interminable lecture about agricultural improvements in early modern Bavaria, it is tempting to leave all of this to the “experts,” those with the time, patience and knowledge to sift through the material. This assumes however that history books, neutral and objective, simply regurgitate the distilled contents of the past. We should not conflate monotony with neutrality.

William James once joked that modern experimental psychology could only have arisen in Germany, a place whose inhabitants were incapable of being bored. You could say the same thing about the history of state administration: perhaps only Germans could have produced the intimidating, detailed, colossal administrative histories that helped make Prussia, with its well-disciplined soldiers and anal-retentive bureaucrats, into the ideal type of a modernizing state. More recent variations, like Foucault’s celebrated riff on the disciplined bodies of Prussian infantrymen, have only served to cement that reputation.

But it is time to rethink the evidence upon which these claims rest. 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. It is the vicious circle of anachronism.

Though the living try to winnow meaning from the chaos of history, they often discover only themselves among the dead generations.

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Thinking in Place is a collection of nine essays written over the last five years of moving around the world.

Each essay is located in a place but sometimes the places are conceptual. So some essays are located in a geographical place such as Venice, while others are about Museums in general and the relationship of artists as cultural producers to the “collection” of objects that comprise museums and the attitudes of most curators and directors about the making of art. One essay is about “Gandhi’s Body” and how he used his body and his evolving nakedness to reflect his inner condition and how powerful his approach and his image became for the world.

The writing is poetic in nature but it is also narrative, philosophical, and theoretical. It is hard to characterize. And, the issues I cover range from the life of artists and art schools to the massacre of civilians in My Lai, Vietnam. The writing of each piece really reflects the way in which I thought about the place that generated the idea itself.

The book is about wandering as a way of organizing the experience of the world—wandering on the physical plane but also on the intellectual plane, moving within one’s mind. I wanted to reflect my thought-process as closely as possible. The first piece is about the complexity of my own half-Jewish, half-Catholic identity and its location in the streets of Brooklyn and in a small mining town in Western Pennsylvania. Ultimately, this identity-dilemma is about becoming a writer and recognizing that I couldn’t “live” anywhere, wholly, except inside the act of writing itself.

The wide angle

The book really does reflect my years of thinking and training as an intellectual—as a public intellectual. Each of the essays evolved in response to a place and then to an opportunity to write and then “give” the essays in a public context. Sometimes I read them as lectures or keynotes many times before the final essay is developed. They are the product of an engaged intellectual life.

I put ideas out into the public arena and get feedback in the form of conversation, public and private dialogues. I then rework the writing. Often the essays were first published in one context—a performance studies journal or art magazine, or a cultural studies publication—and then refined and developed again until they were perfected for the book. They have done their time in a crucible of interaction.

I studied with philosopher Herbert Marcuse when I was a student at University of California, San Diego. So, although I was educated to be a professor of English and American literature, in fact, I became a cultural theorist very much influenced by the work and thinking of the Frankfurt School. I think that orientation is apparent in the way in which I go about understanding the world and also in the inherent optimism of my thinking.

I am also trained as a literary critic who became a writer about art; therefore, so much of what I write about concerns art and artists. I am also deeply an educator—and have spent years teaching and administrating art schools. Watching the new generation of cultural workers in art and design emerge has deeply affected how I think about the cultural arena. I am constantly surrounded by young people who will be the artists of the next decades. This allows me to track the evolution of consciousness through art, culture, and design.

But I am not an art or design historian. In truth, I have invented my own approach to art and culture, with a deep orientation to progressive political thinking. I admire Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman, Rebecca Solnit, and William Blake, all of who express wonderful ideas in fascinating ways. I would feel very fortunate for my writing ever to be associated with theirs.

I am constantly surrounded by young people who will be the artists of the next decades. This allows me to track the evolution of consciousness through art, culture, and design.

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

The Creation and Destruction of Value focuses on parallels and differences between the current financial crisis and the Great Depression, and asks whether today’s crisis—like that of the Great Depression—might lead to a reversal of globalization, or a significant change in globalization. The Great Depression not only produced a renationalization of politics and economics, but it also led to profound changes in the global geo-political balance.

Almost every contemporary use of the depression analogy takes the year 1929 as a reference point. But there are really two completely different pathologies during the Great Depression, which involve different diagnoses and different cures: they can be labeled in shorthand as 1929 (the Wall Street crash and the beginning of a bad downturn in the U.S.) and 1931 (a banking and financial crisis in Central Europe and South America, which through contagion spread to the U.S. and tuned a bad downturn into the Great Depression).

1929 has been popular with academic and political commentators since it provides a clear motive for taking particular policy measures. Keynesians have been able to demonstrate that government fiscal demand can stabilize the expectations of the market, and thus provide an overall framework of stability. Monetarists have an alternative but rather parallel story of how stable monetary growth means that radical perturbations are avoided.

But there are no obvious macro-economic answers to financial distress of the 1931 kind. As a consequence, the effects of this type of crisis are much longer-lived. The answers, if they exist, lie in the slow and painful cleaning up of balance sheets; and in micro-economic restructuring, which cannot be simply imposed from above by an all-wise planner but requires many businesses and individuals to change their outlook and behavior. The improvement of regulation and supervision, while a good idea, is better suited to avoiding future crises than dealing with the consequences of a catastrophe that has already occurred.

The wide angle

Ten years ago, I began writing a book on the phenomenon of globalization, in part in order to try to understand the bitter debate which pitted globalization protesters against international institutions that were attempting to manage the inherently chaotic process of increased flows of goods, capital, and labor. How permanent and how stable was globalization?

The book that resulted from my reflections then, The End of Globalization, also published by Harvard University Press, in 2001, suggested that globalization was reversible, and that indeed in the interwar period the Great Depression had finally ended the sustained era of globalization that opened up with the steamship and the transatlantic cable in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In that book I also suggested that the anti-globalization protest movement had no widely appealing ideology that was capable of creating a new model of order supplanting globalization. In that sense the anti-globalization protest movement around the turn of the century was not analogous to the anti-system movements on the left and right that marked the interwar era, those of communists and fascists.

Ten years later, there is an obvious urgency about the crisis. The complaint against global institutions is not that they are too strong or too interventionist, that they detract from national sovereignty, but that they are too ineffective in the face of a financial crisis of a magnitude whose only precedent is in the Great Depression.

the anti-globalization protest movement around the turn of the century was not analogous to the anti-system movements on the left and right that marked the interwar era, those of communists and fascists

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

My book offers a new look at a familiar subject, Executive Order 9066 and the removal and confinement of West Coast Japanese Americans during World War II (commonly called the Japanese internment).

I realize that it may come as a surprise to readers that there is anything new to say after all the memoirs, histories, plays, documentaries, and so forth that have appeared on this subject. Part of it is that my book takes account of a whole mass of new scholarship, including my own research, and of different newly available sources. This new information deepens our knowledge of the wartime events, though it does not really change our view. What is very new and transformative about the book, on the other hand, is that it daringly breaks through the narrow framework of time and space in which the subject has always been discussed.

First, I go beyond the wartime period and discuss the postwar and prewar years. And not just as backstory—this is a main part of the narrative. In particular, the book reveals for the first time the massive government surveillance of Japanese communities during the 1930s, and the construction by the Army and the Justice Department of what were termed concentration camps for enemy aliens. All of this helps show how much of a momentum for mass suspicion and arbitrary treatment of Japanese Americans on a racial basis had been created even before the war.

More importantly, A Tragedy of Democracy is the first-ever North American history of confinement. The book breaks new ground by looking at the history of the camps in the United States alongside the Canadian government’s wartime removal of 22,000 citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast of British Columbia. I also compare official policy toward Japanese Americans with that in wartime Hawaii, where fears of “local Japanese” led to a declaration of martial law after Pearl Harbor, the establishment of a military dictatorship, and replacement of civilian courts by military tribunals. I also shed new light on the histories of the Japanese Latin Americans kidnapped from their home countries and interned in the United States, plus the 5,000 Japanese expelled from Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

By studying Japanese American confinement within a continental—indeed international—pattern, we can learn more about its causes as well as the results for its victims.

The wide angle

This book is the final product of a long train of circumstances and developments. It was more than ten years ago that I started doing research on the signing of Executive Order 9066, for what ultimately became my first book, By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans, published by Harvard in 2001.

At first, I was interested mostly in filling a hole in the existing historiography: books on the confinement of Japanese Americans ignored the role of President Franklin Roosevelt, while books on Roosevelt did not discuss Japanese Americans. In the process of research, I not only found much more new information than I expected—or that I could fit into one volume—but I realized just how much the wartime removal of Japanese Americans has influenced American society, literature, and law. In fact, it has become one of those central events in American life, a central historical reference point in public debate and the subject of numerous fictional works, exhibits and commemorations by both Japanese Americans and others.

Yet I realized that most ordinary people did not know a great deal about what happened. Thus, once I finished the Roosevelt book I decided to write a short study that would give a clear and easy-to-follow version of the scholarly consensus in regard to Japanese American confinement.

The need seemed even more pressing after the September 11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which reopened old debates about immigration, race, and patriotism. I realized just how vital the issue of Japanese confinement and its proper understanding was when the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin published a popular work challenging the consensus narrative and defending the government’s wartime removal policy as a successful instance of racial profiling.

My interest in retelling the story, though, was increasingly overshadowed by an uneasy sense that the accepted version was inadequate—though not mistaken—and that more needed to be done to flesh it out. As I said, my inspiration came in part from own experience of immigrating to Canada and teaching in Montreal, which led me to study American History from a North American point of view. As I learned Canada’s history, I saw both parallels and differences with developments in the United States. Both of these were useful to study, as they tested widespread assumptions by Americans that our national history and culture are unique. In the same way, as I read up further on the wartime treatment of Japanese Canadians, and discovered how deeply they had been victimized by their own removal policy, I was very surprised that no book had really examined the similarities and differences between the two. It dawned on me that a comparative North American study would be interesting.

Another revelation came when I visited Hawaii for the first time in 2006. I had always heard that Hawaii was a place of overall racial harmony and good relations, and that the Japanese Americans had been spared mass removal during World War II thanks to the enlightened policies of the military government in power during those years. During my trip, however, I heard some of the stories of martial law and of the military tribunals that had dispensed arbitrary justice.

I slowly realized that the apparent contradiction between tolerance and authoritarianism was in fact not so absolute: the military governor in Hawaii had indeed refused to round up masses of Japanese Americans, and had ultimately allowed Americans of Japanese ancestry to join the Army and prove their loyalty. Yet, almost in the same breath, the Army proclaimed that the presence of so many Japanese Americans at large was a danger.

Indeed, as the years went by after Pearl Harbor, and the threat of an invasion by Tokyo became less and less plausible, Army commanders increasingly played the race card, justifying military rule over civilians on the basis that the menace of Japanese Americans made it necessary. There was an essential connection between the military invasions of constitutional rights of Japanese Americans both on the mainland and in Hawaii. In the process, I realized that the book had to look at events in transnational fashion, to look beyond the mainland United States.

Ironically, even though I am recounting a seemingly familiar story, there is actually a rather more original research in this book than in By Order of the President. Part of this is that I had the good fortune to be around for the explosion of internet-searchable documents as a research tool over the past few years. I found all sorts of sources—newspaper articles, interview transcripts, legal briefs, census records, and finding aids. The information is also the result of several years of devoting considerable time to poring over sources from the period in different libraries and archives.

the apparent contradiction between tolerance and authoritarianism was in fact not so absolute: the military governor in Hawaii had indeed refused to round up masses of Japanese Americans, and had ultimately allowed Americans of Japanese ancestry to join the Army and prove their loyalty. Yet, almost in the same breath, the Army proclaimed that the presence of so many Japanese Americans at large was a danger

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

For more than a generation, the conservative counterrevolution in America blurred the distinction between the invisible hand of the market and the all-powerful hand of God. In the “culture wars” explanation of the Republican ascendancy, gullible voters allowed themselves to be distracted from hard economic issues by cultural sideshows like abortion and homosexuality. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” asked the Left in frustration. Why did those people in the pews keep enabling a political order that demonstrably undermined their security? Weren’t Jerry Falwell and Milton Friedman rather unlikely bedfellows, after all?

To Serve God and Wal-Mart traces this paradoxical pairing of evangelical religion and free-market economics through the specific history of the world’s largest company. “If you want to reach the Christian population on Sunday, you do it from the church pulpit,” said the head of the Christian Coalition in 1995. “If you want to reach them on Saturday, you do it in Wal-Mart.”

Beginning in the Ozark Mountains in the 1920s, the book traces the people, ideas, institutions, and resources that built Wal-Mart and then in turn supported its international success. Based on years of research in the Ozarks and Central America, To Serve God and Wal-Mart approaches the paradigmatic service corporation on its own terms rather than as a factory manqué. I argue that the rise of “family values”—of intense religious concern with physical and social reproduction—depended on the rise of the service economy in America, or the replacement of productive industries with reproductive ones.

As factories fled for the border and Wal-Mart surpassed Exxon-Mobil and General Motors to become the largest corporation on earth, work in the United States came increasingly to look like home. The feminization of work—that is, the demand for traditionally female “people skills” like patience, communicativeness, and nurturance—threw the old heroic narrative of masculine productivity into a crisis. A new Christian emphasis on service offered both a pattern for organizing the service workplace and an ethos for valuing that work, now performed by men as well as women.

The part-time service jobs, Bible study groups, marriage retreats, Christian colleges, megachurches, and mission trips of the Sun Belt offered a new way to find meaning in work. From its check-out lines to its stripped-down headquarters to its wide-reaching ideological philanthropies, Wal-Mart shows how the old home-turf of Populism came to consider markets only a little lower than the angels.

The wide angle

Histories of the long, prosperous liberal consensus in the middle of the twentieth century looked back to the specific experience of the industrial North. The people and institutions of the New Deal order were urban, modern, radical, immigrant, internationalist. But rural Southerners made up influential segments of labor, management, and consumers for the economy that displaced Detroit after World War II. They drew on quite different experiences to build Fordism’s successor in the rising Sun Belt.

In Wal-Mart’s home territory, the company was largely staffed with people who left farms for service jobs without ever passing through factories. They brought different ideologies with them—not the dynamo but the dime store, not the union but the Pentecostal church, not the heroic myths of industry but the parables of Christian service. When the American economy grew to its post-war dominance, then, it carried these traditions to an international stage. The economic vision we call neoliberalism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics, or free-market fundamentalism could also claim the title of Wal-Martism.

For the New Deal’s redistributive policies ironically pulled capital out of the industrial Northeast and down Route 66. Then as now, the robust defenders of capitalism saw no contradiction in building private enterprise on public subsidy. So long as the state relinquished any right to oversight, the Sun Belt’s champions of free enterprise would deign to cash the checks—as would the burgeoning faith-based sector.

With its infrastructure in part underwritten by the public, Christian free enterprise grew up through the new service industries of the South and West. Just as the shock of factory discipline had reverberated through the culture of an earlier century, the new experience of mass service employment demanded a new ethos of service to dignify it. On the job, at church, and in many evangelical homes, this elevation of service work—reproductive labor—evolved into the Biblically-inflected management philosophy of “servant leadership.”

Caught up in a regional revival, the white working mothers who staffed the stores changed the nature of their work as surely as the Flint sit-down strikers had a generation earlier. But the labor victories at the early Wal-Mart addressed different priorities, and so didn’t register within the terms set by the old industrial narrative. To Serve God and Wal-Mart uncovers these hidden struggles, without whitewashing the fundamental moral violence of a Wal-Mart economy.

the rise of “family values”—of intense religious concern with physical and social reproduction—depended on the rise of the service economy in America, or the replacement of productive industries with reproductive ones

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

The book criticizes an attitude I call “global legalism,” the faith or hope that international law can solve the word’s problems even though the world is a largely anarchical place, one with weak institutions and an incredibly diverse array of peoples.

This view is hardly new, and criticisms of it are not new, either. But in the last twenty years, global legalism has taken hold with renewed force, thanks in part to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the acceleration of international cooperation that followed that collapse, and the profound but brief sense that all the nations were converging to liberal democracy.

The book is not entirely negative about international law. It argues that international structures that assume good will and global consensus are bound to fail, and that nations should concentrate on less ambitious forms of international law that take seriously the national interests of states and the limited forms of cooperation that are possible.

So the book is about both the promise of international law and the limits of international law. For those who have adopted the book’s perspective, the supposedly “lawless” behavior of the United States under George Bush would not have been a surprise, nor would Barack Obama’s decision to continue with many of Bush’s policies rather than to make a clean break with them. The United States will act in its interest, and when international law blocks the way, it will violate the law unless the negative consequences are greater than the benefits. This is the way all nations view international law; it is just that American actions are more noticeable because of that country’s power and importance.

The wide angle

International legal scholars have, with only a few exceptions, taken a largely uncritical approach to the international legal institutions that they study. Compliance with international law is taken for granted, and the argument has mainly concerned how international law should be advanced. But compliance is the central problem of international law.

If compliance is assumed to occur, then there is little to debate—we might as well create as much international law as possible. Because states have trouble cooperating, they can only punish law violators with difficulty, with the result that states can often violate international law with impunity. The challenge for scholars, politicians, and diplomats is to design forms of international law that are robust and to recognize the outer limits of what international law can accomplish.

This position is controversial among international law scholars, but it is more common among political scientists, many of whom are skeptical of the efficacy of international law, and others of whom have focused the critical tools of rational choice on them. My book follows in this latter tradition: it attempts to understand international law as the result of states rationally following their national interest.

The major question is how much trust can we put in international law and institutions. Should the United Nations be treated as a kind of proto-government of the world, or as an occasionally useful mechanism for coordinating the actions of the great powers? On the first view, we should work to reform and improve the United Nations; on the second view, we should use it when it is useful and not otherwise. Should international courts be understood as the ultimate arbiters of international justice or occasionally useful devices for resolving low-level disputes between states? On the first view, we should put our energy into constructing and supporting international courts; on the second view, we should use them only when necessary. Do human rights treaties cause states to improve their treatment of their citizens, or are they largely meaningless? On the first view, our efforts should center on the existing human rights treaties; on the second view, we might think more about other ways of helping people, for example, through development aid. I take the skeptical side in these debates.

I began writing about international law in the late 1990s after a colleague pointed out that my longstanding interest in rational choice explanations of decentralized behavior, social norms, and similar phenomena could be applied to international law. Much of social behavior is effectively unregulated—the government doesn’t regulate our friendships or much of our family life or even, it turns out, much of the business world. International relations are similarly unregulated. This parallel—the absence of (national) government in our social lives, and the absence of (world) government in international relations—got me thinking about international law.

compliance is the central problem of international law

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

Having taught philosophy and religion at Williams College for thirty-six years and now at Columbia University, I had long considered writing a book that would bring together abstract ideas and the concrete experiences and dilemmas of human life in the form of a philosophical memoir. For many people, the writings of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida, which lie at the heart of my academic work, are so abstract that they often seem irrelevant. Since my student days, however, I have always found that these writers illuminate questions we all ask and decisions we all face. Over the years, my intellectual life has been suspended between Hegel, who is a speculative systematic thinker par excellence, and Kierkegaard, who probes individual subjectivity with unparalleled insight.

I have written many books over the years on subjects as diverse as philosophy, religion, literature, literary criticism, art, architecture, technology, and economics. In addition, I have published artistic books, done some art and even had an exhibition, Grave Matters, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Though I did not realize it at the time, there is a coherence to all this work that has only become clear as I look back.

Of my latest two books, After God represents an effort to integrate the many strands of my thought. After God is my most Hegelian book. Field Notes from Elsewhere is, by contrast, my most Kierkegaardian book.

Field Notes is a meditation on personal experiences, friends, family, teaching and many other topics. I have also included 120 photographs that are either from family albums or that I took for the book. Rather than a continuous narrative, I tell the story in 52 chapters, each of which has an AM and a PM section. The book begins with a meditation on dawn and ends with reflections on dusk. I regard the book as a cross between a diary, a book of hours and a family photograph album. Each chapter is a three-or-four-page meditation on paired topics like: Premonitions/Postcards, Abandonment/ Mortality, Pleasure/Money, Solitude/Loneliness, Failure/Success, Imperfection/ Vulnerability, Love/Fidelity, Hope/Despair.

The wide angle

The point of departure for the book is a severe illness I suffered in December 2005. As a result of a biopsy, I went into septic shock and suddenly fell critically ill. For two days a team of forty doctors, many of whom did not think I would live, worked to save my life. During the first night, I realized things could go either way but thought I was out of the woods by morning. I was not; my condition remained serious and would not stabilize for several weeks. After five days in the intensive care unit and ten in the hospital, I was released. Five months later, I underwent surgery for cancer. These experiences have changed my life in ways I still am trying to understand.

Though my experiences were severe, they are not unique; indeed, everybody faces many similar difficulties in life. In Field Notes, I have tried to convey how the lessons I have learned from forty years of reading, writing and teaching help us understand and cope with such experiences. My approach is not analytic but narrative; that is to say, I make my points by telling stories about myself, family, friends, students and colleagues. Needless to say, such a book raises difficult questions about what to reveal and what to conceal about oneself as well as others.

The tone of the book is meditative and I hope it will provide the occasion for readers to reflect on how the questions I ponder affect their own lives.

This not a book that should be read quickly or straight through. To the contrary, it should be read slowly, picking it up and putting it down and giving oneself time to think. Kierkegaard always said that his works were mirrors in which people could see their own lives reflected. I hope Field Notes will also work this way.

my intellectual life has been suspended between Hegel, who is a speculative systematic thinker par excellence, and Kierkegaard, who probes individual subjectivity with unparalleled insight

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

My book is about the peoples who are often referred to as “barbarians” during the period commonly known as “the Dark Ages.” I argue that far from being the uncivilized and unaccomplished peoples whom many Late Roman writers described, the communities of the early Middle Ages achieved great heights in artistic creativity, technology, manufacturing, and commerce.

The special approach of Barbarians to Angels is to use the archaeological evidence of these peoples, rather than trying to understand them by taking at face value the assertions of Roman writers. The Romans were not part of these societies. So I use the direct evidence of material culture to understand how people of early medieval Europe fashioned their social, economic, and religious worlds.

The wide angle

I have always been interested in applying the techniques of archaeology to understand peoples who were described by others but who left no written record themselves. Julius Caesar’s descriptions of the people the Romans called “Gauls” is one prime example, Tacitus’s accounts of the “Germans” is another. My training in anthropology helps me to understand societies on their own terms, rather than interpreting them through the eyes of others. The rich archaeological evidence from Late Roman and early medieval Europe makes such an approach possible.

That evidence enables us to look in detail at how people in the period AD 400-800 built their houses and organized their settlements; how they fashioned their tools, weapons, and personal ornaments; how they practiced religious rituals; and how they expressed status relationships in their social systems through funerary ritual.

Archaeological study of workshops indicates both the kinds of crafts that people practiced and the scale of production. Study of imported objects shows us that, contrary to the image some people have of small, isolated communities during the Dark Ages, communities of that time had access to goods not only from all over Europe, but from Africa and Asia as well.

My approach in this book is informed to a large extent by my experience conducting fieldwork—archaeological excavations—on settlements in late prehistoric Europe. One of the sites at which I have excavated, at Kelheim on the Danube River in Bavaria, Germany, was the location of a substantial town at the time that Julius Caesar was campaigning in what is now France in the course of his conquest of Gaul (middle of the last century BC).

The experience of excavating and recovering the direct physical remains of the daily activities of people who lived 2000 years ago gives one a deep appreciation for the ways that material culture links past and present. For example, we recovered charred grain from the meals people prepared, pottery out of which they ate their meals, iron tools that they used to build their houses, and debris from the smelting of ore to make the iron with which they fashioned those tools. Materials such as decorated fine ceramics, figural images on the coins they minted, and brightly colorful glass bracelets and beads allow us to see not only the economic aspects of their daily lives, but also the ways in which they expressed their aesthetic sensibilities. Working directly with such objects provides a feeling for how material culture relates to peoples’ lives and values, both in the past and in the present.

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

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

Buying Power traces the origins and development of consumer activism in America from the 1760s to the present. Historians and other scholars have written about discrete boycotts or closely conjoined sets of boycotts (such as those of the 1760s and 1770s). My book, by contrast, treats consumer activism as a continuous and significant American political tradition.

To say that boycotts constitute a political tradition is not to claim that that tradition was monolithic. From the beginning, boycotts were deployed by groups with very different political agendas. Two chapters early in my book, for example, contrast antebellum America’s abolitionist boycotters of slave-made goods and white Southern proponents of “non intercourse” with the North. These groups employed nearly-identical tactics to promote antithetical goals, putting their shared belief in the power of organized consumption to work for opposing causes.

One advantage of studying consumer activism from a long-term perspective, then, is that this vantage reveals that recent conservative boycotts (such as the Southern Baptist boycott of the Disney corporation) are not departures from a monolithic “progressive” tradition.

Another advantage of studying consumer activism from a long-term perspective is that it makes salient both the continuities and transformations within this more than two-century tradition, setting into relief aspects of consumer politics that developed and changed over time.

It was not until the twentieth century that consumer politics came to be characterized by a conception of “the consumer” as needing protection. Moreover, it was in this period that there emerged self-described consumer organizations, groups that saw their task as representing, defending and lobbying for consumers themselves. These groups established consumers as one interest group among many in a pluralistic society—rather than as an embodiment of that society, as consumers had been thought of by most nineteenth century consumer activists.

These groups coalesced in the 1930s into something known as the “consumer movement,” an organized political effort on behalf of consumers, whose chief aim was, as Helen Sorenson described it in her 1941 book, The Consumer Movement, “protecting and promoting the consumer interest.” The federal government itself came to understand the protection of the consumer interest as one of its duties, starting with the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, through the various consumer advisory boards of the New Deal, and through the President’s Special Assistant for Consumer Affairs, begun under President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s.

What distinguished the “consumer movement” from previous and contemporaneous movements of consumers was precisely this emphasis on consumers themselves as the chief beneficiaries of political activism. By contrast, neither Revolutionary boycotters, “free produce” campaigners, nor even the turn-of-the-twentieth-century founders of the National Consumers’ League saw themselves as part of a “consumer movement.” Rather, these groups mobilized consumers not for the benefit of consumers but on behalf of the nation, the slave, the worker, or the poor.

The wide angle

Long distance solidarity is perhaps the key concept I explore in this book. Consumer activists were among the first Americans to declare that moral agency should not be dictated by geography. They did so not for abstract reasons (about human brotherhood, for example) or because they necessarily held that every person on earth was equally worthy. The claim for the importance of long distance solidarity was far more concrete. Consumer activists argued that consumers’ actions had a direct impact on the people who made and sold the goods they bought. Consumers in the aggregate held tremendous power over these people and thus had a concomitant responsibility to exercise this power in an ethical fashion.

In making this claim about consumer power and responsibility, consumer activists consistently challenged contemporary standards of moral responsibility: not, as did most critics, because those standards set the bar too high, but because they set it too low.

Humanitarianism in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and philanthropy in the twentieth and twenty-first have urged individuals to feel sympathy for, and to alleviate the suffering of, others, typically through charitable donations. But they have not held the individuals whose donations and support they seek responsible for that suffering. By contrast, consumer activists, from the late eighteenth century onward, posited a networked world (hence their favored metaphors of the web and the chain), in which there existed no guilt-free observers. If humanitarians and philanthropists urged Good Samaritans to step in after the suffering for which they bore no responsibility, consumer activists held shoppers liable for the suffering.

Consumer choices, in their view, were inevitably moral choices as well. Consumer activists proclaimed the “death of moral distance,” long before recent debates about the need to “think globally.” No matter how far away physically, victims of deleterious consuming practices were not unrelated to consumers in a moral sense. Consumer activists, in effect, proposed a new physics of time and space, highlighting the real-time effects of consumption and suggesting that in an increasingly networked economy, the moral impact of one’s actions was not determined by physical propinquity but by the market-based effects of one’s economic actions.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the logic of consumer activism held that consumption might and probably did influence the morality of one’s relationships with the distant and unknown workers who produced the goods one bought—as well as with their employers, environment, and countries.

Consumer activists proclaimed the “death of moral distance,” long before recent debates about the need to “think globally.”

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

This book started almost ten years ago. Initially, I wanted to know what were the conditions under which a civilization could produce science afresh.

I was trained in ancient Semitics, and mathematics, but I was always interested in these rumors that the general reader knows about, that the great invention of science was a really Greek project. And that everything else is either a shadow or a continuation of the classic antiquity.

Growing up, you assimilate these paradigms. You begin to think that these are the normal things. But then, trained in mathematics, and beginning to read a little bit of what was produced in the Islamic civilization, in science, I grew curious. I grew curious because I began to note that some of the science produced was not a shadow of the Greek project. It was more re-focusing of light, a new way of looking at things, which the Greeks did not know.

I began to also wonder about a fact that many a student of history and general reader would know. That there was this period of fantastical effervescence in the classical Greek tradition, say from the 4^th century BC to the 2^nd century AD. All the major names that we can think of happen to be in this period, all the major classics, in every discipline you can think of, from Plato to Aristotle to Ptolemy to Euclid to Diophantus to Galen to Dioscorides. And all comes to an end by the 2^nd century. Then nothing happened. And then, all of a sudden, we begin to hear, in the 9^th century, of the crazy caliphs of Baghdad who are spurring this and that, translating this and that, incorporating all of the Greek material.

To me, this sounds totally ahistorical. Politicians that I know, or that I read about, usually do not do that. Why would the rulers of Baghdad in the 9^th century be any wiser than any of today’s politicians? I wanted to know what triggered that interest in Greek science, after a lapse of seven hundred years. What were the social, economic, the political and personal motivations of the scientists who produced this modern science?

The wide angle

The first two chapters of the book propose a completely new reading of this period. I don’t believe that things drop from heaven. That all of a sudden one caliph or one man can make a difference of reviving the whole culture. Cultures are not defined like that.

The Islamic culture’s definition of itself as Islamic was something new. This is the first time that we have a religion undertaking the project of creating a political entity, and defining itself in political terms. It is a political-religious environment, inspired by the Qur’an and by the life of the Prophet, that begins to define the culture. The Prophet speaks of himself as a continuation of the lines of prophecy known from the Old and New Testaments. He sees himself as the culmination, not as a rebellion.

At its zenith the Islamic Empire was the largest empire that human civilization had even known. Its geographical expansion was immense. And it came as an heir to two earlier empires, the Roman Empire, and the Sasanian Empire.

Administering an empire is not a joke. And this was an empire plagued with fundamental problems. On the one hand, it had to stay very close to the inspiration of the religious morality, and the religious context of life, and on the other hand, it had to act, on everyday basis, enacting the political system.

Running an empire means that a political leader is responsible for the wellbeing of his subjects, for the economy, for the defense, for public health. I realized the immensity of the difficulty that a caliph would have. Would he get to think, all of a sudden, about this ancient Greek text that would be nice to translate? Of course, not. But this was the realization that gave me the clues as to how to read the texts that recorded the history of that empire.

Once you look at the social and economic conditions, on the ground, you begin to see that there were serious needs for harmonizing the administrations of two previous empires. They even spoke two different languages, none of them Arabic. The Byzantine Empire conducted its business in Greek, the Sasanian empire in Pahlavi (ancient Persian).

Translating the bureaucratic procedures of the earlier empires into the new language was the first step in the act of administering the empire.

The mere harmonizing of the terms for the new bureaucracy would include the subdivision of terrain for collecting taxes. And in turn this would include elementary mathematical and astronomical treatises on surveying and the setting of calendars and such things as length of daylight times of rising and setting of stars, etc. Think also about elementary medicine, the need to take care of public health. There was, in other words, need for sophisticated science. Science was needed for building a better empire than the one defeated.

I used to read before about this son of a caliph who aspired to become a caliph, but who didn’t get to become one, and who, to compensate himself, began to be interested in alchemy. (In fact, the first texts that we hear were being translated into the Arabic from Greek were the alchemical and astrological texts.) In our traditional understanding of alchemy, this fellow was trying to make gold. So you would smile about this silly dream of this guy who did not make the caliphate and who didn’t make the gold either.

But it turns out that he was interested in the real proportion of gold and other alloys that you have to combine to create a unit of currency. You cannot establish a new empire without a coin. And in this period, the 7^th century, the 8^th century, the only people who knew how to do this were in alchemy. They knew how to measure, with minute weights. This explains the interest in alchemy, and why alchemical texts were translated.

The longer the stability period, the higher the production of science. Times of turmoil are not very conducive to science. Abdulmalek Ibn Marwan ruled for about twenty years, from 685 to 705. Throughout this period, all bureaucratic transactions had to be conducted in Arabic. Which meant that the bureaucrats either had to be born into the language or had to learn the language. And this also meant that the bureaucrats who had been in place before the new empire were no longer needed.

Sociologically, if a group of bureaucrats is laid off, no longer needed in the empire, as a group, what would their natural reaction be? You have few choices: You can go into oblivion. Or you can specialize into what the new empire requires and come back with a much more sophisticated knowledge.

This is indeed what happened. The next generation of those who were discarded from the bureaucracy of the empire came back. You begin to see their names: the private physician of the caliph, the private astronomer of the caliph, the chief of this and that. It is this competition with the ones who took their fathers’ jobs that perked these individuals to master the more sophisticated sciences.

And here is a motivation as to why the major Greek classical texts that were forgotten for seven hundred years had to be picked up. Because now you have a new competitive environment, you come back with the new competitive knowledge to be able to compete with the people who replaced your father in the bureaucracy.

This explains the translation of Greek texts much better than the dream of a caliph to know what Aristotle had said. It is the one who gains employment from what Aristotle said, and from what Euclid said, and from what Diophantus said, and from what Galen said, who pushes for their translations. These people, once they armed themselves with these master texts, they could gain employment at a higher level in the bureaucracy than the ones that replaced their fathers.

The first two chapters of the book tell the story of the birth of science as a response to the sheer needs of the new empire, and explain why this science flourished; they take account of the competitive conditions that the new empire created. It is all economic, political, to the bone.

Religion remains important. Islam, as a new religion to the empire, spurred also new questions that were never anticipated in the Greek tradition.

For example, as a Muslim, you have to pray, five times a day. And you have to pray in a specific direction to Mecca. Both of those are simple things. But they are very complicated if you take them seriously. Because one of those five prayers is defined by the length of your shadow on the ground. Originally, the time for the afternoon prayer was supposed to commence when your shadow was equal to your height and to terminate when your shadow was equal twice to your height. It was during that range that the afternoon prayer was supposed to be performed. That was good enough in Mecca, and maybe up to Medina. But when you reach Damascus, there will be many times, many days per year when your shadow will never be equal to your height, no matter what time of the day it is. So when do you start prayers?

This very mundane concern triggered a study of shadow lengths at various latitudes. Mathematical geography became then a necessary component of prayers. The minute you go into mathematical geography, you just made a big entry into astronomy. You are learning where is the sun every day of the year, where am I on the globe vis-à-vis the position of the sun, how does the sun cast the shadow, how is the shadow related to my locality. All of those questions are excellent introductions to astronomy. Is there still a question as to why you would need astronomical texts?

Two, no Greek ever dreamt of praying in a specific direction to a specific city. Islam requires that you have to pray in the direction of Mecca. We operate in the paradigm of flat maps. When I ask my students where Mecca is, from our position in New York City, nine out of ten say “southeast.” Because they look at the flat map. It comes to them as a shock that, if you are in New York, Mecca is really northeast. That’s why the airplanes to Europe fly over Boston. But to come to such a realization you need sophisticated spherical trigonometry, you need laws of trigonometry that the Greeks did not need. Hence a new discipline was born.

The second part of the book deals with the impact of all of this material on Europe.

In the 12^th and 13^th centuries there was a massive translation movement in Europe, from Arabic into Latin. Traditionally, this is seen as the time when Europe was recapturing its own roots so to speak. It is said that the Greek texts could not be found, that’s why they were translated via Arabic.

But it is not true that those texts could not be found. They were actually found and translated directly from Greek later on, in the 15^th and the 16^th centuries. The question is, why did they translate them from Arabic when the same text existed in Greek?

The essence of my argument is that the European scientists used the bricks that were already formulated in the Islamic civilization to construct their very own and new science. It does not mean that the Renaissance is not a brilliant renaissance. That is indeed one of the most creative periods in history.

But note that the method of translation changed after the 14^th century. In the 15^th and 16^th centuries, the Europeans were no longer treating those Arabic texts in the same way they were treated in the medieval period. Instead of hiring translators, the European scientists learned Arabic themselves.

Indeed, why should one assume that the Renaissance scientists were any less intelligent than our modern scientists? 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?

The second part of the book deals with such issues.

This explains the translation of Greek texts much better than the dream of a caliph to know what Aristotle had said. It is the one who gains employment from what Aristotle said, and from what Euclid said, and from what Diophantus said, and from what Galen said, who pushes for their translations.

A close-up

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?

In a nutshell

America has had three revolutions: 1776, 1929 and Ronald Reagan’s New Federalism. The signs of the coming third American revolution were evident in 1975 when New York City experienced its worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression. New York City presaged other municipal crises in the decade that followed.

New York had been a city of progressive thought and a provider of generous social services for its citizens beginning with the Great Depression of 1929 when Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, with the help of President Franklin Roosevelt, established extensive governmental services for city residents – public housing, new public schools, rent control, expansion of public health services, and an extensive park system. But in the 1975 fiscal crisis, the financial elites in Wall Street sought to unravel the safety net of that earlier period. And, in large part, they have succeeded.

In many ways, municipal decision-making has been hidden; most New Yorkers did not know that the decisions made on Wall Street would affect their future. The curtain of privacy of hidden deal-making between politicians and financial elites raises only in times of fiscal crises when ordinary citizens begin to question the private deal making of Wall Street because those deals negatively affect the “real world,” the world of Main Street. During fiscal crises, we turn to government for help and leadership, leadership on every level - national, state and local.

This book explores the leadership of government on the local level. What goes on between the financial elites who control the nation’s purse strings and the political leaders elected by us, the citizens of New York City? What deals are made that affect the lives of ordinary New Yorkers? What compromises do New York City politicians make when dealing with the most powerful people in the financial world?

The wide angle

I first became interested in how money affected political decision making when my son was in the first grade at PS 75 on the West side of Manhattan. It was 1976 and New York City was in the second year of a fiscal crisis that had decimated city services. The schools were in chaos; teachers, aides and assistant principals were laid off, supplies were nonexistent and the parents were furious. Our response was to organize – we raised funds to buy supplies and pay for the art and music teacher; we signed and delivered petitions by the thousands to the Board of Education.

It was a busy year. Yet none of us knew how our schools had gotten in such terrible shape in so short a time. So I began a search. How were New York City education funds raised and allocated? Just as importantly, who was responsible for those decisions? I became a fiscal analyst and eventually put those tools to work in government and then in academia. My interests broadened to fiscal decisions in other areas of government, and finally led me to this book.

In political science, those of us interested in decision making usually talk about the pluralists, who emphasize bargaining among a multiplicity of interests that define the urban power structure and de-emphasize economic power, and the structuralists, who emphasize the relationship between the state and the underlying socioeconomic system that shapes the political agenda. The structuralists are divided among various camps: regime theorists, public choice theorists, and neo Marxist critiques.

Yet somehow these theories seemed inadequate when I examined mayoral decision making in New York City. In spite of differences, they were both right – interest groups do make enormous differences particularly the rich ones. And the very structure of the state and the socioeconomic system makes all the difference – the Governor of New York State has extraordinary power over public policy issues facing the city and many New York governors have exercised that power again and again. So in Follow the Money I examine each New York City mayor since the Great Depression who faced fiscal difficulties. And I explore the principal people behind a mayor’s fiscal decisions.

When we start with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, we discover that the New York State Governor Herbert Lehman made a deal with the banks when the city was broke – the banks would finance the city’s debt and the city in return would give the banks what they wanted – lower taxes and service reductions. That same deal was made after the 1975 fiscal crisis between Governor Hugh Carey and the banks. History does indeed repeat itself. But the responses of the two mayors were quite different. Mayor La Guardia called the banks thieves and the Governor irresponsible. He was so determined and persistent in his name calling that Governor Lehman finally gave in and agreed to raise taxes to improve the city’s revenue position. In 1975, Mayor Abe Beame had no success fighting Governor Carey’s agreement with the bankers. He caved, as did the unions, and watched his city being cut to ribbons.

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.

What goes on between the financial elites who control the nation’s purse strings and the political leaders elected by us, the citizens of New York City?

A close-up

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.

In a nutshell

At its broadest level, Prosperity for All is about the changing meaning of consumer society over the past half century. I argue that whereas access to the benefits of consumer society for everybody dominated thinking in the mid-twentieth century, consumer society has more recently come to be about individual choice: that is, only for those who can afford to participate.

The book gets at this transformation through an examination of the aims and priorities of global consumer activism. Usually associated with best buy magazines such as Consumer Reports in the US, Which? in the UK, and Que Choisir in France, consumer activism has in fact also been associated with the needs and aspirations of the developing world. Inspired by western activists such as Ralph Nader, consumer groups have emerged in Asia, Latin America and Africa. They have been concerned not with the value for money of cars and electronic goods, but with the rights of the poor to decent food, housing, water, transport, and energy.

In doing so they remind us that consumer society is about poverty as well as luxury. For all the problems confronting affluent societies seemingly dominated by excessive and unsustainable consumption, for the majority of the world’s population, mere access to a world of goods is still a legitimate desire.

Unfortunately, debates about consumer society are rarely couched in these terms. By following the fortunes of the consumer activist movement—and the setbacks it faced from the 1980s—we can see how the dominant meanings of consumer society changed as well.

Today we rarely talk about access to consumption. Instead, we talk about choice. Whether we see unlimited choice as the triumph or tragedy of consumer society, to focus the debate on such a narrow concept cuts out other important debates once so central to the meaning of consumer society: needs, rights, entitlements, fairness, equality, sovereignty and, ultimately, the redistribution of wealth.

The wide angle

The book is very much a product of my training as a social historian. That is, I have attempted to uncover the hopes and aspirations of ordinary groups of people. While much of social history has been concerned with the lives of the working class, I chose to examine how people think and behave as consumers: with how they spend, rather than how they earn their money.

In particular I am interested in how the everyday problems of getting and spending—dealing with faulty and dangerous goods, overcoming unscrupulous manufacturers, dealing with inequities in the marketplace, challenging the tactics and assumptions of advertisers, and so on—have translated into political agendas.

Ralph Nader provides the classic case in point. His analysis of the US motor industry demonstrated that the problem was not simply the poor design of one brand of commercial vehicle. The problem was deeper and multilayered. The reason why a consumer might be offered a dangerous motorcar was ultimately due to problems about collusion in the industry, the lack of standards, the absence of federal government regulation and the non-existence of a form of political pressure to act on behalf of the public or consumers.

Ralph Nader therefore gave rise to the public interest movement. He became the leading consumer advocate in the US, achieving a public profile such that he was even talked of as Jimmy Carter’s running mate in the 1975 Presidential election. (That Nader entered politics again a quarter-century later is another matter.)

But I also want the book to start a debate about consumer society distinct from much of the liberal critique so prevalent in the West. Think of all the popular works devoted to consumer society. They go back to Thorstein Veblen’s critique of ‘conspicuous consumption’ in his Theory of the Leisure Class. They include the classics of 1950s liberalism—Vance Packard’s Hidden Persuaders and J. K. Galbraith’s Affluent Society. The sixties counterculture gave rise to numerous attempts to seek a more meaningful existence beyond the false neon lights of commodity capitalism. They continue to this day, ranging from Naomi Klein’s No Logo to the more recent debate about ‘affluenza’.

The inadequacy of all these books is that they oversimplify so much about consumer society. Middle-class liberal guilt too readily condemns the aspirations of ordinary people eager to participate in the good life. Important economic issues about trade and finance are misunderstood such that we are expected to be for or against free trade. Significant political decisions about public intervention in the market place are reduced to a ‘nanny state’ versus libertarian individualism. But most of all, these books relate the problems of consumer society purely in terms understandable to the rich.

Consumer society is our common guilty indulgence for which we must constantly chastise ourselves. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that. But the focus does obscure another more important question—the question of who should get to participate in consumer society. Debates about participation were central to Roosevelt’s New Deal, to the GI Bill at the end of the Second World War, and to the establishment of welfare regimes and social market economies across Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. They would remain important too to the world’s poor. But now poverty is treated as an issue separate from consumer society. The poor don’t get to have a say in the world of affluence; instead their plight is left to structural adjustment, philanthropy and pop concerts. My point is that the poor too should be incorporated into any discussions about consumer society; poverty is not a problem distinct and external to consumer society.

For all the problems confronting affluent societies seemingly dominated by excessive and unsustainable consumption, for the majority of the world’s population, mere access to a world of goods is still a legitimate desire.

A close-up

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

In a nutshell

Slaves to Fashion is a cultural history of the politics of black fashion and dress since the creation of the black diaspora, from the slave trade to the present. Dress has been (and continues to be) one of the most important ways in which we project a sense of self, a class status, and a place on the spectrum of gender identities, sexuality and nationality. This has been the case especially for black people who—though materially deprived in the West throughout history—have made the presentation of their bodies (hair, dress, gesture) a key component and signal of their self-definition and political, social and cultural possibility.

Slaves were dressed by their masters; clothing was used to define black people as subservient. Almost as soon as a slave was issued a piece of clothing, he or she understood that the garment served not only to protect him or her from the elements, but was also part of a power struggle over black identity. Refusing to be defined by others, blacks have countered their representation sartorially, by pointedly playing with their clothing, manipulating it to better express the complexity of who they are.

By examining cultural moments and artifacts that highlight the ability of dress, especially fancy dress, to both dictate and define identity, my book examines this power struggle between masters and slaves, free blacks and whites, upper and working class blacks at key moments and locations in black diasporic history. I look at the ways in which black people, once slaves to fashion, have made fashion their slave.

The wide angle

Slaves to Fashion began with a footnote I encountered in graduate school. While auditing a class on W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, I came across a troubling reference to the fact that the revered Du Bois had been caricatured as a black dandy. In the class, we spent even weeks in detailed analysis of Du Bois’s skill as a rhetorician and lyricist. In order to appreciate the truly interdisciplinary nature of his talents, we took very seriously his training as a philosopher, historian and sociologist. The image of Du Bois that emerged was that of an erudite, punctilious, quintessential “race man.” None of this prepared me for the footnote and accompanying illustration from a political cartoon of Du Bois as a degraded buffoon, overly dressed and poorly comported, whose erudition had been turned into what the cartoon called “ebucation.”

Only when I began to research the history of dandyism and, in particular, the racialization of the dandy figure, did I realize the complex strategy and history behind that caricature. Dandyism has been used by Africans and blacks to project images of themselves as dignified and distinguished, it has also been used by the majority culture (and blacks) to denigrate and ridicule black aspirations. Slaves to Fashion examines the interrelatedness of these impulses and what the deployment of one strategy or the other says about the state of black people and culture at different moments in history.

Although dandyism is often considered a mode of extremely frivolous behavior attentive only to surfaces or facades and a practice of the white, European elite and effete, I argue that it is a creative and subtle mode of critique, regardless of who is deploying it. 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. Particularly during times when social mores shift, style and charisma allow these primarily male figures to distinguish themselves when previously established privileges of birth and wealth, or ways of measuring social standing might be absent or uncertain. Style—both sartorial and behavioral— affords dandies the ability and power to set new fashions, to create or imagine worlds more suited to their often avant-garde tastes. Dandyism is thus not just a practice of dress, but also a visible form of investigating and questioning cultural realities.

A quick look at the definition of “fop” and “dandy” in the Oxford English Dictionary articulates a difference between them that is extremely important for considerations of the figure’s racialization. A fop (fifteenth century) is one “foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress or manners.” But a “dandy” (1780) is defined as one who “studies above everything else to dress elegantly and fashionably.”

Anyone can be in vogue without apparent strategy, but dandies commit to a study of the fashions that define them and an examination of the trends around—which they can continually re-define themselves. Therefore, when racialized, the dandy’s affectations (fancy dress, arch attitude, fey and fierce gesture) signify well beyond obsessive self-fashioning—rather, the figure embodies the importance of the struggle to control representation and self- and cultural-expression.

Manipulations of dress and dandyism have been particularly important modes of self-expression and social commentary for Africans before contact with Europeans and especially afterwards. In fact, in order to endure the attempted erasure or reordering of black identity in the slave trade and its aftermath, those Africans arriving in England, America, or the West Indies had to fashion new identities, to make the most out of the little that they were given. Whether luxury slaves or field hands, their new lives nearly always began with the issuance of new clothes.

Enslaved people, however, frequently modified these garments in order to indicate their own ideas about the relationship between slavery, servitude, and subjectivity. For example, there are documented cases of slaves saving single buttons and ribbons to add to their standard issue coarse clothing, examples of slaves stealing or “borrowing” clothing, especially garments made from fine fabrics, from their masters for special occasions. Slaves created underground second-hand clothing markets in major cities to augment their wardrobes and to exchange clothing that identified them when they wanted to escape. In fact, many slaves “dressed up” or “cross-dressed” literally when they absconded, wearing clothing beyond their station or of the other gender in efforts to appear free and be mobile. The black dandy’s style thus communicates simultaneously self-worth, cultural regard, a knowingness about how blackness is represented and seen. Black dandyism has been an important part of and visualization of the negotiation between slavery and freedom.

In Slaves to Fashion, I wanted in particular to use the black dandy figure to exemplify the inter-relations between racial, gender and sexual identity and the way these categories are always expressed in terms of each other—but with different emphases during different historical periods and geographical locations. In order to illustrate the black dandy’s embodiment of this intersection of identity markers, I consider the pleasures and dangers of the styling of blackness and self-fashioning as well as the performativity, irony, and politics of consumption and consumerism that define such stylization.

The first black dandy in my book, a fabulous black man named Julius Soubise, famous in Enlightenment England for his beautiful dress and outrageous, defiant attitude, often held court in coffee shops that also offered slaves for sale. In this environment, he defied and ironically played with his own former status as a commodity, arriving at these shops in a chaise attended by white footmen, even as his brothers were bought and sold around him. Soubise’s behavior reveals that during that time and forever more, blackness was and is a complicated idea, wholly constructed and always already “performed.”

I argue that blackness is itself a sign of diaspora, of a cosmopolitanism that African subjects did not choose, but from which they necessarily reimagined themselves. In Slaves to Fashion, black dandyism is an interpretation and materialization of the complexity of this cosmopolitanism.

blackness is itself a sign of diaspora, of a cosmopolitanism that African subjects did not choose, but from which they necessarily reimagined themselves ... black dandyism is an interpretation and materialization of the complexity of this cosmopolitanism

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.

In a nutshell

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds, Plato, Aristotle and Galen among others, paid careful attention to what dreams might mean. Yet no work in English (and only one in any other language) attempts to establish how the Greeks and Romans understood their dreams. In Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity, I make cultural history out of this material, with the help of contemporary post-Freudian science.

I contrast Greek and Roman ways of understanding dreams with those that prevail in the modern west, while contradicting the opinion that the Greeks and Romans in general treated their dreams superstitiously and credulously (sometimes they did, just as people do now).

I start with “epiphany” dreams, a type of dream still sometimes described in unmodernized societies: these are dreams consisting of “appearances” by authority figures who give orders or impart information. I explore the psychological, religious and literary reasons why this form of dream-description was so popular, trace its continuance through the Middle Ages and attempt to explain why it has virtually died out.

Did ancient people really dream like that? This question leads to another: can we ever know what any ancient person really dreamt? A number of extraordinary individuals feature in this discussion, including Saint Perpetua and the emperor Constantine. But the person who comes out of the investigation best is the hypochondriac second-century AD rhetorician Aelius Aristides, author of what is in effect antiquity’s only surviving dream diary.

Did the Greeks and Romans then believe in their dreams? What that might mean, and how Greeks and Romans of different classes and periods differed on this subject, are questions that require a careful analysis. In the book, this ranges from the relative credulity of Artemidorus of Daldis, the author of Graeco-Roman antiquity’s only surviving dream-book, to the lucid scepticism of Cicero. This is mainly an investigation of ordinary people; my last chapter by contrast assesses Greek and Roman attempts to understand dreams naturalistically. In other words the chapter is about the efforts of philosophers and physicians, some of whom – most notably Aristotle – made a large number of perceptive statements about a phenomenon, which as far as dream-content is concerned, still remains mysterious.

The wide angle

We do not know why we dream, or what if anything our dreams may mean – though some theories are much more plausible than others. In these circumstances it is worth considering what other highly articulate cultures have had to say on the subject, and especially what our intellectual ancestors among the Greeks and Romans had to say.

All the more so because it is hard to resist the notion that dreams reflect, in some way, our “real” thoughts or “real” personalities. This idea has ancient roots – though it was not the general belief of the Greeks or Romans.

What is in fact most extraordinary about ancient ideas about dreams is ancient skepticism. What fits least well with common assumptions about the Greeks and Romans is the clear-eyed rationality of certain among them.

Hence the study of ancient dreams offers a window into the development of ancient religious thought, including early Christianity.

It also offers a window into the development of ancient science, or, as some might like to say, “proto-science.”

The historiographical challenge here is pluridisciplinarity. One kind of history-writing that is, in my opinion, destined to grow in importance requires not only some use of social sciences (in this case anthropology) but, more importantly still, some use of natural sciences (in this case psychology). Without considering exact scientific descriptions of the phenomenon of dreaming, it would have been impossible to reach a balanced conclusion about the credibility of ancient dream-reports.

From my point of view, this study continues the sort of historical-psychological investigation that I undertook in Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Indeed, rage was an important part of the psychological landscape of antiquity.

What fits least well with common assumptions about the Greeks and Romans is the clear-eyed rationality of certain among them.

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,