Rorotoko

In a nutshell

This is a book about a geopolitical space—Galicia—that existed for a very precisely limited historical epoch.

Galicia was created—I would say “invented”—in 1772 at the time of the partitions of Poland, and then abolished at the end of World War I in 1918, disappearing forever from the official map of Europe. (An historical memory or phantom in the 20th century and still today, the former Galicia occupies southern Poland and western Ukraine, roughly the region between Cracow and Lviv, which were its two principal cities.)

So the book is a study of how an invented, artificial space became real, authentic, historical, and meaningful for the people who lived there (Poles, Ukrainians, Jews) and for the people who governed it (the Habsburg dynasty in Vienna and their administration in Galicia)—and then how the abolition of Galicia brought this province of the Habsburg monarchy back into the realm of the unreal.

The book is an experiment in writing the history of a place as an idea—or rather the multiple and various ideas that gave meaning and identity to Galicia during its historical existence, and then preserved its memory afterwards.

At the same time I argue that the idea of Galicia was important for imperial reasons. It was part of an imperial ideology that justified and explained Viennese rule over this province, and ordered the relation between the province and the ruling metropolis Vienna.

In particular, I’m interested in how an ideology of civilization enabled the Viennese government to envision a program of reform and development (even messianic transformation) in Galicia, and how this was related to a presumed “Western” metropolitan superiority to an “Eastern” province of the Habsburg monarchy.

The idea of Galicia was shaped by Europe’s mental mapping of the supposed difference between Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Galicia was mapped as backward, exotic, alien, and eastern from a Viennese perspective, and the Galicians themselves wrestled with these imposed categories as they sought to come to terms with their own provincial identity.

Finally, I argue that the provincial identity of Galicians as Galicians was important and meaningful to them—and not simply a secondary aspect of their religious or national identities as Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews.

The wide angle

The theories and approaches of The Idea of Galicia are closely related to earlier work that I have done on Eastern Europe more generally.

In 1994 I published a book called Inventing Eastern Europe, which argued that the geopolitical difference between Eastern Europe and Western Europe (which was taken totally for granted during the era of the Cold War, up until 1989) was in fact an artificial, culturally imposed distinction, created by the philosophers and travelers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century.

I argued that “Eastern Europe” was in fact invented, along with “Western Europe”—but since it was invented in the West, it was Western Europe that appropriated for itself the identity of the civilized half of the continent while Eastern Europe was characterized by relative backwardness. (The concepts of backwardness and development were also created precisely at this time and partly for this purpose.)

I argue that this invention was a work of “mental mapping” (as opposed to scientific geographical mapping) and that it was at the same time a work of “demi-Orientalism” (as opposed to the full Orientalism that was discussed by Edward Said as the Western characterization of the absolute “otherness” of Asia and the Middle East).

These cultural processes of invention, mental mapping, and demi-Orientalism in Eastern Europe are extremely important for my approach to Galicia. I argue that Galicia was an invented space, created by the Habsburgs who needed a name for the territory that they annexed from Poland in 1772, that Galicia was mentally mapped (as the Habsburgs explored and reformed the province, “discovering” its backwardness), and that Galicia was demi-Orientalized as being both eastern and exotic on the one hand, but still redeemably European on the other, that is, Eastern European.

A famous German-language series of fictional stories about Galicia, published in the nineteenth century by the Galician writer Karl Emil Franzos, was entitled Halb-Asien (“half-Asia”)—a neat and unusual summation of the supposedly demi-Oriental character of Galicia.

I make use of a lot of literary sources—which offer some of the “fantasy” aspects suggested in the subtitle—as I am interested in the way that fantasy and history interact to produce an idea of Galicia. The general issues of my book are thus connected to broader theories about mental mapping, the ideology of empire, Orientalism and demi-Orientalism, and the relation between Eastern Europe and Western Europe.

While The Idea of Galicia is closely related to my own earlier research and publications, it is also a subject that I came to for reasons of family history. My father’s parents were born in Galicia, as subjects of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph. Although they lived most of their lives in the United States, they nevertheless maintained a sense of identity as Galicians.

Millions of Americans (in the United States and Canada) today are the descendants of Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish emigrants from Galicia, and one of the ways in which Galicia has survived its own geopolitical existence is in the family memories and histories of what could be called a Galician diaspora.

Among Jewish Galicians this sense of identity with the province was particularly powerful—Jewish ethnography still uses the identity category of “Galitzianer” to represent a particular form of Jewish culture, customs, cooking, religious temperament, political background, and Yiddish pronunciation.

One of the general problems that the book addresses in its final chapters is how to measure and register the “afterlife” of a geopolitical space that has been abolished from the map. Emigration and diaspora offer one approach, but it is also possible, in both Poland and Ukraine, to find traces of Galician identity and agenda within contemporary politics.

Especially in western Ukraine the memory of Galicia reinforces a powerful sense of European identity. Some Ukrainians in Lviv in 2000 celebrated the 170th birthday of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph! The celebration was a reminder that Lviv, the provincial capital of Galicia, had been imperially related to Vienna long before it was bound to Moscow after World War II.

So one of the general problems that I study in my book is that of historical pentimento: the map of nineteenth-century Galicia hidden behind the contemporary map of post-communist Poland and post-Soviet Ukraine.

“Eastern Europe” was in fact invented, along with “Western Europe”—but since it was invented in the West, it was Western Europe that appropriated for itself the identity of the civilized half of the continent while Eastern Europe was characterized by relative backwardness

A close-up

A fascinating cast of characters populate the pages of the book—individuals who contributed to shaping the idea of Galicia over the course of two centuries.

I write about Habsburg emperors like Joseph II, who sought to bring about a messianic transformation of Galicia in the 1780s, and undertook, for instance, the reform and recasting of its Jewish population—who received last names from the emperor. Or like Franz Joseph, who, ruling for almost 70 years (from 1848 to 1916), became a semi-mythological figure in his own lifetime, and was then fully mythologized in literature and fantasy after his death.

I hope my readers will notice the Galician experiences and perspectives of Mozart’s son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart, who decided that he would rather pursue his musical career as a composer in Galicia instead of in Vienna under the shadow of his father’s legendary genius.

No less intriguing are such Galician writers as Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote the notorious novella Venus in Furs about Galicia, and later left his name to the sexual temperament of masochism. Or Karl Emil Franzos, the author of Halb-Asien, who fictionalized the world of the Galician Jews. Or the greatest comic dramatist of Polish literature, Alexander Fredro, who built his comedies upon the tensions and contradictions of Galician life. Or the great Ukrainian writer. Ivan Franko, who wrote about the Galician oil fields in his novella Boa Constrictor.

There were also great 20th-century Galician writers who wrote about Galicia after the province ceased to exist. Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, and Shmuel Yosef Agnon, all born in Galicia, survived the abolition of their native province and later became great writers in the German, Polish, and Hebrew languages respectively, thus illustrating the cultural complexity of Galicia.

One random thing I’d like my readers to notice is the brief discussion of Billy Wilder, the great Hollywood genius of cinema, who was actually born in Galicia.

Lastly

I hope readers will take away a sense of the “evolutionary” history of geopolitical forms.

In the course of history, a province like Galicia can suddenly be created, evolve for more than a century, accumulate meanings and associations on the map of Europe, then lapse into extinction—and yet not be altogether forgotten, still playing a phantom role in the historical developments that follow.

In Eastern Europe we have seen radical changes on the map since the end of the Cold War, the disintegration of some countries, the emergence of others, a division and subdivision of former geopolitical spaces. All this serves as a reminder that the map of Europe, as we see it at any given moment, represents the contingent reshuffling of many different forms that have appeared and disappeared over centuries.

Mapping is intellectual and cultural work, and every geopolitical space may also be represented by ideas and identities, which may survive in consciousness and memory even after the space itself vanishes from the map. I hope that this book will unsettle and reshape readers’ sense of the Habsburg Empire, what it signified when it existed, and how— in fantasy and history—it continues to haunt and complicate the countries that have replaced it on the map.

I hope readers will take away a particular sense of how powerful is the role of fantasy (as, for instance, in the fictions of Sacher-Masoch) for shaping especially perspectives on Eastern Europe.

Finally, I hope that Americans whose families emigrated from Galicia more than a hundred years ago will take away from the book a sense of the complexity of the province that no longer exists, but that powerfully shaped the affiliations and identities of their grandfathers and grandmothers.

© 2010 Larry Wolff

the map of Europe, as we see it at any given moment, represents the contingent reshuffling of many different forms that have appeared and disappeared over centuries

In a nutshell

In Jazz Icons, I argue that jazz history is now dominated by iconic figures who have taken on an almost God-like status.

When musicians and fans discuss the life and music of Satchmo, Duke, Bird or Trane, they often create a mythic world where legendary jazzmen are used to tell the story of jazz.

So I explore the growing significance of icons in jazz through individual case studies—to explain the politics behind why jazz history is frequently portrayed as a succession of heroic male figures.

I am interested in contemporary uses of mythology and how the telling of the story of jazz history ties into American politics and values. I want readers to examine their own relationships with iconic figures. Why do we invest so much of our energy in icons? (And this could apply to other types of art, not only jazz.) How can our behaviour be understood in broader contexts?

The wide angle

After teaching jazz history for years, several independent observations led me to the concept of a book on jazz icons.

I began to see how the behaviour of musicians was tied to broader value systems and mythologies. For example, I was amazed by the way in which students (and the books and magazines they were reading) would often relate intensely to certain musicians but would also refuse to enter into critical dialogue about legendary jazzmen of the past.

Similarly, I was interested to know why musicians—both students and professionals—sought to distance themselves from the benefits of formal training and would use the anecdotal accounts of musicians as gospel truths.

After a while, I began to think about the way in which the whole language of jazz seemed to reinforce certain values and mythologies, from evoking the macho gunslinger who works at the frontier to suggesting the regal and sophisticated.

Rather than treating the language of jazz innocently, I began to think about how and why this language was used and for what purpose. This led into general theories about icons in art and the impact they have on the present day. The way certain people are invested with meaning or become symbolic usually has something to do with the status of art and its relationship to society in general.

Equally, I wanted to demonstrate how critical and philosophical questions about jazz and the music’s relationship to certain myths can be found in everyday life. For example, I begin the book with a discussion of the use of Miles Davis in Michael Mann’s film Collateral, which starred Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. This typical Hollywood portrayal of jazz feeds into a discussion of how jazz figures have become iconic, are used to reinforce certain stereotypes and have been invested with new meaning.

I also look at the way in which jazz is advertised and marketed today to examine the way in which the notion of a ‘Great Tradition’ influences the behaviour of contemporary artists.

From a wide angle, the book explores how and why legendary figures are needed in order to tell historical stories and examines the potential impact of turning jazz music into a museum piece.

It is irrelevant and impossible to know whether Ellington was in fact bisexual. However, what I am interested in is the problem this concept presents for jazz audiences and fans of Ellington alike.

A close-up

In my view, the most thought provoking (and potentially provocative) section of the book links to the way in which jazz history promotes masculine and heterosexual norms.

In my opening chapter, I examine the way in which jazz can be understood as a heterosexual masculine discourse, from the way the history of ‘great men’ blends narrative influences from the 19th century genius to the American cowboy. Even at the level of language, jazz is governed by masculine rhetoric; tenor ‘titans’, saxophone ‘colossuses’ and musicians that engage in cutting contests, trade punches and blow each other off the bandstand.

Masculine and heterosexual norms are later explored in a chapter on the life and music of Duke Ellington. Several years ago, the author David Hajdu published an article in Vanity Fair that gave a beautiful account of the relationship between Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and posed the question of whether their friendship could have gone beyond the purely professional.

From my perspective, it is irrelevant and impossible to know whether Ellington was in fact bisexual. However, what I am interested in is the problem this concept presents for jazz audiences and fans of Ellington alike. Within the chapter, I trace several narrative themes that are used to encapsulate the spirit of Ellington and his music but then question the extent to which these themes have anything to do with Ellington’s actual life experience.

The ‘problem’ of an artistic jazz legend being bisexual tells us something about the way in which great artists have to adhere to certain stereotypical traits in order to remain authentic. And it makes us think both about how music itself is sexualised and about broader societal views.

Although gender and sexuality are only aspects of a much broader discussion of iconic influence in jazz within the book, these examples demonstrate very clearly the way in which jazz history is controlled ideologically to perpetuate and reinforce certain values and beliefs.

Lastly

Jazz Icons runs contrary to the dominant offerings of jazz history. The book is an alternative take on jazz historiography, providing the readers with a close examination of the changing role of musicians in history.

Besides turning everyday assumptions on their heads, Jazz Icons finds significance in things that usually go unnoticed.

This approach encourages the reader to see the world critically and to question the notion that music just exists naturally or that history is an unchanging, linear and unified story.

© 2010 Tony Whyton

Besides turning everyday assumptions on their heads, Jazz Icons finds significance in things that usually go unnoticed.

In a nutshell

What if the destruction of architecture was understood to be just as complicated, just as culturally resonant, and just as open to interpretation as architecture itself—or, indeed, as any other cultural form? This is the question that Violence Taking Place considers.

The salience of the question emerges from dominant perspectives on destruction, in public culture and the social sciences alike, which often insist on it as either a simple rational act, reducible to the intentions of its author, or an irrational act, completely escaping interpretation at all. What these perspectives each block, in equal but opposites ways, is consideration of the cultural labor that destruction performs—as a social performance, a spatial practice, an object of narrative and a figure of collective imagination.

Violence Taking Place focuses on the former Yugoslavia and, in particular, Kosovo, where the destruction of architecture has been a prominent dimension of political violence. When this destruction has been registered, it is typically understood as a response to architecture’s status as a representation of ethnic or religious identity, territory, or history; destroying architecture becomes, then, a way of symbolically destroying what architecture stands for.

Mosque in Reti e Poshtme, Kosovo, dynamited in March 1999. Photograph by Andrew Herscher.

The problem with this sort of interpretation, however, is that it assumes that what architecture stands for can stand alone, without need of architecture or other “representations” to conjure itself into existence. By contrast, I see architecture as a necessary supplement to identity, territory, history and the other phenomena that architecture is typically seen to simply represent.

Violence Taking Place thus suggests that architecture is not so much destroyed in order to destroy what it stands for, but rather to make architecture stand for something in the first place. From this perspective, destruction becomes not a mere epiphenomenon to the forms and forces that make history, but crucial to the constitution of those forms and forces, a constitution which, I suggest, invokes the need for an architectural history of destruction.

The history described in Violence Taking Place places the architectural and urban destruction inflicted during the 1998-99 Kosovo War in a larger context that encompasses modernist urban renewal, structural underdevelopment, refracted colonialism, nationalist conflict and neoliberal reconstruction. In each case, I see destruction as an indispensable component of a historical process.

I also see destruction as a link between historical moments usually perceived in distinct isolation from another. Violence Taking Place thus relates modernist and neoliberal structural violence with transacted forms of political violence, posing new architectural and urban continuities between historically-differentiated periods of “war” and “peace.”

The wide angle

Trained as an architect and an architectural historian, I was led to re-think destruction when I began to survey its remains in Kosovo for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

For the Tribunal, as for most of destruction’s interpreters, destruction comprised a representation of something else, something that occupied a different level of value, significance and conceptual coherence. For the Tribunal, destruction represented the actions of the alleged perpetrator on trial. For scholarly disciplines, destruction represents the social, political, cultural or ideological dynamic that the discipline in question knows how to study.

Coming to destruction as a historian of architecture, however, I was struck with it as a form of architecture, a kind of architecture-in-reverse, and so possible or even necessary to understand via the particular interpretive protocols of architecture.

Most important to me is the imperative to acknowledge architecture as irreducible to its various contexts—as emerging from but also somehow different than those contexts, as in some ways specific, particular and distinctive in itself. This acknowledgement leads to an understanding of destruction as, like architecture, a form of cultural production, formative of the identities, agencies and contexts that seemingly bear on it as causes.

I argue, then, that destruction should not be approached as a mere surface expression of supposedly deeper contexts and that its analysis shouldn’t rest on mere “contextualization.” Destruction instead ought to be subject to critical interpretation, I suggest, just like architecture and any other cultural form.

architecture is not so much destroyed in order to destroy what it stands for, but rather to make architecture stand for something in the first place

A close-up

Much of Violence Taking Place appears to be dedicated to violence “over there,” apparently far away—politically if not geographically—from most readers in the Global North.

But in one section of the book, a supplement on NATO’s 1999 air war against Serbia, I suggest that architecture functioned in that war in just the same way as it functioned on the ground in Kosovo—as a way to make manifest otherwise inchoate or invisible presences. For NATO, those presences were the Serbian “war machine,” “command-and-control system,” “military network,” and “infrastructure”—the explicit targets of NATO’s violence. Yet those targets were made available to NATO and subject to destruction by representing them architecturally, as the different sorts of buildings which came to be included in NATO’s every-expanding “target set.”

At the same time, the representation of targets as architecture and not as human beings allowed NATO to leave the human targets of its bombing campaign—both members of Serbian armed forces and civilians alike—unrepresented. NATO represented its war by images like videos shot by cameras mounted on precision-guided weapons or by surveillance photographs that showed buildings before and after they were attacked.

But these images displaced other images and even knowledge of other destruction, inflicted on human beings whose injury or death was only noted as “collateral damage.” Human bodies were often violated in the course of violating buildings; in these cases, then, the videos shot by precision-guided weaponry were snuff films screened as architectural studies.

NATO’s air war was imagined and narrated as a “humanitarian war,” conducted in the name of human rights (those of the Kosovar Albanians besieged in the violent Serbian counter-insurgency) by the seemingly humanitarian means of precision-guided weaponry. The humanitarian nature of the war, however, was a fully architectural production, represented by architecture that seemingly allowed the targets of the war to be attacked and that allowed the human victims of that war to be left invisible.

Lastly

We’re surrounded by the images and remains of destruction—from the targets of so-called “terrorism” to those of technologically-sophisticated warfare. This material suggests that architecture is no longer what it once was, or at least what it was once said to be—in Walter Benjamin’s famous words, “the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.”

Indeed, the intensively visualized NATO air war marked a key moment in the formation of architecture as a privileged mediation of violence and thus, into an object of scrutiny for a public guided by military image capture and aesthetics. In times and places of emergency, in other words, architecture is no longer the object of a distracted perception, but rather a perception that tracks violence, whether with fear, regret, satisfaction, confusion or unease.

During and since the NATO air war, then, a militarized public attention has been fixed on architecture, on buildings whose destruction is threatened, imminent, in process, complete, or anticipated. These buildings are not only destroyed by violence; they also comprise decoys, lures or ruses, substituting for or repressing other sites and sights of violence. There’s no time like the present, then, to scrutinize destruction more closely.

Violence Taking Place tries to suggest how this scrutiny might proceed and, in so doing, reframe our understanding of the violence that destruction often mediates.

© 2010 Andrew Herscher

the representation of targets as architecture and not as human beings allowed NATO to leave the human targets of its bombing campaign—both members of Serbian armed forces and civilians alike—unrepresented

In a nutshell

My book charts the shifting impact of decolonization on the human rights project. I challenge the presumption that the colonized were marginal players in the construction of the human rights order. Using new archival research, I demonstrate the decisive influence of post-colonial figures on the key debates that shaped the human rights system.

In 1948, the UN General Assembly passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the cornerstone of a global movement to promote and protect individual freedoms across the world. Yet the General Assembly that claimed to speak for the world represented only part of it, with much of Asia and Africa outside the halls of the UN, their voices muted under the rule of European empires.

As these empires collapsed, the debate on human rights became truly universal.

By the 1960s, it was a chorus of former colonies that determined its trajectory. In an era when the superpowers dominated so much of the international agenda, in the sphere of human rights, it was the voices of the nascent “Third World” that dictated proceedings—often to the irritation and despair of their Western counterparts.

During the 1950s, it was those who had been left out of the deliberations of 1947 and 1948 that were the most ardent and articulate champions of universality—confounding the claims of critics who cited insuperable cultural differences between the civilizations of Europe and those of the former colonies.

Less than a decade later, the Third World’s embrace of universality had begun to loosen, with a wave of assertive dictatorships denigrating the vision set out in 1948.

Unlike almost all other arenas in the Cold War period, the UN General Assembly, and in particular, the human rights program it supervised, were a field where the least powerful states led the most powerful.

By the 1990s, major political leaders routinely dismissed human rights as a project dominated by the West, and demanded, admittedly without success, a wholesale revision of the principles laid down in 1948.

The wide angle

This book originated in the search for the origins of contemporary skepticism on the universality of human rights—a skepticism exemplified by the 1990s controversy on “Asian Values,” and more recent debates on the compatibility of Islam and women’s rights.

Were post-colonial leaders, and anti-colonial nationalists, always hostile to the idea of universal values? When did the critique of universality, so prevalent in the modern era, actually emerge? As it turns out, when you look at the archives, speeches, and UN records, it was not a defining feature of early anti-imperialism. Counterintuitively, it was the crusading European imperialists who were the most careful to defer to the claims of cultural particularity, at least when it suited them.

Literature on the universality of rights has often been consumed by the abstract propositions of political theorists and philosophers, who argue about the virtue of rights in a way far removed from their operation and historical evolution. I sought to approach the problem of human rights and the post-colonial world by looking at what happened—what was said, and what was done, in the great debates on human rights.

As impressive as the gladiatorial struggles of philosophical argument may be, they were not, ultimately, what determined the fate of human rights on the international political stage. The passage of the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All-Forms of Racial Discrimination, for example, rested not on the logical power of the case for human equality, but on the skilful rhetoric and diplomacy of its champions—champions from countries like Ghana and the Philippines.

Beyond the perennial conflict on the question of universality, I sought to examine the way the human rights ideas circulated, both within the UN across the world. An impressive body of scholarship has been devoted to the history of the most famous UN initiative, the Universal Declaration. But historical attention to the decades that followed has been, in real terms, quite threadbare. I wanted to explore what happened after that 1948 momentous session of the General Assembly—those grand articles of the Declaration had been announced to the world, but what would happen next? Who would take the place of the great architects of the Declaration—the American Eleanor Roosevelt, the Frenchman René Cassin, and the Canadian John Humphrey?

It was, overwhelmingly, those from the newly independent countries, and countries outside the West. The fate of the program was inherited by figures like Salvador Lopez from the Philippines, Mohammed Abu Rannat of Sudan, and the Iraqi delegate Badia Afnan. For better or worse, the future of the UN effort on human rights was no longer in Western hands.

I recover the story of those battles fought to make human rights truly universal, to outlaw racial discrimination, and discredit the eloquent excuses of colonialism. Then the book illuminates the depressing reversal of that universality, as the post-colonial world lapsed into the kind of authoritarianism it had once struggled against.

A close-up

Two sections of the book exemplify its arguments and their significance—and it would be wonderful if, in the hands of a reader, the volume serendipitously fell open at them, preferably out of sequence.

The first relates to the notion of cultural relativism, on page 119. The constant refrain from those who attack universal human rights is that their universality is illusory, a neo-colonial imposition on societies outside the West. Yet in October 1950, it was those countries which wanted to retain control of their colonies that invoked the problems of cultural difference. Defenders of European colonialism feigned respect for Asian and African tradition and culture as an excuse for weakening the principle of universality in the new draft human rights treaty. By contrast, the Iraqi, Egyptian, and Indian delegations argued against the notion of cultural differences—and successfully insisted on the universal application of rights.

Far from being the handmaiden of imperialism, universality was, in fact, the prime weapon of those representatives who sought the end of colonial rule. Universal human rights were an integral part of decolonization—exalted as a set of ideas for liberation, not oppression. Given the later record of so many post-colonial regimes, their sincerity might be seriously questioned, but in these early days, it seemed real enough. And in terms of effects, this outspoken advocacy sharply strengthened the principle of the same rights for all, regardless of tradition, nationality, or culture.

If the reader accidentally dropped the book again, I would hope it fell open to page 108. Here, a short vignette illustrates the level of control the Third World would gain over the human rights agenda.

At the First World Conference on Human Rights, held in Tehran in April 1968, the decolonized utterly dominated proceedings—so much so that an unlikely marriage was made between the US and the Soviet negotiating teams. Driven together by their frustration at being sidelined from the proceedings, American and Soviet diplomats grumbled to each other about being “exploited.”

By the last week of the conference, the two Cold War enemies were sharing lunch in the US embassy, and the American diplomatic cables were reporting back that it was “comforting to know that even Soviets have their troubles and annoyance with small-time prima donnas who gang up to throw their weight around.” Instead of the usual sterile Cold War polemics, the two superpowers agreed, in the words of the US delegation, to “take it easy on each other.”

Nothing better encapsulates the unusual dynamics of the human rights debate, where the strongest states in the world were reduced to consoling each other about their lack of control, sharing meals together as the Third World representatives wrote their priorities into the conference Proclamation.

Lastly

Today, the legitimacy of human rights often seems to rest on competing arguments about their past formulation. Much of the rhetorical armamentarium employed by the planet’s most egregious dictatorships pivots on the claim that their cultural and traditional values were not accounted for in the development of the international human rights system.

From atheist autocrats, to Islamic theocrats, to African kleptocrats, assertions of exclusion and marginalization reside at the heart of attacks on human rights standards as imperialist, inapplicable, and illegitimate. Such assertions were at the heart of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s repudiation of the Universal Declaration in 1984, and its attacks on democratic dissent in 2009. Yet a previous generation of leaders and diplomats, many of whom were directly engaged in winning independence, actively fought for those very same standards against real—and well-armed—imperialists from Britain, France, and the Netherlands.

My book provides an insight into the complex history of Third World engagement in the birth of the modern human rights order. I recover the story of those battles fought to make human rights truly universal, to outlaw racial discrimination, and discredit the eloquent excuses of colonialism. Then the book illuminates the depressing reversal of that universality, as the post-colonial world lapsed into the kind of authoritarianism it had once struggled against.

Across the work, my focus remains on those voices from outside the West. Voices that both consolidated and compromised the hopeful vision of rights for all that was announced in their absence in 1948.

© 2010 Roland Burke

Far from being the handmaiden of imperialism, universality was, in fact, the prime weapon of those representatives who sought the end of colonial rule. Universal human rights were an integral part of decolonization—exalted as a set of ideas for liberation, not oppression.

In a nutshell

Supernormal Stimuli explains how our once-helpful instincts get hijacked in our garish modern world. Instincts for food, sex, or territorial protection evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago—not today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution.

Nobel Prize-winning ethologist Niko Tinbergen biologists coined the term “supernormal stimuli” in the 1940s to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than the real thing. In his experiments, song birds abandon their pale blue eggs dappled with gray to hop on black polka-dot Day-Glo blue plaster eggs so large they constantly slide off and have to hop back on.

Tinbergen and his students eventually constructed supernormal stimuli for all basic animal instincts—comically unrealistic dummies which an animal will try to mate with or fight with in preference to a real individual if color, shape or markings push their buttons.

These behaviors look funny to us... or sad—the reflexive instincts of “dumb” animals. But then there’s a jolt of recognition: just how different are they from our behavior? In Supernormal Stimuli, I apply this concept to explain most areas of modern human woe.

Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when an experimenter builds them. We make our own, from candy to pornography, from stuffed animals to atomic bombs. We’ve reversed the relationship between instinct and object to manufacture a glut of things which gratify our basic desires with often-dangerous results.

The “good news” in this is that the concept of supernormal stimuli itself—this image of the bird on the day-glo blue egg—can help us realize where we’re going wrong and help our huge brains to kick in and exercise self-control.

We need to “trust our instincts” less and trust our intellect more. Recognizing a supernormal stimulus when we see one is the most important step.

The wide angle

Niko Tinbergen clearly thought ethological principles applied to man. But while waxing eloquently for pages about bee-wasps and sticklebacks, he devoted the occasional sentence or two to man.

The major push to incorporate Darwin into psychology has come under the term “evolutionary psychology.” In their primer, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby are fond of saying that “our modern skulls house a stone age mind.”

Evolutionary psychologists view the brain as a biological computer with circuits which evolved to solve problems faced by humans and pre-human ancestors. Cosmides and Tooby point out that consciousness is a small portion of the contents and processes of the mind. They describe how conscious experience can mislead individuals to believe that that their thoughts are simpler than they actually are. Most problems experienced as easy to solve are actually very complex and are driven and supported by elaborate brain circuitry.

Evolutionary psychologists argue that this is not just another swing of the nature/nurture pendulum. They are not stating as baldly as Tinbergen did in his landmark talk that “Nature is Stronger than Nurture.” Their position instead is that nature/nurture is a false dichotomy: more nature allows more nurture.

In evolutionary psychology, “learning” is not an explanation—it is a phenomenon that requires explanation. Cosmides and Tooby use the example of a larger brained elephant not being able to learn English, not because its brain is less complicated nor even less learning-disposed: elephants have many aspects of memory better than ours. Rather we have evolved specific neural circuits that enable certain types of communication that the elephant has not evolved.

Though sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists have incorporated many of Niko Tinbergen’s ideas, they have not used the concept of Supernormal Stimuli.

I believe that the concept of Supernormal Stimuli is the single most valuable contribution of ethology for helping us understand many issues of modern civilization. So my book examines a range of human dilemmas from the standpoint of Supernormal Stimuli, interweaving other relevant concepts from all of these evolutionary disciplines.

the concept of Supernormal Stimuli is the single most valuable contribution of ethology for helping us understand many issues of modern civilization

A close-up

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment to picture whatever you find cute—puppies, kittens, cartoon characters or your own children. Cuteness is the type of attractiveness associated with youth; your “cute” objects no doubt have many youthful traits.

Infants of most species have a small body with a disproportionately large head, big eyes, small nose, chubby limbs and clumsy coordination. Youthful behavior includes playfulness, affection, helplessness, and a need to be nurtured. A few characteristics such as dimples and baby-talk are unique to humans, but most are common across species.

Evolutionary biologists view “cuteness” as simply the mechanism by which infantile features trigger nurturing in adults—a crucial adaptation for survival. Scientific studies find that definitions of cuteness are similar across cultures. So are our responses.

Anyone disheartened by research demonstrating that attractive adults are better liked and better paid than their homelier peers will be further dismayed at studies on infant cuteness. Articles such as “The Infant’s Physical Attractiveness: Its Effect on Bonding and Attachment” document that stereotypically cute babies receive the most attention from both strangers and their own parents. They run less risk of abuse or neglect. Cute children proceed to get better treatment from teachers. Fortunately, most babies are cute enough to attract sufficient nurturing from parents and the world around them. The decline of cuteness normally coincides with the child’s diminished need for caretaking, which gradually shifts toward younger siblings.

Toy manufacturers are well aware of what’s cute. Dolls have grown progressively cuter: first they looked like people, then like children, then like supernormal exaggerations of children. In the 1990s, the Journal of Animal Behavior published a series of articles on a creature not of the wilderness but of the marketplace.

“The Evolution of the Teddy Bear” traced the origin to 1900 when President Theodore Roosevelt was photographed in the Rockies, after a hunt, with a brown bear in the background. The early teddies looked like bears—with a low forehead and a long snout. Over the years, the teddy “evolved” to become the cute popular creature of now, laden with infantile features, including a larger forehead and a shorter snout. “It is obvious that the morphological changes that have occurred in teddies in the short span of a little over 100 years have contributed greatly to their reproductive fitness,” observed the authors. “There seem to be teddies all over the place.”

With tongue in cheek, but metaphor firmly in mind, animal behaviorists continued publishing on the evolution of the teddy. They pointed out that the changes might be likened to mutation, but are actually closer to “intelligent design,” diverting human resources to enable teddies to reproduce at a phenomenal rate.

Since a teddy bear is often a child’s first toy, one hypothesis that teddy specialists wanted to test was that they evolved to please infants or young children. Researchers offered 4- to 8-year-old children their choice of teddies with adult features or ones with infantile features. The four-year-olds chose the adult-featured bear almost two and a half times more often than the baby-featured bear. Among the older children, 6 to 8 years of age, the babyish teddies were three times more likely to be chosen.

This makes perfect sense. Very young children are the only beings immune to cuteness. What good would it do a baby to attach to other babies? It is clearly in the babies’ interest to attach to adults.

The function of the evolved teddy is to please adults—and older children who are already playing at nurturing. These are the purchasers of toys supposedly bought for infants. And teddies are increasingly bought overtly for adults. Dressed in theme clothing, they are a phenomenon on college campuses.

Babies will hold the standard babyish teddy when they’re not offered the choice of an adult bear. They attach to anything soft and warm, but it’s the tactile resemblance to their mother that draws a very young child to the teddy.

Lastly

We need to begin to engineer our environment back to something more like what we were designed for and also to notice and resist whatever Supernormal Stimuli inevitably remain around us. Collectively we can decide to make our environment more walkable, to tax or even ban junk food, to reduce televisions blaring around us. We can broadcast the opinions, similarity, humanity of people across world, train people to be automatically wary of leaders asking us to fight another group of humans pretty much like ourselves.

Individually, just identifying the supernormal stimuli out there is a crucial first step. We don’t have to just “listen to our instincts,” we can exercise will power—almost a dirty word in these days, but a trainable skill shown to help habitual problems. That’s what our giant brains were designed for—overriding reflexive instincts when they start to lead us astray.

In a world increasingly designed to stimulate hunger, sexual arousal, and acquisitiveness, chasing the supernormal is a losing game. It’s not anti-hedonistic to rein in, or redirect, instincts.

Our pleasure system is robust and very flexible. Scientific studies show that people experience similar levels of happiness long-term regardless of external events. Winning millions in a lottery, or getting paralyzed in an accident—these make a modest difference for six months or less. People in the poorest nations are a couple percentage points less happy than in the most affluent. People who drink, don’t drink, watch TV, don’t watch TV, eat natural vegetables, eat junk food—all experience similar levels of life satisfaction. In fact, the only thing that makes a difference is chronic pain or consistent health crises—things our modern pursuit of supernormal stimuli tend to produce.

The pleasure mechanism can be shaped as to what it responds to—it doesn’t have to be other way around. We understand this more readily when we’re thinking about the evanescent highs of a drug-addicted life vs. pleasure of normal life interactions. But the same is true for diet or social activities or what you find cute.

People get pleasure from what they have gotten used to getting pleasure from. Reward circuits in our brain will respond to the sugar in a handful of tart berries or from the whole cake, to the earned rest after exercise or the whole day on the couch, to real friends dropping by or the simulated laugh-track of a sitcom—all depending on what habits we get accustomed to.

We are the one animal that can notice sitting on a polka-dotted plaster egg—and climb off.

© 2010 Deirdre Barrett

That’s what our giant brains were designed for—overriding reflexive instincts when they start to lead us astray.

In a nutshell

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built environments. From Ebenezer Howard and his vision for garden cities to today’s New Urbanists, these visionaries have sought to deepen civitas, the shared community of citizens.

Civitas by Design takes a critical look at this planning tradition, examining a range of environmental interventions and their consequences over the course of the twentieth century. As American reform efforts moved from progressive idealism through the era of federally funded urban renewal programs to the rise of faith in free markets, planners attempted to cultivate community in places such as Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York, Celebration in Florida, and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.

Key figures—including critics Lewis Mumford and Oscar Newman, entrepreneur James Rouse, and housing reformer Catherine Bauer—introduced concepts such as planned neighborhood units, regional shopping malls, and greenbelt towns that were implemented on a national scale. And many of the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures that these planners envisioned still remain. But frequently the physical designs have proven insufficient to sustain the ideals they represented.

The wide angle

This book represents the evolution of my thinking as a writer over the past 40 years, extending back to my graduate education at Yale.

While the university offered no formal training in urban history or planning, New Haven at the time was being treated as an advanced laboratory for urban policy. Mayor Richard C. Lee was highly successful in securing federal funding for “urban renewal”—at a cost, however, of growing protests from victims of displacement and ultimately from critics who discerned the class and race bias of prevailing policies.

Lee attempted to repair the damage by securing funding from the Ford Foundation to address the social problems of the city’s poorer residents. That effort attracted considerable interest and presaged to some degree Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, but it did not prevent riots which roiled the city in 1967.

Since that time, I have been absorbed with the detrimental effects of separating social from physical design considerations in urban planning and allied fields. Inspired in part by an exposure and exchange with Lewis Mumford (incorporated in this book in the essay on the 1939 film “The City”), I found additional guidance for addressing this divide in the work of the University of Pittsburgh’s Roy Lubove.

It is Lubove’s concept of environmental intervention that led me to review efforts to use physical design to promote civic well-being. This process had precedents in Frederic Law Olmsted’s nineteenth century designs for parks and suburbs. But it really took hold in reactions to the excesses of unbridled urban industrialism on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 20th century.

Ebenezer Howard’s utopian vision for garden cities that would combine the best elements of urban with country life did not immediately take hold in America. It was Mumford and his colleagues who embraced the concept and applied it to community building efforts in the Northeast after World War I. Mumford’s associate Catherine Bauer extended the effort in support of the nation’s earliest public housing programs, which included prime examples of living environments that enhanced social interaction and even solidarity among residents.

My explorations took me further into unlikely territory, including plans for the earliest regional shopping malls. Here, architect Victor Gruen and developer James Rouse claimed, new centers for sociability would be created to anchor the civic life of otherwise anonymous suburbs.

More recently, New Urbanist critics have rediscovered some of the principles advanced by Mumford and his colleagues. While initially applying their design solutions to suburban sprawl, they ultimately extended their theories to the reconstruction of public housing gone bad as well as to disaster areas along the Gulf Coast following Katrina’s devastating impact.

The results of all these efforts have been mixed. Too often, even the best intentioned reforms had unintended consequences. The legacy of civic design thus remains uneven at best.

I have been absorbed with the detrimental effects of separating social from physical design considerations in urban planning and allied fields

A close-up

I am particularly intrigued with the story of public housing, where one would least expect to encounter “communities of citizens.”

The early history of the movement to provide decent shelter at affordable prices reveals, however, the same high intention of creating physical means for enhancing social ties among residents, such as common recreational and use facilities. The hostility to such amenities and their presumed costs led to their elimination, and public housing became over time the last refuge of those who could least afford better options in the private market.

Park Duvall public housing complex in Louisville, before (above) and after (below) conversion in accordance with New Urbanist design. Photographs courtesy of Urban Design Associates, Pittsburgh.

When the Department of Housing and Urban Development adopted New Urbanist design guidelines under its Hope VI program in the 1990s, the gap between public and private housing narrowed. Despite this apparently successful marriage between social uplift and good design, however, such successes have been infrequent in the private sector.

One example, pictured on the book’s cover, in calculated relationship to the best example of garden city design in America (Radburn, New Jersey), is the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Open to residents whose incomes fall between 20 and 80% of median income, the Lawrence facility is every bit as inviting physically as the best private developments in the region. Such examples remain the exception, however.

Lastly

Civitas by Design went to press as the country entered one of its worst recessions. It was obvious that, even with a new president steeped in progressive values and associated with community work, the persistent problems of our most devastated post-industrial cities were not going to receive immediate priority. Crisis management rather than long-term reform has been the primary concern of the early Obama administration.

That being said, I still have hope that design precedents that fully incorporate a commitment to social justice can once again be utilized in a variety of circumstances. The history of interventions to upgrade physical conditions with hopes of strengthening our civic life offer both precedents and lessons for improvement. We have the information to extend these efforts. We need only the will to act.

© 2010 Howard Gillette, Jr.

The history of interventions to upgrade physical conditions with hopes of strengthening our civic life offer both precedents and lessons for improvement. We have the information to extend these efforts. We need only the will to act.

In a nutshell

In 1790-91, France became the first European country to make the Jews full and equal citizens. Considered a backward population in need of “regeneration” by Enlightenment reformers, the French Jews transformed over the course of the next hundred years into a modernizing vanguard, spearheading many of the social, economic, and political changes that helped make Paris into the “capital of the nineteenth century.”

Inventing the Israelite examines the fiction produced in the mid-nineteenth century (1830-1870) by the first generation of Jews to be born as French citizens. These writers include Eugénie Foa, Ben-Lévi (pseud. Godchaux Weil), Ben Baruch (pseud. Alexandre Créhange), Alexandre Weill, Daniel Stauben (pseud. Auguste Widal), and David Schornstein. Mostly unknown to scholars, their novels and short stories provide unique insight into a community in the throes of momentous change.

I argue that these nineteenth-century French Jewish writers used fiction to come to terms with the possibilities—and pitfalls—presented by emancipation, and as a kind of laboratory for the invention of modern Jewish identity. They did so by bringing the forms of the French literary tradition to bear on the central problems facing modern Jews. The result is unique in both French and Jewish literary history.

My book begins with an introduction that outlines modern French Jewish history and explains the factors—including early emancipation—that made the French Jews unique among their European coreligionists. The core of Inventing the Israelite is five chapters, each centered on a writer who epitomizes a different point on the Jewish ideological spectrum of the time—a different answer to the problem of how to be Jewish in modern France.

These answers range from apostasy to orthodoxy, from advocating intermarriage and conversion to maintaining strict adherence to Jewish laws and traditions. In between these two extremes, other writers advocate through their fiction for religious reform as well as for more idiosyncratic ways of becoming a modern Jew. Still others sought to redefine Jewishness in secular terms, leaving behind religious practice for a more historical form of identity.

In the conclusion, I skip forward to the early twentieth century to show how the fiction of Marcel Proust perpetuates the legacy of these nineteenth-century Jewish writers by asking very similar questions about what it means to be a Jew in modern France.

The wide angle

Nineteenth-century French Jews have often received bad press. Denounced by antisemites at the time as the new feudal lords of capitalism, they were also seen as nefarious agents of communist revolution.

But more damning—because less preposterous—criticisms have come from other Jews. Indeed, twentieth-century Jewish historians often characterized nineteenth-century French Jews as misguided apostles of assimilation.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, Hannah Arendt criticizes the French Jews for having renounced their Jewish identity in a bid to become French and for having been woefully unprepared to deal with the difficulties of the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy period as a result.

I decided to examine the fiction produced by the nineteenth-century French Jews to test the truth of these stereotypes. I quickly discovered, however, that most scholars did not believe that such a literature existed.

One recent textbook that I consulted declared that there was no French Jewish literature to speak of before the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the nineteenth century. Before this period, French Jews had apparently been too busy with their social integration and economic advancement to write.

And yet, while researching my last book, on historical representation in nineteenth-century France, I came across a historical novel entitled La Juive (The Jewess) published in 1835 by a Jewish woman from Bordeaux named Eugénie Foa. Written in the descriptive style of Walter Scott, this melodramatic page-turner, set in eighteenth-century Paris, tells the story of a Jewish woman who falls in love with a handsome Christian nobleman and dies as a result of her illicit passion.

This novel fascinated me because of the way it used the popular generic forms of the historical and sentimental novel to confront the central problems of Jewish modernity, including intermarriage, conversion, and the conflict between personal freedom and Jewish tradition. Here, it seemed, lay evidence that a French Jew of the early nineteenth century in fact had made an attempt at writing fiction about the Jewish experience. But did Foa represent a lone case?

When I began to read the new French Jewish press of the period, especially the two major monthly Jewish newspapers founded in the early 1840s, Les Archives Israélites and L’Univers Israélite, I realized that Foa had in fact inaugurated a trend. These newspapers, which continued to thrive until World War II, published a great deal of writing in many genres, all depicting Jews. They also published reviews of other works, including much fiction. After locating these works at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, I was finally convinced that something like a French Jewish literary sphere existed in the nineteenth century.

The period I researched (1830-1870), spanning the July Monarchy, the Second Republic, and the Second Empire, represents the point at which French Jews’ faith in the path of emancipation was at its highest level, following the fall of the conservative Restoration monarchy and prior to the outbreak of fin-de-siècle antisemitism.

As I show, even in this period, most French Jews resisted the temptations of assimilation—if by “assimilation” one means the renunciation of all Jewish specificity in the rush to integrate completely with the dominant culture. Indeed, the very fact of their publishing fiction about Jews reflects a willingness to assert their Jewishness in the public sphere. This is true even of Eugénie Foa, who advocates intermarriage and conversion, but who nevertheless attempted to carve a place for herself in the crowded literary marketplace as France’s first Jewish writer.

the fiction of Marcel Proust perpetuates the legacy of nineteenth-century Jewish writers by asking very similar questions about what it means to be a Jew in modern France

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Maurice Samuels

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

In a nutshell

Animal Characters studies the place of nonhuman animals in Renaissance writing.

Between 1400 and 1700, written and visual records tell us, Europeans began to experience the animal world in new ways. Animal Characters uses these records to describe the changing fortunes of five breeds of animal—horses, parrots, cats, turkeys, and sheep—as they lived, died, and were written about in the early modern period.

My book follows the fate of these beasts through the work of the age’s greatest authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Ariosto, Rabelais, and more—as well as through husbandry manuals and exploration narratives, paintings and cookbooks, public processions and private menageries. In the process, it recounts how these breeds of animal changed, both literally and figuratively, at the dawn of the modern age.

When it comes to social roles and associations, the animals I’ve chosen to study appear against different historical backgrounds and for different reasons. Exotic and expensive, parrots serve as high-prestige commodities in the early modern period’s growing luxury trade, and as such they were either kept in private zoological collections or as rare companion animals. Cats, on the other hand, figure in common households, where they serve as vermin-catchers before they gain acceptance as pets. The turkey starts out as an exotic and expensive food animal that is gradually domesticated across Europe over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sheep, valued both for its wool and its flesh, gains additional symbolic status through its association with Christian sacrifice. The horse, prized for various reasons and bred with various purposes in mind, gradually loses its supreme importance as an instrument of warfare.

But whether the beasts in question are associated with privilege or poverty, and whether they are used for food or clothing or companionship or haulage, they all develop over the course of the Renaissance, changing their meaning, their uses, and more generally their character in the process.

The wide angle

The treatment of beasts in Renaissance literature tells us something about their evolving place in European culture more generally. It also tells us how early modern society understood the difference between human beings and other beings.

By Shakespeare’s day, writers are well used to giving reason and speech and consciousness—what we call character—to nonhuman animals. Sentient beasts appear in travelogues, bestiaries, tales of the supernatural, allegorical poetry, and more. Moral histories castigate human beings for sinking to the level of beasts, and natural histories credit nonhuman beings with self-awareness, reason, and even speech.

But from the mid-1500s on, these ways of depicting nonhuman life grow more and more subject to ridicule. Cervantes and Shakespeare associate sentient animals with worn-out styles of writing and thinking. Rabelais uses them to lampoon the pope. And by the mid-1600s, Descartes defines human consciousness in a way that denies anything similar to other animals.

In essence, this new understanding of the human/animal divide requires writers to depict human beings in a new way, as the privileged vessels of self-awareness. As a result, the Cartesian definition of the human leads to a new emphasis on inwardness and personality in the depiction of literary character.

As inner life becomes a uniquely human attribute, a whole set of literary forms dealing with animal characters—beast-fable, beast-epic, chivalric romance—disappears from the literary mainstream, replaced by new genres built to display human subjectivity: the novel preeminently, but also lyric poetry and the comedy of manners.

You could even put it this way: the construction of character became central to literature because it had also become central to the philosophy of species difference.

As inner life becomes a uniquely human attribute, a whole set of literary forms dealing with animal characters—beast-fable, beast-epic, chivalric romance—disappears from the literary mainstream, replaced by new genres built to display human subjectivity: the novel preeminently, but also lyric poetry and the comedy of manners.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

© 2010 Bruce Boehrer

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

In a nutshell

Great Books, Bad Arguments looks at three of the most famous texts in Western political thought and asks whether the proposals advanced by Plato, Hobbes, and Marx for the avoidance of disorder and injustice in human societies are sufficiently plausible, when analyzed sociologically, to carry conviction.

The conclusion I draw is that they are not. And that the problem which they accordingly pose is that of accounting for their enduring reputation as ‘great books.’

My suggested answer is that they should be read as masterpieces of what I call ‘optative’ sociology. By that I mean that Plato, Hobbes, and Marx want their readers to share not only their anger and dismay at what they see in the world around them but their passionate hope that a way can somehow be found to bring into being institutional arrangements whereby human beings can live together in harmony.

Many other commentators have pointed out what they see as weaknesses in Plato’s, Hobbes’s, and Marx’s arguments for their respective proposals. But none has gone on to account for how it is that proposals so demonstrably unrealistic can continue to command such universal and admiring attention.

The wide angle

That the concerns which Republic, Leviathan, and the Communist Manifesto address are of perennial importance is not in doubt. I first encountered the three books as a student more than fifty years ago, and it never crossed my mind to question why they were there on the reading lists.

But since then, I have pursued an academic career as a comparative and historical sociologist studying the range of political, ideological, and economic institutions which have evolved down the ages and across the world and the reasons for which they have or have not held together under different historical conditions. It is no surprise, therefore, that I should have reacted rather differently when reading the three books for the second time half a century later.

Sociology is not, and never will be, able to resolve Plato’s, Hobbes’s, and Marx’s concerns by laying down a political constitution which will guarantee internal peace. But over the last hundred years, the social sciences have made striking advances in our understanding of the institutional mechanisms and psychological dispositions which hold large societies of unrelated people together—despite the inherent conflicts of interest which always have, and always will, put different individuals and groups within their population into competition with one another for power.

It was that thought, and then a chance conversation with an eminent authority on Greek philosophy, which set me off to re-read first Republic, then Leviathan, and then The Communist Manifesto. This book is the result.

none has gone on to account for how it is that proposals so demonstrably unrealistic can continue to command such universal and admiring attention

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 W. G. Runciman

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

In a nutshell

The modern history of the Jews is deeply intertwined with the history of capitalism. My book tries, in a brief compass, to show the many facets of this relationship.

The way in which capitalism itself was interpreted by modern Western thinkers and political movements was often influenced by the linkage between Jews and commerce—a linkage going back to the medieval Christian stigmatization of usury and the Jews’ role as lenders of money.

Historically, the way in which Jews were viewed by non-Jews was often linked to the Jews’ economic roles, and to broader ideas about the benefits and evils of commerce. The ways in which Jews understood themselves was also linked to their reactions to modern capitalism. The varieties of modern Jewish politics—liberal, socialist, communist, and Zionist—can only be understood in relationship to capitalist development and its effects on the Jews.

In the space of a short book, I try to give the reader a variety of angles from which to think about the ways in which the history of capitalism and the history of the Jews have been interlinked.

The wide angle

My previous book, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought, examined how modern European intellectuals thought about commerce. Writing it, I recognized that the way modern European thinkers viewed commerce was often linked to the way they thought about Jews.

I wanted to explore that theme in greater depth—and that became my new book’s the first chapter, “The Long Shadow of Usury: Capitalism and the Jews in Modern European Thought.”

This first chapter begins by explaining the significance of the concept of “usury” in western thought, and then examines the ways in which modern European thinkers—including Montesquieu, Voltaire, Marx, Sombart, Weber, Simmel, Hayek and Keynes thought about the linkages between capitalism and the Jews.

The second chapter “The Jewish Response to Capitalism,” takes up a claim by Milton Friedman that Jews were among the major beneficiaries of capitalism, but among its most persistent antagonists. Drawing together a good deal of scattered historical and social scientific research, the chapter examines the historical reasons while Jews tended to do disproportionately well in capitalist societies, when they were granted a modicum of legal equality—a theme that Friedman ignored.

In this chapter, I also show that Jews’ actual intellectual and political allegiances were more varied than Friedman let on. Jews have been among the most articulate defenders of capitalism as well as among its most vociferous critics.

The third chapter, “Radical Anticapitalism: The Jew as Communist,” examines the still underexplored phenomenon of Jewish salience in Communist movements. It shows that while few Jews were in fact communists, Jewish communists rose to positions of great salience in communist movements—often with disastrous effects, not least because the myth of the Jew as Bolshevik contributed to anti-Semitism on the political right.

The last chapter, “The Economics of Nationalism and the Fate of the Jews in Twentieth-Century Europe” examines the ways in which the very success of Jews in emerging capitalist societies could lead to envy, resentment, and the attempt to extrude them from the nation states of modern Europe. This chapter thus explains the role of economic processes in creating Zionism, perhaps the most important expression of modern Jewish politics.

Even today, some Jews regard the public discussion of Jews and capitalism as intrinsically impolitic, as if conspiratorial fantasies about Jews and money can be eliminated by prudent silence.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

© 2010 Jerry Z. Muller

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

In a nutshell

Wounded Knee is the story of the 1890 massacre in South Dakota that left more than 250 Sioux and 25 soldiers dead.

The book explains the history of the relationship between the Sioux and the American government, the religious movement among the Sioux that made Indian agents nervous, the escalating tensions between the military and the Indians, and, finally, the massacre and its aftermath.

Critically, though, Wounded Knee asks a question no one has asked before: Why were the troops sent to South Dakota in the first place, when there were no lives lost and no property threatened in the alleged Indian “uprising”?

The answer is that what happened on December 29 at Wounded Knee Creek came out of a struggle to control the national government.

In 1890, America was bitterly divided between rich and poor, Republicans and Democrats, Easterners and Westerners. Since the Civil War, the Republicans had used the federal government to promote business. But by the 1880s, rich industrialists threw million-dollar parties while laborers worked for pennies in mills and fields and factories. Americans began to worry that government was too cozy with business, and pressured politicians to cut back their pro-business legislation. Government, they said, should not privilege businessmen over everyone else in society.

Horrified, Republicans countered that business development was the centerpiece of America’s life, and that any attempts to ameliorate the abuses of industrial capitalism were “socialism.” Those demanding that government regulate business—or at least stop protecting it at every turn—were trying to destroy America, Republicans insisted. They organized businessmen to pour money into the 1888 presidential election. Their candidate, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote.

Harrison’s administration was weak from the start, and to shore it up, Harrison’s men worked to skew the electoral system toward the Republicans and away from Democrats. They admitted to the Union six new western states that they believed would vote Republican, tried to change election laws to favor Republicans, and bought a popular newspaper to act as the administration’s mouthpiece.

By the summer of 1890, it had become clear that none of these measures were sufficient to stop the flow of voters toward the Democrats. Republicans heightened their rhetoric about socialism and the destruction of America in the months before the midterm election of 1890. At the same time, though, they passed a new law that dramatically benefited business at the expense of consumers, workers, and farmers.

The backlash of 1890 threatened to take control of the government out of the hands of the Republicans. They lost the House of Representatives by a margin of 2:1, and retained control of the Senate by only four votes.

This was not the relief it should have been, though. Three of those four Senate Republicans had voted against the last piece of pro-business legislation, and had indicated that they would no longer support the administration’s economic policy.

Control of the Senate hung on one seat: the seat from South Dakota.

The election for that seat was contested, and would not be decided until January of 1891. While South Dakotans fought over who had won, President Harrison sent troops to the new state.

The Sioux could not vote in the election of 1890, but nonetheless they became crucial pawns in the struggle to control the government.

The wide angle

Since the 1970s, there has been a tendency in America to see inequalities in society solely through the lens of race. Our understanding of the Wounded Knee massacre has reflected this: we have blamed racist soldiers alone for the brutal deaths of the Sioux that day.

But using racism as a scapegoat for society’s inequalities is far too easy. It lets modern-day Americans—most of whom pride themselves for not being racist—condemn inequalities in the past while insisting that problems in the present are not of their making.

Wounded Knee demands that we use a wider lens when we look at society’s problems. I recognize the racism of the soldiers, but if the soldiers had had their wish, they would never have been in South Dakota in the first place.

To understand what created the Wounded Knee massacre, we have to look beyond the racism of the soldiers. We have to figure out what led President Harrison to deploy a third of the U.S. Army to the new state of South Dakota when there was no obviously pressing reason to do so. It turns out that what prompted him to make that fatal decision was a toxic brew of politics and economics.

It is a mistake to let racism alone bear the responsibility for American inequalities. Wounded Knee suggests that to understand events like the massacre—as well as myriad other instances where one group has advantages over another—we have to look at larger societal systems. We need to see how economic policies privilege certain groups over others; how seemingly even-handed legislation can in fact discriminate against certain groups of people; how political machinations have winners and losers.

Looked at this way, continuing inequalities in society cannot be explained away by blaming somebody else’s racism. They implicate anyone who participates in the system without addressing its flaws.

In 1890, the soldiers were responsible for pulling the triggers, yes. But anyone who had voted for the Harrison administration was also responsible for what happened at Wounded Knee.

Some of those Republican voters prided themselves on their goodwill toward the Indians. But they were nonetheless instrumental in setting them up for destruction: accepting the idea that Harrison’s opponents were socialists who wanted to destroy America, they handed the reins of government to men who were determined to promote big business at all costs.

Why were the troops sent to South Dakota in the first place, when there were no lives lost and no property threatened in the alleged Indian “uprising”?

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

Wounded Knee shows that we must reject extreme political rhetoric.

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Heather Cox Richardson

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

In a nutshell

Pen of Iron traces the varying ways in which the language of the King James Version became an enriching element in the prose style of a line of American novelists from Melville to Marilynne Robinson and Cormac McCarthy.

The presence of biblical motifs and themes in American literature has often been studied, but not much attention has been given to how the once canonical translation made a difference on the level of style. My book is based on the assumption that style is not merely ornamentation but the means through which a novelist constructs and understands the world. Understanding style, then, is an indispensable means for getting a handle on the achievement of the major American novelists.

The King James Version opened new expressive possibilities for literary English, and those possibilities were most fully realized in America, where, at least till the earlier twentieth century, the 1611 translation of the Bible pervaded the culture. The stylistic resources of the King James Version were tapped even by writers who stood at a great distance from the biblical worldview or wanted to quarrel with it.

I view the ongoing relation of imaginative writers to the King James Version as an unfolding story. And so I would ideally like writers to follow this narrative in chronological order from beginning to end, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the two novels of the twenty-first century I discuss at the end of the book.

The wide angle

I suppose the professional path that led me to this book goes back to when I was twenty-two years old and read for the first time Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis. Subtitled The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, I still consider this to be the greatest single work of literary criticism written in the twentieth century.

Auerbach, who was trained as a philologist, uses the strategy of close analysis of characteristic passages from the books he discusses. He looks at formal features of the language such as syntax, verb-tenses, levels of diction, and from these technical details he is able to build a compelling account of how the different writers in different periods conceived and represented reality.

The model of Auerbach has stayed with me for half a century. At least indirectly, it informs books I have written as different as a study of biblical narrative, a critical biography of Stendhal, an investigation of the self-conscious tradition in the European novel.

Over the years, the principal fashions of literary studies have moved far away from the sort of concerns and the method of analysis one finds in Mimesis. For two decades or more, the dominant direction in American departments of literature was highly theoretical, sometimes abstrusely so. More recently, the political contexts and implications of literary texts have come to be the favored focus of study.

Not all of this has been useless: I myself am persuaded that contexts cannot be ignored and that literary style cannot be studied in test-tube isolation, and also that consideration of theory can make concepts sharper and more complex.

Nevertheless, there has been a swing away from attention to style in our classrooms and academic journals that in my view has led students and scholars away from one of the great joys of reading and from a crucial dimension of any literary work that complicates it and makes it more interesting.

In light of all this, I would say that there is an implicit polemic—but a constructive one, I hope—in Pen of Iron. That polemic thrust is an argument, through the examples discussed, for the importance of style in the understanding, and the enjoyment, of literature.

The presence of the King James Version in the rhythms and syntax and images of American prose is a particular example—but I think a deeply instructive one—of the importance of style in fiction.

a swing away from attention to style has led students and scholars away from one of the great joys of reading

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Robert Alter

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

In a nutshell

The Speed Handbook is first and foremost devoted to exploring the thrill you feel when you experience intense new speeds.

Of what, exactly does the thrill of speed consist? Can speed’s excitement be harnessed and redeployed to energize the ways we live?

I suggest that this is exactly what happened for the first time in the modernist era, when the speed of the newly invented automobile allowed people at last to feel modernity in their very bones.

The Speed Handbook argues that access to intense new speeds for masses of people, with the arrival of the automobile and its instant acceptance, is a crucial sign of a new level if intensity that was offered to people in modernity.

Speed revolutionized people’s sense of space and territory. It gave drivers a sense of how, through this new technology, they might live their lives more intensely. It introduced them to new levels of physical risk and the powers of technologized violence: the crash. It placed them, even in their leisure moments, ever more fully under the surveillance of the law.

The modernist era, which followed the invention of the mass-producible motor car after 1896, marked a new regime of personal thrill-reward, personal risk and personal responsibility, all centered on offering masses of people access to hitherto-incredible speeds.

The wide angle

In a 1931 essay, Aldous Huxley asked a brilliant question: “Has modernity, with all its stress on progress, on inventiveness and on the new, actually give humankind any truly new experience, any new pleasure?” His answer was that he could only, finally, think of one: the experience of speed.

The Speed Handbook takes up the challenge of Huxley’s claim: if speed is modernity’s single new pleasure, the one experience invented in the modern era that has not been experienced with such intensity ever before, then speed needs to be understood in order to understand modernity itself.

The Speed Handbook ranges through the fascination with speed in the years 1900-1930 in particular, in both high art and the new popular culture genres. This is seen above all in the newest medium, the movies, but also in novels, in photography, advertising, theme parks, speedways, and car design. These were the arenas in which speed’s impact could be celebrated, interpreted, critiqued.

I suggest that many of the radical new forms of modernist high culture, and even more the original formats being pioneered by the new mass media, were developed to represent speed’s thrills.

From the very beginning, to take an obvious example, movies were obsessed with the car chase. Every genre of modernist culture was fascinated by speed: think of the auto-race snapshot-photographs of J. H. Lartigue, novels form The Wind in the Willows to The Great Gatsby to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the rants and metal-fluid sculptures of the Futurists, the modern portraits of Tamara de Lempicka and the posters of A.M. Cassandre. Even Matisse painted French landscapes framed by a car windscreen.

The mass car culture of the post-war era and the sixties reaction generated a new wave of car-obsessed texts: J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Godard’s film Weekend, Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at any Speed. These varied documents of car-culture, horrified and transfixed by speed’s thrills, educated people in how to handle speed even as they improvised new ways to represent its excitements and its protocols of controlled fear.

The automobile, site of all this attention, is the most characteristic artifact of modernism. The automobile has wrought such havoc on the planet that we forget its originality—and the nature of the pleasure of the speed it provides. Its mass adoption allowed people to experience speed as a sensation. The sensation of speed made possible by the automobile meant that modernity could now be experienced as a physical effect on modern bodies. (Since those early years, we have become blasé to speed: we would now need to drive very fast indeed to experience what those earliest drivers felt at, say, 45 mph).

This new technology, for those first drivers, stretched people’s senses of perception to new limits. It demanded a new alertness, faster reaction times and coordination of body to the machine.

Thus car culture, both in its high and popular forms, is one site where the usual narrative of modernist alienation turns out to no longer be credible. The Speed Handbook looks at representations of speed in the inter-war years to challenge the story usually told about the function of modernist art as a latter-day metaphysics of alienation.

The revolutionary strangeness of the high modernist art of Joyce, Picasso, Woolf and the rest is often accounted for as these artists’ response to a modern sense of alienation—that is, the awareness that modern subjects were losing touch with sensuous reality, and therefore feeling a low hum of discontent, a middle-class anomie.

Picasso’s distorted faces, for example, or the boredom-laden cadences of T.S. Eliot’s dawdling lines, are taken to be indices of this modern alienation from a vibrant real. Car culture, which might at first appear banal and “low,” presents in the same years an antidote to this aesthetics of ennui. It is all about dynamism, about excitement, about the frisson of pleasure, along with the terror, of the speed thrill.

How then can we read it? The Speed Handbook suggests that it is the arena in which there developed a nascent “adrenaline aesthetics,” whose cultural forms were much more in your face and immediate, and which was geared to annotating the somatic experience of the thrill of speed which might be experienced by the modern individual as a counterpoint to the unbearable heaviness of anomie.

The book describes how, with new speeds, there also developed a new awareness of slowness. By attending in their texts to the slow, by making us party to the dreariness of waiting in line, high modernist texts were both evidencing their fear of the new technology-driven modernity, and, despite themselves, inciting their readers to move instead to the rhythms of increased speeds.

There is a history of slowness that runs in tandem with the history of speed. In the book, the crowning example of this is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a great hymn to slowness, imperialism and how both relate to what we like to call progress.

“Adrenaline aesthetics,” I posit, insinuates its frissons into every cultural production, so that modernist artworks in fact work to shed the old perspective-based aesthetics of critical distance and the static, still, position it requires, in favor of a multiple-perspectival, unfixed, always moving viewpoint—whose movement has a rate, a rate of speed.

The new speed culture came with a politics. First, it was a politics of access: the rich were granted greater speeds earlier. As the masses, too, at least in the West, gained access to technologized speed, new political implications became evident.

At one level, enjoying the automobile’s speed, which the vast car advertising sold as a leisure activity, might be seen as a compensation for the alienation of work. The Ford assembly-line worker, doing repetitive work with machines each day, could experience the machine as thrill on the weekend drive.

Yet speed’s thrill, apparently so mundane and personal, achieved much farther-reaching political effects. Speed, experienced somatically with the help of technology, altered people’s relation to space. Before, the home had been cast as the—static—place of pleasure: the unknown world beyond, as the place of threat and possible adventure. With the automobile and its thrills, the home ceased to be the place in which to experience the best of modernity. And the far-away world was no longer the place of fantasy, as it had been, for example, in imperial adventure tales. Now the space of movement thrilled more than any place. I suggest that this coincided with the moment when the whole known world was mapped, and the last age of European imperialism was about to end.

Car culture, in other words, accustomed us to a world in which movement, rather than territoriality, would be demanded of us and made pleasurable.

we have become blase to speed: we would now need to drive very fast indeed to experience what those earliest drivers felt at, say, 45 mph

A close-up

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Enda Duffy

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

In a nutshell

My book is about the making of the literate imagination in the history of children’s literature. More than just a survey of books and authors, Children’s Literature is a critical narrative of how education, the family, and social life come together in the many different kinds of things that children read.

I look at literature that was not only written for children, but all books read by children: thus, at different points in history, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Defoe, and Twain were all “children’s writers” in that their works were adapted for and read by young people. My book therefore also looks at the wide traditions of children’s literature in the West—quite literally, from Aesop to Harry Potter—to see the different ways in which cultures and societies defined childhood, understood acts of reading and writing, and taught social values and ideals.

Finally, my work looks at the history of the book and children’s literature: how the physical artifact of the written, printed, illustrated, and even digital book bears meaning and has a social impact on the imagination of the reading child.

The wide angle

I first became interested in the history of children’s literature when I was working on the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer. Chaucer was viewed as the “father of English Literature,” and he was also viewed by his later readers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century as a writer with educational content.

I thus became aware of literary history itself as a kind of family romance—if there was a father of literature, who where the children? I also became aware of Chaucer’s literary “fatherhood” as granting a particular authority—he could be read as a kind of fatherly figure teaching children.

These scholarly concerns dovetailed with my own, personal experience of child-rearing and reading to my son, Aaron, so that after a while I became both professionally and personally concerned with the history of education and the rise of childhood literacy.

Among the general principles guiding the book, therefore, some are critical, some are social, and some are personal.

The critical principles are that, while authors may intend a particular meaning for literary works, meaning is made by or brought to literary works by readers. The meaning of a literary work in a culture is, in many ways, the sum of the traditions of reading it over time. Thus, we come to Chaucer, or Shakespeare, or Toni Morrison, or Jane Austen through the filter of generations of teachers and critics, of popular cultural adaptations, and of our own tastes and presuppositions. Children’s literature, I argue, works in these ways.

The social principles behind my work involve a view of reading (especially reading in groups) as an ethical practice. Reading to and with children is a form of familial bonding. Communities of reading—shaped by schools, public libraries, book groups, and the like—build social networks. Many works of children’s literature take as their very theme the making of a literate child, and many works often have scenes of reading and writing as moments of growth and revelation in their narrative.

My personal principles lie in a conviction that, whatever the rise of digital technology in society, the physical, bound book remains a unique artifact. Our experience of reading bound books is different from our experience of reading on a screen (however book-like). Thus, I am concerned with the physical, bodily experience of reading and writing, and the ways in which children’s books themselves become talismans of identity for children as they grow up.

at different points in history, Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Swift, Defoe, and Twain were all “children’s writers”

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Seth Lerer

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

In a nutshell

Piracy is about how today’s world of intellectual property came into being through half a millennium of conflict.

Beginning in early modern Europe, the book traces the emergence of the laws and customs that structure the information economy. The story it tells ranges from the streets of Milton’s London to the computer labs of MIT and the backstreets of Beijing.

I show how struggles over so-called piracy have consistently driven the development of new practices and concepts. The laws of copyright and patenting—and even the concept of intellectual property itself—resulted from such struggles. At the same time, the debates that piracy triggered also shaped major elements of modern culture—including the Enlightenment itself, science, and the media.

Piracy also traces the emergence of a private policing industry devoted to forestalling or detecting piracy—an industry that has itself repeatedly skirted illegality in its methods.

The book ends in the present day, with a speculation that the age of intellectual property may be coming to an end. The combination of a networked economy that challenges the basic foundations of intellectual property monopolies and a growing backlash against excessive anti-piracy policing may well lead to a revolution in this sphere as great as that which led to the invention of intellectual property itself.

At that point, the convictions and arguments that structured the prior half-millennium of the history of intellectual property will become “live” once again; understanding them may well help us to find a way forward. It is in that light that I would hope readers will approach Piracy: as history, certainly, but as history with consequences.

The wide angle

Piracy today is often presented as the definitive transgression of the information age. There are pirate movies and pirate music, obviously, but there are also pirate pharmaceuticals and seeds, pirate toys, and pirate aircraft parts. Anything that can be construed as information—and in this age that means anything at all—may be subject to pirating.

This means that controversies about piracy reveal the foundations of our age as few others can. In particular, they highlight a central problem: how to reconcile the realms of creative authorship and commercial life.

In Piracy I make the point that those controversies are not at all new. They have raged since the 1600s, taking different forms in different contexts but always forcing participants to articulate important principles on which creation and commerce might be allowed to intersect.

So, for example, in the eighteenth century metropolitan publishers fought against provincial and international “pirates” to preserve their claims to a perpetual “literary property” in printed works. Their clashes defined and publicized what became central concepts of the Enlightenment, and hence of the modern cultural economy: authorial rights, the rights and duties of readers, the authority of the public, and the need for a balance to be struck between monopoly and liberty—between openness and property—for the sake of progress.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, similarly, the ideal of modern science as an objective, collective, and public endeavor took shape through a long series of clashes centering on alleged piracy of industrial research. The distinctive funding and publishing mechanisms on which today’s science depends emerged from those clashes, which climaxed in the 1930s and ’40s. In these ways and more, defining elements of our late-modern world reflect the history that Piracy reveals.

I came to this subject from working on the relation between the scientific revolution and the printing revolution. In the 1450s, the printing press was introduced to Western Europe by Johann Gutenberg. From about the same time, a massive transformation in knowledge about the natural world began that would culminate in Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy in 1687 and ultimately in the creation of modern science.

The question I originally wanted to answer was this: how did printing and science, both being practical activities concerned with knowledge, affect each other in that revolutionary period?

The answer I came up with was quite unlike conventional views. The emphasis tended to be on the intrinsic power of the press to multiply identical copies of texts. But to me the character of “print culture” was much more ambiguous. The printers had generated their own customs and conventions, which were not necessarily conducive to stabilizing knowledge. And the scholars and experimenters had had to band together to make print into a useful tool for science. They created editorial techniques, new genres (the scientific journal and the experimental paper), new notions of authorship, and new reading strategies to do this.

This argument was laid out in The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, which was published in 1998. It was in the course of writing The Nature of the Book that I became aware that in the early modern period accusations of piracy had originated and proliferated. That gave me the idea to pursue their history from that era to the present.

The common thread between The nature of the book and Piracy is that both look for answers about today’s major cultural questions—the identity and origin of science, the character of the media, the problems of the information economy—not in high concepts, but in the mundane, everyday commitments out of which such concepts must grow.

The focus is on the actual people, places, and practices that have shaped entities like intellectual property. So readers will find both books populated with real human beings, facing complex and intractable problems and doing their best to tackle them with the cultural, practical, and technical means at their disposal. I think that this is the essence of history; even the greatest issues of an age have to be comprehensible in such terms.

Piracy also traces the emergence of a private policing industry devoted to forestalling or detecting piracy—an industry that has itself repeatedly skirted illegality in its methods.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Adrian Johns

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

In a nutshell

King of the Lobby is about power, politics, money, and lobbying in Washington in the Gilded Age. It is about delicious food, fine wines, and good conversation and how one suave New Yorker, Sam Ward, combined all three to create a new type of lobbying—social lobbying—and reigned as “Rex Vestiari” for a decade. Scion of an honorable old family, brother of unassailably upright Julia Ward Howe, best friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, mathematician, linguist, California ‘49er, spendthrift who squandered several fortunes, Sam Ward was one of the most amazing men of an era crowded with larger-than-life personalities.

After lecturing the house Ways and Means Committee on the hazards of lobbying and the importance of dining well, Sam Ward told a parable about a clever cook, the king of Spain, and a meal with an unusual ingredient. In this newspaper cartoon, he cooks up a pot of $1,000 pigs’ ears himself. (New York Daily Graphic, December 20, 1876.)

The wide angle

Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in 2010, but the same stories filled the press and the Capitol building in the 1870s.

In the Gilded Age, when wave after wave of scandal uncovered congressmen who sold their votes and ruthless men who arrived in Washington with trunks full of cash with which to buy them, Sam Ward reigned unspotted as “King of the Lobby.” Not only that, he transformed what it meant to lobby. Bribes of railroad stock weren’t for him. “The King” traded in information exchanged at dinner parties, evenings that one guest gushed were “the climax of civilization.” At his table the outlines of a new, modern lobby, a lobby easily recognizable today, took shape. With the spotlight shining again on the lobby and while cries of abuses of power by special interests abound, exposing and understanding the roots of the modern lobby in the years after the Civil War gives context to the current debate.

Before the Capitol’s lobbies were even finished, special interest groups began lining up to exercise their First Amendment right “of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.” How has the Constitutionally sanctioned lobby evolved in the intervening two centuries? Can wily lobbyists like Collis Huntington in the 1860s or Jack Abramoff in 2000 really be said to be seeking “redress of grievances”? Or is the nation now, as the press believed it was in the 1870s, going to hell in a hand-basket carried by lobbyists?

Themes important for examining Sam Ward’s life and the post-bellum lobby into the context of their times run throughout my career. My doctoral dissertation examined high society in Washington during the Gilded Age. As a historian for the U. S. Senate for more than a decade, I studied Congress and lobbying up close. As editor-in-chief of the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774-1989 (GPO, 1989), I gained an understanding (and a trove of arcane details) of the lives of hundreds of former senators, some of whom got caught up in the cascade of scandals that washed over the two administrations of Ulysses S. Grant.

Research for my first book, Capital Elites, introduced me to Sam Ward, a key player at the three-way intersection of politics, power, and entertaining in the post-war years. My second book, Testament to Union, again took me into the thick of politics and lobbying, where I ran into the ubiquitous Sam once more.

In both of these books and in articles for American Heritage and Smithsonian on the Lizzie Borden ax murders, physician Clelia Mosher and her sex survey of American women, and sculptor Vinnie Ream, who unabashedly lobbied Congress for government commissions, I’ve woven biography together with social, cultural, and political history to create a colorful tapestry that not only examines a life but tells a bigger story about power, class, or gender–sometimes all three–and that’s what I’ve tried to do for Sam Ward and the post-Civil War lobby in King of the Lobby.

Lamentations that special interests, spending obscene amounts of money, strangle the voice of “the people”? More lobbyists than Corinthian columns in the halls of Congress? These sound familiar today in 2010, but the same stories filled the press and the Capitol building in the 1870s.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

In a nutshell

The book’s title Drawing on art: Duchamp and Company refers to Marcel Duchamp’s literal defacement of the Mona Lisa image—and also to its figurative meaning, the treatment of art as an idea from which to draw inspiration.

This study shows how the idea of art became the critical fuel and springboard for new endeavors that challenge the meaning of art and of authorship. The deactivation of art’s visual mandate that emerged from the critique of the commodity and market forces, inaugurated by the readymades, opened up the possibility of questioning art’s premises and its social and cultural manifestations.

I argue that rather than negating or abandoning art, the readymades demonstrate the impossibility of defining it in the first place. They transform art into a resource for critical debate. To draw on art is to also to draw on other artists, which brings questions of creativity and artistic influence into play. The idea that the onlooker also “makes” the work of art activates the productive potential of the spectator’s consumption.

In addition to some analyses of Duchamp’s own works, the book provides detailed interpretations of works by other figures: those who proved influential on Duchamp’s thought and collaborated with him during the Dada and Surrealist period (notably Francis Picabia, Man Ray, and Salvador Dali), and those who later appropriated and redeployed these gestures by playing out their conceptual implications (Enrico Baj, Gordon Matta-Clark and Richard Wilson).

I suggest that all artistic production may be appropriative insofar as artists, in attempting to produce new works, necessarily draw on other works and other artists.

The wide angle

Drawing on Art: Duchamp and Company builds on the implications of my earlier work in Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (1995). The focus is no longer on Duchamp alone but also on his Dada and Surrealist friends and sometime collaborators’ efforts to question the idea of art, creativity and authorship through their appeal to strategies of appropriation and collaboration.

The analysis proceeds along three major axes of inquiry. The first, involves various challenges to the visual fate and manifestation of painting and art in response to the forces of commodification, which are dealt with through the elaboration of conceptual strategies. The second seeks to redefine artistic creativity as a productive act that also entails spectatorship and hence notions of consumption. And the third focuses on the fact that artistic collaboration—understood as exchange, interplay, and appropriation of ideas—becomes paradigmatic of a new way of thinking about artistic production as an inter-active and inter-subjective endeavor.

The deactivation of the visual mandate of art that emerged from Duchamp’s and his Dada friends’ critique of the commodity and market forces opened up the possibility of questioning art’s founding premises and its social and cultural manifestations in the public sphere. Disillusioned with painting and art in general, Duchamp along with Picabia and Man Ray, and later with Dali, sought new strategies for challenging art’s vulnerability in the face of commercialization.

My book shows that while Duchamp with Man Ray, and later Dali, moved from the ocular to optics, seeking to activate a new understanding of the conceptual considerations that determine the production of visuality, Picabia along with Duchamp explored the potential of spectatorship as a force for taking on the pressures of consumption. Their critique of painting as a visual experience was extended to the film medium—to short circuit through conceptual considerations film’s advent as visual spectacle. For Duchamp and Dali, the game of chess became a privileged vehicle for figuring a new way of thinking about artistic making and authorship in the modality of play.

Another pivotal question I deal with is how artists inspire and influence each other in the production of new works.

The appropriation of Mona Lisa’s reproduction with the added mustache and goatee and its reissue under Duchamp’s signature transformed the passive spectator of Leonardo’s painting and/or consumer who purchased the painting’s reproduction into a producer who availed him or herself of a new way of making. Duchamp revealed the productive potential inherent in the spectator’s position as a consumer, thus undermining conventional artistic paradigms that privilege the act of the work’s production over its consumption.

I show that the idea that the onlooker also “makes” the work of art overturns the myth of artistic genius undermining the idea of art as individual expression. The invitation to partake in the creative process along with the author will implicate the spectator in a process of artistic making understood no longer in terms of self-expression, but rather as an act of critical responsibility.

Reversing conventional views of creativity, Drawing on Art suggests that all artistic production may be appropriative insofar as artists necessarily draw on other works, other artists, and the tradition in attempting to produce new works.

Last, this argument implies a redefinition of the artistic process as a collaborative partnership and activity. But how can this collaborative model be reconciled with Duchamp’s reluctance to formally associate with Cubism and later Dadaism and Surrealism, even as the latter two were wont to claim him?

Duchamp’s critique of artistic movements based on his rejection of artistic doctrine did not prevent him from selective participation in some group events, or from collaboration with fellow artists such as Picabia and Man Ray. These collaborative endeavors emerged and gained delineation during the Paris Dada period (1919-22), and they also include the Dada film experiments that followed it (1924-28), which marked the movement’s transition into Surrealism.

Moreover, collaborations of various kinds continued throughout, most notably his activities with Dali and the Surrealist group (especially as regards design of exhibition spaces and curatorial activities), and they persisted into the late 1960’s as we can see from his works with Baj, among others.

I claim that the full significance of such collaborations is to be found in the intellectual exchanges and influential play of ideas. And I propose that artists invariably draw on each other’s ideas and works and that the material conditions of production necessarily bring into play prior gestures and ideas.

the idea that the onlooker also “makes” the work of art overturns the myth of artistic genius undermining the idea of art as individual expression

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Dalia Judovitz

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

In a nutshell

Morality’s Muddy Waters, as the subtitle suggests, worries about ethical quandaries in recent American history. I like my history and morality muddy, so to speak. Rather than a dry philosophical approach, the book looks at morality in action.

This project began five years ago on a gentle evening after viewing Hotel Rwanda, the film documenting genocide. I decided immediately to cease working on a book about American cultural criticism. I was shaken to the core of my being, and I had to do something that would address inhumanity, in its varied forms. I think that Morality’s Muddy Waters achieves this end, although without moral hectoring or absolutes.

I am an historian with a philosophical bent. My book is narrative in nature with a desire to draw from historical research insight into what we are to do at present when faced with perplexing moral challenges.

Too often, we shy away from the concept of evil. But evil demands a voice as a descriptive and analytical term. So that is where I begin. Next, issues as varied as the bombing of civilian areas in the Second World War, the My Lai massacre, and the death penalty are examined for their moral cloudiness.

Some presume that the best way of overcoming moral passivity and evil may be through empathy. As I show in one chapter, empathy can be invaluable, the necessary first step towards moral comprehension and action. Alas, empathy can also lead us astray, as in our decision to invade Iraq.

I hope that after following my narratives of trial and tribulation in matters of morality you come away with more questions than answers. That, it seems to me, constitutes the essence of good history, and the start of better moral thinking.

The wide angle

As an historian, everything I do is anchored in a concern with the past presented in what I hope is a lively narrative. In walking along that path in this book, I believe that various conceptions are critical both for understanding our past and for straining towards a fuller grasp of our present. No easy task.

We know, thanks to just war theory, what is right or wrong, at least in principle or in the abstract: civilian areas are not to be targets, except under the most pressing of circumstances and with especial care about minimizing civilian casualties. But in the face of evolving expectations, conflicting moral ends, and just plain complexity, morals get muddy.

Rather than trying to establish a firm set of moral propositions, my narratives of various events and issues demand that, at the very least, we recognize that moral disputes are often irresolvable, different positions are not only possible but reasonable, and that we need, above all else, to take actions with a willingness to grapple with that moral complexity. The process towards acting in a moral manner is rutted with pot-holes, but it must be traveled in a manner that includes “mature consideration” of the issues at hand.

Considerations of evil also stalk the pages of my book. Can’t we use evil as a descriptive and analytical term despite its elusiveness? How else, for example, can we characterize what happened in the massacre in My Lai? We can, using Hannah Arendt’s twin conceptions of evil as radical and banal, achieve a more tragic and oddly enlightened view of historical events without surrendering morality and analysis.

Looking at John Howard Griffin’s attempt to pass as an African-American in the Jim Crow South in 1959—as recounted in his famous volume, Black Like Me—I began to see past the obvious problems with his black masquerade and presumed willingness to speak for black people. I understood him, in effect, to be trying something valuable—akin to the thought experiment that Thomas Nagel imaginatively captured in his essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” By dying his skin and passing for black, Griffin was attempting to shed his privileged racial position and distance; by act and empathy, he was seeking, within the context of his time and place, to understand a radically different other. Out of this action, he was able to address brilliantly the problem of moral luck and the contingent nature of racial identity. After all, he was saying, I am still the same, decent white person I was, but for my blackened skin. Why, then, do you offer me a “hate stare” that denies me my humanity? In this manner, he managed, as Malcolm X recognized, to stir the moral consciousness of his white readers to concede that racism was wrong. No small accomplishment within the context of the early 1960s.

We need empathy, that’s for sure. But even empathy gets its feet stuck in the big muddy. While many of us now realize that the Iraq invasion was terribly botched, might the moral imperatives sounded by President Bush and such pro-war liberals as Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman have been rooted in a sense of empathy for Iraqi suffering? What, then, are we to do in the face of evil, such as Saddam Hussein? Might too much empathy lead to disasters just as too little empathy does?

Does what you have been reading sound vaguely pragmatist and existential? If so, then you are a most discerning reader. My first book was on the American philosopher William James, the father of pragmatism. And I embrace his sense of the contingency of existence and the role that ideas must play in leading us forward. My last book before Morality’s Muddy Waters, Existential America (2003), adopted humanistic existentialism. I find it the best approach to life, although it does bring us face to face with a “dreadful freedom.” This is certainly a burden, but one that may hold back the dangerous torrents of moral certitude.

Too often, we shy away from the concept of evil. But evil demands a voice as a descriptive and analytical term.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 George Cotkin

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

In a nutshell

All life forms are interconnected. We share our DNA with chimps (98%) but also with daffodils (35%). We drive cars that burn crushed dinosaurs. The oxygen we breathe is the excretion of the most ancient bacteria. We humans hardly allow ourselves to know the half of this. We are even less clear on what it all means.

Global warming and mass extinction (the sixth one to hit this planet) are happening around us, and we are directly responsible for both. Humans are currently on a very, very steep learning curve about how interconnected everything is—about how our actions affect every other life form on this planet. It’s a very disorienting time.

With great crises comes great opportunity, and one great opportunity is to reflect, to hesitate, to stay stuck in the headlights of an oncoming train, open our minds, and think. The name of the oncoming train is the ecological thought.

We can only catch glimpses of the ecological thought from where we are. But its disturbing presence is all around us, like a shadow looming from the future over our time. Think of all those conversations you can’t have anymore about the weather with just any old stranger. One of you, at least, is thinking about global warming. So your conversation trails off into an awkward silence, or one of you brings it up. The familiar coordinates of our world are dissolving.

Before the opening snaps closed again and we find ourselves caught in another historical pattern, it would be good for us to see just how open the ecological thought can make us.

One disturbing conclusion we can already draw is that the concept “nature” has had its day and no longer serves us well. The main reason is that nature is a kind of backdrop—and we are living in a world where the backdrop has dissolved: it’s all in the foreground now. When we replace nature with the ecological thought, we discover a much stranger, more intimate, more jaw-dropping world.

The wide angle

Since I was quite little I wanted to be a biologist; then I wanted to study ecology. I grew up in the UK and I saw David Attenborough’s Life on Earth series. I got the book—I must have been about ten years old. Somehow Harvard University Press telepathically echoed the little green tree frog on the cover for the cover of The Ecological Thought.

Ecology was the new progressive kid on the block in the 1970s and in semi-socialist London there was an amazing ecology exhibition at the Natural History Museum, which has since sold out to big oil. But in those days it was amazing. In another part of the Museum was the new human biology exhibit (still up and running pretty much in the same form), and the combination of intimacy and strangeness about these two new exciting exhibitions left a big impression on my mind.

During my university years (1989–1992) I started writing about vegetarianism and poetry—Percy Shelley mostly (Shelley and the Revolution in Taste). This was quite naturally an ecological theme. While I was doing it, “Romantic ecology” started happening: Jonathan Bate gave a very influential talk at a conference I went to and all of a sudden this new field opened up. I wasn’t quite sure how to relate to it, so I kept on thinking about food, which is ecological anyway. I wrote a book on spice (The Poetics of Spice), which argues that the first “global awareness” poetry wasn’t hippie-ish at all, it was sort of capitalist advertising language, kind of Archer Daniels Midland stuff you can find in Milton and all those early commercial capitalist era poets.

So I slowly started thinking about how to write about ecology, because I thought it was incredibly important but I didn’t buy into how people often write about it. It took a long time to figure out what I really wanted to say—about ten years. In the end I wrote Ecology without Nature in about five weeks! By that time I’d figured out what the title basically tells you: being ecological means, at some point, dropping the concept of nature. That book really surprised me, even while I was writing it.

Various people became quite interested in the idea of ecology without nature, and I realized that there was another book project, which explains what kind of thinking process is thinking ecology without nature—the ecological thought. So The Ecological Thought is the prequel, if you like, hopefully not in the Star Wars sense.

I poured everything I could think of into The Ecological Thought. A whole lot of it is about Darwin. The book uses Darwin’s original texts, plus a lot of neo-Darwinism, Richard Dawkins and so on. I thought it would be fun to have the most seemingly empiricist, reductionist, conservative and narrowly utilitarian (to some eyes) views, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Jacques Derrida, and basically saying the same thing. Most progressive-type writing on evolution doesn’t engage with that stuff or it slams it. I think you shouldn’t be afraid of it. Pretty sad how some humanists think that science is all about some kind of hardcore essence; in fact it’s quite the opposite.

I’m a deconstructor, sort of—at least I’ve been called one—so you’ll see Derrida’s spirit throughout this book. But honestly the book is written pretty much in the same style I’m using right now. There are no abstruse jargon filled parts—well there are, I can’t help it, but mostly they’re in the footnotes. The Ecological Thought is a lot easier to read than Ecology without Nature but I think it’s more profound. Derrida is a very moving writer, really. Once you get used to him, you see he’s writing about incredibly personal things, like death. And he’s so not a nihilist—don’t believe anyone who says he’s all about “nothing means anything.” He’s much more like Buckaroo Banzai, that 80s cult film hero: “Wherever you go, there you are.”

I’m also a meditator (Buckaroo again), and I believe that we need more contemplation on this planet. The immense suffering of life forms in the world we’re heating up (one of those life forms is us) should cause anyone with a nervous system to reflect quite seriously on what it all means. Meditation doesn’t mean disappearing up your metaphysical backside into some realm of bliss. It means becoming painfully aware of your entanglement with all other life forms, an entanglement you can’t just peel away from your existence: you’ve got them under your skin—they are your skin. Think of your mitochondria, the energy cells within your cells. They’re bacteria with their own genome, symbiotically wedded to you. Plants are green because of chloroplasts, another form of symbiotic bacterial life.

There’s a lot of art and literature and music in the book. I’m trained as a literary analyst, so obviously art gets in. But I also agree with Shelley that art has a utopian energy in it, and it’s our job to find out what that is and experience it, maybe harness it. So at points where the philosophy needs it, some of the thinking is done through music and poems and movies, like Blade Runner, Solaris, AI and so on.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is in it. Wordsworth is in it. The Romantics figured a lot of things out, but not quite in the way that “Romantic ecology” thinks. Funnily enough, it’s the Romantics’ love of irony that I see as most helpful for the ecological thought, not their supposed fondness for big mountains. Remember, if we’re all intimate with all other life forms, there’s a lot of strangeness there. Think about your long-term partner if you have one. When you wake up next to him or her, doesn’t s/he seem like the strangest person in the world? (Paging Freud…)

The concept “nature” has had its day and no longer serves us well. The main reason is that nature is a kind of backdrop—and we are living in a world where the backdrop has dissolved: it’s all in the foreground now.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

© 2010 Timothy Morton

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

In a nutshell

Empire for Liberty tells a story the broad outline of which will be familiar to many readers: the growth of the American empire from its inception to the present. But the juxtaposition of “empire” with “liberty” embeds the story in a conceptual and interpretive framework that I believe readers will find distinctive, challenging, and perhaps even uncomfortable. Further, my methodology—collective biography—seeks to provide perspectives from both ground level and an altitude of 50,000 feet.

My argument embraces three interlocking premises.

The first is that the United States is an empire, and it aspired to be one from its origin. Of course to label American an empire is to invite all kinds of controversy and criticism. Moreover, for more than a century, the term “empire” has been applied so profligately and imprecisely as to undermine its analytic utility. Consequently, I begin the book by dissecting and defining empire, and doing so within the context of the American historical experience. Like that experience, the definition of empire is dynamic. The United States as an empire evolved along with that definition.

My second premise concerns liberty. In contrast to the case with empire, liberty’s central role in the unfolding history of the United States is scarcely contested. Yet much like empire, I argue, the word “liberty” has been used and abused so extensively that it has lost much of its meaning. Throughout US history Americans have appropriated the concept and ideal of liberty to serve different purposes and needs. At almost all times, nevertheless, liberty has been an engine of empire.

Third, I wrote this book on the principle that people matter. People make choices, and those choices have consequences. Or, I should say, depending on the individuals, the choices they make can have consequences.

The six individuals featured in Empire for Liberty—Ben Franklin, John Quincy Adams, William Seward, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Foster Dulles, and Paul Wolfowitz—were all exceptional. None, however, was unique. Even as each man—I emphasize, “man”—played a pivotal role in shaping the contours of the American empire, he reflected as much as he influenced the attitudes, beliefs, and priorities of others.

Because the choices people make are grounded in specific times and specific environments, the trajectory of the American empire was not linear. But it was inexorable.

The collision of empire and liberty at Abu Ghraib and Guantànamo, however, may prove to be a game changer.

The wide angle

In fundamental respects, I’ve been writing this book my entire professional life. Yet, no less fundamentally, the book is the product of “presentist” concerns.

I became a historian in part because I went to college in the 1960s. As was the case for many of my contemporaries, the Vietnam War competed with my studies for my time. And it usually won.

This is not to say that my coursework and engagement with the war were mutually exclusive. To the contrary, they were often mutually reinforcing. I took multiple courses, for example, from George Kahin and Walter LaFeber. It was Walt who not only introduced me to the notion of an American empire but also demonstrated to me, through his teaching and writing, empire’s potential as an analytic construct.

Still, it was in another course where the inspiration for this book really surfaced. Or maybe it was in graduate school. I honestly don’t recall; I’m quite sure the precipitant was a book, not a lecture. And the subject matter had something to do with Thomas Jefferson.

But I chose not to feature Jefferson in this book—except to borrow his prose for the title. And that’s central to my argument.

Thomas Jefferson referred to an “Empire for Liberty” in a letter to James Madison in 1809. But what struck me as significant, all those many years ago, is that sometime over the course of a quarter-century Jefferson revised the preposition in this very phrase. In 1780, when America’s victory in the War for Independence was far from assured, Jefferson coined the phrase “Empire of Liberty.” In 1809, corresponding with his ally and successor in the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase, among other accomplishments of his presidency, he wrote “Empire for Liberty.”

It is possible, of course, that Jefferson intended nothing by the change. Almost all historians quote only the original “Empire of Liberty.” It is the title of several books.

As for me, from the instant I noticed that Jefferson had switched “of” for “for,” I suspected he had done so for a purpose. By the time he wrote “for,” Jefferson was a committed expansionist, an empire-builder. By this time Jefferson had abandoned his initial optimism that peoples enveloped by America’s expansionism, Native Americans in particular, could accept and benefit from liberty as he and his countrymen defined it.

Thus, as I interpret it, the shift from “of” to “for” signified Jefferson’s transition to advocating a more proactive, indeed a more aggressive extension of the sphere of liberty. America would be an Empire for Liberty. Its mission would be to promote liberty, to spread liberty to peoples and places where liberty was either unknown or suppressed—or just different.

This goal, however, was incompatible with Jefferson’s recently arrived-at judgment that liberty was not for everyone. It was for Americans, of course, but they were exceptional. Most people could not appreciate liberty, and therefore they stood in the way of its progress.

And whether he did it consciously or not, Jefferson’s substitution of “Empire ‘for’ Liberty” for “Empire ‘of’ Liberty” presaged the collision course between empire and liberty on which the United States embarked. In fact, my working title for the book included a question mark: “Empire for Liberty?”

My research on the principal players in this book revealed that they pursued an evolving American empire for a laundry list of reasons—which varied with time, circumstance, and predisposition, and included security, prosperity, and the projection of power and America’s greatness.

But the one constant ground for the pursuit of the American empire was a claim to preserving and promoting liberty.

My hope is that this book will provoke readers to think deeply about the implications of this one constant. There are no easy answers to the questions it evokes.

I have been addressing questions of this kind since I wrote The CIA in Guatemala almost thirty years ago. Moreover, I have long been fascinated with the individual level of analysis, especially the influence of personality on politics.

Yet, I may not have written this book were it not for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That intervention, with the rhetoric that surrounded it and the personalities that orchestrated it, motivated me pull together a lot of disparate thoughts.

Virtually all my previous scholarship has focused on the Cold War. In this book I reach back to Ben Franklin and the Colonial era on the one hand, while writing “contemporary history” on the other.

By placing my principals “end to end,” this relatively short book covers the entire sweep of American history—or, at least, the entire history of the American Empire.

And much of what I came to write in this book first came as a surprise to me. For example, I have written one book on John Foster Dulles and edited another. But never before had I recognized the relationship between what Dulles identified as the “boundary-barrier situation” in the 1930s and his post-World War goal of establishing what I call an “Empire for Security” to confront an “Empire Against Liberty.”

The word “liberty” has been used and abused so extensively that it has lost much of its meaning. Throughout US history Americans have appropriated the concept and ideal of liberty to serve different purposes and needs. At almost all times, nevertheless, liberty has been an engine of empire.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Richard H. Immerman

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

In a nutshell

Made in America asks whether, how, and in what ways Americans of today are culturally and psychologically different from Americans of the past.

The book reaches back to the nation’s colonial era and comes forward to 2010. Throughout our history, observers, both Americans and foreign visitors, tried to describe the special character of this new people in a new world. But what was fact and what was myth in those descriptions? What is fact and what is myth in the ways we understand our history today? Much turns out to be myth—say the notion that Americans today are more mobile and less religious than their ancestors, or that they are more “consumerist.”

Made in America describes the material, social, and mental lives of average Americans from the earliest years through the industrial era to the present, focusing on the everyday experiences of everyday people, on how they survived, built families and communities, and came to understand themselves.

Synthesizing decades of historical, psychological, and social research, Made in America reveals how growing security and wealth reinforced the combination of independence with commitment to community in the voluntarism that characterized Americans from the earliest years.

Drawing on personal stories of many Americans from the past, the book describes how more people came to participate more freely and more fully in cultural and political life, thus broadening the category of “American.” At the same time, what it means to be American in culture and character has remained surprisingly consistent over the centuries.

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

The wide angle

In many of the fiercest debates of our day—for example, about religion, government, family policy, health, even about personal relationships—people draw on vague notions of how things “used to be.”

But we can draw on more than vague notions. In recent decades historians have conducted intensive research on how average Americans in earlier times lived—on how they worked, raised their families, furnished their homes, dealt with illness, found friendship, coped psychologically, and so forth. This is the stuff of social history.

I find such detailed studies fascinating. They tell, for example, of efforts by itinerant ministers in the 1800s to set up the first churches in rural areas; of women confronting the loss of their babies; and of young up-and-coming men joining clubs as a route to middle-class success.

And I found that these studies, when collected together, speak to the debates of our day. For example, we like to think that neighbors helping neighbors was all that Americans once needed to deal with misfortune in their communities. Alas, that was more the exception than the rule in early America. Our expectations, our practical means, and even our emotional capacities for humane assistance to the needy grew over the last two centuries.

Made in America brings the studies of America’s past together into a series of story lines and one broad interpretation.

Among the specific story lines are these:

High rates of death and illness, of economic misfortune, and of interpersonal violence in earlier days gave way slowly to greater security—a security that enabled Americans to plan ahead and take command of their fates. This progress has been uneven and is threatened today, but over the long run, this has been the foundation of changes in American culture and character.

At the nation’s founding, relatively few Americans were truly the independent yeoman of American mythology. Most people were dependents of the household head and also subject to local elites. Over the centuries, more Americans participated in more social relationships of more kinds, including churches, clubs, work teams, and independent friendships. People—most notably, women—formed new bonds and gained more independence, thereby changing the nature of American community and character.

As Americans became materially and socially richer, more of them self-consciously worked on improving their characters and on cultivating the “proper” feelings. Although modern Americans are no smarter than their ancestors, they own a set of mental tools to operate in the world, tools that give them greater command of their lives and themselves. Americans learned to restrain their disruptive emotions and cultivate their socially useful ones like sympathy and sentimentality.

What runs through these seemingly disparate themes is one argument—that the availability and expansion of material security and comfort enabled the expansion and solidification of a distinctive American culture. That culture rests on the notion of community voluntarism: each individual is free to join or leave communities, such as congregations, but while a member of such groups, the individual is bound to be loyal. (“Love it or leave it.”)

Over time, more people—women, youth, ex-servants and -slaves, the rural, the poor, the immigrant—could participate more fully in that culture and in such ways become “more American.”

The availability and expansion of material security and comfort enabled the expansion and solidification of a distinctive American culture. That culture rests on the notion of community voluntarism: each individual is free to join or leave communities, such as congregations, but while a member of such groups, the individual is bound to be loyal.

A close-up

I would like to highlight just two passages.

The first is from the start of Chapter 2:

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

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

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

And this one is from the start of Chapter 6:

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Claude S. Fischer

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

In a nutshell

The Thirty Years War (1618-1648) was the most destructive conflict in European history prior to the twentieth-century world wars. The War was a struggle over the political and religious order in the Holy Roman Empire, Europe’s second largest state (after Russia, which was then generally not considered part of Europe). The Empire encompassed modern Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, parts of Denmark, France and Poland, and also held jurisdiction over northern Italy.

Around 1.8 million soldiers and at least 3.2 million civilians died in the Thirty Years War, reducing the Empire’s population by at least a fifth. This represents, proportionally, a far higher loss than that suffered in either world war.

The conflict left a deep imprint on European consciousness. It was ranked ahead of the Nazi era and the Black Death by late twentieth-century Germans as their country’s greatest disaster. Seminal works of German literature—notably Friedrich Schiller’s trilogy about the imperial general Wallenstein, and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, the first German novel which later formed the basis for Bertolt Brecht’s play, Mother Courage—enduringly placed the Thirty Years War in the popular imagination. Only now, with the proliferation of modern media images of more recent carnage, the memory of the Thirty Years War is fading.

My book is the first full-length treatment of the conflict to appear for seventy years. And it is also the first treatment to give equal coverage to the War’s second half. My interpretation differs substantially from previous accounts which tend to see the War as inevitable.

The real tragedy of the conflict is that it could have been avoided, or at least shortened or contained. That does not mean that the fighting ever was “meaningless” as depicted by C.V. Wedgwood in her justly famous study first published in 1938. Real issues were at stake throughout. It was the intractability of these issues, combined with the self-interest of all protagonists, which frustrated peace making for thirty years.

The wide angle

It was not my intention to diverge so sharply from the accepted interpretation of the Thirty Years War. My brief was to write an accessible account, updated to incorporate insights from more recent research and to consider questions which have only recently assumed importance in historical scholarship.

But having wrestled with the subject for nearly seven years, I can readily understand the temptation to fit the War into grand, generalized interpretations. One of the most persistent and apparently persuasive of these is the belief that the War was a religious conflict with its roots in the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century.

The Reformation shattered the medieval unity of religion and law. People nonetheless clung to the belief that truth and justice were singular, not plural, thereby denying dissenters any legitimacy. These tensions were allegedly only papered over in the Empire by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 which allowed most German princes to choose between Lutheranism and Catholicism according to the famous principle, “he who rules, decides the religion” (a phrase that isn’t in fact in the peace, but comes from a much later commentary on it). Religious identities hardened as the generation born after the Reformation reached adulthood and influence. The Empire supposedly polarized into two armed camps around the Protestant Union (1608) and the Catholic League (1609). General war followed the Defenestration of Prague when some Bohemian aristocrats threw two of the emperor’s representatives and their secretary out of the palace window in May 1618. (All three survived, by the way, and the secretary, who is usually forgotten, was ennobled as “von Hohenfall,” or “of the high fall.”)

Unfortunately, this simple explanation does not hold up. The Holy Roman Empire enjoyed 63 years of internal peace between 1555 and 1618—an era of tranquility in German history only matched in 2008 by the continuous peace since 1945. France and the Netherlands descended into violent civil wars from the 1560s, but Germans preferred to argue rather than fight over their constitutional order. There were even signs that tensions were ebbing by 1618: the League had been disbanded while the Union was in a state of near collapse. Neither organization encompassed all their co-religionists, while the majority in the Empire hoped negotiation would resolve differences.

The War resulted from contingency and human error. A major factor was the underlying weakness of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty ruling both the Empire and the largest group of territories within it, including Bohemia. This weakness obliged the dynasty to grant concessions to their nobles, most of whom had converted to Protestantism. Tensions grew once the Habsburgs tried to stabilize their authority by making Catholicism a test for political loyalty. Under pressure, a group of Bohemian Protestant aristocrats staged the Defenestration to force the more moderate majority to decide where their loyalties lay.

It was a colossal error. The Habsburgs had been constrained by their own sense of legality, only targeting Protestantism where it lacked firm legal foundation. By taking up arms against the emperor, the Bohemians and their supporters in the rest of the Empire forfeited their rights under the constitution. Viewing the War as a rebellion, the Habsburgs and their allies, like Bavaria, expropriated their opponents, wherever they had the opportunity. Though most of this was reversed in the German lands, the redistribution of confiscated rebel land in the Habsburg monarchy constituted the largest property transfer in Central Europe prior to the Communist seizure of power in that region after 1945.

No party was in a position to fight in 1618 (another argument against inevitability). All appealed for assistance, but few did so on religious grounds. Instead, each party emphasized its constitutional rights, or “liberties” as they were known. Foreign intervention was legitimated on these grounds, with each new belligerent justifying its involvement as upholding the “proper” interpretation of the imperial constitution. Each pursued its own interests. Intermittent Spanish support for the emperor was motivated by the desire to pacify the Empire and allow Austria to assist Spain against its own Dutch rebels. French intervention aimed to keep both Spain and Austria busy. Denmark, Sweden and Transylvania all hoped to grab territory and enhance their own security.

Crucially, the religiously-motivated violence which occurred in France, Ireland and elsewhere was largely absent in Central Europe. The War was undoubtedly vicious, even if it was not as destructive as once thought. However, atrocities such as the infamous sack of Magdeburg in 1631 all had their roots in the inadequacies of military organization, rather than sectarianism.

Far from seeking to inflame passions, clergy of all persuasions blamed their own flocks for the disaster, arguing the War had been sent by God to punish Germans for their sins. This refrain was institutionalized in the subsequent official commemoration of the conflict, conveniently both absolving the political authorities of responsibility and justifying a post-war strengthening of the state as the best means to prevent such horrors reoccurring.

The Holy Roman Empire enjoyed 63 years of internal peace between 1555 and 1618—an era of tranquility in German history only matched in 2008 by the continuous peace since 1945.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Peter H. Wilson

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

In a nutshell

After five hundred years John Calvin remains the object of admiration and loathing. For some he is revered as the great reformer of the sixteenth century whose legacy embraces both the rise of capitalism and modern American democracy. Many others recoil in revulsion at the mention of his name, regarding him as a hateful tyrant who condemned opponents to death, preached an intrusive morality, and with his doctrine of predestination reduced humanity to abject slavery before a capricious God.

Quite honestly, I feel no affinity with either of these camps, both of which shouted loudly during the 500th anniversary of the reformer’s birth in 2009. My biography has an entirely different agenda: to recover an astonishing and complex man who lived an extraordinary life during the most brutal years of the European Reformation.

Drawing heavily on Calvin’s letters, I sought to find what we could know about him; to pursue how we could bring his character to life; and to understand what was so remarkable in this man. What quickly emerged was a person far more interesting than the one I thought I knew, even though I am a historian of the Reformation.

Although anything but the isolated, asexual, embodiment of fixed religious ideas so frequently derided by opponents, the man I encountered was hardly a softer, kinder reformer. John Calvin was a human being of contrary impulses. Brilliant, politic, and shrewd, he believed passionately that ideas and ideals have to be adapted and accommodated to the circumstances of the moment without compromising the truth. And his mind was not static. The ultimate autodidact, he dedicated himself to a punishing regime of study and the refinement of his thinking till the day he died. His was a life of perpetual motion. Calvin was always in the process of becoming Calvin.

The wide angle

The biography seeks to capture the dynamic nature of Calvin’s character; to illuminate how heady interaction with influential friends and enemies, unexpected events, and spiritual and intellectual growth shaped the man. Yet he was more than the sum of circumstances. His prodigious mind, his extraordinary memory, and his unrivalled talent in crafting prose separated him from contemporaries—a fact readily acknowledged by his fiercest opponents. The Institutes of the Christian Religion is an extraordinary piece of theology and pedagogy, setting before the reader a compelling vision of God, creation, humanity, and redemption.

Calvin’s life in the sixteenth-century world, and his relations with the people he loved and served, are what most fascinated me. He surrounded himself with friends and family on whom he depended emotionally, spiritually, and financially. To get inside his world is to meet a broad cast of characters, many of whom left the stage after bitter quarrels. Calvin struggled with his own personality, his friendships, and the frailty of his body. All of these fit uneasily with his profound sense of divine calling.

It was a life lived in many phases. Calvin thought he was going to be a priest, then a lawyer, then a humanist writer. He ended up a Protestant reformer in a backwater city he disliked intensely, and the feeling was mutual. His eyes were always on his native France, yet he had to learn to be a leader to the whole of Protestant Europe, from England to Poland. Exile from France was his greatest burden, yet it was the experience that gave him his voice to a generation of people dislocated for their faith. Calvin spoke as one who had lost everything: he made the trials of the Israelites real to his contemporaries.

The challenge of this biography was to do justice to the many, often contradictory, aspects of Calvin’s life. He was himself aware of the fragmentary nature of his character. It was in the Apostle Paul, I argue, that he found a model to emulate, and he wanted to be Paul to his generation. The great convert to Christianity, Paul was the apostle to all the churches without belonging to any one in particular. He was Calvin’s ideal as the Frenchman devoted himself to the unity of the Church.

Few religious leaders left the security of the city walls to travel the dangerous roads of Europe more than Calvin, though he had precious little to show for it. By the time he emerged as a leading figure in the 1540s the Protestantism of the Reformation was a broken body. Calvin believed that he was uniquely placed to resolve the endless quarrels, but in the end he became stuck in the tar pit that nearly ended Protestantism. His hopes of bringing true religion to France vanished on the battlefields of the Wars of Religion. As he lay dying in 1564 there was meager reason for optimism. Yet after he had gone to his unmarked grave movements claiming his name sprang up that would transform Europe and the New World.

It was a life lived in many phases. Calvin thought he was going to be a priest, then a lawyer, then a humanist writer. He ended up a Protestant reformer in a backwater city he disliked intensely, and the feeling was mutual.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Bruce Gordon

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

In a nutshell

How and why do international environmental norms arise? In what ways do they affect behavior? Do they change what states and individuals actually do, and, if so, why? How effective are they in solving international environmental problems? These are some of the questions I examine in The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law.

The book has several defining features. First, it focuses on the processes by which international environmental law is developed, implemented, and enforced, rather than on the substance of international environmental law itself. Accordingly, it is organized thematically, with chapters on such topics as the causes of environmental problems, obstacles to international cooperation, the design of international agreements, policy implementation, enforcement, and effectiveness. Process issues have received increased attention in recent years but have not yet received a book-length treatment. The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law aims to fill that gap.

Second, the book is multi-disciplinary. To understand the international environmental process, we need to consider not only law, but also political science, economics, the natural sciences, and, to a more limited degree, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

Third, the book is theoretical in its orientation, but tries to ground its discussions of theory through the use of concrete examples. In a wonderful book entitled Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Jon Elster wrote that his subtitle might have been “Elementary Social Science from an Advanced Standpoint.” That has been my goal as well: to write an elementary book from an advanced standpoint, with a stronger methodological and philosophical orientation than is typical in an introductory work.

Finally, the book aims to be pragmatic, reflecting my experience working on international environmental issues as a U.S. government negotiator, adviser to non-governmental-organizations, and U.N. consultant. It tries to provide a real-world perspective on how international environmental law works—and sometimes doesn’t work.

Students and scholars of international law fall along a spectrum, from true believers at one end to complete cynics at the other. My book seeks to chart a middle course. It reflects a degree of skepticism about some of the more visionary claims regarding the role of international environmental law. But it does not throw out the baby with the bath water. Rather, it seeks a realistic understanding of both the role and the limits of international environmental law.

The wide angle

I decided to write this book after a personal incident that took place more than a decade ago—with which I begin the introductory chapter.

I was living in Seattle at the time. One evening the doorbell rang and it was an environmental volunteer asking for contributions for his organization. I wasn’t a big fan of his NGO, so I declined and when he asked why, I said that I disagreed with some of his organization’s positions. He asked which ones and I responded, “Norwegian whaling.” After an inconclusive debate about the status of minke whales in the North Atlantic, the volunteer, in frustration, played his trump card, exclaiming, “I suppose it doesn’ t matter to you that Norway is in violation of international law!” That really got me going, so I replied—somewhat pedantically—that I happened to be a professor of international law and that, as a legal matter, Norway is in compliance with the International Whaling Convention. He stomped off in search of greener pastures.

I found the encounter fascinating because it illustrated so many themes in international environmental law: the intertwining of normative and factual disputes, the special status of legal argumentation, the various design features of international agreements. And I got to thinking, what could a person read to get a broad, realistic, pragmatic overview of the field, which synthesizes the range of work in different disciplines on international environmental problems? I couldn’t think of anything and decided to write this book.

Students and scholars of international law fall along a spectrum, from true believers at one end to complete cynics at the other. My book seeks to chart a middle course.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

Is international environmental law on the right track?

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

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

© 2010 Daniel Bodansky

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

In a nutshell

It seems that almost everyone has heard of Chairman Mao and China’s Cultural Revolution and the “red guards” of the late 1960s. The “red guards” were students who rampaged through schools and government offices, terrorizing officials and intellectuals, humiliating them, beating them, and even killing them. These events are seen in China as a national catastrophe, so traumatic that even today publication on the period is almost completely forbidden in China.

Remarkably, there is no book in any language that describes in detail the activities of these students in the Chinese capital. But the Beijing red guards set the trend for the movement nationwide, and many of them became national celebrities. By trying to explain how and why students became involved in all of this, and chronicling what they did, my book is intended to fill a huge gap.

The greatest puzzle about the red guards is that they fought one another almost as violently as they persecuted intellectuals and government officials. The question is, why?

For more than two decades academics have claimed that students divided into two different groups depending on how much they benefited from the status quo. “Conservative” red guards benefited from the system, were close to the leaders, and defended them. They attacked the weak and defenseless—intellectuals, old members of “capitalist” classes. “Radical” students had build-up resentments against the status quo and wanted to change things. They attacked the powerful—communist officials, party members. In other words, according to this view, the students fought one another because some sought to change an oppressive system, while others tried to defend it.

In Fractured Rebellion I explain that this view turns out to be wrong.

I am, in fact, the first person to look closely at the many materials on the red guards that have become available in the past ten years or so. I have looked closely at the backgrounds of student leaders and read their extensive writings at the time of these events. Somewhat as a surprise to me, and I suspect to many others who thought they understood these events, it is now clear that students on both sides of the struggle were from the same background. The leaders on both sides were close to their school’s party organizations, came from politically reliable families and already held student leadership posts in their schools.

So why did they join groups that fought with one another for almost two years? The best short answer is that student leaders were searching for clues about how to respond in a situation where a very coercive political system was breaking down.

But this is a fairly complex story. Students were forced to make choices in confusing and rapidly changing circumstances. They made different choices, and took different stands, and this ended up dividing classmates and friends, even family members, against one another. The Chinese system at the time also punished people severely for making political errors; if you ended up a loser, your future would be ruined, at best, and you might be imprisoned or sent to a labor camp, at worst. Once you took a stand and confronted others, you paid a very heavy price if you lost. So student red guards, in a sense, were trapped into a struggle in which the prospect of losing was unthinkable.

They fought on against one another, with increasing violence, for almost two years. In the end Mao, disgusted with his darling student radicals, sent in the army to suppress them, and sent almost all of them to rural farms for a decade. Fractured Rebellion tells the whole two-year story.

The wide angle

I’m challenging a way of thinking about politics common in fields like sociology and political science—the one in which people have interests based on their jobs, their levels of education, their political affiliations, and their future prospects. When political circumstances change, giving them opportunities to advance themselves, raise grievances, or force them to defend what they have, they will band together to advance or defend their interests with others who are similar to them.

This is exactly what past accounts of China’s red guards have claimed. In this view, students chose sides based on who their parents were, whether they were already student leaders or party members, because the Cultural Revolution gave them the opportunity to express these interests for the first time. So in this view the students fought against one another, spinning out of control, because they had fundamentally different social positions and different interests.

I used to believe this, and wrote a good deal about China’s Cultural Revolution in this vein. But when I started to read carefully the many accounts written by students in Beijing at the time these events took place, I realized that the facts just didn’t fit.

Students who led both sides of the struggle came from the same backgrounds. They were divided into antagonistic groups because they became drawn into divisions among China’s leaders, each side thinking that they were doing what Mao Zedong wanted and expected, but not realizing, at first, that they were in fact being drawn into a leadership conflict. In the book, I try to spell out as clearly as I can how this complex process played out.

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

So why did they join groups that fought with one another for almost two years? The best short answer is that student leaders were searching for clues about how to respond in a situation where a very coercive political system was breaking down.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Andrew G. Walder

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

In a nutshell

Relationscapes attempts to develop a theory of the incipiency of movement. Initially, my main concern was to continue a line of questioning developed in my previous book, Politics of Touch, which already aimed to explore the amodality of sensation and how sensation is always linked to movement.

The focus of Politics of Touch was on the sensing body in movement’s relation to the political; emphasis being on how the sensing body in movement is distinct from the ubiquitous concept of the body-politic. Upon finishing Politics of Touch, I wanted to delve deeper into the microperceptual fissures opened up by my work on touch/sensation. This allowed me to engage more thoroughly within dance and movement studies (which have tended to focus on semiotic inquiry or movement in its phase of displacement) as well as on artistic and protopolitical practices that focus on movement.

A key concept in Relationscapes is preacceleration. I developed this concept to get to the idea of a movement in its very primary phases of initiation, before it actualizes as such. Preacceleration allows us to begin to develop a modality of thought for the virtual intensity of movement in its incipiency. To explore movement in its incipiency allows for a different stance as regards movement. It enables a focus on potential by exploring in detail the micromovements (including rhythm and duration) that are alive at the phase where a particular shape has not yet taken hold. Once the movement is actualized (once a step is taken, for instance), movement is reduced to very specific conditions and is acted upon by its co-constitutive surroundings (including gravity).

Taking the thought of preacceleration across various fields, Relationscapes aims to develop a transversal vocabulary for how movement functions in areas as different as Leni Riefenstahl’s films, Étienne-Jules Marey’s’s chronophotographs, Dorothy Napangardi’s paintings, Shusaka Arakawa and Madeline Gins’s architectural concepts, and William Forsythe’s choreography. The book crosses these fields (and more) with a continuous concern for the development of a politics of touch—a sustained engagement with the sensing body in movement.

Relationscapes draws to a close with an emphasis on language. Recent work by so-called low-functioning (non-speaking) autists suggests that language plays a large part in the thought of how movement moves. With Amanda Baggs’s extraordinary short video, In My Language, I attempt to open the way for a reading of preacceleration (here called prearticulation) that allows for an engagement with the affective relational milieu a protolanguage (of gesture and sensation) calls forth. Language in Baggs’s work is not conveyed solely through words, but through the creation of a responsive environment that facilitates complex communication beyond the limited notion of language-as-spoken.

Relationscapes seeks to make a philosophical contribution to art practices of various kinds, taking seriously the notion that an art practice—be it painting, dancing, filmmaking—develops concepts in germ and activates them in the language of its technicity. Rather than speaking “about” art, from the outside of its incipient movement, Relationscapes aims to intercept concepts in the making, activating various modes of articulation in tandem with their emergence as artworks in their own right. This is not a book that explains movement or stands outside a practice to articulate it. It is a book that attempts to dance in the writing, looking for a way to articulate what is perhaps most ineffable about art: how it moves us.

The wide angle

Relationscapes is a very Whiteheadian book. From the outset, it philosophically attempts to lay out a process philosophy and to outline how Alfred North Whitehead’s thought is in conversation with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, William James, and Brian Massumi, to name a few.

Whitehead’s process philosophy is focused around the idea of the actual occasion. For Whitehead, while process is what constitutes the extended continuum of the world, a certain monadicity is absolutely necessary. The emergence/prehension of actual occasions is synonymous with what we know/experience. There is no actual experience outside of an occasion’s coming into appearance, and “we” are not prior to them. Occasions are co-constituted with their worlding, creating superjects (subjects of the event) in their passing. A radically reconstituted engagement with subject/object relations, Whitehead’s approach offers an opening for a microperceptual analysis such as that undertaken in Relationscapes.

The first arena of emphasis Relationscapes thinks through is dance, specifically relational movement. I conceptualize relational movement (which is a continuation of the movement exploration foregrounded in Politics of Touch, which circled around Argentine tango) as the very modality of movement: movement always moves relationally. This takes into account Bergson’s idea that duration (movement-moving) is extracted (as displacement) when measured as such. Movement is thus not what is added to time but what is subtracted from duration. If all movement is already relational (creates spacetimes of experience even as it composes with them), movement-moving can no longer as easily be sidestepped (as it has often been in dance and in cinema in lieu of a focus on a movement-grammar, a narrative structure, etc.). To engage with movement-moving is also to create a more complex vocabulary around choreography and improvisation (where both can function as subtractions of movement-moving).

Relationscapes then continues its movement exploration within the realm of Encephalitis Lethargica, a medical condition associated with Parkinson’s’ disease where the activation of movement is inhibited. The focus throughout this chapter and in the subsequent three chapters/interlude—on Marey’s chronophotographs, Norman McLaren’s animations, and the contemporary field of dance and technology—is on forms of activation as they relate to incipient animation (be it in terms of Oliver Sacks’s patients, motion detection software, or the editing process in cinema) to highlight how these divergent practices make use of the microperceptible edge of movement-moving.

The book takes a turn toward the political in the last chapters, proposing first that we take a closer look at the movement practices foregrounded in Leni Riefenstahl’s films. Contrary to much work on Riefenstahl’s filmmaking, these are not images of solitary bodies: they are uncanny composites of movement-moving. No matter where you cut them, not only do they continue to move, but they continue to operate serially, both within and across the frame (each image is always more-than the image of a single body). This has implications as regards the so-called fascist aesthetic and the notion of transcendence.

The following chapters look at the politics and aesthetics of contemporary Aboriginal painting in Australia. This section perhaps most forcefully draws together how a focus on movement is also an invitation to rethink ethics/politics. Examining in detail the ways in which Aboriginal people in the Australian central desert build their politics out of a durational notion of movement, and then paint this movement in a recasting of the interplay between the abstract and the representational, these chapters suggest new ways of thinking art in relation to a moving landscape and a spiritual realm that moves-with life in the making.

This is pursued in the final interlude, which explores the work of Arakawa and Gins. The last chapter turns its attention to language, exploring the politics of representation in theories of language and literacy that effectively shut down the potential of language with respect to affect and the sensing body in movement. Focusing on the autistic activist Amanda Baggs’s film In My Language, I suggest that we have a lot to learn through modalities of thought and communication proposed by Baggs. Imbricating spacetimes of experience with communication (foregrounding the complex sensory dimension of the world conceived as relational environment), Amanda Baggs complicates the notion that language functions only denotatively and proposes instead a challenging and important interweaving of the sensing body in movement and language in the making.

As a dancer, an artist and a philosopher, these concerns are very close to home for me. I strongly believe that different practices hone different vocabularies and articulate themselves according to the technicities the practices foreground.

When language opens itself up to more-than semantic articulation, a wide array of potential is unleashed that provokes a more complex aesthetic and political field of engagement. Working transversally across practices allows for this complexity to begin to come to light, repositioning the role of the academic/philosopher in relation to art. To delve into the experiential microperceptual realm allows for a dancing-with, a painting-with that promises no pre-constituted ethics but allows, perhaps, for a different kind of conversation to begin. The politics of this conversing seem to me to allow for a more sustained engagement with difference at the very incipient level from which movement moves us. It is here that the creative germ is most powerful, and with it, the potential to activate the incipient links between creative practice and micropolitics.

A key concept in Relationscapes is preacceleration. I developed this concept to get to the idea of a movement in its very primary phases of initiation, before it actualizes as such.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

© 2010 Erin Manning

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

In a nutshell

On the Trail of the D.C. Sniper tells the story of the press coverage of the deeds of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo as they traversed the Washington D.C. area in October 2002.

Honing in on twenty-three days permits a tightly focused analysis of the kaleidoscope of information and opinions provided by the media.

To understand this coverage, the book also compares it to the sniper as imagined by major school systems responding to the threat.

In a nutshell, the press embraced fear while the schools turned toward coping. This contrast does not prove who was right but instead reveals the underlying structures of press and schools which then led and still leads toward a particular viewpoint. The impact of a media inclined to propagate fearful reporting can be problematic in a nation in which fear is so casually used to political and commercial advantage.

The narrative story of the reporting perhaps provides even more unexpected results than the book’s main conclusion. Following journalists who surveyed this carnage reveals more vulnerable professionals than appear in either movies or the writings of critics. The image of the schools wrestling with that crisis, on the other hand, shows decisions that are rarely in the spotlight.

Despite the general orientation of the press, differences—some surprising—turn up in this book. Some of them relate to the variety of the media I include—regional, national, and international; radio; local and cable television; and opinion and news shows.

The wide angle

I was drawn to a new topic—I am an historian of the press of eighteenth-century and revolutionary France.

But I can trace my interest in contemporary media to my belief that the techniques developed by scholars in eighteenth-century press history can be more generally relevant. (A very large group of historians, scattered across the globe, have worked intensively on these methods—even collectively, I might say, under the informal leadership of Pierre Rétat and Jean Sgard, who taught in Lyons and Grenoble respectively.)

Of course, living in the Washington suburbs also exposed me to the press coverage of 2002 and fascinated me.

Two contemporary issues pushed me to take up this particular subject.

First, despite some important exceptions, the dominant approach to the contemporary American press measures political bias. While this is surely an important perspective, it seemed not to match up well to the practice of more general reporting.

I decided to pursue the motivations driving the press in a story where it was difficult to establish political sides. Despite some effort to construct the sniper as a terrorist or, from the left, as the result of poor gun control laws, this story essentially lacked a partisan rift. And in this situation professional goals and personal risks proved to be the main factors.

Second, I was unhappy with the standards used by media critics. Such scholars in and outside the university, whether from left or right, typically start with personal abstract standards and produce overwrought condemnations.

Even the most generous approach—using the goal of objectivity—is not very helpful: objective knowledge is not really attainable for complicated issues. As a substitute, the press tries to meet the goal of objectivity by simply showing “both” sides—even if one or even both of these sides have only a vague claim to fairness.

Although I do not have a solution to this problem, I show a range of approaches to the sniper story from various strains of the media, contrast those approaches to the ones of the schools, and link media coverage to factors that framed reporting. Even though the “true evaluation” might not emerge, we might understand the basis for the reporting we see

Finally, the view that contemporary media is too inclined to purvey fear, raises another important question. While my book asserts that the years after 9/11 proved more fearful for most Americans, the question may still be asked how this era fits in with previous ones.

Some scholars see a systematic rise in fear during the last few decades or even earlier. I believe that there have been at least episodic spikes. All of these trends make an impact both on the press and on the public. But always together? At the same time? To what degree? The book helps to establish a chronology.

The impact of a media inclined to propagate fearful reporting can be problematic in a nation in which fear is so casually used to political and commercial advantage.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Jack R. Censer

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

In a nutshell

A Brave Vessel is a story of two Williams: William Strachey, a poet and would-be chronicler of the New World in 1609 London; and William Shakespeare, a playwright of uncommon wit with an eye for a good plot. The book tells the story of Strachey’s shipwreck on Bermuda during a voyage to the Jamestown colony in Virginia. A long letter home to an anonymous lady about the hurricane-tossed wreck of the Sea Venture and the months the castaways spent on the midatlantic isle found its way to Shakespeare and helped to inspire his ethereal play The Tempest. Ultimately Strachey’s hope of writing lasting literature under his own name would come to naught, but he would unknowingly contribute to the creation of a masterpiece.

The magical qualities of The Tempest have their roots in Bermuda. Even before the Sea Venture castaways arrived on the island, it was thought to be enchanted. Sailors reported strange howls in the night as they sailed past, noises Strachey would learn were the calls of nocturnal seabirds. Thunder and lightning storms were said to plague Bermuda to an unusual degree. The exotic landscape was described in the chronicles of the voyages and helped to inspire the supernatural elements of the Tempest island. Strachey also described the dancing light of St. Elmo’s fire in the rigging of the Sea Venture at the height of the storm, an account that scholars believe inspired Shakespeare’s Tempest portrait of the sprite Ariel and his luminous appearance on the shrouds of the king’s ship.

Readers of A Brave Vessel will find a story of sea voyage, shipwreck, and the settling of America. They will also discover a literary detective story. Connections between the Sea Venture chronicles and Shakespeare’s play emerge throughout the narrative. Readers have the opportunity to join a hunt for literary treasure as they travel with the voyagers to Bermuda, Virginia, and back to London.

The wide angle

I discovered the story of the Sea Venture while I was researching the life of Pocahontas, whose future husband was one of the Bermuda castaways. Soon after learning the broad outline of the episode, I came across William Strachey’s account of the hurricane and shipwreck. His description of the storm and his time marooned on Bermuda is a rich narrative that is rare for the era. I was captivated and never stopped digging for more details until I had researched and written A Brave Vessel.

I approached the project as an historian, but a real bonus for me was the exploration of the connections between The Tempest and the New World chronicles. Examining those correlations provided an opportunity for a greater understanding of the creative methods of the greatest playwright of the English language, insights I delight in sharing with my readers.

The search for those connections dates back to 1797, and Shakespeare scholars continue to debate their extent and significance. After immersing myself in the subject, I came away convinced that the correlations are inescapable and that they were an important catalyst in the creation of the play.

Learning about the life of William Strachey and his fellow voyagers was just as intriguing as meeting Shakespeare’s muse. The two Williams were remarkably alike in some ways: each of their families had recently become wealthy as sheep farmers; each had a mid-level education and was versed in the classics; each left a family in a country village when he came to London—Strachey leaving a wife and two sons and Shakespeare a wife and two surviving daughters; and each tended to draw upon other writers in creating their works, a common practice of the day. In the most important way, however, the two could not be more different. Few had ever heard of William Strachey, and William Shakespeare was renowned throughout the land.

Nonetheless, Strachey possessed something Shakespeare did not have—a taste for travel. He was one of the few willing to risk everything on a voyage to the New World. Strachey got more adventure than he had bargained for with a detour to Bermuda before he finally made it to Virginia. The chronicles he and his fellow adventurers wrote are a fascinating look at their lives in a wild land. They tell of what they ate, what they argued about, who they married, how two women gave birth to children on Bermuda’s sandy shore, and why they mutinied—rebelling three times before a firing squad squelched dissent.

When the castaways finally reached Virginia in two island-built boats, the chronicles tell of famine and bloody wars with the Powhatan. They also describe making wine in Jamestown, picking strawberries outside the Jamestown fort, and gorging on Chesapeake shellfish. What emerged in my research and unfolds on the pages of A Brave Vessel is a living portrait of an infant America.

What emerged in my research and unfolds on the pages of A Brave Vessel is a living portrait of an infant America.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Hobson Woodward

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

In a nutshell

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent (the change in the present) by a chain of logic.

Counterfactual argument is no different in these respects from its “factual” counterpart. Depending on the context, it may also be rich in supporting evidence. We give credence to either kind of argument on the basis of its assumptions, chain of logic and consistency with evidence.

Counterfactuals nevertheless differ from “factuals” in that they create non-existent worlds. We can never really know if such worlds could or would have come about by the means we use to create them.

We employ “minimal rewrite” counterfactuals routinely: small, credible changes of reality close in time to the outcome they wish to alter. We also tend to mutate features of context that appear unusual. If Susan was in an automobile accident while driving to work, we reason it might have been prevented if she had left at the usual hour, not ten minutes late, which caused her to drive faster than usual.

People frequently invent counterfactuals to buttress their self-esteem and self-confidence, reduce anxiety and evade responsibility for negative outcomes. Scientists use counterfactuals to frame hypotheses and probe causation. If we say that “x” causes “y,” other things being equal, “y” should not occur in the absence of “x.” When cases are unique or show inadequate variation in outcomes, we must imagine alternative outcomes and conduct thought experiments to reason how they might have come out.

This is essential in history and international relations where the tape of events cannot be rewound and run millions of time to see what variation might occur. We must introduce variation through comparative analysis and counterfactuals.

So counterfactuals are widely used by physical and social scientists. Historians are on the whole are resistant to counterfactuals, but cannot write good history without them. They smuggle counterfactuals into their narratives—often unreflexively and badly.

One of the goals of Forbidden Fruit is to develop a set of protocols for conducting counterfactual thought experiments in history and international relations. I identify conditions that good counterfactual arguments must meet and the generic problems they encounter. I devise methods for using counterfactuals to probe causation but also ways of undercutting these arguments, with the goal to understanding the robustness of the outcome we would change. I offer as an historical example the phenomenal success of Western civilization in the modern era and ask what minimal rewrites of political, military, religious, social or scientific developments might have prevented it. My goal in doing so is not to create an alternate world but to understanding the causes behind and the contingency of the world in which we live. Subsequent case studies conduct counterfactual explorations of the origins of World War I and the end of the Cold War with the same end in mind.

In the second section of the book I don my psychological hat and conduct a series of experiments and surveys using policymakers, historians and international relations scholars as participants. I demonstrate how resistant these professionals are to accepting the contingency of the political world but also how easy it is to manipulate their estimates of contingency. The very people who should be thinking about causation in more complex ways are often extremely reluctant to do so, especially when contingency would call into question their preferred theories or views of the world.

The third section of the book turns to literature. Psychologists speculate that counterfactuals are credible because of their vividness: they draw people into scenarios and make them appear realistic by providing small details of the kind we associate with our world. I start with a story of my own, about an alternate world in which Mozart lives to sixty-five and, as a result, neither World War nor the Holocaust occur. My heroine tries to imagine what the world would be like if Mozart had died at her partner’s age, thirty-five—the age at which Mozart actually died. This is a deliberately far-fetched counterfactual, although I present a compelling chain of logic linking Mozart’s longevity to the peace of Europe by virtue of its consequences for Romanticism and the political goals of minorities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I use the story as one of my experimental instruments to evaluate the role of vividness in counterfactuals.

I also analyze Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which uses counterfactuals very effectively to honor his parents—by creating a situation in which their response would reveal their commitment to their children and America. The counterfactuals, which lead to a pro-Nazi Lindbergh administration, also show the contingent nature of American-Jewish identity. Roth’s novel makes us reflect upon truths we take to be self-evident.

A final chapter explores the relationship between so-called fact and fiction and “factual” and counterfactual arguments. These binaries are meaningful but so full of tensions and overlap that they are best understood as continuums. Good literature, psychology, history and international relations should not brush these tensions under the rug but exploit them for creative purposes.

The wide angle

History and social science largely rest on Humean causation: the belief in causes that can be established by something approaching a constant conjunction between two events, one envisaged as a cause and the other as its outcome.

The social world is open-ended and non-linear, both of which render Humean causation of limited value. By open-ended I mean a world in which events in one domain, say the political or social, can influence events in another, like economics, and perhaps even the understandings people have about how such a domain works. Non-linear refers to the interaction of multiple causes which have effects that are more than additive, and may be responsible for bringing about major transformations.

The social revolution of the 1960s, to offer an example, was brought about by the interaction effects of the rise of a youth culture (due to the creation of a market niche and the development of rock and roll), the invention of the birth control pill, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. All these events had independent chains of causation in diverse domains but interacted in non-linear ways to transform the social-political context of 1960s America.

Counterfactuals provide a critical tool for exploring complex causation of all kinds and I use my two historical case studies of World War I and the end of the Cold War to demonstrate how both were the result of highly contingent non-linear confluences. Despite the common belief that both developments were the result of deep causes and all but inevitable, counterfactual historical research makes it apparent that these events, not merely their timing, were highly contingent. Such contingency has profound implications for the kinds of theories we think capable of making sense of our world.

I first became involved with counterfactuals because American security policy during the Cold War rested on a counterfactual: if only Britain and France had stood firm early on against Hitler, World War II and all of its horrors could have been prevented.

As Stalin and Khrushchev were assumed to be the linear descendants of Hitler, deterrence was considered the appropriate response. No effort was made to test this counterfactual against rich and available historical evidence. Deterrence, moreover, was confirmed tautologically. Its failures were never attributed to the strategy and the responses it provoked but rather to the putative failure to apply it forcefully enough. Such “learning” in Washington and Moscow was responsible for the chain of crises culminating in the 1961 Cuban missile crisis, the closest the superpowers came to destroying themselves through a nuclear war.

Counterfactuals can have enormous rhetorical appeal and be made partially self-fulfilling. This is all the more reason we must study them and do so in the most scientific manner possible.

One of my goals is to develop a set of protocols for conducting counterfactual thought experiments in history and international relations. Not to create an alternate world but to understanding the causes behind and the contingency of the world in which we live. I identify conditions that good counterfactual arguments must meet and the generic problems they encounter.

A close-up

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

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

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

Lastly

The significance of this book is two fold.

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

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

© 2010 Richard Ned Lebow

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

In a nutshell

New York’s artists around 1960 were living in the shadows of the city’s deindustrialization—moving among demolition sites, abandoned factories, and decrepit hardware stores, while all around them new highways, sleek skyscrapers, and urban renewal projects were forever altering the city’s purpose and shape. The purpose of The Disappearance of Objects is to tell this important chapter of postwar art history, but especially to place that strange history back in the context of a city undergoing incredibly rapid change.

Using four case studies focused on the work of Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg, the book discusses the art of this period as a deeply revealing (if also clumsy) effort to understand New York’s first stages of postmodernization. Oldenburg installed room-sized works made from trash, Johns sculpted heavy little replicas of outmoded flashlights and beer cans, Rauschenberg made paintings out of nineteenth-century architectural scraps, and Judd ordered up crystalline sheet-metal boxes. In various ways, all this difficult-to-interpret art offered an unusually sophisticated way of thinking about the changing texture of everyday life.

The book’s title comes from a note in Johns’s sketchbook about the “loss, destruction, disappearance of objects.” I hope that the book communicates what this art taught me about how recent history has brought an abstraction of our everyday spaces, a shift toward systematicity and away from particular, palpable things. Of course I hope, too, that the book serves as a way for us to think historically and critically about the texture of life in the present, about how profoundly our relationship to the material world has changed in a few short decades.

The wide angle

I came to this topic as an art historian, trying to make sense of some art I really liked but couldn’t understand or explain. As I looked at the art more and more, and as I began sorting through archives, I discovered that these sculptures and paintings and installations had deep relationships to a chaotic time in a very chaotic city.

Johns and Rauschenberg were literally moving from loft to abandoned industrial loft as their homes were demolished to make way for new skyscrapers. Oldenburg installed a work called The Street just around the corner from a massively contentious effort (which eventually failed) to plow an expressway through Washington Square Park. I became fascinated with the urban history, and found its unfolding evidence in the Village Voice and in old fire-insurance maps. Eventually the project turned into a book as interested in New York as it is in understanding the art.

Soon the art made more sense to me (or I felt more comprehending of its nonsense), and I drew connections between the obstructions in the art and all the new blockages and clearings in the city. If the book straddles the realms of art history and urban history, though, I also mean it to be an entry in the theorization of contemporary experience. I want the book to contribute to our understanding of how our daily lives are constantly reshaped by the history of capitalism.

I think most of my readers so far have been people interested in postwar art. But the book is written for anyone interested in the cultural history of the last several decades, and for anyone who just loves the history of New York.

The purpose of The Disappearance of Objects is to tell this important chapter of postwar art history, but especially to place that strange history back in the context of a city undergoing incredibly rapid change.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

© 2010 Joshua Shannon

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

In a nutshell

Culinary Nostalgia focuses on Shanghai and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city’s history. Taking foodways as a window onto urban change, the book argues that regional food culture mediated and expressed the ways in which city residents connected to the past, lived in the present, and imagined a future. By considering the Shanghai experience as part of a wider history of food in China, the book also draws into relief one of the most remarkable, and yet rarely remarked upon, features of Chinese history during the past two centuries: the enduring appeal of traditional foodways and their regional manifestations during periods of often rapid and drastic social and cultural change.

The significance that Chinese have attached to foodways has of course changed many times, and in many important ways. But regional foodways remain a salient component of cultural identity in China—even in a place as “modern” and cosmopolitan as Shanghai—despite the nationalization of so many other arenas of “Chinese” culture. My book seeks to explain this, by examining the tenacity of regional taste preferences and the almost limitless flexibility that food provides as a vehicle for constructing a sense of home and imagining an ideal society.

Since so much of this constructing and imagining turns out to have been nostalgic, my book is also an inquiry into the history of nostalgia, and of culinary nostalgia in particular. This is a concept that I define broadly as the recollection or purposive evocation of another time and place through food. The broadness of the definition is intentional. I propose that nostalgia not be framed in negative terms, as is most commonly done, for example, as a pathology, or a form of delusion or obfuscation. Instead, the book asks that nostalgia be considered a category for critical reflection upon a changing world. This alternative approach to nostalgia more accurately reflects the historical record of Shanghai, at least in terms of how culinary nostalgia operated.

In more general terms, Culinary Nostalgia is quite simply a book about the joys and delights of eating, remembering, talking about, and writing about favorite hometown foods. It is, therefore, a book about something that might be thought of as a universal human theme, but which in China manifests itself with a remarkable intensity, and which became, in addition, a matter of particular urgency.

The wide angle

Culinary Nostalgia evolved out of my attempt to make sense of an unexpected turn in my research. I set out looking for the various ways that Shanghai people used food to participate in the “modern” world and act out their cosmopolitan status. While I did find some evidence of this use of food, I found much more of the opposite: food, more often than not, was an assertion of provincial pride and an objection to modernity, or at the very least to the many structural forces and ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: urbanization, industrialization, nationalism, capitalism, socialism, and globalization.

I kept finding, for example, twentieth-century writers on Shanghai foodways alluding to nineteenth-century writers on Shanghai foodways, who were themselves often citing verbatim even earlier writers on Shanghai foodways. This pattern was especially pronounced in writing about regional specialty crops, in particular the Shanghai honey nectar peach, which back in the sixteenth century had helped Shanghai residents distinguish their city as a place of note. The early literature on Shanghai’s peaches even likened the city to the rural idyll described in fourth-century poet Tao Qian’s “Peach Blossom Spring.” Then, later on, came the many complaints about how the taste of the peaches deteriorated in quality as urbanization pushed local peach cultivation beyond city limits and out of native soil.

In addition to the literature on Shanghai peaches, I was struck by the appearance of “Proustian” essays, written by sojourners in Shanghai, about how a chance encounter with their favorite childhood food, such as lotus root, conjured images of a better and more just world. Equally striking was the way that restaurant décor, carefully chronicled in consumer guidebooks to city life, celebrated historical motifs more than Shanghai’s modernity. I was especially surprised to find that even Communist Party authorities in Shanghai, famous for their denigration of the city’s pre-1949 society and culture, participated in culinary nostalgia about Shanghai’s and China’s past.

Lurking in all of this material, I eventually realized, was an enduring culture of remembrance surrounding regional foodways and regional culture. Equally important was recognizing that this culture provided me with a way to study food in a manner suitable for an historian; that is, without divorcing food from social processes and power, since each act of food memory could be closely linked to shifting power relations at key stages in the development of city life. Significantly, these stages now took on a meaning different from that usually ascribed to them, as the most “modern” city in China emerged as a deeply nostalgic place.

In this regard, I like to think that the book succeeds in avoiding some of the pitfalls of earlier forms of culinary history, as well as some of the less productive tendencies evident even in the more recent “food studies” scholarship. One of the dangers of studying “food” is that food as such becomes the subject matter, while social relationships become incidental. This tendency is especially (if not always) evident in work on the history of foodstuffs, which often make a fetish of a particular item of food and seek only to locate its importance in history, and as a result only reify history. We thus learn much about food but little about history.

What I try to show instead was that food wasn’t in history; rather, it made history. A lack of clarity about the differences between these two approaches accounts, in part, for why the field of food studies continues to be belittled as trivial (although I think that there has also been some conflation of books written for distinctly different audiences).

My ongoing reflections about the curious belittlement of food as a topic of academic inquiry certainly primed me to raise questions about the ongoing belittlement of nostalgia, a sentiment derided even by poststructuralists, from whom one might have instead expected more examination of the strategies of belittlement. It thus became important to me to consider the possibility of de-pathologizing nostalgia: not to err by glorifying it, but more simply to listen to it, carefully.

Perhaps Shanghai’s honey nectar peaches really did taste better in the past. But the more pressing historical issue is why people felt compelled to write about the decline of peach cultivation nostalgically by invoking, in particular, the image of the peach blossom spring. This image was originally conceived as an allegory of escape from the corruption and infighting that plagued the Jin (265-420 CE) court. In late nineteenth-century Shanghai, this same image now read as a poignant counterpoint to the rapid development and uncertainty of modern city life, as well as to patterns of corruption exemplified by gluttonous civil officials. To criticize nostalgia, culinary or otherwise, is to miss larger points in play for social and cultural analysis.

I propose that nostalgia not be framed in negative terms, as is most commonly done, for example, as a pathology, or a form of delusion or obfuscation. Instead, the book asks that nostalgia be considered a category for critical reflection upon a changing world.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

© 2010 Mark Swislocki

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

In a nutshell

While Europe is considered the “old world,” it is the United States that is actually far older. The European Union in its current configuration of 27 member states and 500 million people dates back only to 2004.

My book is about a “Europe” fundamentally different from its previous incarnations, reconstructed from the rubble of World War II with America’s generous assistance. It is the story of how post-World War II Europe has transformed itself from the military warring machines its nations had been for centuries, into a model for how a modern society can develop itself, take care of its people, foster “peace and prosperity partnerships” with its neighbors and region, and do all that in a way that is as environmentally sustainable as possible. For a decade I traveled widely across the continent to understand this uniquely European Way that, I concluded, has taken the lead in this make-or-break century challenged by a worldwide economic crisis, global climate change and new geopolitical tensions.

Yet these changes mostly have taken place under the radar, misreported by the media and misunderstood by the American public and its leaders. Because modern-day Europe is so new and still in formation, journalists can’t figure out if Europe is a single nation or a confederacy of individual nations. Increasingly the answer is “both,” confusing many reporters who don’t quite know how to report on Europe because of this duality. As a result, numerous myths and half-truths about Europe now pass as conventional wisdom, and these myths have clouded Americans’ perceptions and understanding.

Thus, in Europe’s Promise I undertook the task of chronicling and illuminating for readers Europe’s quiet revolution that is proposing a bold new vision for human development at a crucial juncture in global affairs. A world power has emerged across the Atlantic that is recrafting the rules for how a modern society should provide economic security, environmental sustainability and global stability for its many peoples. History is in the making, and those paying attention have ringside seats.

The wide angle

The world faces two major challenges in the 21st century. First, how do we advance the institutions and practices capable of enacting a desirable quality of life for a burgeoning global population of 6.5 billion people? And second, how do we do all that in a way that does not exacerbate the severe impacts of global warming and environmental degradation? Put another way, how do we allow China, India, Brazil and other countries to come up in the world without burning up the planet in a Venus atmosphere of our own creation?

It is a tall order—yet also the defining task of the 21st century. And more than anyone, Europe has forged the types of innovations and institutions that point the way forward for the world to meet these twin challenges.

Europe’s Promise details how Europe’s leadership manifests in several major areas:

Economic strength

Europe is now the world’s largest trading bloc, producing nearly a third of the world’s economy, almost as large as the U.S. and China combined. Europe has more Fortune 500 companies than the U.S. and China together, and more small businesses creating two thirds of the jobs in Europe, compared to only half the jobs in the U.S. Europe is the largest trading partner with both the U.S. and China, and had a higher per capita annual growth rate than the U.S. from 1998-2008 (until the global economic collapse). And currently the continent previously known as the land of high unemployment has a lower unemployment rate than the United States. So contrary to the myths and stereotypes, Europe’s economy is robust and competitive, producing a great deal of wealth. This is not socialism, as some have claimed, it’s fully capitalist in its orientation.

Social capitalism and real family values

While Europe is fully capitalist, it has a different brand than America’s “Wall Street capitalism.” I call it “social capitalism,” because the genius of Europe is that it has figured out how to harness capitalism’s tremendous wealth-creating capacity so that its benefits are broadly shared. Hardly a “welfare state,” Europe has created an ingenious “workfare” framework that better supports families and individuals to help them stay healthy and productive, which is especially important during this time of economic crisis.

Better health care

Part of Europe’s social capitalism includes having health care systems that have been rated by the World Health Organization as being the best in the world. Yet they spend far less per capita than the United States for universal coverage, even as U.S. health care is ranked 37th—just ahead of Cuba and Kuwait.

Readying for global warming

Not only is Europe’s economy robust, and not only has it figured out how to harness capitalism to foster a more broadly shared prosperity, but Europe is figuring out how to do that in a way that is as environmentally sustainable as possible. Europe has deployed widespread use of renewable energy and conservation technologies which has resulted in an “ecological footprint” that is half that of the United States for the same standard of living. The European landscape is being transformed slowly by giant high-tech windmills, vast solar arrays, underwater seamills, hydrogen-powered vehicles, “sea snakes,” and other renewable energy technologies. While renewables grab the headlines, even more significant has been Europe’s leadership in implementing conservation and “green” design in everything from skyscrapers to homes to fuel-efficient automobiles, high-speed trains, low wattage light bulbs, and low flush toilets. Europe has gone both high- and low-tech: it also has developed thousands of kilometers of bicycle and pedestrian paths that are used by people of all ages. In the process, the greening of the economy has created new industries and hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Innovative foreign policy

Europe is transforming our very notions of “effective power.” With America’s “hard power” suffering setbacks, Europe’s “smart power”—based on regional networks of nations and Europe’s own Marshall Plan for development—has produced a “Eurosphere” with some 2 billion people (one third of the world) linked by trade, aid, and investment to the European Union.

Europe’s Promise shatters several myths, such as the one about Europeans paying more taxes than Americans. The fact is that, for their taxes, Europeans receive a seemingly endless list of supports and services for families and individuals—quality health care, decent retirement, more vacation, paid parental leave, paid sick leave, free or nearly free university education, housing assistance, senior care, job training and much more—for which Americans must pay extra for, out-of-pocket, via escalating health care premiums, fees, deductibles, tuition and other charges, all in addition to our taxes. When you sum up the total balance sheet, you discover that many Americans pay out as much as or more than Europeans—but we receive a lot less for our money.

Europe has pioneered new forms of social, political and economic innovations such as: codetermination, which allows the workers in major corporations in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere to elect up to 50% of the corporate board of directors (imagine Wal-Mart being required by law to allow its workers to elect 50% of its board of directors—the impact would be immense); proportional representation, public financing of campaigns, and free media time that fosters multiparty democracy, higher voter participation, a better informed populace, and policy shaped by broad consensus; cogeneration, which redirects wasted heat from power plants (that usually is lost up the chimney flue as exhaust) into pipes that can bring that heat to homes and buildings, thereby greatly increasing energy efficiency; nonprofit private insurance companies that deliver health care and which, along with negotiated fees for all medical services, keep costs down to a fraction of what Americans pay, even as they produce better health for people than America’s for-profit health care system.

Because modern-day Europe is so new and still in formation, journalists can’t figure out if Europe is a single nation or a confederacy of individual nations.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

Financial Times :

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

Reuters International :

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

Foreign Affairs :

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

Reuters International:

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

Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker :

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

© 2010 Steven Hill

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

In a nutshell

Hot Stuff is a cultural history of disco that is at once scholarly and popular. The book charts disco’s trajectory—from its steamy beginnings in Manhattan’s gay clubs through its Blob-like takeover of pop music, to its apparent collapse—probing throughout what made disco so compelling to some and so troubling to others. Rock once had its enemies, too, but they were reliably conservative. By contrast, disco managed to offend people across the political spectrum. Attacked for being both too gay and too straight, too black and too white, oversexed and asexual, leisure class and leisure-suited (loser) class, disco represented anything but a stable signifier.

My book probes disco’s “hotness,” which I locate largely in its upending of America’s racial rules and gender and sexual conventions. Disco broadened the contours of blackness, femininity, and male homosexuality. African-American musicians and producers experimented with lavish, sophisticated arrangements that didn’t always sound recognizably “black.” Their lush new sounds became the foundation of disco. With this sonic turn, black masculinity moved away from the “sex machine” model of James Brown towards the “love man” style of Barry White. As for gay men, as they became newly visible, largely through the dissemination of disco culture, their self-presentation shifted as effeminacy gave way to a macho style recognizable to anyone who has ever glimpsed the Village People. Feminism’s critique of three-minute sex found its voice in disco, and black female performers broke with representational strategies rooted in respectability. There’s no way to make sense of how we got from Diana Ross to Lil’ Kim without exploring disco.

These changes, experienced as liberating by some, nonetheless provoked controversy. Was disco a repudiation of pernicious racial profiling or was it turning R&B “beige,” transmogrifying it into a “mush of vacuous Muzak,” as one critic alleged? And what about the new gay masculinism? Was it best understood as a parody or as a mimicking of conventional heterosexual masculinity? Was it liberating in its rejection of the age-old association of homosexuality with effeminacy, or was it regressive in its stigmatizing of sissiness?

Disco filled the air with what one singer called “women’s love rights.” But this happened in a context in which the social and legal policy that would ensure a more level playing field for women lagged behind the sexual revolution. Indeed, disco’s promotion of greater sexual expressiveness seemed to some to run the risk of exacerbating women’s sexual vulnerability.

The wide angle

Like my biography of Janis Joplin, Hot Stuff is meant to engage both scholars and interested readers outside the academy. This is my second book to wrestle with the popular music and the social change movements of the sixties and seventies. Although I draw on my experiences as a disco/funk deejay, Hot Stuff is very much in dialogue with work in cultural studies, gay studies and musicology.

One of the book’s signal achievements is that it demonstrates something that scholars of popular music such as Susan McClary and Simon Frith have been saying for a while now: music is a social process. Through it we learn how to experience our own feelings, desires, and bodies. Indeed, we can say that music socializes us. This argument is often advanced in a rather abstract fashion. But Hot Stuff’s discussion of gay sociability, sexuality, and masculinity is a case study of the way that music shapes us.

The book describes how as disco took hold, gay style shifted. The ironed chinos, cashmere sweaters, and penny loafers that had been favored by many gay men gave way to 501 button-fly Levis, flannel shirts, aviator fight jackets, work boots, and belt-dangling key chains. Short hair, mustaches, and muscles became the style. At the time, gay writer and activist Douglas Crimp tried to make sense of what he was seeing on the dance-floors of gay New York. It looked to him as though gay men were developing nearly identical bodies fashioned for a specific activity. And it dawned on him: “These bodies have been made into dancing machines.”

You could say that this emphatic move towards gay macho was merely a shift in style, but that would miss its larger social significance. Here it’s important to note the importance of 1969’s Stonewall riot, which many argue marked the beginning of gay liberation. Some writers believe that disco and gay liberation were on parallel trajectories rather than overlapping. I think it’s impossible to disaggregate disco from politics when dancing constituted a kind of protest.

For a while disco and gay liberation enjoyed a synergistic relationship. In the years after Stonewall, gay clubs, which had been sites of repression and surveillance, became something akin to liberated zones. Through disco, gay men charted a course that permitted them to feel sexually legible (that is, real) to each other. And it facilitated their rejection of gay masculinity as failed masculinity. It was on the disco dance floor surging with the energy of “so many bodies becoming one” that gay men created a different sexual subjectivity and a powerful feeling of one-ness.

How did this happen? The ear-shattering volume and bass-driven sonics of disco encouraged physical intimacy and sexual straightforwardness. After all, the volume was set so high that patrons had to dispense with the usual formalities and chit-chat. Moreover, a good disco sound system, which emphasized the music’s thunderous bass and its bass drum kick (the disco thump) was like an “audio orgasmatron,” as journalist Frank Owen put it, and it worked on “erogenous zones you never knew you had.”

The sweatbox conditions at many gay discos also encouraged stripping to the waist, which in turn made working-out pretty much obligatory. The buff body was about style, but it also was critical to the reconfiguring of gay identity and desire. Before, gay men had often been “hunters after the same prey,” recalls gay clubber and record executive Mel Cheren, “rather than allies or prospective partners.” Now, gay rather than heterosexual men became the embodiment of masculinity and the fantasized object of desire for each other. “We’re brothers,” was the feeling, recalled novelist Edmund White. “We’re the men we’ve been looking for.”

Rock once had its enemies, too, but they were reliably conservative. By contrast, disco managed to offend people across the political spectrum.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Alice Echols

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

In a nutshell

The Essential Engineer is about the similarities and differences between scientists and engineers, and between science and engineering, and how they relate to contemporary technological issues. The book provides historical background to the distinctions between science and engineering and considers their relevance for solving today’s global problems.

I emphasize that science, in its purest form, working alone, is not likely to solve problems relating to climate and energy issues; it is important for science and engineering to work together in meeting the technological challenges that face the world.

The Essential Engineer also describes opportunities that have been presented to scientists and engineers today in the form of a host of challenges and prizes offered to stimulate research and development in important areas of need. (These range from the mundane, say the search for a more efficient battery, to the exotic, say space travel and exploration as private enterprise.)

The wide angle

This book relates to the nature and to the practice of research and development. I write as an engineer who has been involved with many aspects of the profession, including design, research and development in the nuclear industry, and teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

The central topic is how research and development has been, can be, and might be funded and practiced to improve effectiveness in producing results that are relevant to problems facing the world today. Rather than being at odds with each other, research and development should be seen as two aspects of the same endeavor; sometimes the one takes the leading role, and sometimes the other.

Many significant engineering developments have been advanced without full scientific understanding of the phenomena involved. This situation has often forced engineers to engage in scientific exploration and experimentation in the absence of scientific interest or motivation to do so. The lessons learned from historic case studies should be encouraging to inventors and engineers engaged today in efforts to develop new devices and technologies even in the face of incomplete scientific knowledge.

There is much debate today about choices and strategies involving alternative energy sources. In the book, I weigh the pros and cons of many of them. Among the energy sources I discuss are bio, solar, wind, wave, tidal, geothermal, etc. Also, I pay some attention to the various pros and cons of all-electric, hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and other variations of more fuel efficient vehicles.

Rather than being at odds with each other, research and development should be seen as two aspects of the same endeavor; sometimes the one takes the leading role, and sometimes the other.

A close-up

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

© 2010 Henry Petroski

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

In a nutshell

Italy in Early American Cinema traces the formal and ideological history of an aesthetic tradition, the Picturesque, from its original association with Italian landscapes to its deployment in early American cinema’s representation of the country’s distinct geographic and racial diversity. Thus the book touches upon formal conventions about national and racial difference that preceded the inception of moving pictures and even of photography, conventions which both producers and spectators, no matter their social or national background, knew and appreciated.

This work began from the consideration that all too many studies of race in early American cinema tend to focus rather exclusively on individual groups. Reacting to this parcelization, I call attention to a sustained, transatlantic connection between how early American cinema as a whole represented racial difference and national identity and how, on both sides of the Atlantic, literature and image-making media had for centuries popularized romantic and entertaining representations of distant landscapes and populations.

This pervasive aesthetic tradition, known as Picturesque, referred to both actual and painterly landscapes whose accidental or studied appearance turned their irregularity and roughness into appealing aesthetic effects. The Picturesque had emerged in conjunction with how European travelers, including writers and artists, romanticized Southern Italy’s ruin-dotted city views, pristine forests, erupting volcanoes, and quaint populations. Over time, the Picturesque’s reconciling arrangements came to imbue not only burgeoning tourist and image-making industries promoting the pleasing representation of distant places and populations, but also modern nations’ idealized representations of their own striking natural views and marginal dwellers.

After showing the international popularity of Italian picturesque representations, I discuss how the Picturesque became the first American aesthetic. In the United States, the Picturesque popularized charming depictions of natural and urban sceneries, from the Hudson River Valley and the Wild West to the nation’s largest metropolis, New York City. Through pleasant arrangements of landscapes and man-made presences, the Picturesque offered something that American tourist and railway boosters as well as artists, writers, and filmmakers deeply needed: a familiar design to sort through, exoticize, and thus domesticate the wilderness of American natural and social landscapes—from the Niagara Falls and the immense Western forests to the Lower East Side.

Early American cinema was keenly sensitive to the Picturesque. Western, gangster, and melodramatic films, as well as travelogues, deployed the picturesque tradition of “agreeable pictures” to idealize—to Americanize, that is—“agreeable races,” from noble, yet vanishing Native Americans to Italians, the Picturesque’s original subjects. Ultimately, however, the Picturesque identified a pleasing, manageable, and assimilable alterity that was not for everybody: to be picturesque or “colorful” implied not to be “colored.”

The wide angle

If the argument I make is fairly simple—even intuitive: like other media, cinema domesticated the alleged wilderness of remote places and populations into entertaining representations—executing it required familiarity with a transatlantic network of visual practices and critical debates.

Thus the book incorporates illustrations and methods from the history of painting, print-making, photography, landscape architecture, anthropology, tourism, theatre, caricature, and moving pictures. This wide framework of references allowed me to show how the power-laden aesthetics of the Picturesque crossed historical periods and geographic distances, moved from the canvas to the photographic plate and the movie screen, and, consequently, served as a long-lasting resource for both racial allegations and identity formations.

The project grew in such a way because of personal interests and inclinations: my background in philosophy helped me think through larger aesthetic debates. But this broad approach was time consuming. Ultimately, I was able to carry out the project because of fortunate academic opportunities. A three-year postdoc at the University of Michigan’s Society of Fellows enabled me to read extensively and entertain an intense dialogue with junior and senior scholars from other fields, without the customary obligations of regular teaching and service. A few years later I was able to have the same experience during a one-year fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, where I rewrote the manuscript while trying to weave together all the different strands of my research. Under these privileging circumstances, the original project, initially centered on the relationship between early cinema and Italian immigrants in New York, gained in scope and ambition.

The broader implications of the argument put forward in the book are, I think, twofold. On the one hand, if we take seriously the intermedial history of films’ representations, we ought to revisit the widely-held notion of moving pictures’ radical novelty and distinctive modernity. My study seeks to show that, at least from a racial viewpoint, films’ communicative power was actually fraught with debts to powerful, older, yet equally modern, geoaesthetic traditions.

All too often, the argument about cinema’s novel aesthetic property has stressed its unique capacity to reproduce movement, namely the photographic embalming and manipulation of time. In this study I seek to complement this assessment by showing moving pictures’ creative complicity with popular notions of spatial and geographic distance, and related perceptions of social and racial diversity. By relying on, and furthering, this long-lasting aesthetic tradition, familiar to both image-makers and consumers, cinema readily achieved a broad appeal even among the subjects of films’ racially-charged depictions. This is the second implication of my study.

In the past, scholars have argued that immigrants’ exposure to moving pictures offered them a radically new experience, one that could not easily be assimilated with their own cultural universe, and that in the process “Americanized” them. My research on the international pervasiveness of Southern Italian landscapes of erupting volcanoes, charming seashores and colorful banditi suggests otherwise.

Since before coming to the United States, Italian immigrants were strikingly familiar with these conventions, which pervaded Sicilian stage plays, Neapolitan melodramas, and local films productions. Not only did they recognize picturesque representation on American screens, but they also contributed to the resilience of picturesque conventions in their own remarkable theatrical and filmmaking enterprises—as archival holdings and the ethnic press reveal.

The book cover’s composite landscape view is suggestively meant to capture the multiple layers of the Picturesque’s transatlantic circulation. Featured as a stage backdrop in the 1917 footage of The Godfather: Part II (1974) and, originally, in the logo of the music-publishing firm of Coppola’s grandfather, the image links the picturesque representations of Naples and New York in a single, impossible view. Here, Old and New World are reunited in a common exoticizing gesture that not only reproduces immigrants’ nostalgia and wonder, but also shows how the Picturesque, despite its long and patrician history, was in 1910s America a widely appreciated visual currency exchanged across social and cultural barriers.

Western, gangster, and melodramatic films deployed the picturesque tradition of “agreeable pictures” to idealize—to Americanize, that is—“agreeable races”

A close-up

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Giorgio Bertellini

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

In a nutshell

From Utopia to Apocalypse is a study of political upheaval and revolutionary change, as they are portrayed in works of speculative and science fiction. It is my contention that science fiction and speculative narratives, by virtue of their fantastic character, enable us to imagine in vivid terms the experience of sweeping political change and social transformation. The narratives I discuss in this book—the superhero comics of Alan Moore, the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, the cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, and the manga of Hayao Miyazaki—depict, with unblinking candor and rigorous equanimity, the violence committed in the name of founding a new order or destroying an unjust one. As such, they compel us to come to grips with the unrelenting compulsions and uncontrollable forces that are unleashed in the process whereby one kind of order gives way to another.

For example, in Miracleman, a revisionist superhero comic by Alan Moore, the superhuman beings tire of serving an unsatisfactory status quo and decide to take over the globe. They force the leaders of the world into retirement, eliminate poverty, destroy all nuclear weapons, and heal the environment from the ravages of industrial pollution. But these acts of humanitarian compassion soon reveal a darker side: the superheroes essentially become dictators who declare themselves to be gods, while any dissent against their rule becomes reduced to inconsequential spectacle.

Though it has little in common with classical tragedy, Miracleman contains an indelibly tragic dimension, for it lays out in vivid terms the harsh price entailed for achieving what most would consider a glorious outcome. The other narratives I look at contain similarly cruel dilemmas and wrenching twists: mass murders that trigger world peace and thus remain unpunished, the destruction of annihilating weapons that has the consequence of eliminating the technologies for creating abundance and guaranteeing human survival in an increasingly toxic planet, a program to rescue humans from their violence that requires the horrific suffering of a small number of innocent individuals. The protagonists in these works find themselves trapped in tragic conflicts, but these predicaments, which often exact a terrible price, turn out to be the necessary precondition for passing into a wholly new or entirely different state of affairs.

The wide angle

I had not undertaken any scholarly studies of science fiction or popular culture prior to writing this book—my graduate work had focused on the aesthetics of literary modernism. But the attacks of September 11 led me to embark on a project that would enable me to reflect on the uses and consequences of violence in political life. Although my book is not a study of how the terrorist attacks have influenced the production of certain films or the writing of certain literary texts, nevertheless, at its heart, this book is an examination of the relentless compulsions that underlie such fateful and destructive endeavors as imperial expansion, the control of access to scarce resources, and the anxious defense of an unsustainable status quo.

The critical approach I take to studying science fiction and political theory stems from my dissatisfaction with the intellectual methods currently predominant in contemporary theory. Efforts to theorize political life in literary and cultural studies generally take the form of denouncing the policies and critiquing the dominant values of an oppressive state. Rarely do they gravitate toward a substantive reflection upon what it means to govern a modern state, nor do they face up to the hardships that any actual shift toward a leftist politics would entail. In either case, what is excluded is the thought of imagining and wrestling with the dilemmas faced by those who are responsible for the fate of a collective.

To avoid the pitfalls posed by the disabling position of permanent critique, in which political responsibility becomes smothered in a discourse of moral indignation and the act of interpreting literary and other texts becomes a predetermined exercise in advocating a radical cultural politics, I chose to undertake my readings of science fiction texts in a theoretical and ethical field demarcated by two extreme, ostensibly contrary positions—the first being the political realism associated with Niccolo Machiavelli and to a lesser extent, Thomas Hobbes, and the second being a politics and ethics of saintliness exemplified by the French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil.

In the former position one finds the hard-headed and ruthless pursuit of worthy and selfless objectives, in which morality is subordinated not to the ambitions of the unscrupulous but rather to the task of achieving independence and security in a world wracked by the ceaseless struggle for power. Weil, on the other hand, enunciates the uncompromising stance that human action must be guided by a supernatural good, yet in her writings one finds a profound meditation on the crushing power of human cruelty and the vulnerability of all good things to injustice. The good for Weil must be conceived against the harsh realities of massacres and the spiritual destruction of those reduced to slavery, or else it remains a tawdry piece of fiction.

While Machiavelli’s political realism and Weil’s ethics of saintliness are directed towards radically different ends—patriotism for the former, the well-being of the soul for the latter—both share a fearlessness with which they seek to attain an elusive lucidity regarding human actions. Contemporary liberal thought is apt to dismiss such illumination as excessively severe. But the unyielding rigor with which both thinkers examine social reality underscores the fact that reality is not a given but can only be grasped by those prepared to face up to harsh and arduous truths. Thus, the tension between realpolitik and saintliness enables a detailed reflection upon an unsettling series of themes: the compassionate aspects of tyranny, the unconditional dedication to a loved one that results in total destruction, the choice between empathy and survival, and the sublime freedom that arises from terrible ordeals.

Rather than point out how a certain text fulfills the principles of a certain ideology, my readings emphasize how ideological doctrines are unsettled and their constituent elements torn apart by the narratives that are the object of my study. The contingent character of our political choices comes to the fore when we can imagine those values we take as existing together breaking apart and recombining into new and unexpected ideological formations.

The contemporary critique of capitalist society depends on the health of the economic and political status quo: an oppressive authority that is “strong” is far easier to condemn than one that is weak and caught in the process of dissolution.

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Peter Y. Paik

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

In a nutshell

America’s Army is military history of a different kind: it uses the story of the making of the all-volunteer army as a window into the history of American society over the past forty or so years.

Today’s all-volunteer military was born in crisis. It grew out of turmoil over the Vietnam War, and its first decade is a chronicle of struggle and frustration. In the wake of a war gone badly wrong, an unpopular institution wracked by internal crisis faced the challenge of recruiting large numbers of young men from a racially, culturally, and politically divided society. Despite a dreadful civilian job market and the Army’s attempts to “sell” soldiering, all signs were bad. Many of the convulsive struggles of 1970s America–over race, over the proper roles of women, over the meaning of democracy and citizenship and patriotism–also exploded within the ranks of the Army.

The overall “quality” of recruits was poor; the notion that the all-volunteer force (AVF) would draw “motivated men . . . with the higher level of technical and professional skill” necessary to operate the “complex weapons of modern war” seemed increasingly implausible. Many thought the AVF would fail; a renewed draft seemed more than possible. But in the 1980s and 1990s–a period of more limited deployments and relative peace—the volunteer force created believers both within and outside the military.

In ending conscription, the United States discarded the understanding that military service is an obligation of (male) citizenship. That move had serious implications, some of them unforeseen. All-volunteer status pushed the army into the marketplace–not only into the labor market, where it had to compete with other “employers,” but into the consumer marketplace as well. Trying to fill its ranks, the Army adopted the most sophisticated tools of consumer capitalism. It turned to market research and high-budget advertising and worked hard to portray military service not as obligation, but as opportunity.

The end of the draft also gave the military less control over who joined. The Army turned increasingly to women, accepted a vastly disproportionate number of African Americans, and worried greatly–for different reasons—about both of these decisions. I argue that the US military, out of necessity and not always happily, was the American institution that most directly confronted the impact and legacies of the nation’s struggles over civil rights and social justice.

The wide angle

I meant this book to change some conversations. Military history draws a lot of people who read serious non-fiction, but it occupies a complicated place in the academic discipline of history. Military history has spent a lot of time on the academic “outs,” often ignored by more mainstream US historians who have been most concerned, for decades, about the experiences and struggles of those marginalized and oppressed and quick to dismiss military history as an endorsement of war, violence, conflict, and militarism.

I’m trying to challenge that understanding and that relationship. I would insist that anyone who wants to understand the history of the United States over the past half-century must pay attention to its military. That’s not only because the military is a key instrument of US power, but because it is a critically important institution within US society.

If we want to understand struggles for social justice and questions of equality, we can’t ignore the role that the military has played–and continues to play–in these struggles. If we want to understand the meaning of citizenship, we have to think more about the ways that the rights and obligations of citizenship have been negotiated around questions of military service. If we want to engage current discussions of consumer citizenship, we can’t avoid the implications of military advertising. If we care about the shape of the modern family, the construction of military benefits are crucial. And the very creation of the AVF speaks volumes about American struggles to balance its core values of liberty and equality.

At the same time, I also believe that the army must be taken seriously on its own terms. It is not simply a site for social struggles or a reflection of ideological debates. The army has longstanding history and traditions, practices and beliefs. The significant role it plays within American society does not change the fact that its primary mission is national defense. My goal in this book was to begin to understand and explain the institution in its complexity, to show people with human motivations and powerful loyalties confronting the problems of their age, and to analyze the results of their actions.

This book was quite a change for me; my most recent (non-edited) book was on the sexual revolution (Sex in the Heartland), and I’d bet that my 1988 history of dating, From Front Porch to Back Seat, has been read more than anything else I’ve written. But as a cultural historian I’m interested in the construction of meaning, and I became fascinated, back in the late 1990s, with a series of television commercials that portrayed the army as a form of social good, picturing young men who could be seen as potentially at risk or potentially dangerous, depending on the position of the viewer, and presenting army service as redemption and salvation.

I began with a desire to study the ways the army attempted to shape its public image through commercial advertising—and soon understood that such an approach would yield a very shallow book. So I threw myself into the study of army institutional history and recruiting statistics and policy debates and arguments about doctrine and training, never, despite it all, losing hope that I could transcend the deadeningly bureaucratic language of the documents that eventually stacked thirteen feet high. I had no idea, in the beginning, that this project would require me to learn so very much about the army, but I’m very glad it did.

In ending conscription, the United States discarded the understanding that military service is an obligation of (male) citizenship. All-volunteer status pushed the army into the marketplace–not only into the labor market, where it had to compete with other “employers,” but into the consumer marketplace as well.

A close-up

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

Courtesy of US Army

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Beth Bailey

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

In a nutshell

This is a literary biography of Helen of Troy. It is not a historical life of a Bronze Age princess or a study of mythology; it is not an account of Troy or an exploration of the ancient world. It does not consider whether Helen of Troy had a historical existence or was a mythical figure. My subject is the literary afterlife of the woman we know as Helen of Troy, the beautiful Queen of Sparta whose abduction by the Trojan prince Paris led to a ten-year war and the downfall of King Priam’s Troy—and to twenty-eight centuries of poetry, drama, novels, opera, and film.

The German Romanticist Goethe wrote, “We do not get to know works of nature and art as end-products; we must grasp them as they develop if we are to gain some understanding of them.” He was talking about revisions of a single author’s work but his statement is equally true of revisions of one story across centuries and cultures. I wanted to get to know Helen’s story.

However, this is not the same as getting to know Helen herself. Indeed, one of the arguments of my book is that Helen is strangely absent (emotionally, physically) from the story she has initiated. Although she is the narrative motor, she is an absent center. She is the literary equivalent of the Mona Lisa’s smile: absence is her essence. This is a book about what is not there, what is not said, what defies representation, and what cannot be told.

In chronicling Helen’s story I have necessarily had to spread my net wide. The most recent works discussed are from the twenty-first century: a radio drama by Mark Haddon (the award-winning author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), an American cable TV series, Helen of Troy, poems by Carol Ann Duffy and Eva Salzman; the earliest texts are Greek (Homeric epic, Euripides’ plays). In between come Shakespeare, pre-Raphaelite poetry, the Victorian novel, Virginia Woolf, silent movie, opera and operetta, C. S. Lewis, Derek Walcott—almost everyone has written about Helen at some stage!

The wide angle

This book took me many years to write—longer than the Trojan War itself took. At Oxford University, where I teach, students study every period of English Literature from 800 CE to 2010. And every century of literature that I teach is full of references to Helen of Troy. Those are usually expressions of hate towards her. But what aroused my curiosity was the persistent narrative difficulty that authors have in dealing with the most beautiful woman in the world.

Part of this difficulty seems to be the problem of representing in language someone whose beauty is deemed beyond description. This problem of representation is constant in all Helen narratives and it becomes particularly acute in drama. Authors can simply abdicate narrative responsibility, saying “I can’t even begin to describe her.” But stage and film actresses have to represent Helen; drama is representation.

So I became interested in gaps and blanks. For some literary theorists, literature is a system of exclusion. It is about the relationship between what is present in the text and what is absent from it, and it comes to the reader to negotiate this relationship. The reader provides continuity and connection (at the most basic level: of character), coordinating viewpoints and filling in blanks. (This, in fact, is how all perception works: in night driving the brain connects remarkably little visual data into a road, a bend, a hill.)

From the very beginning, Helen’s story has been an attempt to fill in gaps. These gaps are both emotional and practical. Was she abducted or did she elope? What did she feel for her husband, Menelaus, at home in Sparta, or for her lover, Paris, in Troy? How did she manage what Rupert Brooke called (disparagingly) “the long connubial years” when she was finally recaptured and returned to Sparta? What did the most beautiful woman in the world look like?

Within a century of Homer’s Iliad, stories arose to fill in these gaps, dealing with everything from Helen’s lost child to attempts to kill Helen when she was recaptured. (It was not until the sixteenth century that a poet managed finally to kill Helen; in two Renaissance versions she commits suicide, devastated at the loss of her beauty in old age.)

Alongside attempts to fill in large narrative gaps in Helen’s story come localised attempts to suppress Helen’s presence linguistically. In The Women of Troy Euripides’ Menelaus arrives to fetch “the Spartan woman, once my wife—even to speak / Her name I find distasteful.” C. S. Lewis’s Menelaus thinks of his estranged wife as “the Woman” (in his short story, “After Ten Years”). In George Peele’s Renaissance poem The Tale of Troy (1589) Helen enters the poem only as a pronoun not a proper name: “She.” Helen, the cause of the Trojan war, is systematically linguistically suppressed from its literature.

The most surprising suppression of Helen comes on the DVD cover of Wolfgang Petersen’s film Troy (2004) where, at least in the UK edition, Diane Kruger’s name does not appear at all. This might make sense in terms of film narrative—Kruger is little involved in the plot—but it was the search for Helen of Troy / Diane Kruger that was publicized internationally, and Kruger does occupy prominent screen time.

So stories about Helen do two things simultaneously: they write her in and then they write her out!

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

A close-up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly

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

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

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

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

© 2010 Laurie Maguire

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

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