The author, a human-rights lawyer, is invited to the Ukrainian city of Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg/Leopoldstadt (depending on the language and which empire was The author, a human-rights lawyer, is invited to the Ukrainian city of Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg/Leopoldstadt (depending on the language and which empire was around) to give a talk. While there he starts looking into his family background, and his connection with the city. That leads him to tell the story of two other Jewish lawyers from Lwów (in fact from the same "East West Street"), Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, originators of (respectively) the terms "genocide" and "crimes against humanity".
The book runs on a couple of parallel tracks: Sands' investigation of his own grandparents' ordeals during the Holocaust, the respective journeys of Lauterpacht and Lemkin, and the development of their legal arguments. Sands also took an International Law class at Cambridge taught by Lauterpacht's son Eli. The audiobook is read by two narrators: the author reads the more personal parts, and a professional narrator (David Rintoul) the rest.
The legal arguments is basically as follows. The horrors of the Nazi atrocities in Europe led legal scholars to seek new criminal terms to define killing on such a scale. Lemkin promoted the concept of "genocide", a term he'd invented, to refer specifically to the targeting of one definable group of people, which he felt was a separate crime and went beyond that of "mass murder". Lauterpacht worried that focusing on group identity in punishment might reinforce the very group divisions that had led to the crime, and instead argued for the more universal "crimes against humanity".
The Nuremberg trials after World War II were considered the beginning of international criminal law. Until then, an action done by an individual that was not a crime in their own country could not be punished elsewhere. The Nuremberg court (the International Military Tribunal) represented the revolutionary idea that instead of the victors of the war imposing their will on the defeated side (as in, for example, the Treaty of Versailles), they would instead appoint a court which would mete out justice based on a consistent international framework. Although the judges came from the winning side and it is clear from the book that there was a certain amount of pressure to get to the right verdict - for example, not exonerating too many high-profile Nazis. One of the accused, Hans Frank, was the Nazi governor of Poland who was responsible for Lwów, and his story is covered in depth in the book. (The author even spends time with his son and discusses what it's like to be the child of such a person.) So it is clear that the justice meted out by the court was not disconnected from the international balance of power, a tension which is still very much present in international law today.
The Nuremberg tribunal found the Nazi war criminals guilty of crimes against humanity but not genocide, a form of victory for Lauterpacht. However, the ICC (founded in 2002, after the end of the Cold War made an international court feasible) has used it repeatedly, to the extent that there is a concern that it is used too freely: victim groups do not want to "settle" for less, and it may indeed reinforce the group divisions it hoped to extirpate, as Lauterpacht had worried....more
Historical saga about the Xinhai Revolution, although I learned little about that from it - it is largely narrated by children. Its hero Xiumi is a woHistorical saga about the Xinhai Revolution, although I learned little about that from it - it is largely narrated by children. Its hero Xiumi is a woman trying to make sense of a chaotic, hostile and misogynistic world. Her father disappears and a strange, lecherous man claiming to be her uncle takes his place. She endures a brutal series of events (including kidnapping and rape) to become a major figure in the revolution, although what exactly her role is wasn't clear to me (again, not a huge amount of historical detail in the book, though there are some footnotes filling in biographies of real people). I actually hadn't realised that the Chinese Communist Party allowed less-than-glowing portrayals of the titular paradise promised by revolutionaries. Apparently the Fei is one of several notable authors who came of age during the glasnost of the Deng Xiaoping era. Despite some setbacks since then, his writing (including some more experimental/postmodern work) continues to be tolerated....more
An autobiography, sort of, told in the first person plural. Though not quite as literally as in Then We Came to the End: rather, as the narrator puts An autobiography, sort of, told in the first person plural. Though not quite as literally as in Then We Came to the End: rather, as the narrator puts it
There is no "I" in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only "one" and "we," as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.
She (the author/character) refers to herself as a figure in a series of photos (described but not shown), but also as a member of and stand-in for a generation. In this book life is described in a series of images, the more poignant for their triviality. Commercial jingles, childhood games, the feeling of a certain kind of fabric. It has echoes of Sebald, but even more so Joe Brainard's I Remember (which Ernaux's compatriot Perec copied as Je me souviens, which actually gets name checked at the end of the book)
And inside ourselves, we had a great, vague memory of the world. Of almost everything we retained little beyond a word, detail, or name that would later make us say, like Georges Perec, "I remember," whether it concerned Baron Empain’s kidnapping, Picorette candies, Bérégovoy’s socks, Devaquet, the Falklands War, or the Benco breakfast. But these were not real memories. That was the name we gave them, but in fact they were something quite different: time markers.
And of course, since this is Ernaux, there is a lot of sex, very matter-of-factly and without shame. From the repressed hormonal teenage years under a strict Catholic school's rules, the book follows the hero through the slow liberalisation of the 60s (including an illegal abortion) to the wild experimentation of the 70s to her divorce in the 80s and subsequent string of younger lovers (alluding to the much younger, married Russian with whom she had the torrid affair detailed in Simple Passion).
Another maybe representative quote:
And so she will never forget the date of the insurrection in Algeria, nor that All Saints’ afternoon, of which she will retain one clear image, a kind of pure fact: a young woman squatting over the grass, as if to lay an egg, [micturating], and standing again, pushing her skirts down. To this storehouse of illegitimate memory she consigns things too unthinkable, shameful, or crazy to put into words — a brown stain on a sheet of her mother’s that had once belonged to her grandmother, dead for three years — an indelible spot that violently attracts and repels her, as if it were alive — the scene between her parents on the Sunday before her sixth-grade entrance exam, when her father tried to kill her mother, dragging her to the cellar next to the block where they kept the sickle planted
I thought that the second half/third of the book was much weaker, descending as it does into a listing of political news, with the cursory hurrahs for the good guys (the FLN, IRA, PLO, trade unionists, immigrants, Allende, Mitterand) and boos for the bad (the United States, austerity, police and soldiers, Pinochet, Chirac). Ernaux is a bit older than the soixante-huitards but supported them from the sidelines as a young mother. "France was asleep" and the shake-up was inevitable, but it died out into nothing. But what exact change would Ernaux want? Of course this isn't a book about politics, but I was frustrated by the hero's bourgeois rebellion, passively supporting every revolutionary while content to enjoy all the bland conveniences of modern life. She possesses the exasperating disdain for facts of the European intellectual, who can hand-wave the Khmer Rouge as just one of those sad and inexplicable parts of life, but point to long lines during Christmas shopping as the way that capitalism seeks to humiliate and dehumanize the individual.
Somewhat related, the reason for her character's divorce is never explained, except for a vague gesture at the freedom enjoyed by women growing up in the liberated 1980s. Did it make her happier? It is hard to tell, and just asking the question feels absurd. A thick cloud of anomie and ironic detachment surrounds the author, impregnable to people like me who think you should try to figure out if your life is objectively all that bad, and if so take steps to change it!...more
Roth's writing contains two melancholies, only one explicit. The first is the slow death of the Austrian Empire, which seemed to all its subjects bothRoth's writing contains two melancholies, only one explicit. The first is the slow death of the Austrian Empire, which seemed to all its subjects both inevitable and utterly unimaginable (in Vienna, so thick with fatalism and nostalgia, it is hard to imagine it could ever have been otherwise). The other is legible only to those who know his background in a Galician shtetl, a world that was also dying but was fully erased by the Nazi Holocaust. There are many Jews in this and Roth's other novels and newspaper pieces (I reviewed a collection of the latter here), but he always discusses them with a certain ironic remove, the urbane journalist amused by some strange people forgotten by history.
One of the Jews in this book is an elderly, toothless Rabbi, who meets the last Kaiser, holding a purple-draped Torah scroll, and blesses him: "Thou shalt not live to see the end of the world." The "end of the world" is the end of the empire, portrayed in the book through the parallel lives of the emperor and three generations of the Trotta family, the first of whom is ennobled for military heroism and the last leads a life of dissolution. (The Emperor's Tomb continues the story into the interwar years, but it was the last work of a broken alcoholic still mourning his lost world.)
The story felt like a series of images, describing a slow but constant decline. There is prostitution, gambling, alcoholism (one character "simply used water to clear the way for liquor, the way streets are cleaned before an official visit"). The book opens with soldiers fighting for the glory of the empire, against Italian separatists; by its end they are asked to fire on striking workers. When the empire's assassination is announced, his subjects are overjoyed.
"The bastard’s gone!" the count yelled in Hungarian. But everyone understood him as if he had spoken German.
This contradictory urge to see the empire's end, and grief at its loss, is very Austrian - who else could have invented the death drive? - and also characteristic of Roth, who visited Russia a socialist and came back a monarchist, a pacifist who felt stateless after the rise of Nazism and didn't want to keep writing in German but wasn't qualified to do anything else. Roth got by on journalistic freelancing and lived his life in cafes, afraid on the quiet of being on his own.
Herr von Trotta seemed like some character from a province that was historically rather than geographically remote, like a ghost from the Fatherland’s past, the embodied pang of a patriotic conscience."
In an introduction, Nadine Gordimer describes Roth's ability to conjure up a mood with a series of small details using Walter Benjamin's metaphor of the "extensiveness…of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes". With short vignettes and minor characters, he spreads out a lost world....more
A great, immersive diplomatic history of Britain's policy toward the Arab world before and after the First World War. Diplomatic history is my term: tA great, immersive diplomatic history of Britain's policy toward the Arab world before and after the First World War. Diplomatic history is my term: the book is light on social, economic or military details, but is strongest on the fragmentary and failed communication between nations (synecdoche abounds: the Quai d'Orsay, the Sublime Porte, Simla, Cairo) and the intelligence failures and fragmented politics that drove them. Fromkin claims that the book is structured around Winston Churchill, something of an exaggeration - Lloyd George and Mark Sykes probably get at least as much time* - but Britain's perspective and interests are in the centre. (Not a problem in itself, but I imagine that there is a way to tell this story which might be more understanding of French belligerence or Italian avarice.) Going through the various crises, the reader is able to understand the dilemmas and try to think of better decisions, which is (unsurprisingly) very hard even when given the outcome! (I still think the idea [floated by Churchill] of restoring the Ottoman Empire after the war as a British client state with a path to full independence would have been less bad than what actually happened.) At its best, the book shows the fascinating complexity of diplomacy and foreign relations, the way that the inchoate and conflicting desires of many parties are turned into some kind of compromise, which hopefully lets everyone feel like they gained something. (Not the case here.)
Britain's primary motivation (besides for assisting the war effort) was to preserve the "road to India", keeping a buffer between it and Russian or German influence. (This was a generation of leaders raised on the Great Game.) As part of this it made commitments to the Arabs (the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence), the Jews (the Balfour declaration, motivated by a mix of factors including the false belief that the Young Turk CUP were led by crypto-Jews), and France (which saw Lebanon, with its Maronite community, and Syria as part of its sphere of influence). By the end of the war, Lloyd George had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister, and brought with him a large imperialist appetite incompatible with all of these wartime commitments (as well as an unfortunate weakness for minority nationalist causes such as Zionism and the Greek war against Turkey).
In addition, there was constant tension between the prewar European programs of colonialism, and the ideals of self-determination blowing from the two rising superpowers: the USA (led by Wilson with his Fourteen Points), which had funded the war; and the USSR (loudly denouncing capitalist imperialism**, and trying to subvert it) which had abandoned it. European decision-makers seem to have underestimated the desire of the Arab world for self-rule - or at least rule by Muslims - and thought that a semi-autonomous patronage would work (which is what led to the system of French and British "mandates" for Syria and Palestine; the League of Nations offered the US one for Armenia, which it declined). Only in the 1950s did the Suez Campaign and the Franco-Algerian war disabuse them of this notion for good. Another issue dividing the great powers after the war the just-awakening desire for the region's oil.
After the war, the British economy was shattered and there was little public desire to keep troops in the Middle East to hold on to imperial gains. In addition to its mandate, Britain ended up with two client states (Iraq and Jordan) and was outfoxed by ibn Saud in Arabia and Mustafa Kemal (aka Atatürk) in Turkey, who brilliantly defeated the invading Greeks and played off the former Allies against one another. Turkey was born and Lloyd George's coalition government collapsed (which incredibly, was the last notable act of the Liberal Party to this day, ignoring Nick Clegg's stint as Deputy PM).
One major upshot of the book is how world-historical outcomes, far from being driven by Grand Strategy, are in fact contingent on personal foibles, ludicrous conspiracy theories***, and random accidents like the king of Greece being fatally bitten by a monkey. Also the influence of individuals, for bad - the dishonest and self-aggrandizing T.E. Lawrence, the awkward and hapless Kitchener, so competent in Africa but lost in Europe - and sometimes for good. The mess of today's modern Middle East, this book suggests, could have turned out very different - but it was never likely to turn out well.
* Wait, I'm typing this on a computer, I can check! Sykes occurs 1,935 times, Churchill 2,781, Lloyd George 3,751
** Although the Bolsheviks preached anti-imperialism, they proved keen imperialists themselves from early on, aggressively suppressing Turkic independence movements in Central Asia and installing Slavic governments. Fromkin suggests that this volte-face may have been the early influence of Stalin.
*** Amid a rush of conspiracies linking Jews, Bolsheviks, German agents, and pan-Turanists, there turned out to be a gleam of truth: the renegade Communist Alexander Helphand, known as Parvus, was a German Jew who associated with Lenin and helped transfer German funds to assist the Bolsheviks in their war against Russia, and also lived for a time in Constantinople where he advised the Turkish leadership!...more
As a memoir, this book tells the fascinating story of Khalidi and some of his ancestors, who as prominent Palestinian intellectuals were involved in sAs a memoir, this book tells the fascinating story of Khalidi and some of his ancestors, who as prominent Palestinian intellectuals were involved in some of the key moments of the Israeli-Arab conflict. His great-grandfather corresponded with Herzl, his father worked for the UN, he lived in Beirut in 1982 and negotiated at the Madrid Conference. As a history (which is the bulk of the book), it has value but is incredibly one-sided. Recommended for someone familiar with the topic looking to understand the Palestinian side more deeply, but not as a first or only guide to the history....more
I picked this Reagan biography somewhat arbitrarily. (The blogger bestpresidentialbios.com reviews several here, but not Wilentz's.) It actually isn'tI picked this Reagan biography somewhat arbitrarily. (The blogger bestpresidentialbios.com reviews several here, but not Wilentz's.) It actually isn't a biography: Wilentz skims Reagan's early years and instead writes the history of the "Reagan era", a period he defines by a prelude (beginning with Johnson's Great Society and Watergate) and postlude extending until 2008, when the book was published.
Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton, is aware that writing about recent events can be dangerous. In addition
How, in particular, can I write as a historian about events in which I played a public, albeit minor, role, including testifying as an expert witness before the House Judiciary Committee during Clinton's impeachment and supporting Al Gore's candidacy in the election of 2000?
His answer is more or less "well, I'll do my best", but this book clearly represents its author's views, most stridently when discussing Clinton's impeachment and the 2000 presidential election. Still, Wilentz claims that his conclusions will not satisfy partisans on either side, and are different from those he expected.
The arc of the Age of Reagan begins with the malaise of the Carter years. Economic (the growing national debt, gas prices, stagflation) as well as social (crime, urban blight) problems were growing, and a succession of presidents had seemed defeated by circumstances: LBJ had declined to run again, Nixon was brought down by Watergate, Ford struggled to gain the nation's faith after pardoning Nixon (Wilentz is sympathetic, seeing it as a no-win situation: letting Nixon's trial run on would have prolonged the saga and eclipsed his presidency, while the pardon seemed like blatant cronyism), and Carter struggled to find a consistent direction.
Enter Reagan. A former leftist and union leader converted to diehard conservatism, he combined personal charisma with unflagging optimism. To what extent he understood complex policy issues is debated (his authorised biography calls him an "apparent airhead"), but he had superb political instincts and was able to unite conflicting political tribes: military hawks and supply-side liberals, Christian social conservatives and anti-regulation libertarians. Sure, the conservative movement had fought from the edges of the Republican Party at least since the Eisenhower era - and had succeeded in nominating Barry Goldwater in 1964 - but Reagan was able to win elections, and in style. (He took 98% of the Electoral College against Walter Mondale, a feat matched in the modern era only by FDR.)
Early success came in 1981 with the PATCO strike. Although it was illegal for air traffic controllers to strike, the union called one, relying on its endorsement of Reagan and assuming that he would not have the gall to fire critical workers. Reagan decided to; most were never hired back. During the 1970s one gets the sense of a lingering sense of anarchy, with domestic terrorist groups hijacking aeroplanes and setting off explosives with gusto. (The Weather Underground even bombed the US Capitol in 1971). Although Nixon had run on a platform of "law and order", his subsequent scandal only reinforced the sense that there were no "responsible adults" around. Reagan's strike-breaking - along with his survival of John Hinkley's assassination attempt and the immediate effects of his 1981 tax cut - transformed him from an unloved leader into (in Wilentz's words) a "popular hero".
On the economic front, Reagan's legacy was also largely positive. Tax cuts succeeded in juicing the economy, but along with a jump in military spending caused severe budgetary shortfalls. (Some critics called his policy "military Keynesianism".) A later "tax cut" in 1986 was revenue-neutral, dropping the top tax rate from 50% to 28% but exempting millions of poor people entirely, and proved universally popular. Reagan's focus on deregulation led to some good things, such as the break-up of "Ma Bell", but also the savings and loans crisis.
Wilentz repeatedly highlights instances of government corruption (the Wedtech scandal, the Pentagon procurement irregularities, abuses at HUD), as well as a tendency towards foreign policy adventurism from Grenada to Lebanon. The two dovetailed in the bizarre Iran-Contra affair, in which administration members sold weapons to a shady Iranian claiming to represent Iran (he didn't) in the (failed) hope of trading weapons for hostages - a policy they publicly disclaimed - and diverted the funds to the Nicaraguan Contras, something Congress had explicitly prohibited. (The original idea was suggested by the Israeli Foreign Ministry!) Wilentz puts most of the blame on Oliver North, but thinks there is strong evidence that Reagan knew what was happening and lied to the public, and his opinion polls dropped precipitously.
Other issues negatively affecting Reagan by the end of his second term were the politically charged, failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court (after Republican losses in the midterms, Strom Thurmond was replaced as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a young Joe Biden) and the 1987 stock market crash. But Reagan regained his mojo because of Mikhail Gorbachev. After a series of summits, culminating in one in Washington, "Gorbie" became something of a celebrity, prompting Reagan to quip, "I don't resent his popularity or anything else. Good Lord, I once co-starred with Errol Flynn." Reagan's warming up to the Soviets infuriated conservatives (many of whom were purged from his inner circle after Iran-Contra), but it was a sign of his flexibility and opportunism and, according to Wilentz, his essential decency. In moments that would make aides roll their eyes, Reagan would talk about how if faced with an alien invasion, humans would down their weapons and unite. (This was the plot of the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, which had a great impact on him.)
In summarising Reagan's presidency, Wilentz quotes the chairman of the Cato Institute: "There was no Reagan revolution". The government bureaucracy grew faster than it had during Carter's tenure, welfare spending grew (though not in relative terms), and little changed in the "culture wars". However, union membership declined sharply, and the country experienced record growth in employment and GDP. How much of the credit for this belongs to the tough interest rate regime of Paul Volcker (a Carter nominee), and the spike in defence expenditure will probably never be settled. In any case, the major shift from New Deal-style big government to privatisation and "neoliberalism" has proven long-lasting, crossing the aisle to become the consensus politics of Third Way.
Another perennial question is to what extent Reagan deserves credit for the collapse of the USSR. A common narrative is that Reagan realised the Soviets were overextended economically and that by ramping up arms production (most particularly with the obviously unworkable but hideously expensive SDI missile defence program) they could be driven to bankruptcy. In Thatcher's words, Reagan won the war "without firing a shot". Wilentz is sceptical of this claim, firstly because internal Soviet dynamics (the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan, growing economic troubles, loss of faith in the gerontocracy) appeared to be leading to the same outcome; and secondly because there is evidence that the SDI was a sincere attempt, not a feint, and also that the Soviets realised that it was hare-brained (the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov called it a "Maginot Line in space"). Most of the administration's attempts to "roll back" Communism around the world, most notably in Panama, proved bootless and often actively harmful.
The book continues far beyond Reagan's presidency with declining returns, the increasing scope providing brief and partisan recaps of three more presidencies. Bush I, Reagan's deputy, continued Reagan's policies but without his charisma or authenticity. A helpful anecdote:
During the Republican primaries of 1980, Reagan scored points by scorning Bush's membership in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission - viewed by hard-right ideologues as two East Coast, internationalist bogeys. Bush, by now an expert hint-taker, swiftly resigned from both groups, for which he had always had the highest respect. Reagan gibed, "He just melts under pressure," before acquiescing in the political necessity of uniting the Republican Party and naming Bush to the ticket.
He took the fall for the recession which was probably Reagan's fault, while his predecessor absorbed the credit for the USSR's demise.
Continuing through the 90s, Wilentz discusses the increased polarisation and rancour of the period, which he blames mostly on Newt Gingrich, as well as new, partisan television networks. (When Bob Dole, who Gingrich called "the tax collector for the welfare state", went to Arizona to get Barry Goldwater's endorsement, Goldwater said that Gingrich had "nearly ruined our party".) There are abundant details about the Starr Commission, Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky, and perfunctory summaries of each party's primaries which add little insight or savour. The book covers the contested 2000 election and skims the presidency of George W. Bush, at which point the author feels that the "Age of Reagan" ended.
In his recent work Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin has traced how grassroots public opposition to both governmental and corporate environmental abuses emerged from critics and consumer advocates such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs and Ralph Nader, leading leftist activists to be increasingly wary of government power. This is neatly illustrated by two bills signed by Jimmy Carter on one of the last days of his term: a "Superfund" law to pay for hazardous waste cleanup, and a Paperwork Reduction Act. Reagan may in some sense have ridden the waves - privatisation, monetary discipline, Soviet decline - skillfully, but without being their cause. Yet he had the special magic of great politicians: able to capitalise on the good ideas of his advisers while quickly dropping the bad ones; ideological firmness matched with methodological openness; and above all, the ability to convince the public that everything was going well, with humour, charm and incorrigible self-assurance. This is not the best book on Reagan: it is too caught up by still-unhealed political wounds, and its over-long periodisation drags it down. At the same time, it is probably still too early to gauge his true legacy. But it is a good study in the practice of modern politics, and how it has coarsened and soured in recent decades....more
Barry Goldwater's epic defeat in 1964 seemed like a joke, a sidenote in history. Seen by his own party as an extremist, he won just six states and ostBarry Goldwater's epic defeat in 1964 seemed like a joke, a sidenote in history. Seen by his own party as an extremist, he won just six states and ostensibly proved the inelectability of a certain kind of radical ideology in an age of "consensus, managerial, or pragmatic liberalism: the belief that any problem, once identified, could be solved through the disinterested application of managerial expertise". This was one of the great misdirections of history.
After the off-year elections a mere two years later, conservatives so dominated Congress that Lyndon Johnson couldn’t even get up a majority to appropriate money for rodent control in the slums. The House Republican Caucus elected as chair of its Policy Committee John Rhodes, one of Barry Goldwater’s Arizona protégés. In 1962 there were sixteen Republican governors, all but two of them moderates; in 1966 ten new conservative Republican governors were voted in. In 1980 Americans elected one of them, Ronald Reagan, as their President.
In fact LBJ's victory margin over Goldwater was smaller than both of Reagan's landslides over Carter and Mondale, as well as Nixon's against George McGovern in 1972. In this light the 1964 result seems bizarre, an anti-harbinger. What happened?
Rick Perlstein tells the story in this book, expansively and entertainingly. He is sympathetic to his subjects and has a great, Caro-like storytelling gift, which endows deep-in-the-weeds tales of primary campaigns with life and Shakespearean pathos. Here is Nixon meeting with his primary rival, the fabulously wealthy moderate standard-bearer Nelson Rockefeller:
They drove directly to Rockefeller’s apartment in the fading summer light. Nixon was led up the stairs of 810 Fifth Avenue, whose two upper apartments Nelson had purchased as his private home in 1934 upon receiving his $12 million trust - around the time Nixon was cranking a mimeograph machine in a sweltering basement to earn his keep at Duke Law. The bottom third of the building Rockefeller bought in 1938, around the same time Nixon married Patricia Ryan - for her money, he would joke: she had saved up for the honeymoon out of her teacher’s salary.
Rockefeller might have been wearing the open-necked shirts and soft-soled shoes he favoured; Nixon’s dress shoes would have click-clacked his presence as he traversed the eighteenth-century parquet floors Nelson had imported from France to match the rococo mouldings his decorator had chosen to evoke Louis XIV’s Versailles. Rockefeller honoured his guest with dinner, during which he refused Nixon’s entreaties to become his running mate. Rockefeller led Nixon up to the penthouse, his study. They would have swept first through the apartment’s showpiece, the living room. Rockefeller’s passion was modern art. The centrepiece of the living room was twin fireplaces, the andirons custom-designed by the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, their mantels stretching nearly to the ceiling and painted with specially commissioned murals by Fernand Léger and Henri Matisse...Ascending the circular marble staircase, the eye of the nation’s premiere tribune of middle-class morality might have been drawn by paintings by Picasso and Braque, glass cases filled with primitive carvings collected on their owner’s journeys to the four corners of the globe, sculptures by Alexander Calder, one of Gaston Lachaise’s over-endowed bronze Amazons. Then to the penthouse. Nixon was given a seat at Rockefeller’s desk; Rockefeller lounged on a nearby bed. Nixon spied the glorious floodlit expanse of Central Park; when Rockefeller had bought the place, a stone balustrade blocked the view, so he had the floor raised several inches. Nixon was handed a draft of fourteen points that Rockefeller wanted to see in the platform...
At first reluctant to declare his candidacy, Goldwater was persuaded into it by the professor and brilliant political strategist F. Clifton White, who ran a ground game foiled only by the indiscretion of Goldwater's "Arizona mafia". (For the general election, Goldwater denied White his coveted chairmanship of the RNC and gave his campaign management over to the Arizonans, a costly mistake.)
Rockefeller, born with everything, wanted to be president but never made it. He came close when (over Goldwater's veto) Gerald Ford appointed him as his VP. (Or maybe not: to a political animal like LBJ, the position was "so depressing - almost clinically - he sometimes had to be prodded out of bed in the morning".) Rockefeller had a huge machine with endless pockets, but Goldwater had far more grassroots support: the campaign wasn't sure what to do with the tide of small donations and volunteers it received. Two other factors were decisive in the primary race: Rockefeller's quick remarriage after his divorce to another divorcée ("it was a time, wrote Betty Friedan, when it was easier to find an abortionist than a minister willing to marry a divorcée"), and White's careful strategising. Nixon, fresh from his 1960 defeat, hesitated and committed to the race too late; and a last-minute attempt by moderates to unite behind Pennsylvania governor William Scranton failed miserably. The moderates expected Goldwater's acceptance speech to seek to unite the party. Instead, he launched into them with the famous line "Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is not a virtue". (It was written for him by the philosopher Harry Jaffa, a student of Leo Strauss.)
For the background to this was the great realignment in US politics between the New Deal and Southern Strategy. Tensions between Northern liberals and Southern Dixiecrats increased, and LBJ's shepherding the Civil Rights Act through the Senate effectively severed the cord. (The same year Strom Thurmond switched his party allegiance to the Republicans.) The GOP had its own split, between the traditional business interests of the Northeast (prosperous, socially liberal and fiscally conservative) and the rural conservatives of the Mid- and Southwest who supported Christian family values and fanatical anti-Communism. Resentful at being reliant on the capital of Eastern bankers, they also saw the party as in thrall to Eastern money (as outlined by Phyllis Schlafly's book A Choice Not An Echo, which played a significant role in winning Goldwater the all-important California primary in 1964. Schlafly would go on to fame for her successful campaign against the ERA in the 1970s.)
Goldwater wasn't the obvious candidate. While refusing to disown the John Birch Society, he did say he "disagreed with most of their principles". He wasn't a pro-segregation firebrand like George Wallace (who would run as an Independent four years later), although he supported a state's right to segregate and voted against cloture during the Civil Rights Act deliberations. Far from being the outsider candidate determined to expose the corrupt GOP insiders, he was loyal to the party and had looked forward to running against Kennedy, a close friend, planning a friendly debate tour à la Lincoln-Douglas., hopping between towns in his hobby plane. After JFK was killed, Goldwater was depressed about running against LBJ, a pure political beast to whom ideology was, if relevant at all, secondary to the acquisition of power. Goldwater was all ideology, laser-focused on two big issues - reducing the government's size and expenditure, and ratcheting up military confrontation with Communism - to the point of being too cerebral. His speeches, despite drawing huge, adoring crowds, and despite his Western mannerisms, often left them flat.
His massive loss stemmed from a combination of factors, primarily public sentiment towards Kennedy's successor and LBJ's astute, relentless campaigning. It was easy to paint Goldwater as a loose cannon like the unhinged Jack D. Ripper from that year's Dr. Strangelove - in response to his campaign slogan "In Your Heart You Know He's Right", pins appeared with "In Your Guts You Know He's Nuts", and Johnson's famous Daisy ad seared this into the collective unconscious. Goldwater and his rallies terrified European leaders (though predictably, he was popular in Spain and South Africa). It is hard to know how dangerous a Goldwater presidency would have been - he did advocate the distribution of tactical nuclear weapons to NATO allies for discretionary use - but the Gulf of Tonkin in August had already sent Johnson down the road to the war that would ruin him.
There was a fiery appetite for what Goldwater was selling, which was obscured by the magnitude of his defeat. He ran an inept campaign, one he had to be almost dragged into, and he couldn't light up a room. But there was someone with his ideals who could light up a room, whose political instincts were perfect - Ronald Reagan; and he appears towards the end of the book, giving The Talk for Goldwater. Everything Goldwater's voters worried about - American military weakness, crime, lawlessness, racial unrest, national debt, rebellious youth...would get dramatically worse between 1968 and 1980. Historians in 1964 speculated that "if the Republicans nominated a conservative again he would lose so badly that we can expect an end to a competitive two-party system." In retrospect it was Eisenhower and the "Rockefeller Republicans" who were the anomaly. LBJ, a strange type, melancholy and anxious, hewing to the centre, faded from the scene. Technocratic liberal optimism peaked with Kennedy's assassination, as Vietnam made a joke of McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara's scientific management. Perlstein's epigraph is from Jonathan Swift: "It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom". The voice of the kingdom was nebulous, not yet articulate; but it was about to explode into life and remake politics in its image....more
I probably wasn't in the right headspace to take on an 832-page novel that wallows in the most miserable parts of recent history, Nazism and StalinismI probably wasn't in the right headspace to take on an 832-page novel that wallows in the most miserable parts of recent history, Nazism and Stalinism. I'm glad I persisted. Vollmann is an enormously talented writer, whose frequent lyrical passages more than compensate for the gruelling parts. But the gruelling parts were what stuck with me: the long passages from inside the head of psychopathic NKVD operatives, whose endless smug self-justification I similarly couldn't bear while reading Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Or the detailed, mocking insider reports from the final solution, narrated for the most part by Kurt Gerstein, the Catholic SS officer who attempted to inform the international community about the Holocaust.
Profiles of Vollmann (this 1994 piece is excellent) generally mention the accidental death by drowning of his sister, when she was six and he was nine, as something that shaped his life and writing. After studying at Deep Springs College, a sort of liberal arts kibbutz in Colorado without phone service where students ranch cattle in between classes, and then Cornell and Berkeley, he travelled to Afghanistan as a war correspondent, worked as a computer programmer, and finally turned to writing full-time. Is it necessary to add that his wife is an oncologist? His anti-technology views led the FBI to consider that he might be the Unabomber. He cross-dresses, wandering around Sacramento as a women named Dolores.
Vollmann writes enormous books on dark subjects, weighty in multiple senses: five volumes (out of a projected seven) on encounters between Europeans and indigenous Americans during the colonial period; 1,200 pages on a small town on the Mexican border; interviews with prostitutes and skinheads in San Francisco's Tenderloin District; war reportage, and of course, Rising Up and Rising Down, whose seven volumes or 3,500 pages ("some thoughts on violence") seem like a taunt to newspaper book critics, surely the only people who have plowed through its backbreaking mass. This book, winner of the 2005 National Book Award, is perhaps his most mainstream.
What is it about? Central Europe, yes, although the Europe Central of the title seems to be a telephone exchange - the narrator's identity shifts throughout the novel and is never fully explained. There are thirty-six loosely connected stories of historical figures: Fanny Kaplan, the Jewish woman who tried to assassinate Lenin; Käthe Kollwitz; Anna Akhmatova; Andrey Vlasov, the Russian general who switched sides; East German judge Hilde Benjamin (sister-in-law of Walter, nicknamed the Red Guilliotine); martyred partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, who accurately predicted as she died, "you can't hang all 190 million of us"; Hitler, referred to as the "sleepwalker"; and so on. Probably the greatest part is given over to a love story involving Shostakovich, unfortunately so, because this is by far the most irritating plotline. Shostakovich speaks in a form of what he calls "thought-stuttering"
That’s exactly what I, so to speak, mean, he replied...These keys, for instance, they’re, how should I say, black and white...I believe you’re trying not to, so to speak, love me...Rather than take a step backward I shall take a step, so to speak, forward...The nightmares you’ve caused my friends, especially, how should I say, Elena...
I'm not sure if there is some biographical basis to this, but it should have been cut in any case, and the banal love triangle surrounding Shostakovich is not much more interesting. Clearly Vollmann has done a fortune of research (I appreciated his interest in details, such as materials - I noted bakelite, gutta-percha, bauxite, astrakhan), and maybe it is for this reason that he feels reluctant to leave information out.
But he is an uncompromising writer, one unable not to fling himself into danger, create enormous, challenging novels, tackle the darkest and deepest topics. "Rimbaud, but also Rambo," as one critic has it. Here he has tried, through some human stories, to look at the darkest parts of the human soul, at a war that took place at the scale of the tank and aeroplane, genocides measured on the scale of millions, the impossible cruelty and horror of the Eastern Front, Kabbalah and secret police and music and loss. In the hands of a lesser writer this could have been a disaster, but Vollmann is good enough to make it work most of the time. Still, he demands a lot from his readers. The responses to this recent tweet give a sense of how his small fanbase has dwindled since his modest fame in the 1990s.
I believe Vollmann is a great writer, though perhaps not a great fiction writer. His characters, when he departs from historical fact, are too shallow and sentimental, either monsters or romantic saints. It may be that he is too serious, and would benefit from some irony: the way that Grace Paley writes about tragedy, or Don DeLillo writes about world-historical events. It may be that in fiction there are limits to the dividends from sheer cleverness. But he is a major talent, and for those few still willing to commit to his unique style of fiction, a brilliant and profound voice. ...more
Few quotes are more famous in the history of liberalism than Adam Smith's "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diverFew quotes are more famous in the history of liberalism than Adam Smith's "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public". In some ways the Federal Reserve, whose origin story is described in this book, proved an exception to this rule. American presidents James Madison and Andrew Jackson had twice allowed central banks to sunset, worried about the concentration of too much wealth in the hands of the central government. It took the intervention of Paul Warburg, a German immigrant and scion of a famous banking family, to push for something like the European model of a central bank which would provide a stable source of capital in liquidity crunches like the Panic of 1907, as well as the fortuitous political alignment of Woodrow Wilson's first term. As told by Lowenstein - a veteran Wall Street Journal reporter - this was basically a benign conspiracy by financiers to modernise and stabilise America's financial plumbing, against the ghost of Andrew Jackson. (Of whom Warburg quoted approvingly in his private diary "to my thinking, the country had greater cause to mourn on the day of his birth than on that of his decease".) And although he doesn't deal much with modern events, outside of occasional comparisons to the 2008 financial crisis, Lowenstein does connect the resistance around the founding of the Fed to still-popular conspiracy theories. When searching YouTube for "Federal Reserve" the first result is a video called "Century of Enslavement", followed up by "What You're Not Supposed to Know About America's Founding", (the latter produced by the John Birch Society).
Lowenstein's book looks only at the founding of the Fed, against Progressive opposition best represented by Theodore Roosevelt (who split with his erstwhile friend Taft to run as a third-party Progressive [or "Bull Moose"] Party), and William Jennings Bryant (the populist most famous for his "cross of gold" speech supporting bimetallism). The result of the three-way split in the 1912 election was a resounding victory for the moderate Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who appointed Bryant as his Secretary of State. Wilson (then and since the only US president to hold a PhD) had a Democratic Senate and was able to push through the bill, after much editing and debating. Also instrumental was Carter Glass, who as creator of the Federal Reserve Act, the Securities Exchange Act creating the SEC, and the Glass-Steagall Act may well be the most influential single financial regulator of all time.
Overall I'd recommend this book mainly to connoisseurs of American financial history (for whom this is a mere canapé next to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960. But it can shed light on America's complex (and sometimes self-defeating) political system.
Two odd quotes I liked: "It is a truism of capitalism that if money is injected into the system, no matter the intent, some of it will end up benefiting well-connected financiers."
(of Wilson) "Indeed, he once mused that had he been alive in 1776, rather than see the nation split into thirteen ragtag fiefdoms, he might have been a Tory."...more
The final volume of Hobsbawm's trilogy on what he called the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914). Like its predecessors, this book gives a chapter eThe final volume of Hobsbawm's trilogy on what he called the "long nineteenth century" (1789-1914). Like its predecessors, this book gives a chapter each to an aspect of its period (women, the arts, religion, science, nationalism...), trying to give a sense of the intellectual and political currents of the time. It is thus hard to summarise: as usual, I write mostly odd bits that seemed notable or interesting to me. For example the changed perception of H.G. Wells, who seems to have been seen in his day as one of its great intellectuals - Stefan Zweig refers in The World of Yesterday to "the two keenest minds of their time, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells"(!), and his writing inspired Leo Szilard to come up with the atom bomb - but is now mostly remembered as a science fiction pioneer. Thus Hobsbawm:
The ‘serious’ prose literature of the time has found and kept its place, though not always its contemporary popularity. If the reputation of Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann or Marcel Proust has (rightly) risen, the fortunes of Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, Romain Rolland and Roger Martin du Gard, Theodore Dreiser and Selma Lagerlöf, have been more chequered.
(Dreiser is today probably the best known of the lot; Alfred Kazin liked Sister Carrie.)
Ideology is a major theme in the book, along with class, and in this volume I sensed Hobsbawm's famously unreconstructed Communism most - his willingness to associate capitalism with racism and imperialism, say, and his skimming over the details of socialist governments (of which there were few in this period, to be fair: when Alexandre Millerand joined the French government in 1899 he was kicked out of the national and international movements). Hobsbawm's choice of facts and style of presentation is susceptible to his criticism of sociology:
As an academic discipline, it still suffers from endless and inconclusive debates about social class and status, due to the fondness of its practitioners for reclassifying the population in a manner most suitable to their ideological convictions
When I have mass support, as they say, its a grassroots movement - when the other guy does it's populist demagoguery.
After the depression of the 1870s, when Marxist theory had predicted that capitalism was at its end and the battle over bimetallism raged, the world entered a period of prolonged economic expansion, possibly because of the Klondike and South African gold rushes, and European empires expanded all over the world. This was the Belle Époque (at least for the bourgeoisie). Artists began experimenting radically (the term avant-garde in its modern sense first appeared) and scientists discovered that the world was too strange even to picture in our heads by analogy. Nationalism surged, with second-tier nations never before considered as separate people (Finns, Slovaks) developing national identities and independence movements. Jews, too: Zionism began in this period in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. In larger nations, nationalism shifted from a liberal movement (opposed to local aristocrats) to a reactionary one (largely working-class and xenophobic). Monarchs had previously been international, since they all intermarried. The crowns of Britain, Greece and Belgium were all Germans, but they quickly rebranded as patriotic national figures.
Hobsbawm is a superb writer of English prose, and was maybe the best-known historian of his day. If he tends to cast an overly ideological light on things, he is honest in accepting when the facts do not fit his theory. I'll close with a quote from the end:
It was a century which transformed the world – not more than our own century has done, but more strikingly, inasmuch as such revolutionary and continuous transformation was then new. Looking back, we can see this century of the bourgeoisie and of revolution suddenly heaving into view, like Nelson’s battle-fleet getting ready for action, like it even in what we do not see: the kidnapped crews who manned them, short, poor, whipped and drunk, living on worm-eaten rusks. Looking back we can recognize that those who made it, and increasingly those growing masses who participated in it in the ‘developed’ west, knew that it was destined for extraordinary achievements, and thought that it was destined to solve all the major problems of humanity, to remove all the obstacles in the path of their solution. In no century before or since have practical men and women had such high, such utopian, expectations for life on this earth: universal peace, universal culture by means of a single world language, science which would not merely probe but actually answer the most fundamental questions of the universe, the emancipation of women from all their past history, the emancipation of all humanity through the emancipation of the workers, sexual liberation, a society of plenty, a world in which each contributed according to their abilities and received what they needed. These were not only dreams of revolutionaries. Utopia through progress was in fundamental ways built into the century.
Before hearing Quinn Slobodian (in this 2018 podcast) on the topic, I'd decided that neoliberalism - despite the ubiquity of the term - could be dismiBefore hearing Quinn Slobodian (in this 2018 podcast) on the topic, I'd decided that neoliberalism - despite the ubiquity of the term - could be dismissed by a useful intellectual history rule I have: in any "neo-x" (sometimes "x revival"), you can just ignore the prefix (or suffix); the differences are invariably historical but not substantial. So critics of neoliberalism are critics of liberalism - an important debate, sure, but old-hat. This learned, fascinating book is full of interesting details (more in a bit), but since I found the definition of neoliberalism a bit slippery, I will put it here (in my understanding) for the impatient:
1) Historically neoliberalism was a response to the shocks of the entre-deux-guerres in Central Europe, and the Keynesian moment. Neoliberal thinkers differ from classical liberals most markedly in their desire for state structures (an order) to protect the security and stability of the market from the populist pressures of special interest groups. Far from trying to "unfetter" markets, they wish to strengthen the legal structures in which those markets operate against democratic pressures.
2) In recent times, the book focuses on the global application of those principles, via international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation. Just as neoliberals seek to circumvent democratic pressures on a national level by enshrining commercial freedom in law, the international neoliberal institutions seek to replicate the dominating force of empire to protect trade in a world of selfish, unruly nationalism.
The origins of neoliberalism aren't hard to trace back to the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, where both neoliberalism and ordoliberalism began. From Slobodian's book it seems that the two are largely synonymous: English Wikipedia stresses their differences
Ordoliberals promoted the concept of the social market economy, and this concept promotes a strong role for the state with respect to the market, which is in many ways different from the ideas connected to the term neoliberalism. Oddly the term neoliberalism was originally coined by ordoliberal Alexander Rüstow.
but the German language one disagrees
Der Ordoliberalismus gehört zu einer heterogenen wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Strömung, die unter dem Oberbegriff Neoliberalismus zusammengefasst wird...Die Begriffe Ordoliberalismus und Neoliberalismus werden in der Literatur teilweise aber auch synonym verwendet.
My understanding is that leftist critics of liberalism have tended to indiscriminately label all free-market liberals as neoliberals (Thatcher, Reagan, Milton Friedman...), but see ordoliberals as different; however in truth the differences between ordo- and neoliberals are nugatory compared to their mutual distance from standard liberalism. Slobodian at least chooses to focus on the subgenre of neoliberal most similar to ordoliberals, that of what he terms (parallel to the "Freiburg School" of ordoliberalism) the "Geneva School". (Globalist cosmopolitanism, of course, is very Swiss.)
Geneva Schoolers such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises were involved early on in the collection of statistics on the global economy. (Both attended a 1936 conference to discuss the question "Does the global economy exist?") One of the interesting ideas in the book is that Hayek tended to answer negatively: that the economy was so complex, almost mystical, that no attempts to map or plan it would succeed, contra both Keynesians and socialists. He sometimes borrowed the language of cybernetics (describing prices as a "feedback effect"). Evidence of this (to me) is that highly educated people will argue passionately as to whether Keynesian stimulus is effective, implying that this cannot be definitively answered by empirical means.
Thus the term "ordoglobalism". Order, noted Jan Tumlir (a senior wonk at the WTO predecessor, GATT, and a major figure in the book) can have two meanings: stability, in the sense of "law and order"; and the rules and institutions which create it. Freiburg School ordoliberals saw chaos in postwar Vienna, and sought to use "nomocracy", rule by law, to protect the social order from the demands of the masses. Likewise, as empires crumbled and postcolonial states stepped up to demand more privileges, the Geneva School "ordoglobalists" sought to utilise international law and institutions to curtail that disruption. In Tumlir's words: “International rules protect the world market against governments.”
Early on the book cites a useful distinction made by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, based in Roman law, between empirium (government) and dominium (private property). Schmitt thought it desirable to strengthen the former world at the expense of the latter, but the Geneva School believed the oppposite. Most of them were Austrians who remembered warmly the advantages of the Dual Monarchy, and saw it as a model to try and reproduce. In the words of Röpke (discussed below), they were
the generation which in its youth saw the sunset glow of that long and glorious sunny day of the western world, which lasted from the Congress of Vienna until August 1914, and of which those who have only lived in the present arctic night of history can have no adequate conception.
Chapter Five focuses mostly on Wilhelm Röpke, a heterodox neoliberal (he quit the neoliberal Mont Pelerin society after disagreements with Hayek) who was a notable defender of South African apartheid. However, Hayek and Milton Friedman were also skeptical about boycotts of the regime, emphasising neoliberalism's priority of markets over human rights. (This is basically Friedman's only appearance in the book, adding to the confusion of the term "neoliberal".) Another example is the way the Geneva School supported freedom of movement for capital, but not for people. In the words of Gottfried von Haberler:
The Ruhr Valley would become unbelievably crowded, and the Alps would empty out entirely...One need not be a nationalist for such things to be undesirable...free trade is beneficial for all even when there is no freedom of migration and the peoples remain firmly rooted in their countries.
Slobodian relates how the founding of the European Economic Community, far from being a boon to ordoglobalists, actually worried them. A colonial bloc spanning from "the Baltic to the Congo" meant simply a vast space of imperial protectionism, a trading bloc that would disrupt the natural flow of capital in and out of its borders (while liberating it internally). (In Schmitt's terminology, it was empirium, not dominium, which perhaps can be said of its successor European Union.) In fact some European rearguard defenders of colonialism projected a potential Eurafrique trading zone - but it was not to be. Decolonisation meant a potentially destabilising wave of countries leaving the framework of empire and allowing the particular interests of their populations to threaten global trade. It was in global institutions that neoliberal ideas would now come to expression.
It is a curious fact that while Slobodian's politics are rooted in left opposition to trade treaties and globalisation, the standard-bearers of anti-globalist nationalism are now on the right, the most prominent of whom is in the Oval Office, and it is because of them that this book has probably been read by far more people than its austere prose would predict. This surprising convergence of two worlds has surprised many, myself included, and besides for noting it I won't add to this already long review.
PS I first came across Foucault's Collége de France lectures on neoliberal history when I was researching Walter Lippmann's ideas on democracy and public understanding. Despite (because of?) being a journalist, Lippmann was skeptical about the public's understanding of complex issues, and debated John Dewey on the topic. Dewey advocated expanded citizen journalism, while Lippmann leaned towards technocracy, a view shared by Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. The idea of the law as a methodical, slow process which serves as a buffer against the democratic winds of populism, is related, and informs a good deal of why I strongly disagree with Slobodian's politics...
PPS Historian Patrick Iber's review in the New Republic is misled by this book in the same way I was, so I want to clarify. The term "neoliberal" has been criticised (even on the left, as Iber discusses) as signifying basically "all the people I dislike", and rarely a self-appellation. In theory Slobodian restores rigour to the term by focusing on the ideology of those who explicitly call themselves neoliberals. But in fact Slobodian also uses the term for "people he dislikes" (such as Milton Friedman, otherwise completely outside this book's purview). In fact despite the title, the book makes clear that it is only about a narrow corner of neoliberal history. So this is not really a definition of "neoliberalism" as currently used - even by the author....more
It's hard to fathom the paradigm shift that separates us from the world in which slavery was considered an acceptable, obvious part of the world (remiIt's hard to fathom the paradigm shift that separates us from the world in which slavery was considered an acceptable, obvious part of the world (reminiscent in some way of Ursula le Guin's quote about an invention only dawning during Louverture's lifetime: "we live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but so did the divine right of kings.") One of the amazing things about this accomplished biography is how it takes place during a breakneck change in such perceptions - in the course of the book, blacks in Saint-Domingue go from being chattel, subject to savage torture, to being seen as potential equals to whites. Although it had roots in the Enlightenment, Louverture played no small role in this. His leadership was watched eagerly by abolitionists (and their opponents) as a test-case for the economic viability of emancipation, as well as the ability of people of colour to handle their own affairs. (Girard notes that Hegel's master-slave dialectic was actually based on the Haitian revolt.) It was also a world in which sugar and coffee were scarce products (and bananas simply unavailable outside the tropics), making the Caribbean world something like the oil emirates of today.
Although he concealed it, Louverture was born a slave and made his way up in the world through education and religious devotion. After being freed, he owned slaves and an estate - he was not a devout abolitionist, but seems not to have been as bad as the average white slaver. In the first part of his life he was a devout Catholic and patriotic Frenchman, and it was as a French general that he first came to prominence, basing himself on Jacobin ideals of racial equality to end slavery in Saint-Domingue (the French half of the Island of Hispaniola, the other - Santo Domingo - what is now the Dominican Republic), proclaim loyalty to France and defeat two other European powers. He cared immensely about being seen as an equal by other world leaders, above all Napoleon, though Girard finds no source for the legend that he signed off his letters to the emperor “the first of the blacks to the first of the whites.”
Louverture reminded me somewhat of twentieth century "little statebuilders" such as Lee Kuan Yew or David Ben-Gurion, in how he juggled the great powers of his day as well as racially fraught domestic politics, trying to carve out a protectorate with maximal independence but still within the French empire. Although speaking French as a third language and only learning to read later in life, he learned how to play the politics of Paris, telling different audiences what they needed to hear. Another aspect of this diplomatic strategy was a conscious decision not to export the Haitian Revolution, as other Latin American slave owners feared. Louverture traded off diplomatic pacts for a promise to keep his revolt local, even betraying the Sasportas revolt in Jamaica (but also claiming to have supported it...) However, he was never able to square economic viability with a free labour market, instead implementing a tightly controlled command economy not so different from slavery (although without the terrible cruelty).
Louverture came to a tragic end. Betrayed by France and Napoleon, who sent his brother-in-law Leclerc to invade Saint-Domingue, he was captured after a bitter struggle and imprisoned in France in the cold Jura mountains., It would be Jean-Jacques Dessalines who would instead defeat the French and proclaim independence (under the indigenous name of Haiti) with the words
Independence or death...let these sacred words unite us...anathema to the French name, eternal hatred to France: that is our cry.
He would go on to massacre the island's whites and make Haiti a pariah in the world, and his legacy must have contributed to Haiti's not holding fair elections until Aristide in 1994. Louverture's last words before leaving the island for prison and death in France were
In overthrowing me you have cut down in Saint Domingue only the trunk of the tree of liberty; it will spring up again from the roots, for they are numerous and they are deep.
Another masterful volume. Hobsbawm is probably a good intro to Marxism for the sceptic (although he presupposes quite a lot of background knowledge). Another masterful volume. Hobsbawm is probably a good intro to Marxism for the sceptic (although he presupposes quite a lot of background knowledge). A dogmatic Marxist notorious for defending Stalinism, his writing is surprisingly fair-handed, gently emphasising a class-centric interpretation of events but without an ideologue's adherence to iron laws of history. In fact, he seems to have a good deal of respect for the animal energy of capitalism - railroads shrinking the world, goods becoming more accessible, the smog and wealth and efficiency...It was during this period that Marx was active, and Hobsbawm considers his sociology and economic thought along with other antiliberal movements which rose in response to the triumph of liberalism: socialism, anarchism, and statism, the latter of which would come to dominate the period of the succeeding volume.
Rather than move through the period in increments, each chapter focuses on a geographic or cultural aspect and discusses the entire period in that respect. Hobsbawm considers in turn the bourgeois, the workers, the scientific and cultural worlds, as well as the regions dispossessed and defeated in this period, namely the Ottoman world and East Asia (excepting Japan, which was able to modernise and compete with the West on an equal footing). Later generations of anticolonialists would learn to use the liberal world's tools against it, but at this stage its rebellion with the weapons of tradition was bootless.
After the Spring of Nations, the great threat to the world order was no longer a bourgeois revolution - they had been largely placated - but one of the proletariat. While living standards soared and science made immense progress, living conditions became dire for the industrial poor, who if better off materially than the agricultural serfs of pre-Modernity lacked the corresponding stability and bucolic surroundings. The rational factory towns of northern England where Engels was radicalised were grey, ugly and unhealthy. That ugliness may not have been co-incidental: Hobsbawm declares this age as one unusually poor in artistic skill, despite a great market for art, with the only successes coming from either those already mature before the period began, or else the outsiders attempting to épater le bourgeoisie (Impressionism, Aesthetism, etc.) This period also saw the beginning of mass mechanical reproduction of artistic images.
Another notable feature of this period is the rise of Romantic nationalism. Hobsbawm notes that this was a bourgeois phenomenon, with the workers at this stage largely uninterested. Still, they seem to have joined on later, so perhaps this observation is slightly more wishful Marxist internationalism.
The book ends (somewhat arbitrarily, Hobsbawm admits) with the transition to a more collective mode, with more government intervention and large trusts/monopolies instead of individualist capitalism. The final volume of the trilogy (I don't count The Age of Extremes) tracks this period until the fall of empires after WWI....more
This is The Book on its topic, written by the foremost expert. Bits and pieces were new to me (the multiple attempts to appoint an American Chief RabbThis is The Book on its topic, written by the foremost expert. Bits and pieces were new to me (the multiple attempts to appoint an American Chief Rabbi, Ulysses Grant's expulsion of the Jews from large parts of the US, rescinded by Lincoln), but the broad strokes were familiar, so I don't have a whole lot to add. Sarna aims at a non-Jewish readership, explaining all religious terms and referring to interdenominational struggles purely in a disinterested way, giving it a somewhat uncanny "horse-race" feel. (Actually, he rejects the term "denomination", since while Christians see themselves as of a denomination, Jews see themselves foremost as Jews, just of a given stream.) So: Conservatives outflanked Reform with their via media, but Reform hit back by modernising and ordaining female rabbis. And then Orthodoxy surged out of nowhere with its post-Hippie revivalism...Sarna can't see any path as more meaningful than any other, so his narrative can feel somewhat hollow.
Trying to focus on an American history, he avoids periodising in terms of waves of immigration, giving rich detail to the earliest communities, comprising Portuguese Jews from Dutch South America and then Germans such as Abigail Franks. He covers the surge in immigration from Eastern Europe, major events such as the Depression, the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel, and their impacts on Jewish community and practice. So too cultural changes such as the increasing informality and spirituality of the "Me Generation", changing roles of women, and increasing assimilation of ideas from the broader American context. Today the American Jewish scene includes a smorgasbord of practices, from neo-Hassidism to Reconstructionism to Satmar to Jewish Renewal to egalitarian and LGBT. As the community shrinks, some are seeking to view it as the "extended community" including non-Jewish partners in mixed marriages. But as Sarna points out, this community has been prematurely eulogised many times in the past....more
The French Revolution was grounded in classical Enlightenment rationalism, but after the excesses of the Jacobins the European powers combined to suppThe French Revolution was grounded in classical Enlightenment rationalism, but after the excesses of the Jacobins the European powers combined to suppress it. By 1815, with Napoleon exiled and the restoration of a Bourbon king, the forces of conservativism had re-established the prerevolutionary order. Social forces, however, were working inexorably against this. The new nexus of revolution would be among the new princes of industry: liberals and Freemasons, Neapolitan Carbonari and romantic philhellenists. Liberalism could also be an obstacle to revolution - by working for reforms which expanded the circle of power to them but shut out the working class - but the increasing misery of industrial workers, in their grey, rational, immiserated factory towns, meant that the suppression of revolution from 1815 to 1848 (and through that year's Spring of Nations) could be only temporary. For Hobsbawm, the main themes of this period - and the periodisation in itself is a novel and useful one - are the rise of industrialisation as the constituent of world power, the related ascent of Britain as the world's superpower empire, and the bourgeoisie's eclipse of the landed nobility.
That was what I saw as the thesis of the book. Hobsbawm is a fascinating thinker, pulling together a lot of disparate threads into a broad narrative of social and intellectual change, but often distracted by his idiosyncratic interests and ideological commitments. Is the loveliness of the Biedermeier style as opposed to the dullness of Methodist red-brick really an objective fact, or relevant to this story? Was political revolution a spur to mathematicians to consider the possibility of complex and imaginary numbers? Don't get me wrong, I love the thought that it was, and found the latter chapters on religion, ideology and science among the most fascinating. But when Hobsbawm abandons the course of statistical history for the fields of literary and artistic criticism, he weakens his case. This book is fascinating and worth reading, but probably doesn't meet the standards of modern scholarship....more
An enjoyable and opinionated stroll through 500 years of Western Civ, very much reminiscent of Will and Ariel Durant - with both their strengths and wAn enjoyable and opinionated stroll through 500 years of Western Civ, very much reminiscent of Will and Ariel Durant - with both their strengths and weaknesses. (They may have overlapped: Durant was an "instructor" at Columbia University sometime after receiving his doctorate in 1917; Barzun was the 1927 valedictorian and remained affiliated for life.) Barzun has an encyclopedic knowledge of his field and firm opinions on most subjects. Frequently he will reject a commonplace idea or an artistic judgment, or submit an artist as criminally underappreciated. (Finley Peter Dunne's Mr Dooley, anyone?)
Barzun seamlessly blends changes in the artistic and cultural world over time, jumping back and forth and combining threads so that one doesn't notice the jump between centuries and eras. He also keeps the reader's attention with sidebar quotes (often from surprising sources) and has a stream of catchphrases (the book to read is X; his name? Y). Like the Durants, he clings to an ideal now abandoned in academia, that it is possible to have a bird's-eye view of everything: the objectively correct take on Nietzsche, Yeats, Proust, Kierkegaard, Dadaism, jazz, and on and on, thus to explain these things once and for all to an open-minded reader of average education. Such a tendency stretches into the final section where the author pours scorn on the contemporary scene with the same detached and omniscient tone, seeing in everything from progressive education to ripped jeans to political correctness to the Internet the signs of a decadent culture unmoored from moral and artistic bearings.
A word about that term decadence. In an excerpt from his new book on the topic, Ross Douthat cites Barzun's assertion at the beginning of this book that "the term is not a slur. It is a technical label" referring to economic stagnation, institutional decay and intellectual exhaustion in the midst of prosperity. But the final forty-odd pages of this book (written at the astonishing age of 93) are a harangue against all that is modern. While willing to grant that Western society may lack dynamism, may be saturated with an existentialist nihilism preventing it from progress, there is at very least a counterargument to be made, one which a younger author may have been more receptive to. Has new music ever been created more quickly and with wider range than today, with YouTube and Soundcloud as distribution platforms? Has scientific progress ever been marshaled and distributed to fight pandemics or solve problems in number theory more rapidly? Naturally Barzun, with his decades leading the Common Core program at Columbia, should be heard out and taken seriously. But us reading and thinking about the world in 2020 also ought not to adopt his criticisms unthinkingly....more
Stendhal's The Red and the Black refers to the colours of the radicals and the clergy, as his protagonist attempts to pass as a conservative cleric whStendhal's The Red and the Black refers to the colours of the radicals and the clergy, as his protagonist attempts to pass as a conservative cleric while hiding his radical credentials. In that vein did Mohammad Reza Shah (deposed in 1979) once describe the ayatollahs who replaced him as “the coalition of the red and black reactionaries”. While the Ayatollah Khomeini preached his own new and extreme religious doctrine, the revolution absorbed the thought of cutting-edge leftist and postcolonial thinkers (among them Fanon, Sartre, and Massignon), primarily via the ideologue Ali Shariati. As Julian Sorel discovered, the combination was never really viable.
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(Above: the Azadi Tower in Iran, one of the Shah's last great extravagances.)
This book, written by the director of Yale's program in Iranian Studies, covers the modern state of Iran from its founding with the Safavid Empire in 1501, through the Qajar and Pahlavi dynasties, and to the present day. However roughly the second half of the book is about 20th-century developments, and it goes deep on the current republic: the regime's crimes, economic and demographic changes, the Iran-Iraq war, and the cultural production both inside the country and in exile.
Iran's founding made it the first Shi'i state, in some ways mirroring the cleavage in Christendom (Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door in 1517). During that time and the subsequent Qajar reign, the country was fairly closed off and underdeveloped, with bloody succession battles following the death of each shah. During the 19th century, the rise of European empires to its south (Britain) and north (Russia) resulted in Iran being torn between the two powers and losing much of its territory. When oil was discovered in 1901, things again took a turn for the worse. Reza Khan, a military dictator, became shah after a brief and chaotic interregnum, something akin to Germany's pre-Weimar period, when liberal, socialist and atheist ideas were briefly in vogue.
Modern Iran has a tendency toward victimhood, and one upshot of this book is that is is fairly justified. From the de Reuter concession, the extortionate shenanigans of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the Western overthrow of Reza Khan in place of his son, the "temporary invasion" during World War II, and of course the CIA's 1953 coup against Mosadegh. Even without going into the root causes of each event, one can understand why the country has a sense of grievance, a national childhood trauma compelling distrust of outsiders.
The "Persiosphere" of time immemorial spans from India (via Babur and the Moguls) through the plains of central Asia (Tajik and the Afghan language Dari are Persian dialects) to Mesopotamia to the Caucasus. The modern state is far smaller, and its rogue government, which has tortured and executed without trial thousands of its citizens, has attempted to erase much of its past culture and beauty. Hopefully the next chapter of its history - whenever it comes - will be a more tolerant one which allows expression of this ancient people's vibrancy, creativity and romantic soul....more
Before the foundation of modern Greece in 1830, "Greek" just referred to all Christians in Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, as it had referred to tBefore the foundation of modern Greece in 1830, "Greek" just referred to all Christians in Southeastern Europe and Asia Minor, as it had referred to the Byzantine Empire and Church, in contrast to the western "Latins". The idea that Greece - or for that matter any of the various minnow nationalities of the region - would emerge as an independent country was generally seen as absurd utopianism. What changed all this was the Romantic nationalism of the 19th century, which for Mazower was a negative, destabilising force which disrupted what had been a rough equilibrium. (Though surely the vacuum caused by the Ottoman Empire's collapse would have precipitated a general reshuffle in any case.) "Balkans" is a modern term, (balkan being a geographical term for a mountainous ridge over a body of water, possibly a metonymic reference to the mountains which shield rain from most of the peninsula) for what would have been thought of in the past (if at all) as European Turkey.
Mazower wrote this shortly after NATO's intervention to protect the Kosovar Albanians from Slobodan Milošević, and it seems a clear riposte to Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, showing the centuries of fertile co-existence, in which religious boundaries were viewed by most as fluid and of lesser significance (with frequent conversions, customs moving between Christianity and Islam, and even people turning to saints or holy objects from another faith during times of trouble). But there is lots of other material, stretching from medieval times to the end of the Communist era. This short book by a highly knowledgeable author conveys a dense distillation of a huge amount of history.
Edit: serendipitous connection to the last book I read: Demetrios Ypsilantis, a leading figure in the Greek War of Independence, appears several times. And the town of Ypsilanti, MI is named after him and not, as I'd assumed, an indigenous name!...more
A magisterial, narrative history that flows smoothly like fiction, a bit like The Fall of Constantinople 1453, or ultimately Gibbon. Wedgwood wrote thA magisterial, narrative history that flows smoothly like fiction, a bit like The Fall of Constantinople 1453, or ultimately Gibbon. Wedgwood wrote this during 1936-8, when Germany's past was becoming all too topical. She portrays the ravages of the war on the peasantry (which, as horrible as they were, may have been slightly exaggerated by contemporaries). She also draws on great portrayals of the ruling personalities involved, coming up with lines like this: "Born, like Elizabeth of England, under a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, Wallenstein’s stars gave him a peculiar mixture of weakness and strength, vice and virtue." One theme of the book was that the war wasn't really about the ostensive religious conflict involved, but about the balance of power between the great (Catholic) powers of Europe - Habsburg, Bourbon, and the Papal States. Richelieu lent French aid to the Protestant sides and brought about the protracted stalemate that ended Spain as a major power (arguably at the Battle of Rocroi). At the dawn of modernity, religious absolutism faded to be replaced by nationalist identity and a greater role for scientific reason. There's a great passage to that effect, which I couldn't make shorter than this, but it's a chance to share some of Wedgwood's stellar prose.
While increasing preoccupation with natural science had opened up a new philosophy to the educated world, the tragic results of applied religion had discredited the Churches as the directors of the State. It was not that faith had grown less among the masses; even among the educated and the speculative it still maintained a rigid hold, but it had grown more personal, had become essentially a matter between the individual and his Creator
Inevitably the spiritual force went out of public life, while religion ran to seed amid private conjecture, and priests and pastors, gradually abandoned by the State, fought a losing battle against philosophy and science. While Germany suffered in sterility, the new dawn rose over Europe, irradiating from Italy over France, England, and the North. Descartes and Hobbes were already writing, the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, had taken their places as part of the accepted stock of common knowledge. Everywhere lip-service to reason replaced the blind impulses of the spirit.
A new emotional urge had to be found to fill the place of spiritual conviction; national feeling welled up to fill the gap.The absolutist and the representative principle were losing the support of religion; they gained that of nationalism. That is the key to the development of the war in its latter period. The terms Protestant and Catholic gradually lose their vigour, the terms German, Frenchman, Swede, assume a gathering menace. The struggle between the Hapsburg dynasty and its opponents ceased to be the conflict of two religions and became the struggle of nations for a balance of power. A new standard of right and wrong came into the political world. The old morality cracked when the Pope set himself up in opposition to the Hapsburg Crusade, and when Catholic France, under the guidance of her great Cardinal, gave subsidies to Protestant Sweden. Insensibly and rapidly after that, the Cross gave place to the flag, and the ‘Sancta Maria’ cry of the White Hill to the ‘Viva España’ of Nördlingen.