Description of the World - Part 60

John S. Robsenow, A Chinese-English Dictionary of Enigmatic Folk Similes (Xieyouyu) (Although it would be hard to devise an excuse for buying this book, especially since it was rather expensive; but few volumes in my library have given me more pleasure. I ran across it in the textbook section of the San Francisco State bookstore where I was supposedly seeing what math texts were on order—I edited math books in those days. The sheer perversity of acquiring a big collection of Chinese folklore probably appealed to me. Or perhaps it was the frontispiece that lured me in, a drawing of a Chinese sage fishing with a barbless, unbaited hook. The picture illustrated the saying “Jiang Tai Gong going fishing—whoever gets hooked does so of his own free will.” That line could serve as an epigraph for inanis et vacua since it perfectly encapsulates my approach to literary self promotion. Many of the similes are drawn from Chinese history or timeless agrarian situations (“killing a rabbit while cutting grass—incidentally”), but there are references to anti-aircraft guns, Mao, and even Elizabeth Taylor, who the Chinese apparently regarded as an overstuffed frump. What I call objective delirium, the shared cultural detritus of a society, is like the unconscious. It is indifferent to contradiction and innocent of chronology. Robsenow’s book was probably used in classes on advanced Chinese. You are hardly fully fluent in a language if you simply understand its grammar and lexicon. That’s perhaps especially true in China. It may not be a case of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra, but a great deal goes over your head if you don’t catch allusions. The one drawback of the book is the difficulty of looking anything up in it. I’ve been using one simile for years now but can’t find where I saw it and wonder if I’m quoting it right. “Throwing boiling water on your lice: it won’t kill ‘em but it will scald ‘em.”)

Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts—Postwar French Thought Volume II, ed Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (My reading of this very rich anthology has been regrettably selective. I mostly just picked out a few favorite authors—Ponge, Bachelard, Serres—but I did reread Sartre’s writing on political commitment fairly recently and was surprised to find it so cogent. I came into the theater just as Sartre was being hustled out, but perhaps he’s becoming relevant again. Of course he wrote a great many absurd things, but to recognize that is not to set him apart from the rest of us. It’s like discovering that some politician or artist you like behaved badly in a sexual way as if human sexual behavior weren’t generally deplorable.)

Fernand Braudel, The Identity of France: Volume One: History and Environment (I’m a reader of the late works of famous authors, the books everybody ignores—Ovid’s Fasti, the last five cantos or Orlando Furioso, the Cantos on Mutability of Spencer, Hegel’s Larger Logic, the Mythologiques of Levi-Strauss. It’s probably my way of protesting against mortality as it also was for some of the authors. The old guys have to stick together. Braudel has a different take. In at writing at last about his home country, he celebrates a homecoming. “I have saved my white bread until last: there is still some left for my old age.” I don’t know if there is anything in this work that is novel from a historiographical point of view, but looking at France geographically makes sense of much of its history—I certainly wish that other historians would begin their syntheses with a deep description of the landscape of the events they will narrate and explain. Anyhow, I love the idea of pays, i.e., the distinct nooks and crannies of a country.)

Description of the World - Part 59

Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (I knew very little about Hirschman when I encountered this book. I don’t think I fully appreciated the wisdom of the man until I read Exit, Voice, Loyalty. I also rather misread the Rhetoric book or at least gave it a bit of spin. Hirschman writes about how reactionary thinkers that projects of political liberation routinely routinely result in less freedom or simply prove impossible or have various bad consequences.  I’ve been more impressed with the same sort of programmatic pessimism applied to technology. Perversity, futility, and jeopardy certainly catch the drift of anti-environmentalism. Liberals who quote Hirschman sometimes miss the other side of his argument: if the right overestimates the difficulties of doing anything, the left tends to under estimate them. Of course Hirschman is also known for the idea of the hiding hand, which points to the advantages of positive thinking, which is to say overly optimistic expectations. It’s perhaps a good thing that we don’t realize that accomplishing great things requires unpredictable creativity. Things always take longer than you expect, but you can’t win if you don’t play.)

J.C.Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook (Great big exhaustive biographies seem to be making a comeback as witness Caro’s L.B.J. biography. Big books seem fitting for big persons. If they’re dull, the fault generally lies with the author, not the subject, though Beaglehole had a head start granted Cook’s adventurous life. Since Cook died in his early 50s, killed by Hawaiians but already ground down by command of three world-spanning expeditions back to back, it’s all the more astonishing that 700 pages doesn’t seem too much. Before Cook left on his first great voyage, he got informal instructions from the Earl of Morton who recommended “to exercise the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch. To check the petulance of the Sailors, and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms. To have it still in view that sheding the blood of those people is a crime of the highest nature…They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit…They may naturally and justly attempt to repel intruders, whom they may apprehend are come to disturbs them in the quiet possession of their country, whether that apprehension be well or ill founded.” I wrote in the margin: “the original Prime Directive.” Cook does remind me of Picard, though in the event the British ended up being sufficiently high handed.)

Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law (I considered becoming an attorney for about twenty minutes in 1966, not because I had lost interest in philosophy, but because academia seemed to me a lousy place to practice philosophy and I had to do something. I kept a certain interest in jurisprudence if not law itself later on, even listening to jurisprudence classes from the hallway at Yale. I don’t think much of it stuck. I note that virtually the only note in this tome was appended to an ancient case from colonial Massachusetts: “In 1673, Benjamin Goad, ‘being instigated by the Devil, committed the ‘unnatural & horrid act of Bestiality on a mare in the highway or field.’ This was in the afternoon, ‘the sun being two howers high.’ The Court of Assistants sentenced him to hang; and the court also ordered ‘that the mare you abused before your execution in your sight shall be knocked on the head.’” I wrote in the margin “pretty unfair to the horse.”)

Maria Reidelbach, Complete Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (This anthology contains several of the Mad pieces that did more to shape my thinking than any point of common law. For example, it reprints the article from Mad #47 ‘How to be a Mad Non-Comformist.’ which I found very meaningful and even comforting at a time when I realized I didn’t fit in very well with people who didn’t fit in very well. All these years later, however, it still bothers me that the description of ordinary non-conformists says they patronize ‘obscure foreign language pictures with the sub-titles in pidgin Swahili,” but the illustration shows a picture subtitled in Sanskrit. Reidelbach also resurrects the “Potrezebie System of Weights and Measures,” which was the first publication of Donald Knuth, the great mavin of computer algorithms. I’m still envious of the juvenile Knuth for getting a publication in Mad with with illustrations by Wood no less.)

Description of the World - Part 58

N.J.G.Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe (I don’t read fact-filled books like this in the expectation that I’ll remember a large fraction of their contents. Mostly I do so to keep my understanding of history and geography at a reasonable level by relearning things I first learned long ago. Meanwhile I apply to reading what amounts to management by exception, looking for the particulars that upset my expectations. I’m also looking for significant details. “In 1546 the emperor Charles V, when passing along the bank of the river Meuse, noted the city of VIllefranche on the opposite shore. ‘Whose is it,’ he asked, ‘mine or the King of France’s?’ Then ‘the records of the district…were brought and examined, and it was shown that the inhabitants…were subject of the French king.’ It was typical of medieval kingship that the limits of its authority were in many areas uncertain or unknown, and when questions arose, it was usual to ask the local population to whom they owned their loyalty. Such uncertainties were one by one cleared up as they arose, but some remained until the eighteenth century.” The ambiguity of frontiers wasn’t news to me. Lucien Febvre had made the same point in a well-known essay, but the anecdote makes it better. Another item, one which reinforces my suspicion that history moves faster than we suppose: “About 1530, corn, the first new World crop to be adopted in the Old, was being gown in Castile.”)

Claude Manceron,The Wind from America (The last four years of the American Revolution narrated as part of the history of France. The culminating event of the period isn’t Yorktown but the birth (finally) of a male heir to Louis XVI. Manceron’s anecdotal approach makes the book a considerably less strenuous read than Franco Venturi, but he cheats—you always know where things are headed.)

Clay Blair, Jr., Silent Victory: the U.S. Submarine War Against Japan (The War in the Pacific was a great demonstration of what human stupidity can accomplish, beginning, of course, with the biggest and best: the Japanese decision to attack a nation they knew would overwhelm them. We couldn’t match that one, but we had our moments. For example, even though we could intercept and decode American military messages, we didn’t ambush and shoot down Douglas MacArthur’s plane, thus ensuring that the war would last an additional six months to a year and that thousands of Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, Chinese, Filipinos, and Japanese would die to satisfy the vanity of an old imperialist. There were smaller errors, too. In the submarine war, we spent the first part of the war bouncing defective torpedoes off Japanese freighters and tankers because of the pig headedness of the relevant Navy departments. That admitted, though, the submariners contributed more to victory than almost any other element of our military. Their performance contrasted sharply with their Japanese counterparts who never loosed their fleet of excellent subs (and excellent torpedoes) against our shipping lanes.)

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (This copy originally belonged to my ex-wife—I think there’s another copy of the book around here some place. I find reading her annotations more interesting than managing to have yet another thought about a book that has probably been read too many times by too many people to be readable for the foreseeable future. Rita was far more idealistic and morally rigorous than I’ve ever been. She wrote “Let justice be done though the heaven’s fall” on the flyleaf while I’ve more than once protested that even the categorical imperative shouldn’t be treated as a suicide note.)

Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (I’m not sure when or why I developed an aversion to Peter Gay, but the nit-picking annotations in this book prove that it was very much in evidence circa 1984. I even bitch about his adjectives, quite unfairly. The content of the book interested me enough to overcome my prejudices, however. The book is about sex in a purportedly straight-laced century. “This much should now be plain: the bourgeois experience was far richer than its expression, rich as that was; and it included a substantial measure of sensuality for both sexes, and of candor—in sheltered surroundings.” Gay quotes a length from the diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd to make the point—not even the Curies had so much fun experimenting together as Mabel and David. Well, at least in England, the Regency had been as raunchy as Victoria’s reign was repressed; but an obsession with sexuality, however modulated, appears to be something of a constant in cultural history. There are sex scenes in Tom Clancy novels.* We’re supposedly living in a period of hyper-sexuality, and yet we treat sexual offenses as worse than bloody murder.

*Speaking of constants. Everybody who’s ever written a novel or even begun one has congratulated themselves on the daring of their sex scenes even though their readers, if there are any, are seldom impressed.)

Jane F. Dunnigan and Austin Bay, A Quick & Dirty Guide to War: Briefings on Present and Potential Wars (This instant book came out the same year as Gay’s book and has something in common with it. ’86 was about the last chance to take Freud seriously in an English language publication, and it was also a golden moment for military intellectuals or would-be intellectuals to get their bets down on numbers that shortly wouldn’t be on the wheel. Dunnigan estimates the likelihood of various outcomes for the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan but doesn’t even consider the possibility that the Russians would give up, go home, and then have a revolution. Considering the military confrontation between NATO and the Warsaw pact, he doesn’t include the collapse of communism as even a remote possibility, though he does imagine a war of liberation waged from outside the Union. Bad timing. If you bat .300, you’re a star in baseball. The Mendoza line for war game enthusiasts is closer to .000.)

Carlo Ginzburg, Night Battles: Witchcraft & Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth Centuries (The Inquisition knew what it was going to find; and because it had ways of making you talk, it usually found it. The benandanti were peasants who participated in rituals featuring nocturnal dream battles against witches. The Inquisitors managed to interpret their activities as heretical, indeed a form of witchcraft, and eventually even convinced some of the peasants themselves. An old story. If you read the Witches’ Hammer and similar books, you’ll discover that an earlier generation of witch hunters had already turned witchcraft, at least in their own minds, into a form of heresy. For that matter, it’s unclear whether the heretics of Languedoc were really members of a sect of Cathars with a worked out dualist theology and elaborate rituals before all those Dominicans decided they were followers of Mani and created the reality of the heresy. The Inquisitors had learned all about the Manichees from reading Augustine, who had once been one. Maybe they figured that there was no reason to develop arguments against a new enemy when you could simply recycle the old arguments after convincing yourself that you knew what the heretics really thought. The same sort of thing happens in politics. If you hang around the comment threads of the National Review website, you’ll discover that you are actually a 1930s-style fellow traveller and will be earnestly entreated to give up the fantasy that the Soviet Union is a worker’s paradise.)

Description of the World - Part 57

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine (Before the micros were the minis. When this book came out in ’81, personal computers could do next to nothing and took a very long time doing it. They didn’t do a heck of a lot more for quite a few years. I moved to the land of chips and software at about that time; and the serious techies I met were far more interested in Sun workstations than pc’s. The money was good, too. Flying through a blizzard in Pennsylvania while on a business trip, I shared a flight with a brilliantly drunk computer salesman who had just closed a deal with Harrisburg for six mini computers. “I sold a six pack! I sold a six Pack!”)

The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, ed. Max Hastings (Holocaust deniers sometimes cast doubts on the narratives of camp survivors.”If it’s so bad, how come you’re still here?” That’s sufficiently obscene, as Jean-François Lyotard pointed out in the Differend apropos Faurisson; but a much milder version colors our understanding of war. All the first person accounts are written, if not by victors, at least by survivors. It would require a poet or perhaps a medium to produce a book of military anecdotes that began to reflect the reality of the thing itself.)

Steve Pincus, 1688: the First Modern Revolution (Pincus writes very well, but hefting the book again reminds me of the limitations of my efforts to get college educated people to read adult books. Unless you know a fair amount of the history of Glorious Revolution, by which I mean not only what happened but why people have been arguing about it for so long, you won’t be impressed by the depth and brilliance of this work. There are pleasures that must be earned. The just-so story about 1688 is that Protestant Britain could tolerate a catholic king but not a king with a catholic heir, that the nation more or less unanimously rejected James in short order once William and Mary came ashore, that the revolution was peaceful and civil, and that it didn’t involve fundamental changes in the British constitution. Pincus refutes or qualifies all of these elements of the received narrative, pointing out that even many English Catholics opposed the king, who stood for Louis XIV’s version of the faith against more ultramontain versions, that the Revolution resulted from a successful Dutch invasion, that there certainly was bloodshed even if you don’t count the Battle of the Boyne, and that the settlement that followed 1688 wasn’t a reversion to ancient practices but a genuine revolution.)

Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Before the 17th Century battle of the ancients and moderns, it was still possible to imagine that the Greeks and Romans had been as prosperous and even as militarily formidable as the nations of Baroque Europe. Ober isn’t exactly reopening that fight, but he does attempt to show that Classical Greece achieved a level of economic performance nearly on a par with, say, the Dutch Republic. He thinks that the broader participation of the population in governance explains much of this success. I’m more inclined to focus on the Greek ability to import food as a critical factor, but that’s perhaps a matter of emphasis. You can’t have the demographic growth experienced by the Greeks without lots and lots of Scythian and Sicilian wheat; and you can’t get that without the military and financial power made possible by democratization (in a broad sense) at home, i.e. by citizen armies and navies and high levels of professionalism and economic specialization. Under ancient conditions (if not ours), democracy and imperialism are a natural fit.)

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and Making of American Capitalism (I suppose the most sensational claim in this book is that the productivity of Southern cotton production and therefore the enormous profits it made possible were literally beaten out of the slaves. Cotton picking wasn’t mechanized until after the Civil War. Before that time, its efficiency was a function of the skill of the pickers, who were “encouraged’ to gather more and more by the application of the lash to workers who didn’t make the ever larger quotas at the end of the day. The system worked. The same inputs resulted in more and more bales as disinterested cruelty was transmuted into gold over the first half of the 19th Century. The general message that slave labor underlie the great expansion of American wealth was not news to me. I was more impressed—or depressed—by what Baptist had to say about the Old South, the states further North where little cotton was grown but plantation owners could still tap into the bonanza by selling slaves down South. Before the cotton gin, the prospect of an end to slavey wasn’t very threatening to Virginia planters as the economic value of slaves diminished; but once the cotton rush was on, breeding slaves became a new source of wealth, a development that partly explains the difference between Thomas Jefferson, circa 1776, and the same man in1808 and why the Old Dominion signed on to the Confederacy. It’s vulgar Marxism at its rawest, but it sure looks as if a huge swatch of American history can be explained by the refusal of greedy men to give up a sweet deal.)

Description of the World - Part 56

Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company (This book’s first edition came out in the mid 50s—Mukhyerjee himself finally died this last Fall. I gather his book was a revisionist work at the time. Even Indian historians tended to find nice things to say about the Company much in the same way that in my youth accounts of Reconstruction were all about carpetbaggers and scallywags—the Gone With the Wind version of Civil War history. I don’t think I ever bought into the Romantic dream of the Raj, though I doubt if Mukherjee’s book had much to do with forming my opinions. The account of the Great Mutiny in one of the late volumes of the Great Events by Famous Historians featured a photo of the British executing rebellious sepoys by tying them to the muzzles of field pieces. Looking at that sufficed for me. For the life of me, I can’t understand why American Conservatives, some of whom like to dress up in three-cornered hats, no less, think of anti-colonialism as a dubious attitude. I note that the two great disasters of American foreign policy since World War II all had something to do with an incomplete disavowal of Imperialism. Eisenhower refused to bail out the French in Vietnam, but we reneged on our support for the peace treaty that called for elections and a reunification of the country. In Iran, our policy continued earlier British medaling in Persian domestic affairs. The assassination of Mossadegh and the establishment of the Shah’s dictatorship were jointly orchestrated by the U.K. and the U.S. in ’53 in response to moves to audit the books of the British oil company that eventually became BP. )

John Costello, The Pacific War 1941-1945 (I’ve read many histories of the Pacific War, even nothing special efforts such as this one, because I think of myself as a Pacific rim guy. There’s a family connection too. When my great aunt Cora visited my family many, many years ago, we took her to Redondo Beach—she’d never seen the ocean. She asked us whether it extended to San Diego. That was the funny part. Then she realized that it also extended to the distant island where he son died in the war and began to weep. My father, who had been working as a chemical engineer in a salt mine, spent the war figuring out how to pack landing craft at a naval base at Oxnard so that everything fitted in and the most important stuff was on the outside.)

Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Though I once took a course from him, I can’t claim that Toulmin was a major influence on my thinking. We have this much in common, however: we both wanted to think philosophically about the concrete. We didn’t want to leave out the particulars when considering the general. In Toulmin’s case, that led to an interest in what he called field-dependent reasoning and in casuistry, which is moral reasoning on the hoof. It also made him take history seriously. Wittgenstein’s Vienna puts the Tractatus in the context of one of the great scenes of history, a place and time on a par with the Athens of Socrates and Sophocles, the London of Pope and Dean Swift, the Goethezeit, Fin de Siecle Paris, or 254. It usefully reminds us that great minds hunt in packs. The book could serve, along with Lunar Men, as a case study to supplement Randall Collins’ The Sociology of Philosophies. I always felt at home in what Robert Musil called Kakania* because of as much as despite of the sense of decadence and doom that hung over the place along with the fantastic creativity. Perre Menard wanted to write Don Quixote. I wanted to become Karl Kraus.

*The Hapsburg monarchy was formally called kaiserlich und königlich,.i.e., imperial and royal, hence k and k or kakania, which sounds like caca in German as in English. That association shouldn’t really bother anybody with a Teutonic sensibility in view of that civilization’s obsession with excrement, a proclivity documented in Life is Like a Chicken Coop Ladder by the folklorist Alan Dundes, a book that everybody thought was in terrible taste except the Germans. Kakania is like the briar patch in the Uncle Remus story. Who wouldn’t want to be a maggot in a compost bin? Hic porcus. Hic stercus. Hic felicitas.)

Robert B. Asprey, The German High Command at War: Hindenburg and Ludendorff Conduct World War I (I once assumed that finding commanders willing to kill thousands of foreigners was easier than finding men who are willing to get thousands of their own men killed. Reading military history mostly disabused me of that notion. The generals in this book sound delighted when their rivals campaigns fail with long casualty lists. How the German High Command operated had consequences that lasted a very long time. Even thought their side lost, their methods were copied. When Lenin suddenly found himself with an economy to run, the only available model was the system Ludendorff and Co. had imposed on the lands won from the Russians. Marx had very little to say on the topic: praxis isn’t any more of a plan than hope. The commissars acted like they were an occupying army because they were imitating an occupying army.)

Description of the World - Part 55

Fifth Shelf

Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (This is the middle volume of Israel’s Enlightenment trilogy. It deals extensively with what Israel calls the moderate Enlightenment, men like Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, who insisted on being reasonable as well as rational or, less credibly, shrunk back from the implications of Spinoza’s style of monistic atheism. It wasn’t just a matter of trimming, of course. Voltaire was Frederick the Great’s house philosophe, but the authentically radical Diderot played the same role with Catherine the Great for a while. In Israel’s terminology, many of these moderate figures were providential deists. They hung on to the last crucial feature of traditional religion—a personal, caring God—if only by their fingernails; but were repelled by almost everything else about religion. Which is why, as Israel points out, many Enlightenment figures had a relatively high opinion of Islam, which seemed to them a laudably minimalist faith, closer to the one god at most of modern Unitarians than the three gods at least of the Christians. Less ritual, more coffee.)

Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (Israel definitely owes me lunch. God knows I’ve paid for several of his, and that doesn’t take into account the depreciation charge on my eyeballs. By my calculation, the text of the book is about 2.7 miles long—(4.5 inches X 38 lines X 1000 pages) / 5280). I wouldn’t have read this tome if I didn’t enjoy it, but it is startling to realize that I’ve marched my attention down a tunnel not an eight of an inch tall that would stretch from this armchair to the Golden Gate Bridge. Or imagine this thin ribbon of print coiled back and forth across the walls of a huge warehouse—might make a good conceptual art piece. In the old days, when ads and other printed matter was assembled on a light table before being sent off to the press, I learned how tiny a line of type really is. My retinas remind me of that now and again.)

Eugen Weber, France: Fin de Siècle (You feel familiar with a city or a neighborhood not because you remember all the streets and squares you’ve visited but because you know you strolled there many times. I can’t really distinguish Weber’s account of this era from several others, but paging through the book I found many illustrations that seem to look back at me avec des regards familiers. Of course reading carelessly as I habitually do is a good way to acquire prejudices. At least if you footnote everything, you can blame somebody else. I underlined, “‘I don’t shoot for pleasure,’ a peasant in the Landes explained, ‘It’s to annoy my neighbor,’” and a little later “hommes ratiers who [at fairs], for a few pennies, bit rats to death.” Ah peasants! “Patricide is no rarer than fratricide, though I’ve come across only two cases of lads so naive as to kill their fathers in order to gain exemption from military service as the elder son of a widow.” Weber also talks about how the scientific discovers of the time quickly became fodder for superstition, “If radioscopy works, why shouldn’t crystal balls?” Alfred Russel Wallace, William Crookes, Oliver Lodge, and many other bona fide scientists fans of psychical research and expected results, too. Let us not forget what a precious gift the invention of the radio was to the paranoid schizophrenics—I assume that gravity waves will turn up in case delusions shortly if they haven’t already.)

Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950-1350 (Long before Columbus, European imperialism had two great successes, the Drang nach Osten in which the Germans and Scandinavians created an empire in the East and the occupation and subordination of the Irish, a process that went back to William the Conqueror and is one of the authentic long running atrocities of history. (Bartlett doesn’t deal with the third dress rehearsal for world domination, the Castilian conquest of the Cannery Islands, which began in 1402.) The brutality lessons weren’t all that was involved in the Europeanization of Europe: the periphery was inundated with peasants as well as knights. In America, too, the farmers were much more a threat to the Indians than the pony soldiers.)

Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—the Facts of Daily Life in 19th-Century England (Useful if you’re writing period fiction and want to include some picturesque touches. Novels written at the time generally don’t include much ethnographic detail since nobody’s an anthropologist at home. I used to have a couple of big 19th Century home encyclopedias that had long chapters on elocution, the proper way for a horseman to salute a lady, topics suitable for conversation, and elegant parlor games. Pool covers the etiquette pretty well, but doesn’t have anything to say about how much people worried about which word should be stressed in a sentence or the wealth of party games; but my elegant cyclopedias (one of them was literally called that) were American, and Pool is writing about England, which may account for the differences.)

  

Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: the Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (La Société des Moulins du Bazacle, which owned and operated water mills on the Garonne river, was founded in the twelfth century and was eventually nationalized by Electricite du France in the middle of the 20th Century—since I’ve done work for EDF I like to think that I’m associated with a rather well established outfit. This little book isn’t quite as venerable as La Société des Moulins du Bazacle, but it appeared 40 years ago and the idea that the Middle Ages was an era of profound technological progress has lost its novelty. We think of the 12th and 13rd Centuries in terms of what actually happened in the next couple of centuries, which in many ways were darker and crueler than what came before.)

Description of the World - Part 54

Mark Martin & Marsha Porter, DVD & Video Guide 2006 (In the early days of VCRs I came upon a revolving rack of tapes in a bookstore, immediately thought that it was wonderful that classic movies were now cheaply available, and then realized that I really wasn’t all that eager to watch Casablanca again. I’ve had the same set of reactions to Blockbuster, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. The utopia of choice quickly becomes another chore and infinite options a desert of abundance. All Buridan’s ass had to do was flip a coin. It’s not so easy for us. Maybe I’m complaining because of a personal lack of energy. After all, as I’ve bragged before, I’m the Don Juan of sloth. Still I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that consumption work can be as taxing as productive work. On the other hand, maybe it’s the medium. Movies and plays entrain your attention. The images are in charge. You’re the boss when you read so the library is less daunting than the video store. I have the patience to slog through 5,000 pages of Jonathan Israel while two hours in a movie theater seems like a prison term even if I like the flick.)

John M. Blunt, Edmund S. Morgan, Willie Lee Rose, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Kenneth M. Stamp, C. Vann Woodward, The National Experience: a history of the United States to 1877, Part One (I bought this ragged used copy for the election results and maps in the Appendix—even in 1973 I knew the committee of big names on the title page had little to do with the contents. From the publisher’s point of view, what matters in a history textbook is the prestige of the authors. There are doubtless exceptions—R.R.Palmer’s book comes to mind—but the textbook business is a low trade.)

William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; Alone 1932-1940 (The epigraph to this volume of the biography is from Macaulay’s Lay of Ancient Rome, the bit about Horatius at the gate. “To every man upon this earth/Death cometh soon or late. /And how can man die better/Than facing fearful odds, /For the ashes of his fathers, /And the temples of his gods?” I once wrote about how this little jingle with its adolescent idealism may have had a surprising causal role in making Churchill the man he became—Winston memorized it as a thirteen-year old for a school declamation exercise and it apparently gave him a lasting taste for phrase making and declaiming things.)

Wolfgang Leonhard, Child of the Revolution (I met Leonhard at Yale. He gave some of us grad students informal lessons in how to read Pravda and just what it betokened when an opinion piece began “Your Marxism is very good, Comrade, however….” I once spent a whole night arguing with the President of the Communist Party of Massachusetts. He was a young man—I don’t remember his name—who had apparently achieved his position by primogeniture—he was a red diaper baby if there ever were such a thing. Of course the house he lived in wasn’t exactly Versailles. It was, in fact, a pigsty whose dirt and clutter offended even my not particularly rigorous standards of housekeeping. I got the impression that even this low standard of living was only maintained by Soviet subsidies and the dues paid by FBI informants. I was very well read on Marxism in those days—I actually taught a course on contemporary Marxist theory—but I wasn’t a Marxist, a fact that the President of the Communist Party of Massachusetts just couldn’t accept because I could speak the language like a native. Our argument, which lasted till dawn, was about the essential irrelevance of doctrinaire Marxist-Leninism to American leftists—it was around 1975—and the fellow obviously had trouble with that, no doubt because it was as obvious to him as it was to me. Nevertheless, I almost snorted when he finally said, almost in canonical form, “Your Marxism is very good, however…”)

Régis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: the intellectuals of Modern France (Debray was glamorous during the era of romantic leftism, but managed to suffer serial disillusionment from Castro, Che, Allende, and Mitterrand. He was a slow learner; Plato didn’t need four tyrants to get the memo and even a 30-year Bolivian prison sentence didn’t slow Debray down for long—he only served three. This little book attempts to be simultaneously sociological and clever about the French intellectual scene—the French have learned how to use statistical tables in order to be snide. I think Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus, which was written by a real sociologist, is more credible on these things, though just as snide in its own way. Still, Debray has his moments. “But from the point of view of Playboy and the ads, Kant and Lenin are all one…..From a distance, these quarrels between two philosophers reveal an identity of culture rather than an opposition between cultures.” Another good one: “The Atlantic world lives in the era of the scoop. Atlantic France has manufactured the ideological scoop.” Those of us who lived through existentialism, structuralism, post structuralism, and postmodernism will understand that.)

Description of the World - Part 53

Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (This book came out in ’86, which means that it preceded some of the most notable recent reappraisals of fascism, in particular those undertaken by the French, who took a very long time to get around to settling accounts with Vichy and the collaborationists. Farías’ book on Heidegger and the Nazis didn’t show up until ’87, and the de Man scandal didn’t break until ’88—the de Man affair had to mean a great deal to Kaplan, who was one of his students. I’m not sure when I started to take fascism seriously as an ideology with continuing appeal. If I last long enough I may get around to reading my old journals from that era and finding out. I certainly didn’t read this book with much attention. I probably bought it out of a sense of duty and assumed, inaccurately, as it appears, that it was another manifestation of late Postmodernism. I think I was put off by Russell Berman’s foreword, whose style is redolent of the 80s. Kaplan is far more down to earth. She reminds me a bit of Eva Hoffman, another person who writes about history and ideology in an autobiographical vein. And this from a woman who became the head of the Yale French department.)

Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 1 (I’ve been fortunate to stumble across very significant books before they become celebrated. Before everybody weighs in on a book, you can simply read it. Once it becomes a football—or MacGuffin—the text becomes next to unreadable as it sinks below the interpretations like a foundering ship. I’d never heard of Michael Mann when I ran across this paperback edition in the Stanford University Bookstore, but it looked, well, chewy, as indeed it is, full of very specific observations as well as an important general thesis. Example: Mann points out that Rome, unlike many other states before and after, didn’t suffer from periodic fiscal crises brought on by the expense of war because it was always at war. That’s obvious, but also worth the price of admission, even if Mann only takes three sentences to make the point. The big takeaway from the book for me was the idea that statehood was contagious. Once a state emerged in the neighborhood, the other peoples had to match its coercive power or become its victims unless they were protected by topography or climate; and every local big man wanted to have a state of his own. I resisted this explanation when I read the book. Mann suggests that the Mesopotamian example may have encouraged the developments of polities as far away as Shang China by a sort of action at a distance. I wrote, “So what if the Chinese had heard rumors. Without local experience how would they have made sense of them? Or better, since the state isn’t such a nice animal, why should hearing about the state make anyone want to live in one?” To be fair to Mann, he doesn’t make any strong claim for this particular application of his theory. On the other hand, maybe great big simple ideas are at least as communicable as Yersinia pestis.)

Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler, ed. Edward Mead Earle (Best four clams I ever spent. This anthology of essays, published originally in ’43, taught me most of what I know about the subject.  It’s been updated since, but I’ve never seen the expanded version. One essay introduced me to the ideas of Ardant Du Picq, who proposed what amounts to an ethological theory of combat. At least at the point if contact, wars are encounters between troops of mammals who fight or flee. Le choc est un mot. Napoleon made a similar point in one of his maxims: in war the moral is to the physical as three to one. Using the language of forces to explain war is a category mistake analogous to thinking of economics as the physics of money. It’s a commonplace to make fun of the accounts of battles in Livy and other ancient historians because they tell us so little about the dispositions of troops and give so much space to the speeches the generals make to the men before battle. Well, the speeches were invented, but the old writers at least understood that war was a rhetorical activity, especially in the era of edged weapons. You had to persuade the soldiers to fight so they would persuade the enemy to flee. The clever maneuvers beloved of readers of military histories, the boxes and the arrows, don’t mean much if the troops won’t fight.)

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (I don’t know how well this book is remembered now. It was endlessly discussed when it came out in ’87 when the pundits were all gravely warning about imperial overstretch. As it turned out, the timing of the book was awkward. Kennedy was certainly aware of the deep problems facing the Soviet Union—“the most shocking trend has been the steady deterioration in both life expectancy and infant mortality rates since the 1970s”—but he expected that any crack up would be violent because failing empires don’t usually give up without a fight and I’m sure he was as surprised as anybody else how quickly it all happened—three years later. The travails of the Soviet Union weren’t the focus of book, however. Kennedy was warning the United States about its own relative decline. That hasn’t turned out quite as projected. As much as I deplore America’s excellent adventures in the Middle East, I have to admit that our national problems aren’t really a consequence of military spending. The low rate of real investment over the last forty years means that the economy has plenty of slack in it. We aren’t building the infrastructure we need, but that’s not because we’re building weapons instead. Kennedy also subscribed to the notion that the country’s finances were in a dangerous state because of huge deficits and a dependence on foreign money, but that’s folk economics only fit to provide talking points for Republican presidential debates. Prophesy is risky, especially if you’re a man who writes with rather more clarity that Nostradamus. Somebody may look at your book a quarter of a century later.)

George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance (Kennan kept on writing after he composed the long telegram (’46) that proposed the policy for dealing with the Soviet Union that came to be called containment. This little book on the origins of the Franco-Russian alliance came out in ’84. When you think of the long sweep of European history, the last several centuries can be seen as a protracted and eventually successful struggle of the Western Europeans to stifle Russian expansionism—in actual diplomacy as well as the game Diplomacy, Russia was the wicked witch of the East. We tend to forget how menacing the Russians appeared to be or how much effort went in to limiting their power. Partly that’s because there were a couple of notable periods when the process of containment was, as it were, in remission and partly because the checks to what must have seemed like a relentless process of expansion aren’t given much consideration. The Crimean war, the Treaty of Berlin, the Great Game, and the Russo-Japanese war actually were momentous. Now they don’t even come up very often on Jeopardy. The alliance between France and Russia leading up to World War I lasted barely a quarter of a century and was seen as anomalous even at the time—a secular Republic making common cause with a despotic empire. Thing is, it was an anomalous.) 

Description of the World - Part 52

Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Into-European Roots (Shipley, who had a PhD in comparative literature, was not exactly Isidore of Seville, but I wouldn’t necessarily put too much weight on his etymologies. That may be unfair of me, though I found several errors and Shipley reports as fact any story he likes. In other words, he writes like a Greek. Whatever the soundness of his scholarship, an account of the English lexicon that takes off from the PIE roots is bound to produce a delirious effect. The book is essentially a non-fiction Finnegan’s Wake. Hegel called the shared intelligible structure of the human world objective reason, but our minds are also embedded in a matrix of accumulated nonsense; and our conscious thoughts spring up like tiny mushrooms from an immense mycelium of associations and half forgotten memories. Nietzsche spoke of the “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration.” I usually prefer the formulation of an American novelist who spoke less grandly of the “shitty run of category mistakes and non sequiturs” or invoke Pace’s notion of neocarolinian associationism. Charles Sanders Pierce called it the sea of musement. There’s a private as well as a public version of this linguistic/cultural mass/mess satura/satire. In fact it’s hard to draw the line between the bits and pieces stored locally and the communal treasury (or junk yard) since the monads are joined below. Freud explained a case of contagious amnesia by invoking his version of the collective unconscious. A young woman told a group of her young male admirers that she had much enjoyed the novel by the American Lew Wallace, but for some reason couldn’t remember the title.* The men found they couldn’t remember it either, which was odd because the book was a best seller at the time. Freud’s explanation was that they all repressed the title, Ben Hur, because in German “Hur” means whore, not the sort of thing proper young men want to bring up with a debutant (precisely because it’s exactly the sort of thing they want to associate with her).** Shipley’s book is part of the proximal region of objective delirium for me. I haven’t given the book a thought for a couple of decades, but the marginalia show that I read it with close attention and checking out the underlinings, I realized that I’ve put some of the material to use. I was a little surprised at what I had forgotten, though, for example, the derivation of words for blindness from kaiko as in Latin caecum and the saying, made famous by Erasmus in his Adagia, “In regione cacorum, rex est luscus: In the realm of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I though I’d remember that because I’ve been correcting the saying for years. As experience teaches us, in the realm of the blind, the one-eyed man is under arrest. 

*I note in passing that if had Lew Wallace been a transexual, he would have written Been Him. These things have to be accounted for in a philosophy like mine that includes the things that aren’t as well as those that are. In the human world, at least, there are infinitely more possibilities than actualities, and the counterfactuals matter. It’s also true that since the late 60’s I’ve tried live by the zeroth commandment: Remember the object language and keep it holy. That rule doesn’t cover everything, however. Physics may be trumps, but it doesn’t win every trick.

**Shipley derives whore from ka as in Sanskrit kama. He gets charity out of ka but also “By a downgrading twist, L. cara, Gc huore: sweetheart, turned out as English whore.” These reversals are business as usual in the history of language. You may not be able to get something for nothing, but you can get nothing [rien] for something [res], at least in French and, for that matter, in the beginning of Hegel’s Logic where non being is deduced from being since the perfectly indeterminate something is pretty much the same as nothing.) 

  

Gordon W. Prange, Miracle at Midway (Prange was a famed historical researcher who could never quite get around to finishing his books. This effort, like his first and more famous book, At Dawn We Slept, was actually turned into a book by Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon. I knew Goldstein back in the late 70s when he was working on the Prange books. A bluff and hearty man with a military background, he was an admirably loyal and unassuming friend to Prange, at least as far as I can tell. I suspect there’s more Goldstein than Prange in the final product, though I never met Dillon who, for all I know, made the largest contribution of all to these extremely successful books—At Dawn We Slept won a Pulitzer.)

Herwig Wolfam, History of the Goths (That nationalities are largely fictive is a commonplace of modern historiography, though old fictions become real enough eventually. Projecting ethnicity backwards and thinking that the labelled arrows in maps of the Völkerwanderung era identify distinct peoples with ancient roots is rather like imagining that time out of mind there really was a Scotland with beefy men running around in plaid kilts. The Romans were more forthright about their own origins as a conglomeration of horse thieves and juvenile delinquents that fetched up on the Tiber short. The various barbarian “tribes” that eventually took down the empire were similarly gangs improvised by their rather entrepreneurial leaders. I leave it to the kitschy side of Heidegger to imagine that the German language (aka Gothic) was an an originary tongue, the oracle of Being, and not the lingua franca of a bunch of refugees and camp followers.)

David Pace and Sharon L. Pugh, Studying for History (David Pace has been trying to teach college professors how to teach history for many years now. In this little book, he and his co-author attempted the much easier task of helping college students learn something despite their professors. He sent me a copy, probably hoping that I’d get the hint—one section of the book is titled “How Jim Unintentionally Committed Plagiarism,” which is pretty much equivalent to “How David Telegraphed a Punch.” Or maybe he was just getting even with me for persuading him to write his doctoral dissertation about Levi-Strauss.)

William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Visions of Glory 1874-1932. (Like countless other middle class kids of my vintage I grew up in a household with a copy of the Book of the Month Club edition of Churchill’s six volume history of World War II. I can’t remember not knowing rather a lot about him, albeit much of his image had obviously been carefully constructed, something I recognized even as a child. Even so, he was a natural role model for a young teen, the original male Mary Sue: prime minister, cavalry officer, escapee from a prisoner of war camp, pilot, inventor of the tank, founder of the RAF, author, painter, polo champ, etc. He even won a Nobel Prize for a book he hadn’t actually written. Watching his elaborate funeral, which Churchill himself had carefully choreographed, I couldn’t help but think that if it were logically possible to enjoy your own burial, Winston figured out how to do it. The ceremonies were simultaneously genuinely grand and undeniably cheesy, rather as the man had been. I became less of a fan later, more aware of Churchill’s imperialism, absurd sentimentality about the monarchy, and crank economic ideas—he may have been an indispensable war lord, but he was a terrible Chancellor of the Exchequer. I never blamed him for Gallipoli, though. A Nelson would have choked Turkey out of the war, but not even half Nelsons were available.)

Too Long for Twitter, Too Short for a Blog

The perennial bleat about how this candidate or that is fighting the establishment isn’t just boring. It simply doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Unless you buy into some romantic theory of perpetual revolution, isn’t the whole point of political action to replace the current establishment or, more realistically, to change some of its personnel while altering the outlook of the rest? My bitch with the elite is that it’s not very goddam elite, that it’s doing a rotten job of leading the country, dealing with real problems, and maintaining our basic values. I want a better establishment, not the elimination of establishments.

Description of the World- Part 51

Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (The old rhetoricians treated invention as belonging to memory whereas we seem to assume that in imagination we possess a magical, if not divine creative power. I’ve been a skeptic about that since I was tasked to write a one-act play about the assassination of Lincoln and suddenly realized how blank a sheet of white paper can be. I don’t remember how far I got with it, but my attempt began with John Wilkes Booth delivering a drunken soliloquy in his hotel room. If I were writing it now, I’d have his demented reverie interrupted by a knock on the door; and Booth would prove himself a competent actor, if not a competent conspirator, by snapping into character as a born leader, convincing his accomplices to fall in line with a display of steely resolve® and thus moving the action on to the next plot point. At the time, I hadn’t read or seen enough plays to figure out what to do next, and I had to beg off the assignment. Miss Tinkle, the American history teacher—I don’t remember her real name—was visibly disappointed. The episode made me understand that a play is not just any collection of actors doing and saying things on a stage and, more generally, that genre rules, though they can certainly impede creativity, make it possible in the first place. The need for structure is just as great in ordinary life, though we are so accustomed to the roles, scripts, and rituals that we are ordinarily unconscious of how many of our choices have been made in advance. That doesn’t mean that we’re mindless jute boxes, just that we normally express our creativity by the way we play covers. Trexler’s book is about the rituals of public life in Florence. He’s like a historical Irving Goffman. I especially appreciated his treatment of the various ways that Florentines made a virtue out of acting naturally, much in the same way that our ads for mass produced cars endlessly extol individuality. A contemporary commented: “I don’t want to say that they do bad who tell you they don’t want you to use ceremony with them. Indeed I praise it. Because to say this is another type of ceremony and breeding, with which one suppresses ambition.” Sometimes Trexler violates the rule that learned people must present themselves as just plain folks as when he wrote the phrase “Cleisthnian disregard for chthonic solidarities.” I kinda like that one.)

Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams (Those who don’t have nouns, have adjectives, which accounts for the luxuriant verbal creativity of inner-city America. Or, in the Italian case:  “Many people, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were reduced to living mainly on beau langage and feasting on names instead of tasting things.” Camporesi doesn’t leave it at verbal delirium. It’s his thesis that hunger, adulterated food, low-level infections, and dubious medicines combined to create a peasant class that lived in a more or less permanent hallucination. Most of the evidence is indirect as is the usual situation when anybody tries to discover or even simply imagine what was going on in the dark matter of human history. Camporesi relies on records and literary echoes about life in what were then the Papal States. That struck me as a little ironic since Pellegrino Artusi, author of the first great Italian cookbook came from this same hungry neck of the woods.)

C.W.C.Oman, The Art of War in the Middle Ages (When I cared about such things, I’d pick up books like this because I liked their maps.)

John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (The machine gun, which was originally a symbol of the triumph of technology over courage, became democratized. One of my favorite illustrations in this little book is an ad for a Thompson machine gun that shows a cowboy using a tommy gun to fend off attacking Indians. Ellis’ book was written too early to    witness the later stages of this story in the long era of the AK-47, but he saw it coming: “The machine gun has now become personalised, itself the means by which men desperately try to make their mark on a world in which they feel increasingly powerless. In the fantasy world at least technology is turned against itself.” In the fantasy world and also in Eastern Oregon.)

  

Alvin D. Coox, Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939, two volumes (These books were designed by a friend of mine, Lisa Mirski, who gave them to me. The topic is esoteric, but not insignificant, a unofficial border fight between the Soviets and the Japanese in Eastern Mongolia. Led by general Zhukov, who was to become much more famous in the upcoming European war, the Reds crushed the Kwantung Army and gave the Japanese a lesson they took to heart. Nomonhan was in the background of the Japanese decision not to attack the USSR in ’41. The book provides a wonderful display of the mindlessness of military nationalism.)

Description of the World - Part 50

Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment (Whatever else he’s accomplished, Israel has certainly documented the enormous if often underground influence of Spinoza in the 18th Century—not the metaphysician Spinoza of the Ethics but the political and social philosopher Spinoza of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. That little book was forbidden everywhere—it sometimes appeared between phony covers—but orthodox theologians and philosophers couldn’t resist refuting it, and that spread the infection as efficiently as the book itself. What seemed tremendously radical in 1680 may sound tame these days—religious tolerance, reading scripture in its historical context as the work of fallible human authors, discounting the miraculous, a naturalistic version of God, a thoroughgoing rationalism—but if you taught it to high school seniors, you’d still find yourself tarred and feathered in many districts. I have a family relationship to Spinoza. My father, who got his degree in geology, worked as a chemical engineer, and wound up running a small construction company, was very careful to avoid making any comments about his philosophical beliefs; but it struck me that his outlook was very similar to Spinoza right down to the deus sive natura. I always assumed, however, that Dad had arrived at this point of view by a parallel evolution of thought. Shortly before his death, either because his guard was down or the previous death of my mother meant he could be frank without upsetting a Christian, he told me he had read Spinoza at UCLA and simply decided the man was right.)

Alexander Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (I’ve read this book twice. What struck me most the first time was how terrified and ignorant of basic arithmetic the learned men of Europe were before 1000 and even after—Murray is interested in what motivated the rise of mathematical knowledge, but the footnotes and asides of the central section of the work provide raw material for a history of math phobia. The second time I read the book, I probably did the author’s intentions more justice by paying attention to his account of how Europe developed an intellectual elite and his study of the role of the nobility in religion. Murray provides a useful, philological correction/refinement to Nietzsche. Christianity may have been part of a slave revolt in morality, but the nobility looked on holiness as another form of arete, virtù as well as virtue.)

Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (I often find myself writing in praise of dullness perhaps because my existence is standing proof of the futility of cleverness. Anyhow, this collection of historiographic essays is mostly sufficiently dull, but it is also very useful if you decide you want to know the state of play of historical issues such as the origin of the modern state or the causes of the French Revolution. I don’t know if it’s fair to history professors to suggest that what they look for from their students is more a mastery of the recent bibliography of an era or topic than a familiarity with what took place or a fresh take on what it all meant. If I were prepping for a blue book exam for a senior course, however, I’d sure find Bentley’s collection a superior cheat sheet. Is there such a thing as post-graduate Monarch Notes?)

Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790 (This is actually the third of Israel’s huge Enlightenment books—if publish or perish is the true rule, Israel may live forever. After defining a radical enlightenment and contrasting it with a moderate, compromising enlightenment in the previous volumes, Israel addresses the political efficacy of a set of ideas that came down from Spinoza and Pierre Bayle. One of his general themes in this and a subsequent work on the French Revolution is that under particular circumstances definable, specific ideas can explain political change. The set of ideas* that Israel identifies as decisive in this era are not deep or subtle. For many people now, in fact, they are practically common sense; and Israel seems to think that there cogency was obvious even at the beginning of the 18th Century, hence the vehement efforts right thinking men had to exert to suppress them. I'd tweak his list, if you were trying to come up with a secular version of the Laws of Noah, Spinoza would be a good place to start.

*Israel defines the radical enlightenment "as a package of basic concepts and values [that] may be summarized in eight cardinal points: (1) adoption of philosophical (mathematical-historical) reason as the only and exclusive criterion of what is true; (2) rejection of all supernatural agency, magic, disembodied spirits, and divine providence; (3) equality of all mankind (racial and sexual); (4) secular ‘universalism’ in ethics anchored in equality and chiefly stressing equity, justice, and charity; (5) comprehensive toleration and freedom of thought based on independent critical thinking; (6) personal liberty of lifestyle and sexual conduct between consenting adults, safeguarding the dignity and freedom of the unmarried and homosexuals; (7) freedom of expression, political criticism, and the press, in the public sphere; (8) democratic republicanism as the most legitimate form of politics.”)

Donald Kagan, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War (I have trouble keeping the various Kagans straight. Donald is the patriarch of the three—there are more if you count the wives. Among those who interpret the Peloponnesian War allegorically for modern purposes, my current favorite is Marshall Sahlins. I can hardly recall Kagan’s take.)

Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatan (For more than seventy years, the Mayans of the Yucatan engaged the Mexican central government and their local Europeanized oppressors in a series of revolts, sometimes maintaining themselves in independent territories and even winning recognition from the British. Reed’s book isn’t as memorable as the Rebellion in the Badlands (Os Sertões) of Euclides da Chunha, which tells the tale of another doomed insurrection, religious fanaticism, and “rational” racism; but is sufficiently depressing.)

Barbara W. Tuchman, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (I guess this item was too entertaining for me. I apparently never got past page 23.)