The Philosopher's Stone

BACK IN THE SADDLE

2012-01-29T18:57:00.000-05:00

My five week long health crisis has taken me away from this blog more than I would have liked. I think perhaps it is time to essay another "Appreciation." Accordingly, tomorrrow I will initiate a brief discussion of William Golding's extraordinary novel, The Inheritors.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

2012-01-28T16:01:00.002-05:00

From Andrew Sullivan's blog:

"Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?" asked a perplexed Gingrich, to whom Dole bluntly explained: "Because it saves them time."

HOT OFF THE PRESSES

2012-01-27T10:16:00.000-05:00

For gluttons for punishment, my entire three volume Memoir is now available on Box.net, edited and in one big file [the file is so big, it takes up almost as much memory as one photograph!] Enjoy.

USEFUL LESSONS

2012-01-27T07:44:00.000-05:00

I am back from the hospital, apparently in good shape. I think that is enough about my physical condition, which is of the very greatest interest to me, and to a small circle of loved ones, and of very little interest to anyone else. If I should die, I will sure to mention it on this blog.

Some while back, I observed that the Occupy Wall Street Movement has already won, since it has utterly changed the public conversation in America. The brilliant polemical device of defining the fundamtnal issue as a struggle between the 1% and the 99% -- a definition that cannot, of course, withstand any sort of serious political and economic analysis -- has thrust into the public space the issue of income and wealth inequality and the consequent power inequality. Precisely because the roots of this inequality lie so deeply embedded in the structure of capitalism, no laundry list of manageable reforms can address it. The refusal of the OWS movement to formulate such a list is strategically brilliant, and infuriating to those in Washington who would just like to know "what they want" so that a palliative deal can be struck.

The success of the movement is astonishing when one reflects on how small it is. I may be way off, but it seems to me that nation-wide there cannot have been many more than forty or fifty thousand active OWS participants. Now, this is a nation of roughly 330,000,000, so the movement has involved maybe fifteen one thousandths of one percent of the population. Any Sunday pro football game is probably watched by twice that many people in the stands.

Recall the famous and very moving line from one of Obama's stump speeches in 2008: "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." He did not say "I am the one you have been waiting for," though that does seem to be what people heard. Real change never comes from the top, for all that we on the left seem fatally inclined to look for saviors and leaders. The biggest change in the public discourse of the past generation came from that half a hundred thousand men and women, or maybe even fewer, who acted without political leadership -- indeed, even without the usual leadership that popular movements most often produce. All of the tactical devices of the Movement -- the People's Mike, the General Assembly, the demand for unanimity -- are deliberate anti-hierarchical manoeuvres.

These fifty thousand people, and they alone, have earned the right to say, "We are the ones we've been waiting for."

Where will the OWS movement lead? Only those who take part in it can say. But their success stands as a lesson and a challenge to the rest of us.

OFF TO THE HOSPITAL

2012-01-26T06:30:00.000-05:00

Later this morning, I shall be admitted to UNC Memorial Hospital for a surgical procedure -- a pleural biopsy. This is the doctors' last shot, I think, at figuring out what has been wrong with me. If they cannot come up with a diagnosis, I plan to just go on living and let my body cure itself. But I will be out of touch for a day or so. The universe will scarcely notice, I imagine.

MIDDLE CLASS -- SOME THOUGHTS

2012-01-25T15:19:00.002-05:00

In my post on the roots of right wing ressentiment, I made a few passing remarks about the notion "middle class." I should like to return to that subject and invite my readers to weigh in with their thoughts. This is not a subject on which I consider myself any sort of expert, but it is important that it be subjected to some sort of critique.

As I have indicated in several of my tutorials, Classical Political Economy is erected on the premise that society is divided into several great economic classes whose interests are ungetoverably opposed: the landed aristocracy, the entrepreneurs, and the workers, in the writings of Smith and Ricardo, the working class and the capitalist class in the writings of Marx. All three writers define class in terms of the common relationship of a large social group to the means and processes of production. Landed aristocrats own and control a scarce, irreproducible factor if production, viz. land; entrepreneurs own and control capital, the tools and inputs into production as well as their money form; the working class has no ownership of the means of production nor access to land, and hence in order to survive must sell its capacity for labor to those who wish to profit from its use. This, in a nutshell, is the basic structure of a capitalist economy, and from it one can deduce the power relations and relations of exploitation among the three great classes of society.

Marx understood that this simple schema did not adequately capture the complexities of the capitalist economy at which he was looking, and it captures even less well the capitalist economy in which we now live. In the first place, there is clearly a very big difference, on the one hand, between great industrial magnates who command vast stores of capital and employ [and exploit] thousands upon thousands of workers, and on the other hand petty commodity producers who are completely at the mercy of market forces, employ a handful of workers, and by and large serve as the managers of their own small businesses.

An adequate schema must also make some place for the financial capitalists who do not own or manage productive enterprises, either directly or indirectly, but instead engage in complex manipulations of the money supply and the system of credit on which the industrial capitalists rely for access to investment capital. We all know that in recent decades, this segment of the capitalist class has ballooned in size and importance, taking on a more thoroughly internationalized form than any other capitalist sector.

It is also the case that Marx's relatively simple view of the structure of the working class has diverged farther and farther from the observed realities of modern capitalism. First of all, the pyramidal wage structure, of which I have several written on this blog, calls into question the assumption that all workers are stand in the same relation of exploitation to their employers. A good many years ago, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis published a very elegant little paper in which they worked out the mathematics of relative exploitation. High paid workers, they argued, must be understood as simultaneously being exploited by their employers and also exploiting lower=paid workers. This observation has important implications for any strategy of mobilization based on worker solidarity.

Max Weber was convinced that Marx's analysis of capitalism was inadequate in this regard, and sought to introduce an alternative mode of social analysis based on the concept of status. Status, first of all, is essentially a subjective measure, not an objective measure. Status measures the way in which a social group or individual is perceived by others in the society -- the degree of respect or deference it is accorded. One's objective location in the social relations of production is certainly an important determination of status -- in this regard, Weber agreed with Marx. But other factors play an equally important role in determining status -- educational attainments, position in a government bureaucracy, even religion or ethnicity in some societies.

Out of Weber's work, later sociologists developed the notion of socio-economic status. SES, as it came to be referred to, was conceived by them as a unidimensional index of the multi-dimensional factors shaping the perceived status and social position. Thus, a high school teacher, who is an employee of a state or local government, making a good deal less than an industrial worker, might nevertheless have high SES because of the general social respect for educational attainments. A self-employed medical doctor might have very high SES, despite commanding few if any means of production and earning less than a corporate manager. Whereas a Marxian analysis of the class structure of a capitalist economy is, in a certain sense, objective, resting as it does on an analysis of the real relations of production in the economy, a sociological analysis of Socio-Economic Status is inevitably subjective, since it is a measure of people's attitudes. Hence the central tool in the determination of SES is the public opinion survey.

The basic class divisions in a Marxian analysis are determined by the structure of the economy, and hence are not at all arbitrary. But there are no objective fault lines marking the end of one Socio-Economic Status and the beginning of another. Once the polling data is in, it is a matter of arbitrary choice where the sociologist draws his or her lines. So, "high SES," "middling SES," and "low SES" are simply arbitrary marks on a one-dimensional index generated by polling data. One can try to explain why the public ranks doctors higher than corporate managers, or bus drivers lower than WalMart store supervisors, despite the fact that corporate managers make more money on average than doctors and bus drivers earn more than WalMart store supervisors. But it would literally be meaningless to say that the public is wrong about these matters, since the public's attitudes [or at least those of a statistically valid sample] are definitive of SES.

"Upper Class," "Upper Middle Class," "Middle Class," "Lower Middle Class," "Working Class," and "Underclass" are a confused mishmash of categories defined in part of family income, in part of Socio-Economic Status, in part by objective relation to the social relations of production ["Working Class"] and in part by an acknowledgement of the caste distinctions rooted in race that have always distorted American society and continue to do so today ["Underclass."]

It would take too long to try to describe, analyze, and describe the secular changes in the sets of categories with which Americans have described their class structure over the past century and more. In the '50s and '60s, "Middle Class" came to mean, roughly, "owning one's own home, having a salary rather than a daily or weekly wage, able to send a child to college, whether one did or not, having enough disposable income after food, clothing, and shelter were paid for to permit vacations, discretionary spending on luxury items [TV sets, a car, even a second car, etc.], and -- as I have already made clear -- sharply distinguished geographically, culturally, economically, and in social status, from the Black or Hispanic Underclass.

It is in the context of this understanding that we must interpret the unceasing references to "the Middle Class" by politicians of both parties. In effect, the Democratic Party has assumed sole ownership of the African-American vote, according "Middle Class" status to the most successful segment of the Black community. The contest, currently being won by the Democrats, for the Hispanic vote is fought almost entirely over immigration policy. And poor Whites are awarded honorary "Middle Class" status to distinguish them from people of color.

Before a bring these remarks to a close, it is worth putting a few numbers on the table. The median household income for all households in 2011 was $49,445. Remember -- this means that half of all U.S. households had annual income of less than that amount. The median household income for Hispanic households was $37,759, and for African-American households, $32,068. It may help to put these figures in context to point out that an African-American couple, both working forty hours a week, fifty two weeks a year, for the Federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, would have an annual household income of $30,160. In short, this couple, working bottom of the barrel jobs, would be close to the median Black household.

The non-stop talk about The Middle Class, in effect, writes off more than a hundred million Americans as not worth thinking about.

Well, enough is enough. Tomorrow I go into the hospital for one more diagnostic procedure -- a pleural biopsy, under anesthesia. I invite your comments on these observations.

FREE, WHITE, AND TWENTY-ONE

2012-01-23T15:59:00.002-05:00

Newt Gingrich's upset victory in South Carolina appears to have been made possible by his success in tapping into a deep, bitter, implacable sense of grievance and victimhood that afflicts a large segment of the Republican electorate in that state. This permanent ressentiment was manifested in the eruptions of applause with which the debate audience greeted Gingrich's attack on moderator Juan Williams. It found expression in their delight when Gingrich called Obama a "food stamp president." And of course its steadiest manifestation is their hysterical hatred of and contempt for President Obama. The principal appeal of Gingrich to this electorate seems to be rooted in their erotic fantasy that Gingrich would, in a debate with Obama, whip the President and put him in his place.

The sense of being insulted and injured is not new, of course. It has long, deep roots. The purpose of this blog post is to explore those roots and identify what I believe to be the real origin of the grievance that motivates so large a segment of the Republican electorate today. As will become obvious, my explanation is little more than a suggestion, grounded in some historical realities. But readers of this blog may find it to be of some interest.

Our story begins, as do so many of the stories of America, in the pre-Civil War institution of slavery. Slavery was a fact of American society and economy north and south for several centuries -- one tends to forget that at one point New York City was home to more slaves than any other city in America. But although slavery was widespread in the North, the northern economy was not a slave economy. That is to say, slave labor was not the foundation of northern wealth. The South, however, was a slave economy. The tobacco, rice, and then cotton that made the ante-bellum South the wealthiest region of the United States rested firmly on slave labor.

It was far from the case that all white southerners owned slaves. Healthy, adult Black men and women were an extremely valuable commodity in the southern slave markets, each one bringing more money than a northern white free worker could earn in a year. Indeed, in his very valuable study of the economics of southern slavery, Branches Without Roots, Gerald Jaynes tells us that fully one half of the entire wealth of the South at the outbreak of the Civil War was in the form of slaves.

There were a great many poor whites trying to wrest some sort of living from the soil in the hollows and backwoods and upcountry reaches of the Southern states. Jacqueline Jones, in her splendid book American Work, reports that in the period before the Civil War, the popular view among affluent Southern whites was that the slaves were good workers -- skilled, obedient, hard-working -- but that the poor whites were lazy, shiftless, and no account. Within a generation after the end of the War, this attitude had flipped. It was now the newly freed Blacks who were condemned as lazy and shiftless and the white workers who were lauded as reliable and industrious.

Poor as the rural whites were in the Old South, they had one cardinal fact that they could clutch to their bosoms, one balm for their troubled souls, and it was not the old time religion. It was that THEY WERE NOT BLACK. However they might be scorned and condescended to by the gentry in the big plantations, there was an entire large segment of the population that was permanently, unalterably below them in the caste system of the South.

There is an old American saying that was still current when I was a boy: "I can do what I like. I am free, White, and twenty-One!" I am free -- I am not an indentured servant or a slave. I am White -- I can never be a slave; I am a citizen. And I am twenty-one, I am an adult." This was the proud boast of the poorest, most despised whites in an America with Black slaves.

At the end of the Civil War, everything changed. Suddenly, that oppressed, enslaved, and despised caste of Black men and women was Free. This created a situation that Whites found intolerable. An entire system of socially, legally, and extra-legally enforced caste separations and oppressions had to be introduced to replace the easily recognizable status of Slave. Thus were born the Black Codes and the system of Jim Crow. If a legally free Black man walking on a sidewalk did not step into the gutter to make way for a White man or women, he risked a blow, a beating, or even death. Before the war, white slave owners traveled by train with their slaves in the train car with them to attend to their needs and desires. Now, legally free Black travelers were forced to ride in separate cars so as not to offend the tender sensibilities of well-born Whites. Under slavery, Blacks drove carriages and they built and repaired them; Blacks cooked the food of Whites, fed it to them, cleaned up their messes, wet-nursed their babies, bathed them, and did their hair. After liberation, the sensibilities of White women were so easily offended by the mere presence of Black women that Black women were barred from serving as salesladies in department stores.

The hideous practice of lynching was entirely a post-bellum phenomenon. In slavery times, a slave was worth a great deal of money, and a sensible owner would no more kill a slave than kill a horse or a mule. The law records are full of cases in which one white man rented another white man's slave and, by beating him too harshly, returned him as damaged goods, giving rise to a lawsuit for the recovery of damages [to the white owner, of course, not to the slave!]

The strictly enforced caste system persisted through the end of the nineteenth century into the new twentieth century, through the First World, War and the Great Depression, and through the Second World War as well. During all that long century, poor whites could console themselves with the thought, spoken or unspoken, that they were not at the bottom of the social and economic ladder because THEY WERE NOT BLACK. In the great northern cities, housing discrimination, enforced by the Federal Government's policies as well as those of the states and localities, created large inner city ghettoes, in which Black Americans were forced to live by the covenants and housing discrimination in the rapidly expanding suburbs.

It was more or less at this time that a new and curious linguistic practice entered the public speech of America. Ordinary White working class families began to be referred to, and increasingly referred to themselves, as "middle class." Now "middle class" is itself a rather suspicious bastard sociological category. It does not have the historical roots and deeper meaning of "petty bourgeoisie," which conveys the notion of shopkeepers and small business owners who, although owners of their means of production, are yet not the great geldbesitzeren or haute bourgeois who command the economic heights. But it also does not merely mean "between rich and poor." It does, in the American context, somewhat correspond to the old distinction between "suits" and "shirts" or "white collar" and "blue collar." However, in the racially segregated America of the '50s and '60s, "middle class" clearly meant suburban, respectable, not living in an inner city ghetto. It meant NOT BLACK.

The Civil Rights Movement challenged the Black Codes, it challenged Jim Crow, it challenged the deeply embedded caste system of American society. And it was successful! I will yield to no one in my outrage at the discriminations that still afflict Black Americans, but I am old enough to recall what this country was like in the '40s and '50s, and that change has been dramatic, transformative, and irreversible.

We may celebrate this change as the greatest progressive victory of the twentieth century, but to a large number of Americans, the change has been devastating, incomprehensible, and hateful. No longer can Whites at the bottom of the economic ladder console themselves, in the dark night of their souls, with the secret thought, AT LEAST I AM NOT BLACK.

Now add to these thoughts the fact that even now, half a century after the GI Bill, only 30% of adult Americans 25 and older have college degrees. For seventy percent of Americans, even such mediocre jobs as Elementary School teacher or WalMart store supervisor are closed to them because they do not have the college degree that the mass media comfortably assume is possessed by everyone who matters.

Into this world, stripped by the changes of the past half century of the comforting reassurance that at least I AM NOT BLACK, comes Barack Obama, who gets himself elected president in an election that not even a compliant Supreme Court can throw. Obama is the ultimate uppity Nigger, made infinitely more unbearable by his easy manner and insufferable good humor. By popular consensus, the President is the highest status person in America, regardless of politics. It is, to a great many Americans, deeply, unacceptably, offensively cognitively dissonant to see a Black man in the White House. It contradicts everything on which they have built whatever remains of their self-esteem.

Which brings me, at long last, to the question why so many right wing Republicans are prepared to throw their support to Gingrich, despite the polling evidence that he would stand no chance at all against Obama even in these terrible economic times. The answer, I suggest, is that this is their last desperate effort to see Obama -- and by extension, all the other uppity Blacks -- get what is coming to him -- to see him humiliated on the public stage, before all America, by a smart White man who takes no crap and is not afraid to say what they all think.

Now, it goes without saying that this is a mad, hopeless, pathetic fantasy. In the first place, Obama is smarter than Gingrich, and a good deal more knowledgeable. Secondly, so long as you retain your cool, which Obama is a master at doing, you never are destroyed, wiped out, put in your place, in a debate. That is simply not how Presidential debates work. Gingrich's pseudo-historical call for "Lincoln Douglas Debates" between himself and Obama is even dumber. Those debates consisted of a ninety-minute speech by one man followed by a thirty-minute rebuttal by the other. Before the first statement was a third done all America would be watching re-runs of "Two and a Half Men."

But despised for their lack of education, mocked for their religion, deprived of the last-ditch self-defense that AT LEAST I AM NOT BLACK, large numbers of White Americans have a deep, ineradicable need to see the iconic Black man put in his place by a White hero. And that need swamps all practical calculation, all tactical or strategic thinking, even mere self-preservation. If Obama wins in November, especially against Gingrich, a cry of despair will rise up from certain corners of White America that only the Rapture can allay. One almost wishes it for them, especially if they leave America to the rest of us, along with their dentures and prosthetic devices.

THANK YOU

2012-01-23T07:03:00.000-05:00

Thank you all for your kind wishes and thoughts. I shall try to return later today with some thoughts I have been [rather feverishly] turning over in my mind about the historical roots and meaning of the powerful sense of resentment and grievance on the right, and the reasons for their obsessive hatred of Obama.

AN APOLOGY

2012-01-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

I have been absent from this blog for a while, and I have also been very dilatory in responging to emails. This post is a general apology. I have just been through the worst five days of my life, and although life looks a good deal brighter now, I am still not able to function normally.

Last Wednesday, troubled by my inability to throw off what I thought was a bad flu, I went to the Same Day clinic at UNC Health Services, and was seen by a young Doctor Vance. After listening to my heart and lungs, he ordered some blood work, an ekg, and a chest x-ray. The blood work showed a slight anemia. The ekg was normal. But the chest x-ray revealed what is called a pleural effusion -- fluid in the bottom of my left lung. The next morning, Thursday, I went to the Pulomonary Clinic of UNC Memorial Hospital, where a young specialist named Dr. Bice hooked me up to a variety of monitors and inserted a catheter into my lung, withdrawing 360 ml of fluid. When he saw that the fluid was bloody, he said there was a 50% chance that I had lung cancer. He said he would order a CT scan, while the lab examined the fluid. My primary care physician, by phone, told me there was a 70% chance that I had stage 4 lung cancer, which is incurable. He started talking to me about making my remaining time as qualitatively valuable as possible.

I was devastated. I have spent my entire life protecting myself against stroke or heart attack by diet, exercise, and medication. I had before me always the image of my father, who died at 79 of emphysema, obese, alcoholic, and a chain smoker. I swore that I would not lead my final years as he had led his, and now it seemed I probably would not live even to be as old as he was when he died.

My entire world contracted sharply, so that it included only Susie, my two sons, my sister, and Susie's two sons, all of whom, especially Susie, were imm ediately supportive and helpful. Nothing else -- politics, philosophy, my blog -- mattered at all. I was numb -- not really with fear, but with a dead feeling. I even lost four pounds rather rapidly, apparently because I was not eating very much.

I waited all day Thursday for a call setting up the CT scan. On Friday, I called the pulmonary unit and was told that Dr. Bice had scheduled the scan for the following Friday! I was outraged. I desperately needed some definitive word on the cancer, even if it was, as I fully expected, bad news, so that I could start making plans to make sure that Susie would be taken care of. I told the secretary who informed me abou the appoitment that that date was unacceptable. She fussed a bit and said she had rescheduled it for Wednesday. Not good enough, I said, What about this afternoon [it was then about 3:45 p.m.] Well, she allowed, she would have to transfer me to the Radiology lab. Fine, I replied, do so. The Radiology lab said they could take me right then. By 4:00 p.m., Susie and I were sitting in Women's Hospital, where the Radiology lab is, waiting to be admitted. By 4:15 p.m., we were in the basement, waiting to be called. I had to wait for more than an hour, but then I went in and had a CT scan "with contrast" [they inject a fluid through an IV, which makes it easier to see things on the scan.] The med tech, who was very, very nice, told me that as an outpatient, I would be at the end of the line for reading the results, but that if my doctor called and asked, they would read the scan and give him the results. I had already called Dr DeWalt's secretary, while I was waiting for the scan, asking her to send him an email requesting that he get the results.

The next morning, at 6 a.m., I sent DeWalt an email, repeating the request. Later that monring, he called back. It seems that he had not only the CT scan results but also the results of the tests on the fluids. The results? NO SIGN OF ANY TUMORS ON THE CT SCAN, AND NO SIGN OF ANY CANCER CELLS IN THE FLUID. Dr. DeWalt said that they still did not know what was making me sick, and therefore cancer of some sort was still a possibility, but he agreed that stage 4 lung cancer seemed ruled out. There was also no sign in the CT scan of a pulmonary embolism [blood clot], a secondary possibility they were considering.

If I had not insisted on having the CT scan immediately, I would still right now, and until next Friday, be living with a diagnosis of incurable terminal cancer.

I am sure all of you will understand that everything else -- emails, inquiries about the Paris apartment, politics -- has simply not been on my mind.

I don't know what is wrong with me. I awoke this morning at 4:30 a.m. drenched in sweat. My body is fighting something, but it will be a while before the doctors figure out what, if indeed they ever figure it out.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION CONCLUSION

2012-01-16T15:04:00.003-05:00

Well, several days have gone by during which I mostly huddled under the covers and tried to stop the shivering brought on by this implacable flu. I think I am now sufficiently recovered to attempt the conclusion of my Appreciation of Mimesis.

The first passage of Chapter Two is an extended monologue placed by the author, Petronius, in the mouth of one of the guests at a feast being hosted by a parvenu businessman named Trimalchio. The passage is gossipy, circumstantial, full of detail about the backgrounds, pretensions, successes and failures of the other guests seated around the table. Very much in the manner to which we have become accustomed in modern novels, the speaker unconsciously reveals himself, and unintentionally places himself perfectly in the social and economic milieu of which the host, Trimalchio, is a prominent and successful example. [Compare the way in which Becky Sharp reveals herself through her narration in Thackeray's Vanity Fair.] The discourse is vulgar, chatty, and entirely interior to the scene the speaker is describing. The following passage by Auerbach gives some sense of the thrust of his analysis:

"Petronius does not say: This is so. Instead he lets an 'I,' who is identical neither with himself nor yet with the feigned narrator Encolpius, turn the spotlight of his perception on the company at table -- a highly artful procedure in perspective, a sort of twofold mirroring, which I dare not say is unique in antique literature as it has come down to us, but which is most unusual there. In outward form this procedure is certainly nothing new, for of course throughout antique literature characters speak of their experiences and impressions. But nowhere, except in this passage by Petronius, do we have, on the one hand, the most intense subjectivity, which is even heightened by individuality of language, and, on the other hand, an objective intent -- for the aim is an objective description of the company at table, including the speaker, through a subjective procedure."

But, Auerbach argues, the convention of the separation of styles makes it impossible for an author like Petronius to discuss anything serious, let alone tragic, concerning the sorts of characters who are attending Trimalchio's feast. They can only be the subject of comic portrayals, regardless of how accurate and penetrating Petronius' anatomization of their character flaws, aspirations, and social origins. What is even more interesting, to my way of thinking, Auerbach notes that although the world portrayed by Petronius is in constant turmoil, with some getting rich quickly, others just as quickly losing their fortunes and falling to the status of slaves, it is, from the point of view of modern social and economic theory, a static world. Individuals rise and fall, but Petronius has no sense of the deeper and longer acting social forces that might be transforming the entire social world, not merely the fortunes of this or that actor in that world.

The same is true of the next passage Auerbach considers, a speech by a rebellious member of the Roman legions by the Roman historian Tacitus. Because Tacitus is a great literary artist, the speech is powerful and effective as a set piece. But although the occasion for the speech is a moment of the greatest uncertainty in the young Roman empire -- namely, the death of the first Emperor, Augustus [the speaker, Percennius, is protesting the low wages, long service, and harsh treatment meted out to the common soldiers in the legions] -- Tacitus has no sense of or interest in moving historical forces that may bring about changes in the Empire.

After quoting two modern historians of ancient Rome, one of whom, Rostovtzeff, is one of my very favorite historiographers, Auerbach says: "what (both statements) express goes back to the same peculiarity of the ancients' way of viewing things; it does not see forces, it sees vices and virtues, successes and mistakes. ... an aristocratic reluctance to become involved with growth processes in the depths, for these processes are felt to be both vulgar and orgiastically lawless."

What Petronius and Tacitus lack, in common with the other Greek and Roman writers of antiquity, Auerbach suggests, is the idea of historical forces moving beneath the surface, forces of which Trimalchio's dinner party or Percennius' rebellious speech are merely symptoms or expressions. This is an idea with which we are now quite familiar, and in the novels of Stendhal or Tolstoi or indeed Austen, it finds expression either explicitly or by implication. We might imagine that it would be necessary to jump across many centuries to find a passage that shows us far-reaching forces beginning to stir beneath the surface. But Auerbach locates a passage contemporaneous with Petronius and Tacitus in which something very like this finds expression -- the passage in the Gospels in which the Apostle Peter thrice denies Jesus. Jesus, you will recall, has been arrested, and his disciples have been allowed to slip away undetained. But Peter follows Jesus and the officers to the high court, showing uncommon courage. Once there, he is challenged several times to admit that he is one of Jesus' group, and three times he denies that he is.

As Auerbach makes clear, this is a situation that simply could not be satisfactorily rendered by Greek or Latin authors. First of all, the participants -- Peter, a young woman who confronts him, the soldiers, indeed Jesus Himself -- are common people of the lowest social order, and the strict separation of styles forbids that anything tragic or momentous or of world-historical importance should be portrayed as involving them in any essential way. As Auerbach rather nicely puts it, "viewed superficially the thing is a police action and its consequences; it takes place entirely among everyday men and women of the common people; anything of the sort would be thought in antique terms only as farce or comedy." And yet, Peter's situation is of the most profound significance possible. What is more, this is the man on whom Jesus has chosen to found His church. This is St. Peter, the first Pope, the man from whom flowed an institution that transformed first the Roman Empire and then all of the Western world.

There is much, much more in Auerbach's analysis of the passage that I simply do not have the space or the energy to capture. But the central idea I want to leave you with is this: The thoroughly modern sociological/historical idea of deep-moving long-running social, economic, and political movements that transform a society -- the idea on which Marx's theories are built, and that finds expression as well in the writings of every great modern social theorist -- find their first primitive powerful expression in these New Testament passages. Originally, the transformations are metaphysical or theological, and are imposed from outside the social order by God -- the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection. But the violation of the principle of the Separation of Styles, the presentation of subterranean movements among the common people that will eventually burst forth into world-historical significance, the literary and conceptual possibility of a thoroughly secular deployment of these same ideas in the works of Marx and others -- all of this is prefigured in the New Testament two thousand years ago.

Well, that, I think, is enough to pique your interest in Auerbach. And that, after all, is the task of an Appreciation.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION PART THREE

2012-01-13T11:46:00.000-05:00

Auerbach invites us to contrast this with the terrifying story of God's commandment to sacrifice Isaac. The previous Chapter, Genesis 21, tells the story of the miracle by which the seventy-year old Sarah conceives, and bears Abraham a son, Isaac. This is not simply some story of domestic happiness. It is through Isaac that God will fulfill his promise to Abraham to make him to be fruitful and to multiply. Isaac is to be the son who founds a nation.

Genesis 22 begins abruptly and ominously.

"And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, [here] I [am].

²And he said, Take now thy son, thine only [son] Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of."

What on earth are we to make of this passage? Absolutely nothing in the preceding has prepared us for it. Auerbach's gloss is worth quoting at length [as is everything else in the book, alas.] "Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly." Note, the temptation is that Abraham, out of love for his only son, through whom the divine promise of multitudes will be fulfilled, might fail to obey God's command. As Auerbach says at the conclusion of the paragraph from which I have been quoting, "The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things."

Like God, Abraham's position, his location, is unspecified. Is he indoors, out of doors, alone, surrounded by his tribe? It seems not to matter. Nor are we given any details at all of the three day journey that brings him and his son to the place of sacrifice. Both God and Abraham are multi-dimensional. There is a foreground, what is presented in the story, and there are depths and complexities that cannot possibly be contained within any single account. God, of course, is a transcendent figure only a part of which can ever be presented to man. But Abraham too is more than merely a man with a son whom he loves. Abraham is a prophet, the father of nations. He plays a role in a metaphysical story that stretches from Creation to the End of Times.

As Auerbach says, "the relation of the Elohist to the truth of his story remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer's relation.... The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical -- it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historical true reality -- it insists that it is the only true world, is destined for autocracy.... The Scripture stories do not, like Homer's, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us -- they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels."

There is much, much more in Auerbach's analysis of these two passages in his opening chapter, but this is enough, I hope, to convey some sense of the richness and power of his treatment of them. Consider just the last point I quoted him as making. Any fair minded reader, I think, must agree that Homer's work is far better crafted, as a literary work of art, than the rather abrupt, jumbled together, barely sketched in narratives of Genesis. There are, to be sure, later Books of the Old Testament that achieve a higher level of literary art -- one thinks of Psalms, or The Book of Job, among others. But the account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, of Noah and his three sons, of the Tower of Babel, of Jacob and Esau [or of Cain and Abel] have the power to terrify us, to seize us by the scruff of the neck and shake us until we tremble, that nothing in Homer can match.

The key to Auerbach's analysis, he tells us in many different ways, is the relationship between the totally different conceptions of the structure of reality that underlie the two passages, and the language with which Homer and the Elohist tell their stories. What is not said in the Genesis story is as significant as what is said in the Odyssey.

As Auerbach proceeds, slowly and with enormous patience, through the entire sweep of the development of Western literature, we see the literary resources crafted by the writers of one era being carried forward and deployed in ever more complex fashion until, by the time he has reached the familiar terrain of the Nineteenth Century novel, we have some appreciation of how much lies beneath the surface in the novels of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust [the last chapter.]

Tomorrow I shall turn to Chapter Two of Mimesis, in which Auerbach contrasts two passages from First Century A.D. Rome -- one by the comic author Petronius, the other by the great Roman historian Tacitus -- with a passage from the Gospels written at roughly the same time. Once I have completed my account of what unfolds in that chapter, I shall leave off this hopeless task of trying to convey the many dimensions of Auerbach's great work, and leave it to you to explore the rest of it on your own.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION PART TWO

2012-01-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

I shall begin with the first chapter of the book, in which we encounter many of the themes and insights that characterize Auerbach's work. For the opening chapter, Auerbach chooses two very ancient texts, the first from the 8th century B.C., the other from the 6th century B.C. The first text is the famous "recognition" scene from the Odyssey. As you will recall [at least, I hope you will recall], at the end of the Trojan War, Odysseus sets out with his followers to return to Ithaca and his wife and son, but for one reason and another, it takes him ten years to complete the journey. He is presumed dead, and a number of suitors are vying for the hand of his widow, Penelope, and for Odysseus' wealth and position. Odysseus shows up at his home disguised as a wanderer, and is put in charge of a servant who was, when he was young, his nurse. She washes his feet and in a dramatic moment recognizes a scar on his leg as that of her old master, Odysseus. Odysseus warns her to remain silent about her discovery for the moment so that he can study the interactions between his wife and the band of importunate suitors.

This passage is paired by Auerbach with an equally famous passage from Genesis 22:1 in which God speaks to Abraham and commands him to make a sacrifice of his only begotten son, Isaac. [By the way, Kierkegaard has written an wonderful entire book about this story, but that is another matter.] Abraham obeys, and sets out to the place of sacrifice with Isaac, but at the last moment, as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, he sees a ram caught in the bushes, and substitutes it for his son.

These are equally dramatic passages, but they are treated linguistically by their authors, Auerbach argues, in utterly different ways that reveal to us the completely different conceptions of reality of the Homeric Greeks and the Old Testament Hebrews. It is very, very difficult to capture the subtlety and richness of Auerbach's discussion without resorting to endless lengthy quotes. The central points of his analysis of the Homeric passage, as I understand him, are these:

The scene "is scrupulously externalized and narrated in leisurely fashion... Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible." One of the key notions here is expressed by the word "externalized." We are these days [after the literary evolution that Mimesis is designed to explicate] accustomed to distinctions between the inner and outer, the visible and the hidden. The motivations of a character -- her hopes, desires, fears, beliefs, anticipations, understandings and misunderstandings -- may all be communicated by hints and nods, with revealing turns of phrase, as much by what is not said on the page as what is. But all of this is foreign to Homer. As Auerbach notes, even as Achilles and Hector fight to the death, they utter speeches that express their inner feelings. The key to the Recognition scene, the "McGuffin" as stage buffs would call it, is the old scar on Odysseus' leg. Once the maid, Euryclea, spots it, she knows that the stranger is her old master. A modern author would not want to slow down the action, or release the tension, by devoting line after line to an explanation of the origin of the scar. Either the modern author would prepare the way for the Recognition by inserting an account of the scar earlier in the text, so that the reader understands its significance instantaneously, or else such an author would leave the scar unexplained, relying on the reader to fill in the blanks. But Homer, Auerbach notes, enters into a complete and unhurried account of the hunting expedition on which Odysseus acquired the scar. The effect, deliberate, Auerbach is sure, is to drain the moment of its tension. In a Homeric text, all is on the surface, all is fully realized, all is externalized.

A LION IN THE CAPITOL [SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR ACT I SCENE 3]

2012-01-12T12:04:00.001-05:00

One of the standard literary tropes for conveying a breach in the social order is a violation of the natural order -- a lion walking in the Capitol, in Julius Caesar, for example. We are now witnessing a breach of the social order so violent, so unexpected, so incomprehensible that I fully expect to encounter lions lying down with lambs and peaches dropping from fig trees. Deeply conservative Republicans have started attacking venture capitalism as Vulture Capitalism, taking large ad buys to tell piteous stories of ordinary men and women who lost their jobs as a consequence of the wealth-amassing actions of predatory investors. I feel that to capitalize on this development, I must rush back into print my books on the thought of Karl Marx. Surely, Lady Gaga will soon record The Internationale and The Wall Street Journal will launch a serialization of The Communist Manifesto. If I had not tarnished my brand by announcing myself an anarchist as well as a Marxist, I could expect momentarily to be tapped for guest appearances on Fox News.

It is all very well to reply calmly that just as soon as the Republicans anoint Romney as their standard-bearer, they will cease this madness and return to celebrating "the free enterprise system," but as Dan Ackroyd can testify, it is not so easy to stuff the Pillsbury Doughboy back in his can once you have released him.

I am going to resist the temptation to pontificate about these developments. Maybe this is an unanticipated consequence of the Occupy Wall Street Movement; perhaps the zeitgeist has finally aligned itself with the stars. However that may be, the only thing to do in the short run is to relax and enjoy it. You may not see its like again in your lifetime.

ERICH AUERBACH MIMESIS: AN APPRECIATION PART ONE

2012-01-11T13:11:00.000-05:00

Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) was a German Jew trained in the German philological tradition. Forced to flee Germany, he spent the war years in Istanbul, where he wrote his greatest work, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. After the war, Auerbach came to the United States, where, from 1950 to his death, he was a professor at Yale.

Mimesis is a series of twenty chapters, organized chronologically, each of which is a separate essay, capable of standing alone. Each essay begins with an extended passage [in the original followed by a translation] from a work of the Judeo-Christian Graeco-Roman literary tradition, which Auerbach then subjects to an intense linguistic, literary, and philosophical analysis. The only exception to this pattern is in the earliest chapters, in which neither the Greek of the Odyssey, nor the Hebrew of the Old Testament nor the Aramaic of the New Testament is reproduced. In many, but not all, of the chapters, the initial passage is paired with a contrasting passage from the same period drawn from a very different literary/philological style.

The greatness of Mimesis is in the extraordinary detail of the several analyses, but there are certain overarching themes that it is good to be aware of as one reads through the book. The first, and most important, theme is the connection between the purely syntactic linguistic resources of the language being used by the author of the passage under examination and the nature of social reality that the author seeks to capture and communicate. Thus, for example, the extremely limited syntactic resources on which the author of the 12th century Chanson de Roland is able to draw results in [or perhaps, is paralleled by] the very blunt, un-nuanced representation of the motivation of Roland and the other characters of the Chanson. [Although the text is 12th century, and reflects the Chivalric ideals of the time, it refers, of course, to events that took place much earlier.] Two centuries later, when Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, he had available to him in early Italian extraordinarily rich syntactic devices that permitted him to capture the motivations and perceptions of a number of characters from different and even incompatible perspectives, all within the same sentences. When I speak of "syntactic devices," I mean such things as subordinate clauses, if-then constructions, manipulations of tense to capture complex temporal relations, and so forth.

This general idea of the relation between linguistic structures and conceptions of social reality is central to the first chapter of my little book, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, and I think it is fair to say that I was drawing heavily on what I learned from Auerbach when I wrote it, for all that I do not explicitly credit him. Drawing on the English Metaphysical Poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for inspiration, I argued that the rich use of irony and metaphor that distinguishes the early chapters of Capital were Marx's way of capturing the mystifications of social reality embodied in commodity production. The idea was that since Marx believed that social reality is genuinely mystified, even for theorists like himself who have intellectually penetrated that mystification, he needed a language that could at one and the same time convey the persuasiveness of the social surfaces -- of equal exchange in a free market, of workers as legally free partners in a wage bargain with capitalists -- and yet also capture the underlying reality of exploitation and the crippling distortion of the humanity of the workers. His highly inflected metaphors and endless literary references were not extraneous aesthetic embellishments of a story equally well capable of being told in plain English or German, but in fact the necessary literary devices for capturing the complex social reality.

A second theme that plays an important role, in the early chapters especially, is the distinction between high and low literary styles, paralleling the social distinctions of the milieu being represented. All of us are familiar with this distinction from Shakespeare's plays, in which a scene of the most intense seriousness, involving well-born characters, is followed by a scene of comic buffoonery involving peasants or servants or common soldiers. Auerbach demonstrates quite dramatically that one of the most powerful and revolutionary features of the texts of the New Testament is a mixture of high and low styles that would have been impossible either in the classical Greek literature or in the Roman literature of the first several centuries of this era.

In this Appreciation, it goes without saying that I shall not attempt to summarize, or even make reference to, all or most of the twenty essays. Rather, I shall focus on several, drawn principally from earliest portion of the book, to convey something of the complexity and penetration of Auerbach's discussion. As always, my goal is to entice you to seek out the book for yourselves.

BRIEF REPLIES TO COMMENTS

2012-01-11T06:50:00.000-05:00

First things first. Thank you all for your good wishes for my speedy recovery. I think I have turned the corner, and later today I am going to try to launch the Mimesis Appreciation.

GT, I will certainly have a go at explaining my anarchism. To be perfectly honest, that has not been at the center of my thoughts for half a century, but if Google is to be believed, it is, more than anything else, what I am known for, insofar as I am known at all. Perhaps after I finish the Auerbach, I will tackle your questions.

I just bought, through Amazon.com, a comfortable plush backrest, so I have been sitting propped up in bed watching the chaos of the Republican primary contest. Needless to say, life does not offer many idle pleasures quite like listening to Rick Perry condemning Mitt Romney for Vulture Capitalism. One needs the talents of a Jonathan Swift married to the ideological sensibility of a Karl Marx to strike the right tone.

MAJOR SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY, FIRST ANNOUNCED HERE

2012-01-09T14:49:00.000-05:00

When you are seventy-eight, it takes you longer to get over being sick. Who knew?

When my natural animal spirits return, I think I shall start an Appreciation of Erich Auerbach;s great work, Mimesis.

FLATTENED

2012-01-05T14:26:00.000-05:00

Forgive the lack of blog posts. I have been battling a debilitating flu since returning from Paris two weeks ago. It seems that when you are seventy-eight, you do not throw these things off as easily as when you are twenty-eight. Who knew?

MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY

2012-01-02T15:15:00.000-05:00

I have combined all the chapters of the three volumes of my Autobiography in a single file, which I am now slowly proof-reading and correcting. This will take a while -- the bloody thing is eight hundred pages long -- but when I am finally finished, I shall post the entire file on box.net, so that anyone interested in it need not download a chapter at a time.

Meanwhile, I must get ready for a conference in Seattle at which I shall be speaking next week. The conference is the third A. A. Berle Center conference, located in the law school of Seattle University, a Catholic university in Seattle. Most of the twenty speakers are professors of law, and the theme of the conference -- hardly surprising considering the Berle connection -- is The Theory of the Firm. Professor Charles O'Kelley, the Director of the Center, invited me to present my paper, "The Future of Socialism." I shall be very interested to see what sort of reception it gets. It will be a nice opportunity for Susie to see her son, Jon, his wife, and their two sons. Jon helps to run an organization called The Children's Alliance that has for some years now been doing very effective advocacy work on behalf of children's needs and interests. He also sits on the board of the local newspaper of Seattle's homeless.

NEW YEAR'S DAY MUSINGS

2012-01-01T14:30:00.000-05:00

I am not a great fan of New Year's Eves. It is many years since I actually stayed awake long enough to welcome a new year in. And the rare resolutions I do make, principally having to do with my weight, never coincide with a turnover in the calendar. Indeed, as I explained in the first Chapter of Volume One of my Autobiography, a lifetime in the Academy has so shaped my perception of time that I understand the year to run from September to September, rather than from December to December. Nevertheless, now that the maintenance of a blog is my principal occupation, I consider myself to have some responsibility to look back from January 1st and see whether I can identify anything in the past twelve months that is cause for hope,

For some time now, I have been taking a dour view of the prospects for social justice. My paper, "The Future of Socialism," despite its cheery title, is in fact a rather bleak assessment of my lifelong hopes for a socialist world. Like Herbert Marcuse in the Preface to One-Dimensional Man, I believe that useful social critique must arise out of actual progressive developments on the ground, and their absence in the past thirty or forty years has condemned me, Like Marcuse, to abstract intellectual analyses.

And yet, and yet -- there are developments in the past twelve months that suggest the possibility [I emphasize the possibility] of a rebirth of genuine progressive energies. I have in mind first the eruption of massive progressive protests in Wisconsin, Ohio, and elsewhere to the truly appalling efforts by newly elected Republican governors to kill what little remains of collective bargaining rights and basic democratic voting protections. There have been several dramatic victories -- the recall of two Republican state senators, the repeal of a newly enacted law. More important than the content of these victories has been the discovery by hundreds of thousands of progressive Americans that they are not alone, and that by joining forces, they can alter the nation, however marginally.

But far more important still is the sudden, unexpected eruption of the Occupy movement. This has the potential of being the most important political event in America of the past half century. What makes the Occupy movement so powerful is precisely its lack of specific, identifiable legislative or administrative goals. Unlike the protests in Wisconsin and Ohio, unlike the anti-war movement of the late 60's and early 70's, unlike the movements for Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation, indeed even unlike the great Civil Rights Movement itself, the Occupy movement takes as its target a deep structural evil in American economy and society so fundamental that there is no plausible Congressional legislation that could address it successfully. This is, I repeat, its strength, not its weakness. The Occupy movement cannot be co-opted because to change the distribution of wealth and income in America would require nothing less than a socio-economic revolution.

It is easy for me to imagine a positive outcome of the Wisconsin and Ohio protests -- the recall of Governor Walker, the recapture of the State Legislatures. But I cannot even imagine a believable positive outcome of the Occupy movement, short of a gut-wrenching change in the way the American economy is organized. I have no idea at all whether the Occupy protestors understand this, and it is certainly way too soon to imagine the protests morphing into a political movement with identifiable goals. But with a brilliant intuitive grasp of the underlying reality, the Occupiers resist either laying down a list of demands or allowing themselves to be recruited into a political campaign.

When one conjoins to these promising harbingers the extraordinary eruption of the Arab Spring across Northern Africa and into the Near and Middle East, it does seem that the calendar year 2011 gave us the first hope in a very long time of fundamental changes in world politics. I think that ought to be enough to justify a sliver of optimism

A SAD END

2012-01-01T08:12:00.001-05:00

In the end, there was nothing to be done. It turned out that little Christmas Eve had a large, cancerous, inoperable tumor in her abdomen that had already spread to her lymph nodes. On Friday, Susie and I spent some time with her, stroking her and talking to her, and then we took her to the vet, where very quickly and painlessly, as we stood there, she was put to sleep.

These past two days, when we return to our apartment, it seems barren and lonely. It is not a large apartment -- 1500 square feet, more or less -- but she was, at her best, only ten pounds, and she took up very little space. Indeed, truth to tell, we sometimes had to go searching for her to find where she had settled down -- under the bed, under a chest, in a closet, on a chair.

It is much too soon to think about getting another cat. She was found up a tree in Amherst, Massachusetts, on Christmas Eve, seventeen years ago [hence the name]. We offered to look after her for the weekend, and she never left.

I understand that it is odd for two mature, sophisticated adults to lavish so much emotion on a little black and brown long-haired cat, but there it is. We shall miss her greatly.

KIERKEGAARD'S PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS: AN APPRECIATION CONCLUSION

2011-12-30T14:21:00.000-05:00

What Kierkegaard and Dickenson had in common was an intense arrogance that scorned the customary recognitions and awards of the literary or philosophical world. "I am nobody" means, among other things, "No recognition of my poetry in Springfield newspapers or even Boston literary journals can possibly do justice to my poems, which exist in entirely a different aesthetic realm. Hence I am nobody, as the authors of those recognitions estimate, and they are nobody so far as I am concerned." So Kierkegaard rejects any suggestion that he is part of the contemporary philosophical movement, not even as "absolute trumpeter." The ambitious, mediocre philosophers who aspire to be recognized in that fashion are so far beneath him, he feels, that it would be absurd for him to try to set himself in competition with them. After a good day's work at the office, they go home to their comfortable homes to drink beer, sit by the fire, and read the latest issue of a philosophical journal, while he remain alone, unacknowledged, engaged with his entire being in the perilous, vertiginous contemplation of eternity. [Whenever I read the line about "absolute trumpeter," I think of Nanki Poo, the hero of Gilbert and Sullivan's finest light opera, The Mikado, who, though the son of the Mikado, has chosen to wander incognito as "second trombone in a traveling band."]

Very quickly, the mocking tone of the opening lines of the Preface turns darker, more urgent. "It is not given to everyone to have his private tasks of meditation and reflection so happily coincident with the public interest that it becomes difficult to judge how far he serves merely himself and how far the public good," Kierkegaard writes. "Consider the example of Archimedes, who sat unperturbed in the contemplation of his circles while Syracuse was being taken, and the beautiful words he spoke to the Roman soldier who slew him: nolite perturbare circulos meos. [Do not disturb my circles.]" Contemplating the eternal, Archimedes -- and Kierkegaard, of course -- is concerned not for his life but only for the beauty and eternal truth of the object of his contemplation, which for Archimedes is the truths of mathematics, and for Kierkegaard the truths of Christianity.

Every sentence of the Preface invokes yet another image, from ancient philosophy, from contemporary literature, from Hegelian philosophy, mocking, comic, hyperbolic, all in the service of Kierkegaard's desperate effort to distinguish himself from the quotidian academic philosophizing that dominated the intellectual and literary circles around him. "But what is my personal opinion of the matters herein discussed?," he asks. "I could wish that no one would ask me this question; for next to knowing whether I have an opinion, nothing could very well be of less importance than the knowledge of what that opinion might be. To have an opinion is both too much and too little for my uses. To have an opinion presupposes a sense of ease and security in life, such as implied in having a wife and children; it is a privilege not to be enjoyed by one who must keep himself in readiness night and day, or is without assured means of support."

This passage conjures, with bitter irony, the image of a comfortable burgher who sits drinking beer with his fellow merchants after a long day at the counting house, puffing on a pipe and genially exchanging opinions about the latest article in the Allgemeine Tageblatte. It invokes in modern dress the old Christian monastic tradition of the servant of God who eschews all worldly attachments -- home, family, children, comfort -- in order to be ready at a moment's notice for the Divine call.

Kierkegaard ends the Preface with an image taken from the late Middle Ages -- the Dance of Death. [One can find a fascinating account of this image in the greatest work of Kierkegaard's fellow student, Jacob Burckhardt. Those who have a taste for classic films will recognized it from the concluding scenes of Ingmar Bergman's great film, "The Seventh Seal."] In the middle of the fourteenth century, the Black Plague afflicted Europe, killing upwards of half the people alive at the time. Among the many visual and literary artistic responses to this horrific calamity was the image of the "dance of death" [or danse macabre], figured as a chain of mortals linked hand to hand and led in a grotesque and deadly dance by a skeleton who was Death himself. The final passage of the Preface invokes this terrible image in one of the most powerful passages in all of Philosophy:

"I have only my life, and the instant a difficulty offers I put it in play. Then the dance goes merrily, for my partner is the thought of Death, and is indeed a nimble dancer; every human being, on the other hand, is too heavy for me. Therefore I pray, per deos obsecro [I abjure you by the Gods]: Let no one invite me, for I will not dance."

Read that passage again, and think about what it says. No one -- not Plato, with his brilliant description in the Gorgias of "whispering in a corner with a few boys," or St. Augustine in the Confessions, or Kant or Spinoza or Hegel or even, dare I say, Nietzsche -- has ever expressed with such existential intensity the soul-consuming commitment to the search for truth.

Since this is an Appreciation, and not even a mini-tutorial, I shall not try to summarize the complex argument that unfolds in the Fragments. My purpose is only to encourage you to take the book up and read it for yourselves. But I will sketch the central argument that Kierkegaard unfolds from the contrast between Socrates and Jesus. The moral truth Socrates seeks to lead his pupils to is, he believes, already to be found within them. Hence he characterizes himself [also with complex irony] as merely a midwife, who is himself barren [of truth] but can assist at the birth of truth in his pupils [and also kill malformed offspring when they appear with a sharp pointed argument]. It follows that the historical reality of Socrates is of no importance whatsoever. Were he merely the brilliant literary creation of Plato -- indeed, were Plato himself merely the literary creation of some twelfth century monk -- nothing of any significance would have been lost.

But salvation, in the Christian story, absolutely requires that at a moment in time, the infinite became finite, thus miraculously bridging an unbridgeable chasm, and by that miracle of the Incarnation, making available to Man a Truth that could Man himself could never have plucked from his own mind. Not too long before Kierkegaard wrote the Fragments, David Strauss had published The Life of Jesus [Das Leben Jesu], which caused a sensation through the German speaking world by bringing the new scientific techniques of historiography to bear on the Bible stories of Jesus. In what can only be viewed as a direct reply to Strauss, Kierkegaard conjures the lovely philosophical/literary conceit of "the case of the contemporary disciple" [Section iv of the Fragments.] We [i.e. Kierkegaard and his readers] have come upon the scene too late to have met the historical Jesus, but there were, after all, men and women who walked with Him, had the dust from His sandals fall on their feet, touched the hem of His robe, listened to the Sermon on the Mount, and even, like Doubting Thomas, thrust their fingers into His wounds to prove that they were real. Were these fortunate few any closer to the Savior than we who seek, 1843 years later, to reach out to Him? No, Kierkegaard says, for it is not Jesus the man who offers salvation, but Jesus the Son of God, and there was an infinity between Him and the contemporary disciples, as there is between Him and us.

Well, I hope I have said enough to pique your curiosity, whet your interest, make it seem worthwhile to seek out and read this luminous book. As you will have discerned from my enthusiasm, it is not necessary to be a believer to find in its pages pleasure and enlightenment.

This is my first Appreciation.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT

2011-12-29T17:22:00.000-05:00

Our cat is very sick, and we spent a good deal of time at the vet, so it will be at least tomorrow before I can continue my Appreciation of the Fragments. It is difficult to believe that two seventy-eight year olds invest so much emotion in an 8 1/2 pound cat.

KIERKEGAARD'S PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS: AN APPRECIATION PART ONE

2011-12-28T15:22:00.000-05:00

I begin today a series of brief, subjective discussions of individual works that I have chosen to call "Appreciations." These Appreciations will differ from my tutorials, mini-tutorials, and micro-tutorials in several ways. First, they will be short [or so I intend -- once I get started, I never know how much I will have to say.] Second, they are intended in no way at all as definitive or scholarly or even as exhibiting a modest level of expertise. My goal is to call your attention to books that I have found interesting, provocative, or beautifully written. By writing and posting these Appreciations, I presume on the relationship I hope I have established with you over the past several years. I am allowing myself the flattering belief that you have acquired sufficient confidence in me to think it worth your time to read these Appreciations, and perhaps even to follow my suggestion that you explore the works for yourselves.

The maintenance of a blog has been, for me, a welcome and enjoyable continuation of my life-long commitment to teaching, which is, I now recognize, my true calling [rather than Philosophy or political action, to which I have devoted, in the course of a long life, a good deal of time and attention.]

Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen in 1813 and died a scant forty-two years later, in 1855, having in that short life produced a very large and brilliant corpus of works, many published under pseudonyms. Although he fell deeply in love with Regina Olsen and was for a while engaged to her, he broke off the engagement and spent his entire life single. Kierkegaard is one of the most complex literary and intellectual figures of the entire Western tradition, and I am quite incompetent to offer even a brief general characterization of his life and work that is accurate and useful. In their intensity, inwardness, intellectual brilliance, and scholarly allusions and disquisitions, his works show him to be a powerful figure of the Romantic Movement then sweeping European letters. As I am sure all of you know, Kierkegaard is now considered the father of the philosophical school or movement known as Existentialism. One fact, selected from his life, is worth mentioning for its ability to astonish and impress, even though it is not centrally related to what I shall be saying. In 1841, as a student at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard attended Schelling's lectures on irony. In the same audience were three other students: Mikhail Bakunin, Jacob Burckhardt, and Friedrich Engels. What I wouldn't give for a class like that! [That reminds me -- maybe down the road, I should do an Appreciation of Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, and of Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Oh well, we shall see.]

The Philosophical Fragments were published in 1844 under the pseudonym "Johannes Climacus." It is a very brief work, barely 93 pages long in the Swenson translation to which I shall be referring. To understand the Fragments, it is important to know what Kierkegaard was writing against, the intellectual, religious, and cultural context of the work. There are three elements of that context about which I must say something: The influence in German philosophy of Hegel, the intensely subjective form of Protestant Christianity in which Kierkegaard was raised, and the bourgeois culture that by the 1840's dominated Northern Europe. Each of these plays a central role in Kierkegaard's passionate discourse in the Fragments.

Hegel was the author of large, impressive works of philosophy, which taken together comprised a System that purported to account for, and make a place for, Everything. His followers in the Northern European academic world were prone to multi-volume works with important titles. The emphasis was on the objective, the "scientific" [i.e., wissenschaftlich -- a German world that does not really translate very successfully as "scientific" because it applies to Philosophy, History, and the study of society as well as to the study of nature. "Rational and systematic" might be a better rendering.] Kierkegaard was affronted by the empty pomposity of this style of pontificating, and with bitter irony counterpoised to it his inward, desperately private meditations on the deepest problems of the human condition. So, for example, two years after the Fragments appeared, he published a very long, dense, serious work of philosophy to which he gave the mocking title, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. I rather like the idea of a 540 page "postscript" to a 93 page book. Kierkegaard also rejected the Hegelian emphasis on universal essences, choosing instead to present a focused reflection on what it meant to exist as a single human being presented with the awful fact of impending death and the impossible hope of eternal salvation. Hence "Existentialism" as contrasted with "Essentialism."

Like many other late sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century European thinkers, Kierkegaard was thoroughly consumed by the terrors and glimmers of hope offered by the least ecclesiastical and most individualistic forms of Protestantism. Those of you who read my mini-tutorial on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism will recall the anxious religiosity of serious old-fashioned Protestantism, with its emphases on sin, damnation, predestination, and the hope of salvation. In the work before us, Kierkegaard takes the key terms and concepts of this religious faith and reinterprets them brilliantly in a series of tours de force. The Fragments is first and foremost a meditation on Christianity -- to my atheist sensibilities, the most brilliant such meditation in the Christian tradition. [That is one reason why I love the book so much.]

Finally, Kierkegaard was reacting to what he perceived as the soulless, smug, bourgeois religiosity of Danish society. With a penetrating wit that reminds one of the cartoons of American caricaturist Thomas Nast, Kierkegaard mocks and lampoons the comfortable burghers of Copenhagen, with whom he contrasts himself, poor, unfashionable, awkward, utterly without redeeming social value, and yet engaged with his entire being in a struggle with faith and salvation.

The Fragments presents itself as an attempt to answer a simple question, which is posed in the first sentence of Chapter I: "How far does the Truth admit of being learned?" In five brief chapters, including an "Interlude" between Chapters IV and V, Kierkegaard pursues the answer by means of an extended contrast between Socrates, whom he figures as the greatest Teacher in history, and Jesus, who is uniquely the Savior. But before he launches his investigation, he writes a three page Preface to which we must pay particular attention, inasmuch as it is, in my judgment, the most brilliant and moving three pages in the entire corpus of Western Philosophy.

The Preface opens with these words: "The present offering is merely a piece, proprio Marte, propriis auspiciis, proprio stipendio ["on its own errand, under its own auspices, for its own sake."] It does not make the slightest pretension to share in the philosophical movement of the day, or to fill any of the various roles customarily assigned in this connection: transitional, intermediary, final, preparatory, participating, collaborating, volunteer follower, hero, or at any rate relative hero, or at the very least absolute trumpeter." These words always put me in mind of the brief Emily Dickenson poem that I used as one of the epigraphs of my Autobiography:

I am nobody

who are you

are you nobody too?

Then there's a pair of us

shh don't tell

they'd banish us you know

How dismal to be somebody

how dismal like a frog

to tell your name the live long day

to an admiring bog

Well, this is going to go on a trifle longer than I anticipated. More tomorrow.

OUTVOTED

2011-12-27T06:37:00.002-05:00

Well, it seems that I am outvoted on the issue of anonymity, so I shall withdraw my objections to the practice, and henceforth allow comments on this blog regardless of tone or content. But before I drop the subject completely, I would like to say a bit more about it by way of explanation. I think we may have here a generational conflict of the sort that often happens.

For much of my life, I was a tenured professor, protected both with regard to my job and my salary regardless of what views I might express. I was awarded tenure by Columbia University in 1964, and from then until I retired in 2008, I was tenured at one university or another. I enjoyed great freedom to teach what and as I wished, and was rewarded with steadily rising salaries. To be sure, there were occasions on which my political opinions cost me jobs. The Presidents of Hunter College, Brandeis University, and Boston University vetoed job offers that at the time I very much wanted to accept, because of my politics, but I still had a secure job with tenure, so it was easy for me to say that the loss was theirs rather than mine.

But I have not always been a tenured professor, though it may seem that way. In 1951, when I stood up and argued aggressively with a senior professor in a course on Hume's Treatise, I was a seventeen year old sophomore, aware that my pugnaciousness could affect my academic career. Later that year, I wrote a letter to the college newspaper calling on the President of the university to resign because of his stated unwillingness to hire members of the Communist Party as professors. As a very junior Instructor, I took unpopular political positions publically, earning me the enmity of powerful and important people in the Harvard community. Shortly thereafter, as an untenured Assistant Professor at Chicago, I joined with more senior colleagues in an attack on the University President over his support for discriminatory rental policies in college owned housing.

On these and many other occasions, my principal concern was that I be heard, and that it be known that it was I who was giving voice to the opinions. A suggestion to express those opinions anonymously would have struck me as incomprehensible. Indeed, that would have defeated the purpose of the expression.

These days, the public expression of one's opinions is virtually free and easily available to all. This blog exists courtesy of Google, which charges me nothing. Even box.net, where I post my essays, tutorials, and other materials, is free [although there is a deluxe version that costs something.] FaceBook and Twitter are also free, I gather, though I do not use either [limit myself to 140 characters? Please!]

And yet, the practice of anonymous public expression seems to have metastisized into a cultural norm. Now, I have read enough Anthropology to be aware of the great variety in cultural norms, so I think I must put this entire disagreement down to yet another old man grumpily complaining about the strange behavior of young folks.

So be it. Comment away!

COME OUT, COME OUT, WHEREVER YOU ARE

2011-12-25T12:39:00.000-05:00

I have said this before, and I will say it again. When you get up the courage to come out from behind your pseudonym and identify yourself by your real name, I will allow you onto this blog, whether you agree with me or not. But I do not like cowards, and I do not waste my time responding to them. So come down off your high horse and tell us all whom you are.

JET-LAGGED

2011-12-25T08:56:00.000-05:00

Susie and I returned home last night at 11:30 p.m., massively jet-lagged and exhausted after a trip made much more difficult by Continental Airlines [never again!] Jim, who tells us that his birthday is on Christmas Day, asks about our willingness to leave our cat, Christmas Eve. By the way, Jim, I assume that you spent your entire childhood convinced, no matter what anyone said, that you did not get as many presents as you would have received had you been born in June. I suppose young Jesus felt the same way, except of course that anytime he was born would have been Christmas. We have a wonderful pet-sitter, Eric Bradeson, who comes in every other day, feeds her, and gives her her subcutaneous infusions because of her renal failure. This time, despite Eric's ministrations [he actually called us in Paris to discuss the problem], Christmas Eve had lost a lot of weight, which stressed Susie and me no end.

The big political news is that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry failed to get the 10,000 signatures required to put them on the Virginia Primary ballot. I think this means that Gingrich is toast, not so much because of the inability to accumulate any delegates in Virgina, but because it demonstrates that he in fact has no real campaign organization. [By comparison, the folks seeking to recall Governor Walker have alrerady paassed the 500,000 mark in signatures with plenty of time to go.] What with Ron Paul's appalling racism, homophobia, and conspiracy mongering now getting the attention it deserves, this may in fact mean that the Republicans are stuck with their strongest candidate, Romney. I wait to see whether this will trigger a serious third party move.

Can it be that Gingrich's campaign really was, all along, no more than an adjunct to his book tour?

I reach my seventy-eighth birthday in two days, so it will be a bit before I begin the first Appreciation, devoted to Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. However, I passed the time on the long flight [when I was not watching the Mia Wassikowska Michael Fassbender Jane Eyre] starting to write the Appreciation in my head. so I should be ready to go in a couple of days.

Merry Christmas all.

AND HOME AGAIN

2011-12-24T00:30:00.000-05:00

The fridge is cleaned out, the bags are packed, and in a short while we shall catch a cab to Charles de Gaulle Aerogare and fly home to Chapel Hill [via Boston and Washington Dulles, of course.] It will be day or two before I am sufficiently un-jet-lagged to continue posting, at which point I shall launch my series of Appreciations with a discussion of Kierkegaard's brilliant short work, The Philosophical Fragments. I must also prepare for an appearance at the Third A. A. Berle Conference at the Law School of Seattle University, but more of that anon.

a bientot.

SWIFT'S TURING MACHINE

2011-12-23T05:40:00.000-05:00

Herewith as passage from Book II, Chapter III of Gulliver's Travels, the voyage to Brobdingnag, wherein Swift anticipates Alan Turing's famous thought experiment. I especially like the use of "although" in the first sentence!

"The king, although he be as learned a person as any in his dominions, had been educated in the study of philosophy, and particularly mathematics; yet when he observed my shape exactly, and saw me walk erect, before I began to speak, conceived I might be a piece of clock-work (which is in that country arrived to a very great perfection) contrived by some ingenious artist. But when he heard my voice, and found what I delivered to be regular and rational, he could not conceal his astonishment. He was by no means satisfied with the relation I gave him of the manner I came into his kingdom, but thought it a story concerted between Glumdalclitch and her father, who had taught me a set of words to make me sell at a better price. Upon this imagination, he put several other questions to me, and still received rational answers: no otherwise defective than by a foreign accent, and an imperfect knowledge in the language, with some rustic phrases which I had learned at the farmer's house, and did not suit the polite style of a court."

ANTICIPATIONS

2011-12-21T13:02:00.002-05:00

I have decided to begin a series of "Appreciations" of selected texts when I return home, where my books are [save, of course, for my complete set of the works of Marx and Engels in German, and my collected books on the philosophy of Kant, both of which grace my shelves here in Paris, together with one copy each of every edition and translation of every book I have published -- roughly seventy volumes in all]. I think I will start with Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments. The brief Preface to that short work is, page for page, my favorite work of philosophy in the entire Western corpus. I cannot read the last lines of it without tears coming to my eyes. I shall try to do Appreciations of all of the titles listed recently on this blog, and then perhaps some others besides. We shall see. The aim is not to produce scholarly discussions of the texts -- in many instances, I am utterly unfit to attempt such a thing -- but rather to encourage my readers to explore these works for themselves.

It was my older son, Patrick, the famous International Chess Grandmaster, who first suggested that I try my hand at a blog. It was an inspired suggestion. I have found the perfect format in which to continue my lifelong career as a teacher, while in retirement [or "en retrait," as the French say, which is to say, "In retreat"!]

PRACTICALITIES

2011-12-20T09:46:00.003-05:00

The last two days have been consumed by practical problems that absorbed my attention. First, I had to negotiate some repairs to Susie's Segway, which had stopped working during our absence [it seems the "charger" was kaput -- very expensive repair, as is everything to a Segway]. Then, I had to order and take delivery of a new refrigerator, unpack the new one, extract the old one, install the new one, and arrange [with the assistance of the lovely lady in the hotel next door] for the old one to be picked up by the city from the front of our building. All of this in French, much of it over the phone. I learned long ago that stress takes its toll on me, and managing such things in French is, for me, very high stress indeed.

While I wasn't paying attention, Newt Gingrich has apparently started to crater. Enter Ron Paul, the only honest man in the Republican zoo, for all that he wants to return to the sixteenth century. You cannot hate a man who inveighs against American military adventures and supports legalizing marijuana, even if he does think that sick people who have neglected to buy health insurance should be left to die at the hospital door.

I have been invited to visit with the Occupy Chapel Hill folks, and will of course do so as soon as I return to America. I have also been invited by an ebulliant second year student to speak at Balliol College, Oxford, and if Susie and I can work out the combination of a direct flight to Heathrow and the Chunnel train to Paris, I hope to do so in April. At the moment, while working my way slowly through Gulliver's Travels, which continues to delight, I am starting to read the papers for a conference on law and the corporation that will be held in January at the A. A. Berle Center, in the law school of Seattle University. I am delivering my paper entitled "The Future of Socialism," and judging from the program of paper titles, which I have just received, I am afraid I am going to stand out like a skunk in a flower garden. By way of contrast, yesterday I picked up a copy of a special Le Monde supplement devoted to the thought of Karl Marx. It is hard to imagine the NY TIMES doing such a supplement to the Sunday edition. Needless to say, the one American represented in the 122 page booklet is Frederick Jameson. Oh well.

Yesterday evening, we tried a Chinese restaurant touted as one of the best in Paris. Despite the fact that we were the sole non-Orientals in the establishment, the food was not as good as can be had in Amherst, MA or Chapel Hill, NC. I have long been fascinated by the relationship between the imperial adventues of European nations and the ethnic food available in their capital cities. How surprising is it that one can get great Indian food in London, or first-rate Vietnamese food in Paris -- or, indeed, great Chinese food in New York and San Francisco?

This evening, I shall once again prepare cuisses de canard, cooked for several hours in a slow oven. Even the rainy weather cannot cast a pall over the charms of Paris.

AN INTERESTING LINK

2011-12-19T07:10:00.002-05:00

http://affordableworldsecurity.org/,

This link [which I cannot seem to make a genuine link -- copy and paste it] will take you to a new website created by my old Harvard colleague William Polk, a distinguished progressive expert on diplomatic and international affairs. A series of working papers will be posted on the site that you may find useful.

"APPRECIATIONS"

2011-12-17T12:11:00.002-05:00

I have been rather taken with the idea of launching a series of what I will call Appreciations -- which is to say, not tutorials, or mini-tutorials, or even micro-tutorials, but rather subjective discussions of a number of boks that I have, over the years, found especially rewarding. There would be no suggestion of expertise on my part, simply a sharing with all of you of my appreciation of some texts. If that strikes you all as a good idea, I will undertake some of them when I return to Chapel Hill in a week's time.

Here are some of the titles that have occurred to me as candidates for the Appreciations:

Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Every-day Life
Paul Goodman, Empire City
C. I. Lewis, Mind and the World Order
Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long
e. e. cummings, Collected Poems
Plato, Gorgias
William Golding, The Inheritors
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis

What do you think?

A RESPONSE TO SOME COMMENTS

2011-12-17T07:58:00.002-05:00

It is a lazy Saturday afternoon here in Paris, and I have some time now to respond to a few of the comments that have been piling up on my various posts. Marinus offers some interesting thoughts about Swift, and in particular about the Fourth Book, concerning Gulliver’s travel to the land of the Yahoos and Houyhnhnms. What he says strikes me as quite plausible, but I shall hold off commenting until I have re-read it. I must say up front, however, that I am no sort of literary critic, and my opinion will be of corresponding value.

Scaling Factor asks me to say something about Christopher Hitchens, who died the day before yesterday at the age of 62, after a long struggle with cancer. I never met Hitchens, and so cannot reminisce about him as have many of the people who were his friends or colleagues. His death has occasioned a re-posting of some of his most acerbic and brilliant disquisitions, including one memorable take-down of Mother Teresa. What follows is rather a free-form meander through the undergrowth of my mind, and is offered not as a comment on Hitchens but as a bit of shameless self-revelation.

My only contact with Hitchens came some years ago when, out of the blue, I received a letter from him asking me for a copy of or reference to my review of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind. I have already described the review on this blog, so I shan’t repeat what I said. The review, despite appearing in a rather obscure publication [the house organ of the American Association of University Professors] became something of a cult classic.

As I thought about Hitchens’ early death, a line came to mind: ”Only the good die young.” I mistakenly thought that it was a line from John Dryden’s great poem, Alexander’s Feast, written to be set to music in honor of St. Cecelia. Google informed me, to my horror, that it is actually the title of a Billy Joel hit song [I am barely marginally aware of who Billy Joel is, or was.] But this bit of failed memory put me in mind of a line that I had long cherished from Gregory of Tours’ great sixth century work, The History of the Franks. [For those who have not read Gregory lately – hem, hem – I will just note that this long, rambling, circumstantial account of the doings of the godawful fifth and sixth century Franks is our best, and in some cases only, source of information abut the Merovingian dynasty that flourished after the fall of the Western half of the Roman Empire and before the advent of Charlemagne, whose coronation on Christmas Day, 800 A. D. inaugurated the relatively glorious Carolingian period and eventually bestowed on Europe the Holy Roman Empire.] The line, as I recalled it, came at the end of Gregory’s narration of the appalling doings of a particularly sadistic, brutal, amoral Frankish Count, who swashbuckled his way across one bit of Middle Europe for an unconscionably long time. Gregory, who was a Bishop and always on the lookout for evidences of God’s mercy and justice, concluded his account of this malefactor by remarking [or so I remembered it] that “he died in his bed at the age of eighty-four, and so God’s divine justice was once more proved.” What I loved was of course the notion that in a society that regularly cut people off in their twenties and thirties, an evil man dying in bed in his eighties could be construed as an example of divine retribution.

By a natural process of association, this led me to think of more recent deservers of divine punishment, like Dick Cheney, who has survived three or four heart attacks and yet still lives. “Only the good die young.” Like Hitchens, I am quite sure there is no God, but I would appreciate from time to time to see some sort of balance in nature’s allocation of long life.

Well, I thought that if I were going to blog about Gregory’s pious utterance, I ought first to find it. Naturally, The History of the Franks is online [what is not?], and I spent quite a long time speed-reading all ten books, without, alas, turning up the remembered quote.

C. Rossi asks for a tutorial on Erving Goffman. I think I will do that, after I return home, where my copies of Goffman’s books are located. It will not really be a tutorial, a term that surely implies I have something to teach. Perhaps I should start a separate series called “Appreciations,” whose purpose is simply to recommend to my readers books that I have found especially suggestive or enlightening.

As for a tutorial on W. E. B. Du Bois, I think my lengthy tutorial on Afro-American Studies has pretty well done that – available on box.net.

Which brings me finally to High Arka. For some time now, this person has been hiding behind a web-handle and posting abusive comments about me on this site. A little investigation reveals that he [it is a he] has his own web site. To this person, I say: Either come out of hiding and identify yourself, or retire to your own website and say anything you please. I think it is cowardly of you to conceal yourself, and I am not amused. So if you insist on remaining anonymous, then just go away.

SWIFTBOATING

2011-12-16T05:33:00.000-05:00

A number of persons have posted comments on this blog that call for responses from me, which I hope to provide today or tomorrow. John S. Wilkins suggests that I try my hand at a satire, but I must confess that re-reading Gulliver’s Travels does not encourage me in that direction, any more than listening to Itzhak Perlman inspires in me a desire to play the violin! If there are any among you who have not read Gulliver’s Travels, or perhaps have forgotten much of the detail, as I had, let me remind you of the central conceit in the first two books. Swift very carefully works out the contrast between Gulliver and the Lilliputians on the one hand and the Brobdingagians on the other. Lemuel Gulliver is twelve times as large as a man of Lilliput, and one-twelfth the size of a man of Brobdingnag. Thus, the Lilliputians appear tiny, precious, lovely, and exquisite to Gulliver, but also small and petty. The Brobdingnagians appear large and gross and ugly to him – the pores of their skin are so large that they seem like great holes – but also as generous, great-hearted, and large-spirited. The Lilliputians, recall, are torn by a religious dispute, as violent and irreconcilable as that between Catholics and Protestants in England, over the question whether a soft-boiled egg should be cracked open at its big end or its little end. The king of the Lilliputians is six inches tall, of course. Here is how he is described in the Preamble to a Proclamation declaring the conditions under which Gulliver is to be set free:

“Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue, most mighty Emperor of Lilliput, delight and terror of the universe, whose dominions extend five thousand BLUSTRUGS (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter:”

There is one odd error in Swift’s text, which could be deliberate, but perhaps not. The Lilliputians are ordered by the king to provide Gulliver with 1724 times as much food each day as one of their number would consume, and Gulliver, the narrator, explains to the reader that this reflects the precision and advanced state of Lilliputian mathematics. But twelve cubed is of course 1728, not 1724. Is there a scholar of eighteenth century English literatgure out there with some wisdom on this minor matter?

Well, if I were to reproduce all of the deliciously funny satirical passages in which Swift ridicules the English monarchy, I would, I fear, be reduced to copying out the entirety of Book One.

THE OLD WAYS ARE BEST

2011-12-15T11:22:00.002-05:00

Having finished the new John Grisham novel, and having then re-read an old one on the shelves in my Paris apartment, I was casting about for something else with which to pass the time. I toyed with the idea of improving my French by continuing to read Marx's CAPITAL in the French translation [I am at the moment on page 141] when it occurred to me that it might be fun to re-visit GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. I read it more than sixty years ago, as a boy, and though I recall a good deal of the story [who cannot?], and know in a general way that it is a biting satire of English life and politics in the 18th century, I did not have the language in my head.

Sure enough, it is available on-line, and I have now started reading it on my Paris laptop. I am only a few pages into Book One -- Gulliver has awakened to find himself tied down by the slender threads of the Liliputians -- but already, the wit and acerbity of the satire is a delight. In these absurd and dangerous times, when reality threatens to make satire impossible, it is good to return to one of the immortal masters of the genre.

At seventy-eight, I have long since put aside my youthful dreams of a just and rational society. But if I cannot change the world, I can at least in my mind expose the follies and evils that flourish these days.

SHAKESPEARE AND CO.

2011-12-15T05:11:00.001-05:00

In his comment on yesterday’s post, Jim reported that George Whitman, owner of the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Co., had just died at the age of ninety-eight. I checked the NY TIMES, and found the story on the front page. Today, I shall walk over [it is only a few blocks from my apartment] and see whether any sort of commemoration is planned. Rather than repeat the famous stories of the great literary figures who gathered there in the early days – Hemingway, Joyce, et al. – I thought I would tell a story or two about my experiences at the bookshop fifty-six years ago, when I was traveling around Europe as a young student on a Frederick L. Sheldon Traveling Fellowship from Harvard.

My wanderjahr, as I have recounted in Volume One of my Autobiography, started in the summer of 1954, shortly after I completed my preliminary work for the doctorate, and lasted until well into the summer of 1955, at which point I returned home to write my dissertation. After time in Oxford, Rome, Geneva, and Berlin, I made my way to Paris in April of 1955, planning to meet my undergraduate friend and fellow madrigalist Mike Jorrin, who was studying documentary film making on a Fulbright. Like many other American travelers and expatriates, I found my way to the little English language bookshop in the Left Bank, catty-corner opposite the Cathedral of Notre Dame, generally considered the geographical center of Paris.

In those days, the bookshop, which had been opened four years earlier, was called Le Mistral. It was only some years later that it took over the name “Shakespeare and Company” from Sylvia Beach, who had been running a bookshop of that name in a different location. That year the shop was being managed by a young couple from Harvard – Ted Cumming, my classmate, and his wife, Patsy Arens. [I hope I am remembering the names correctly – it was a long time ago.] Ted later died tragically at a young age, I think in a boating accident.

The quartier around the bookstore is now ground zero for tourists. The tiny ancient streets running from rue St. Jacques to Boulevard St. Michel are jammed with cheap fast food joints and shops selling schlock trinkets, but in 1955 it was the Algerian section of town, with a handful of inexpensive restaurants featuring North African food. My most vivid memory of those little restaurants is that when you wanted the check, you called out “plashta ici.” I have no idea what language “plashta” is.

I was much too poor actually to buy books, but Le Mistral was a place where one could be sure of finding some English language conversation, and inasmuch as my French then was no better than it is now, that was quite an attraction for me. Mike Jorrin did show up, and for the better part of a month, we hung out at Le Mistral. I had found a very cheap room in the Algerian House of the cite universitaire, a big dormitory complex in the 14^th at the very southern most edge of Paris. Each day I would take the Metro into the center of town and make my way to Le Mistral.

Generally speaking, not much happened as the days passed, but on one occasion, I stumbled into a quite extraordinary little adventure, which has curious filiations with Woody Allen’s charming film, Midnight in Paris, starring Owen Wilson. Among the folks frequenting Le Mistral were two very attractive young English women with whom Mike and I had struck up a casual friendship. One evening, we were sitting in the chairs set out in front of the bookshop, idly looking over at Notre Dame and watching the world go by, when a fancy car pulled up and stopped. A young Frenchman hopped out, very nicely dressed, and asked the two English women if they would like to go to a party. The liked the idea, but were apprehensive about going off with a man they did not know, so the agreed on condition that Mike and I came too. [I should explain that no one looking at me would imagine I was much protection from white slavers or the like, but Mike is a tall, muscular guy – even now – and I imagine they thought he could protect them.]

Off we went, all together in the car, to a very up market apartment building, and into an elegant flat where there was indeed a party under way. For the next several hours, we danced, drank wine, and rubbed shoulders with some of Paris’ twentieth century jeunesses d’orees. At about midnight, our host drove us back to the bookstore and dropped us off. As the Metro had stopped running by then [Paris is not really a late night town], I walked south through the deserted streets all the way to the cite universitaire.

Shakespeare and Co. is one of two major English language bookstores in Paris. The other, The Village Voice, is in the 6^th on rue Princesse, just off rue du Four. Truth be told, the Village Voice is a better bookstore, but Shakespeare and Co. has become part of the literary legend of Paris. I cannot recall ever meeting George Whitman back in the day [when he would have been only forty-three], but I, like generations of others, shall always be grateful to him. Requiescat in pace.

A TRIUMPH

2011-12-14T12:12:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was a day of strange weather contrasts in Paris. It started when Susie and I ventured out to the open air market, under blue skies, only to be pelted by rain as I shopped for the dinner meal. I quickly collected up some carrots, mushrooms, several onions, some tomatoes, and 300 grams of "crevettes rose," large, reddish shrimp complete with heads and eyes. Later on, when the weather seemed to have cleared definitively, we undertook a long walk to the Musee Carnavalet in the 3rd arrondissement, a museum devoted to the history of Paris. On the way, we suddenly found ourselves in a hail storm, and were forced to stop into a restaurant on the Ile St. Louis for crepes sucre and tarte Tatin.

By the time we returned home, we were somewhat battered, but unbowed. I then put together a crevette stew, incorporating the carrots, mushrooms, and onions and flavored with curry powder and some chicken buillion. I say with no tinge of false modesty that it was fantastic! One of my most successful creations.

This evening, I shall rest on my laurels and just whip up a simple dinner of fresh tuna and sauteed zucchini, washed down with a Sauterne blanc for Susie and a Gigondas for me. Having brought my Durkheim micro-tutorial to a close today, I shall turn my attention tomorrow to the next challenge. All suggestions are gratefully received.

DURKHEIM'S SUICIDE A MICRO-TUTORIAL CONCLUSION

2011-12-14T06:56:00.001-05:00

Before I begin today’s Part of this Micro-tutorial, I must correct an appalling omission in the antepenultimate paragraph of the last Part [i.e., in the third paragraph from the end.] I omitted the words “suicide varies,” thus rendering the sentence meaningless [humph, humph, on one commented on that!] The sentence should read: “He finds that suicide varies inversely with the degree of integration of religious society, of domestic society, and of political society.” OK, now let us continue.

There are some societies, Durkheim suggests, in which social integration has been carried to such an extreme degree that individuals do not sufficiently distinguish themselves from the social order. In such cases, the individual may believe that he or she has a social obligation to commit suicide as a consequence of having failed to conform sufficiently to some social norm. Suicide becomes obligatory in these cases, Durkheim argues, and thus one can actually speak of “obligatory altruistic suicide.” For the most part, he imputes this excessive social integration to “primitive” societies, but he does remark, in a sentenced that I consider one of the most unintentionally funny in the classical sociological literature, “The readiness of the Japanese to disembowel themselves for the slightest reason is well known.” Once started, Durkheim cannot easily let the subject drop, and he actually distinguishes “three varieties” of altruistic suicide: “obligatory altruistic suicide, optional altruistic suicide, and acute altruistic suicide.” I shall spare you the details, but he does produce some interesting statistics of military as opposed to civilian suicides, showing that military men [at that time there were no military women] are very much more likely than civilians to commit suicides, and noncommissioned officers more likely than commissioned officers [wouldn’t you know?]

Finally we come to yet a third species of suicide, to which Durkheim attaches the suggestive label “anomic suicide.” His discussion is especially interesting because it was written more than a century ago, and yet reads as though it were a commentary on economic and political developments of the last decade or so.

Durkheim begins his discussion with a statement that must be read with great precision: “No human being can be happy or even exist unless his needs are sufficiently proportioned to his means.” At first, this seems to mean simply that human beings cannot long survive in a situation of such destitution that the available food and other necessaries fail to meet their basic physical needs. But it turns out that Durkheim has something quite different in mind. Recall that he is living and writing at the end of a long period, extending almost a century by 1897, of an economic expansion of produced by unfettered capitalism. As Marx suggests in the opening line of Capital, the period is characterized by a cornucopia-like outpouring of commodities. Individual human beings, Durkheim believes, are incapable of imposing upon themselves restraints on their desires. “It is not human nature,” he writes, “which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone.” Desires are by their nature “insatiable,” and it is a source of torment to be in the grip of insatiable desire, even when the actual quantity of goods one is consuming far exceeds what was available in an earlier time. “Thus, the more one has, the more one wants,” Durkheim observes, “since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs.”

To be in such a condition is to be without a law or constraint imposing limits on desire. It is thus to be a-nomic [i.e., literally, lacking in law. Compare the pair of terms from Kantian moral philosophy: autonomy, or giving law to oneself, and heteronomy, or having law imposed on oneself by another.] Under normal and healthy circumstances, it is society that imposes limits on appropriate desire, thus protecting us from the psychological disorientation of ever-expanding desire. But, Durkheim says in what really sounds like a cri de coeur, “[f]or a whole century, economic progress has mainly consisted freeing industrial relations from all regulation…. [G]overnment, instead of regulating economic life, has become its tool and servant. The most opposite schools, orthodox economists and extreme socialists, unite to reduce government to the role of a more or less passive intermediary among the various social functions.” [I confess I find this characterization of “extreme socialists” puzzling. I am uncertain to what Durkheim is making reference.]

“From top to bottom of the ladder, greed is aroused without knowing where to find ultimate foothold. … The longing for infinity is daily represented as a mark of moral distinction, whereas it can only appear within unregulated consciences which elevate to a rule the lack of rule from which they suffer.”

The result of this “lawlessness’ or anomie is, in its most extreme manifestations, suicide.

There is a great deal more in the book, of course, both in the elaboration of detailed statistics of rates of suicide in a wide range of social groupings and in the analysis of those statistics, but I think the thrust of the argument should be clear by now. Near the end of his discussion, Durkheim returns to the theme he enunciated in the Preface. Here, in two lengthy quotations from Book Three, is the essence of his position.

“Usually when collective tendencies or passions are spoken of, we tend to regard these expressions as metaphors or manners of speech with no real significance but a sort of average among a certain number of individual states. They are not considered as things, as forces sui generis which dominate the consciousness of single individuals. None the less, this is their nature, as is brilliantly shown by statistics of suicide.”

“Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces [he means physical forces, forces of nature Ed.], though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without, though through other channels. The proof that the reality of collective tendencies is no less than that of cosmic forces is that this reality is demonstrated in the same way, through the uniformity of effects. When we find that the number of deaths varies little from ear to year, we explain this regularity by saying that mortality depends on the climate, the temperature, the nature of the soil, in brief on a certain number of material forces which remain constant through changing generations because independent of individuals. Since, therefore, moral acts [i.e., psychological acts Ed.] such as suicide are represented not merely with an equal but with a greater uniformity, we must likewise admit that they depend on forces external to individuals. Only, since these forces must be of a moral order and since, except for individual men, there is no other moral order of existence in the world but society, they must be social.”

Needless to say, Durkheim does not think that the agency of collective tendencies is restricted to suicide. The operation of collective tendencies, he believes, is seen throughout the sphere of social life, and hence constitutes an appropriate independent realm of phenomena worthy to be the subject of an independent scientific discipline, namely Sociology.

Is Durkheim right? I believe he is, so long as we understand his thesis in the temporally longitudinal fashion that I outlined above in Part Three of this Micro-tutorial. Indeed, the approach championed by Durkheim in Suicide is now so widely accepted that his claims have become commonplaces. There are contemporary theorists who resist this appeal to collective tendencies and invoke the models of Game Theory and Rational Choice Theory to provide individualist micro-foundations for their discussions of such societal phenomena as politics. I have had my say about these authors in a number of publications, and will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere. [See my critique of Elster, at box.net, for one extended example.] For those who would like to see a shorter statement of essentially the same point of view, take a look at my re-posting, on September 24^th of this year, of my Credo.

With that, I conclude this Micro-tutorial. I hope it has proved of interest to some readers. When I return to Chapel Hill on Christmas Eve, I shall put it up on box.net.

DURKHEIM'S SUICIDE A MICRO-TUTORIAL PART THREE

2011-12-12T08:14:00.000-05:00

The central idea of Durkheim’s analysis, and indeed of much of his theoretical work, is that human beings exist in, and are in some sense the products of, a collective social order. He posits this in contradistinction to the methodologically individualist thesis that society is nothing more than the summation of the beliefs, purposes, and actions of the individuals who compose it, and that all explanation therefore must begin with propositions about individuals and move from there to conclusions about collections of individuals, or societies.

Stated thus baldly, Durkheim’s thesis seems patently false, for it is manifestly the case that if one eliminates the individuals from any situation, there does not remain something social, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. But if we examine individuals in a temporally longitudinal fashion, and ask of each one how she or he becomes an individual person, then Durkheim’s claim appears not merely true but obviously true. Here is what I mean.

Each person is born into an already formed social situation, in which gender roles, family structures, religious beliefs, norms, world views, economic categories, political structures, and even styles of bodily self-presentation – ways of walking, sitting, standing, and gesturing – are well established. As the infant develops, she internalizes the particular pattern of norms that characterize the society into which she has been born. Very quickly, we can tell that a child is nineteenth century English or Second Century Roman or eighteenth century Masaii or twenty-first century Chinese, and so forth. The norms, expectations, and modes of behavior that are internalized so completely form the child that there is no sense at all in which the child first grows to maturity and then chooses a social lifestyle. The child who internalizes no set of norms and modes of being is not a free spirit but what used to be called a “wolf child.” Even rebellion has its social styles and norms, so that a rebel is as easily placed in his or her social context as a docile conformist.

It is in just this sense that the social precedes the individual. To be sure, every social role, every style of being, every norm is the product of the choices and actions of previous generations of individuals [think of the way in which language, a quintessentially human activity, evolves.] But to any given individual, almost everything has been formed before he or she comes on the scene. Ask a young child what she wants to be when she grows up, and she will reply by naming some already well established social role – “I want to be a doctor, an astronaut, a revolutionary, a bus driver.”

Now, social roles are not immutable, as Durkheim well knew. Indeed, they are always changing, evolving, being transformed, sometimes by the deliberate and intentional choices of individuals, sometimes without anyone being aware of the process of transformation. But at any moment in the history of a society, one finds individuals who are embedded in a structure of social relations that has shaped them—a structure that is thus temporally and causally prior to the individual, and hence also prior in the order of explanation.

With this as his methodological background, Durkheim addresses the phenomenon of suicide, and concludes that the different modes or forms of suicide correspond to different degrees of the integration of individuals into society. He begins by examining variations in the incidence of suicide among the several religious groupings of nineteenth century Europe. He finds that there is a striking and very stable difference in the incidence of suicide among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Putting it simply, Protestants are much more likely to commit suicide than Catholics, and both are much more likely to commit suicide than Jews. Why?

First of all, Durkheim observes that “as a rule suicide increases with knowledge.” But immediately he adds that “Knowledge does not determine this progress. It is innocent; nothing is more unjust than to accuse it. … Man seeks to learn and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society.” Durkheim then issues a stern defense of knowledge, in a fashion that is peculiarly apposite to the anti-scientific temperament of so many Americans today:

“Far from knowledge being the source of the evil, it is its remedy, the only remedy we have. Once established beliefs have been carried away by the current of events, they cannot be artificially reestablished; only reflection can guide us in life, after this. Once the social instinct is blunted, intelligence is the only guide left to us and we have to reconstruct a conscience by its means. Dangerous as is the undertaking there can be no hesitation, for we have no choice. Let those who view anxiously and sadly the ruins of ancient beliefs, who feel all the difficulties of these critical times, not ascribe to science an evil it has not caused but rather which it tries to cure!”

Durkheim draws the following conclusion” “If religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society. What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value. The details of dogmas and rites are secondary. The essential thing is that they be capable of supporting a sufficiently intense collective life.”

Having examined the effect of religious belief on rates of suicide, Durkheim turns to two other spheres of social integration – family life and politics –and draws analogous conclusions from his data. He finds that inversely with the degree of integration of religious society, of domestic society, and of political society. “Social man,” he concludes, “is the essence of civilized man; he is the masterpiece of existence.”

All of this, recall, is intended by Durkheim as a refutation of the methodological individualism that dominated so much of nineteenth century thought, and as a justification for the existence and autonomy of a separate intellectual discipline, Sociology, whose object of investigation is the distinctively and irreducibly social character of human existence.

Social integration protects human beings from the isolation that can provoke self-destruction, but is social integration, to whatever a degree, an unalloyed benefit for human beings? By no means, Durkheim argues. Indeed, the statistics, he claims, reveal an alternative and contrary tendency to which he gives the label “altruistic suicide.” Tomorrow we shall see what he means by that provocative term.

A MYSTERY

2011-12-11T12:13:00.002-05:00

The two duck legs [cuisses de canard] are seasoned with Five Spices, braised, set on a bed of sauteed onions and garlic, and put in a slow oven for two hours, so I have some time. Here is a mystery that continues to stump me: All over Paris [and, I assume, the rest of France] I can get simply wonderful bread. At the moment, I am eating a piece of baguette de froment from a Keyser outlet on rue Monge, but there are many other places where I can get crusty, light baguettes every day. I have never found anyplace in the United States that makes a good baguette. The bread at WholeFoods is godawful, as is the bread at the very upscale elegant A Southern Season in Chapel Hill. The only really good bread I have found anywhere in the United States is made by a group of young artisans on State Street in Northampton, Mass at a place called The Hungry Ghost. Their French batard is in fact the best bread I have had anywhere in the world.

Now, why is this? Is it the wheat? The oven? The water? Does anyone know? If I could reproduce a standard French baguette in America I think I could make a fortune.

ANOTHER DELAY

2011-12-11T02:54:00.002-05:00

I am afraid I shall not be able to post Part Three of my Micro-Tutorial on Durkheim until tomorrow. This morning, Susie will make an outing on our Segway to the Jardin des Plantes. When she walks, Susie is slowed down by her MS, but when she rides the Segway, I must trot alongside to keep up. It is a sight to see, the two of us proceeding down the quais, past the Institut du Monde Arabe and the Menagerie [Zoo] of the Jardin, until we come to the entrance.

This afternoon, we shall attend a concert of medieval music at the Musee de Cluny just a short walk from our apartment, and then, this evening, I shall be slow-cooking cuisses de canard with 5 spices.

All in all, a typical Paris day.

There is not a great deal to say about the race for the Republican presidential nomination, save that Gingrich continues to soar and the Republican establishment tears its hair in despair. I have on occasion remarked that Obama is lucky, but my son, who is wiser in these matters, says that luck has nothing to do with it. "How on earth does he contrive to seduce his opponents into defeating themselves?" I ask. He replies, "It may sound like a joke, but he is a Jedi master." I am becoming a believer. Use the force, Luke, use the force.

DURKHEIM'S SUICIDE A MICRO-TUTORIAL PART TWO

2011-12-10T08:22:00.000-05:00

Suicide is divided into three Books. Durkheim’s strategy is quite straightforward. In Book One, he considers any non-social causes of suicide, and one by one dismisses them as inadequate to account for the data on the incidence of suicide that he has collected. In Book Two, he identifies three different types of socially caused suicide, which he labels “Egoistic suicide,” “Altruistic suicide,” and “Anomic suicide.” Each of these species of suicide, he argues, can only be explained by appeal to collective social causes. In Book Three, he discusses what he understands to be the general significance of what he has discovered in Book Two.

Durkheim begins Book One by exploring the claim that suicide is a consequence of insanity. He calls into question the common wisdom concerning madness, and offers some data to show that even on the assumption that some suicide is traceable to forms of insanity, such an explanation at best accounts for only a small proportion of the reported suicides. [An historico-philosophical aside: Spinoza argued that suicide could never be the act of a sane person, because all human beings are guided by rational self-love, and hence could not possibly fully understand what they are doing when they take their own lives. This strikes me as a shrewd psychological insight, whatever its larger sociological importance.]

He then asks whether suicide is in any way rooted in racial differences, or is hereditary, concludes that race is a very questionable scientific category in general, and that race and heredity are simply not satisfactory explanatory causal factors in the case of suicide. Nor, he decides, does climate explain the incidence of suicide. Seasonal variations are equally inconclusive. Surprisingly, he produces data showing that the rate of suicides actually increases as the day gets longer. I confess I would have expected the opposite. So much for “seasonal affective disorder,” or SAD, as it is now commonly referred to. Nor do the data support the hypothesis that suicide peaks when the weather first gets hot [or cold]. Durkheim concludes Book One with a discussion of imitation as a significant causal factor.

All of this is rather fun – a kind of throat-clearing as Durkheim prepares for his serious discussion in Book Two. His methodology is one with which we are all now quite familiar, but which was new and important when he was writing. To put it simply, with regard to each hypothesis, he examines statistical records to see whether there is a correlation between variations in the thing to be explained – the incidence of suicide, in this case – and concomitant variations in the proposed explanation. Excessively hot days cause people to kill themselves? Check whether the rate of suicide in a city rises as the temperature goes up and falls as things cool off. We are now so familiar with this mode of argument that it requires a little historical imagination to recall a time when it was not commonplace at all.

Durkheim’s conclusion to the last chapter of Book Two, on imitation as a cause of suicide, is worth quoting, because imitation is a mode of explanation of a social phenomenon that seems to offer a way of reducing the social to the individual. This, as we have seen, would in Durkheim’s view undermine the independence and legitimacy of the discipline of Sociology.

“[W]hat this chapter chiefly shows is the weakness of the theory that imitation is the main source of collective life. No fact is more readily transmissible by contagion than suicide, yet we have just seen that this contagiousness has no social effects. [He means that although one person may be moved to commit suicide by imitating someone else who has done so, this imitation does not alter the social statistics in any significant fashion. Ed.] If imitation is so much without social influence in this case, it cannot have more in others; the virtues ascribed to it are therefore imaginary. Within a narrow circle it may well occasion the repetition of a single thought or action, but never are its representations sufficiently deep or extensive to reach and modify the heart of society.”

And so, by eliminating a wide variety of physical and individual factors, we are brought, as Book Two opens, to the conclusion that suicide “must necessarily depend upon social causes and be in itself a collective phenomenon.” [First paragraph of Book Two.] However, Durkheim suggests, there is not a single species of socially caused suicide, but several different types – what he will go on to identify as egoistic, altruistic, and anomic suicide.

Immediately upon launching his exploration of the types of socially caused suicide, Durkheim enunciates a methodological principle that seems to me deeply flawed. I am not sure the mistake infects his conclusions, but because it is so striking, it is worth looking at for a moment. He begins by acknowledging with some regret that there simply are not useful data on the suicides of sane persons “But,” Durkheim continues, “our aim may be achieved by another method.”

“Let us reverse the order of study. Only in so far as the effective causes differ can there be different kinds of suicide. For each to have its own nature, it must also have special conditions of existence. The same antecedent or group of antecedents cannot sometimes produce one result and sometimes another, for, if so, the difference of the second from the first would itself be without cause, which would contradict the principle of causality. Every proved specific difference between causes therefore implies a similar difference between effects. Consequently, we shall be able to determine the social types of suicide by classifying them not directly by their preliminarily described characteristics, but by the causes which produce them. Without asking why they differ from one another, we will first seek the social conditions responsible for them; then group these conditions in a number of separate classes by their resemblances and differences, and we shall be sure that a specific type of suicide will correspond to each of these classes. In a word, instead of being morphological, our classification will from the start be aetiological.”

Now this is just plain wrong. It is certainly true that different effects must flow from different causes. But it does not at all follow from this that different causes must have different effects. The motion of a ball on a pool table – the observed effect – can perfectly well be the consequence of an infinite number of combinations of forces striking it -- the causes --, so long as all those combinations resolve themselves, by what we used to call the “parallelogram of forces” in high school physics, into the same vector of force. Same causes, same effects – true. Same effects, same causes – false.

Well, enough for today. Tomorrow I shall describe briefly the three types of socially caused suicides identified by Durkheim and bring this Micro-tutorial to a close.

TIME OUT

2011-12-09T11:25:00.002-05:00

It is rainy and cold in Paris, and my French cousins, Andre and Jacqueline Zarembowitch [retired science professors] are joining us for dinner, so I shall have to postpone the next Part of the Micro-Tutorial until tomorrow. Andre's grandfather and my great grandfather were brothers, from the little Polish town of Souvalki. Most of the Zarembowitch family stayed in Paris, while my great-grandfather, Abram, decided to continue on to the New World. The immigration official at Castle Garden [predecessor to Ellis Island] decided that "Zarembowitch" was not an American name, so he renamed us the Wolff family [after my great-uncle Wolff Zarembowitch, who met Abram at the boat.]

A bientot.

DURKHEIM'S SUICIDE A MICRO-TUTORIAL PART ONE

2011-12-08T09:13:00.001-05:00

Emile Durkheim was born in 1858. It is useful, I think, to place him chronologically in context with the other great figures of the classical period of Sociology – Marx, Weber, and Mannheim. Karl Marx was born in 1818, and he published his great work, Capital [volume I], in 1867, when Durkheim was nine years old. Weber was born in 1864 and lived until 1920, after the end of the Great War. Mannheim was the youngest of these giants, born in 1893 and living until 1947, after the end of the Second World War.

As I explained at some length in my tutorial on The Study of Society, prior to the nineteenth century the standard contrast in Western thought was between Natural Philosophy, or the study of the laws governing bodies in space and time, and Moral Philosophy, or the study of human affairs, explanatory as well as normative. Some thinkers, such as the ancient Atomists and also modern materialists like Thomas Hobbes, sought to explain the behavior of human beings by appeal to the laws governing bodies in space and time. Others, such as Rene Descartes, drew a sharp distinction between the two realms, denying that such a reduction of the psychological or human to the physical was possible. This latter tradition can be traced all the way back to the famous passage in Plato’s Phaedo in which Socrates contrasts a physicalistic explanation of why he is sitting in prison awaiting execution with a moral or purposive explanation that appeals to the norms and purposes guiding his decision not to escape and flee.

In neither tradition was there room for, or acknowledgement of, the existence of, a separate and autonomous realm of the social that could not be reduced either to the physical or to the psychological. The discovery of the social, if I may put it that way, is a distinctive accomplishment of nineteenth century thought. Now, obviously, intelligent observers of la comedie humaine have been making shrewd and insightful observations about social phenomena for at least as long as the written record exists. One need only recall Plato’s brilliant typology in The Republic of the various fallings-away from the ideal state – Plutocracy, Timocracy, Democracy, and Ochlocracy. But Plato, like all those who followed him, traced these differing forms of social organization to the psychological characteristics of the persons who dominated them.

A first major step in the direction of the identification of the autonomy of the social was taken by Adam Smith when he compared the customary or natural prices that rule in the marketplace to centers of gravity drawing to them the fluctuating market prices influenced by the vagaries of supply and demand. But it was only in the writings of Georg Hegel [much as I hate to admit it] that we find the revolutionary idea of society as an organic unity exhibiting characteristics and forms that are not immediately reducible to, or traceable to, the psychological characteristics of individuals.

This idea underlies a good deal of Marx’s discussion of social relations of production as well as his extraordinary analysis of mystification in Chapter One of Capital. But there was considerable resistance from nineteenth century thinkers to the novel claims of the social, and this resistance cast doubt on the autonomy and legitimacy of Sociology, the new academic kid on the block, as it were.

Durkheim, the first great Sociologist, fully understood the philosophical presuppositions of the new discipline. In the work before us, Suicide, published in 1897, he undertakes to meet the objections head on and present an elaborate empirical justification of the thesis that there is a realm of social phenomena that cannot be reduced either to the psychological or to the physical.

Durkheim states the central methodological or ontological problem of Sociology clearly and uncompromisingly in the Preface to the book. “Sociological method as we practice it rests wholly on the basic principle that social facts must be studied as things, that is, as realities external to the individual. There is no principle for which we have received more criticism, but none is more fundamental. Indubitably for sociology to be possible, it must above all have an object all its own. It must take cognizance of a reality which is not in the domain of other sciences. But if no reality exists outside of individual consciousness, it wholly lacks any material of its own. In that case, the only possible subject of observation is the mental states of the individual, since nothing else exists.”

He repeats this point with emphasis later in the same paragraph. “[T]here can be no sociology unless societies exist, and … societies cannot exist if there are only individuals.”

Durkheim proposes to establish the existence of society as an independently existing entity, and thereby to legitimate Sociology as a discipline, by studying the incidence of suicide.

Why on earth suicide?

There were two reasons for the choice. The first was practical. The systematic collection of statistical data for entire countries more or less began in the modern era with the work of the Intendants of the ancient regime in France. The Intendants were Royal servants responsible for collecting information about agricultural and other aspects of French society and promoting progressive economic policies in the countryside, frequently over the opposition of the traditionalist landed aristocracy. By the middle of the nineteenth century, central governments throughout Europe were regularly collecting and publishing all manner of data, most particularly vital statistics of births and deaths, including the incidence of disease, of crimes such as murder, and of suicide. By the end of the century, when Durkheim was writing, it was possible to access a wide range of vital statistics classified and sub-classified by age, sex, region, religion, and even time of day. So, in the time-honored manner of all students of the natural and the human, Durkheim chose suicide as a subject of investigation because he could.

Durkheim’s second reason is a good deal more interesting. Suicide, he pointed out, is a quintessentially private and individual act. It is an act that directly involves only one person. Even murder involves at least two people, the murderer and the victim. On the face of it, there does not seem to be any direct connection between one act of suicide and another [though, as we shall see, that is not quite true.] If investigation should reveal patterns of great statistical regularity in the incidence of suicide, that would suggest that forces are at work that cannot in any obvious way be explained by appeal solely to the psychological states and processes of individuals.

It is interesting to contrast this question with that which exercised the Classical Political Economists. They began from an observed regularity – Smith’s “natural prices” or “centers of gravity” – and then sought to explain that observed regularity by a Labor Theory of Natural Price [or “Labor Theory of Value” as the 18^th century put it.] But as Smith himself understood, the observed regularity of natural prices emerges out of “the higgling and jiggling of the marketplace,” which is to say it is a consequence of wide-ranging interactions between economic actors. Although the adequate explanation of the resulting regularities is a challenging task, as Ricardo and Marx discovered, the existence of those regularities is not surprising, since they emerge from a system of economy-wide interactions.

By contrast, if it should turn out that the uniquely private and individual act of suicide is subject to regularities fully as reliable as those in the marketplace, that would seem to argue for the operation of social forces not reducible to, or explicable in terms of, individual motivations.

Tomorrow, we shall discover what Durkheim learned when he looked at the vital statistics of suicide, and how he explained what he found.

THE GROUND GAME

2011-12-07T03:59:00.000-05:00

I received a circular email message yesterday from ObamaForAmerica, inviting me to sign up for a twelve-week course preparing me to be a paid worker in the Obama presidential campaign. The election is eleven months away and Obama is already cranking up his ground game. I should perhaps explain the origin and meaning of that phrase for my readers from overseas. “Ground game” is a term of art from American football. Anyone who has watched an American football game on television is familiar with the “aerial game,” those dramatic moments when a wide receiver races thirty yards down field and plucks a football from the sky thrown with impossible accuracy by a quarterback standing behind the line of scrimmage. But serious fans and old pros will tell you that professional football games are won or lost in the trenches, a strip of turf three yards on either side of the line, where 350 pound behemoths [and that is before they put on their equipment] push and shove to open up slits of daylight through which a halfback can scoot for three, four, or five yards. That is “the ground game.”

The metaphor captures quite nicely the two components of a presidential campaign. The aerial game is the high profile speeches, debates, and tv ads on which the media commentators lavish their attention. But in a nation that can only lure a bit more than half of the eligible voters to the polls in a presidential year, and scarcely more than a third in an off year, elections are won and lost in the neighborhoods where volunteers and paid workers walk the streets, ringing doorbells, handing out literature, and registering citizens to vote. In 2008, Barack Obama and his team ran the most brilliant ground game in the modern history of American politics. Op Ed writers pontificated about Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, the Philadelphia speech about race, and the debate performances, while almost unnoticed, tens of thousands of campaign workers were registering new voters and cajoling nominal Democrats to make the short trip to their local voting places.

In the summer of 2008, shortly after retiring and moving with Susie to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I signed up as a volunteer in the Obama campaign. For the next three months, I got a worm’s eye view of the Obama ground game. [My son, Tobias, a senior law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, first earned his spurs in the January snows of Iowa, and then played an important role in the aerial game, chairing the Advisory Committee on LGBT Affairs for the Obama Campaign and literally flying – on his own dime – from Maine to California, addressing audiences of LGBT activists.] Since all this happened before I had become a serious blogger, it occurred to me that I ought to pass on to my readers some idea of how the Obama ground game was actually played. What follows is as local and individual a description as you will ever read, focusing as it does on what happened in one medium sized town in one county of one state, but if you will, in your mind, multiply this story by all the towns and counties and states in America, you will have some idea of how Obama actually won the nomination and the election.

The Chapel Hill campaign was run by two young paid organizers, whose responsibility extended to all of Orange County. One was a young man from Iowa who volunteered in the caucuses there and then was recruited as a full-time worker. The other was a young North Carolina woman taking a year off from her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The ground game was broken down into three stages. In the first stage, we worked to register new voters, an especially important task in a college town where virtually all of the undergraduates had come of age since the 2004 election. Each day, we would spend hours at tables in front of supermarkets, the town library, the Farmer’s Market, or the desks where new students signed up for their courses, and talked people into filling out registration forms. Some of us would walk the neighborhoods, knocking on doors and asking whether people were registered. Every evening, before turning the forms in to the local Election Commission office, we would enter the data we had collected into a computer program created by the headquarters of the campaign in Chicago. It was an absolute rule that data must be entered the same day it was collected. Since I find it difficult to engage in conversation with people I have never met, I only did the doorbell ringing gig eight or ten times. Mostly, I entered data, bringing my laptop each day to the headquarters office on Rosemary Street in downtown Chapel Hill.

The second stage was devoted to a combination of information-gathering and persuasion. Each day, the headquarters in Chicago would email us a stack of canvassing maps and accompanying lists of people to try to reach. Each map, printed out on a regular 8 ½ by 11 sheet of computer paper, showed five or six streets of one neighborhood, with thirty or forty black dots arrayed along the streets. Each dot corresponded to one of the names and addresses on the contact list [the maps were constructed from Google Maps, I always assumed.] A pair of volunteers would set out for a two hour shift with a map and a list. We would drive to the neighborhood, park, and start walking up and down the streets, using the address list and the map to locate our targets. At each house, we were to record whether anyone was home, whether the person listed actually lived there [an important consideration in a college town where people change addresses frequently], whether the people listed were registered, and – most important – whom they were planning to vote for. Although the Obama campaign was an entirely separate operation from the local Democratic Party, we also asked about preferences in the gubernatorial and senatorial races and shared information with the Orange County Democratic Organization.

Each evening, the information collected would be entered into the campaign data program. The next day, a new set of lists and maps would arrive by email, taking into account the data that had been entered the previous evening. In that way, we never wasted time searching for a voter who had already been canvassed, unless that person was listed as “uncertain,” in which we case we would go back after a while to try to persuade him or her to vote for Obama.

The final stage of the ground game was the get out the vote effort. As soon as early voting began, we would go out,, visiting the homes of people who had been identified by previous visits as Obama supporters, giving them information cards on voting times and places. Other volunteers manned desks at the voting places and kept track of who was voting, so that we would not try to reach someone who had already voted.

This story was repeated in cities and towns in all fifty states. As the campaign progressed, David Plouffe and his team, in Chicago, would evaluate the costs and benefits, and decide how to shift their paid workers into states that looked promising or out of states that looked lost [the winner take all rules of American politics make it a waste of time to mine lodes of supporters in states that are overwhelmingly for one’s opponent.]

When commentators allude in passing to a candidate’s “ground game,” some version of this operation is what they are talking about. The email I received tells me that the Obama ground game is shifting into gear. None of the Republican candidates has any sort of ground game whatsoever, save perhaps in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the man who is looking more and more likely to win the Republican nomination, Newt Gingrich, has never exhibited the slightest talent or patience for the organizational tasks required to create an effective ground game. This is why I am guardedly optimistic, even in a year when the republicans ought to be able to win the White House.

ANOTHER TUTORIAL COMING UP

2011-12-06T06:29:00.003-05:00

Judging from the statistical data that Google provides to those who use its blog-making apparatus, some of the folks who dropped in on this blog to read what I had to say about Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation have decided to visit the site again just to see whether there is anything else here to tempt their intellects. For them, I should explain that over the past year, from time to time, I have attempted what I call "tutorials" -- multi-part posts stretching over days, or even weeks, in which I systematically explain some subject in a more formal way than is typical of blogs. In this guise, I have discussed The Thought of Karl Marx, The Thought of Sigmund Freud, How to Study Society, The Use and Abuse of Formal Methods in Political Philosophy [that one became a short book], Herbert Marcuse's ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN, Max Weber's THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM, David Ricardo's PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY AND TAXATION, and Ideological Critique [with special attention to Karl Mannheim's IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA, among other works.] All of these, and much more besides, can be found on box.net by following the link at the top of this blog.

Tomorrow or the next day [depending on how the quail turn out], I shall do a very short tutorial -- a Micro-Tutorial, as it were -- on the great classic work of early Sociology, Emile Durkheim's SUICIDE. I have been on something of a mission to encourage my readers to re-acquaint themselves with the classics of what might be called the Heroic Age in the study of society -- the writings of Marx, Weber, Mannheim, and others. The Micro-Tutorial on Durkheim is part of that effort.

SERIOUS SCHOLARS WEIGH IN ON THE GINGRICH DISSERTATION

2011-12-05T08:20:00.004-05:00

None of my many, many scores of blog posts has generated as many comments as the piece I did on Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation -- fifty-one comments, at last count, only two or three of which are my responses. I warned everyone in my original post that I am no kind of expert on Belgian colonialism, but the topic was too hot to ignore. Obviously, we would all prefer to hear from some folks who actually know what they are talking about [one of whom, Professor Seay, did contribute a comment], and today, one of the experts weighed in. Adam Hochshild is a genuine scholar of Southern African matters, as well as being, I am proud to say, an old friend. He has an Op Ed piece in the NY TIMES today on the dissertation that you all should read [just go to the TIMES site and click on Opinion in the left-hand column.] I am especially pleased that his knowledgeable judgment of the dissertatiion pretty much confirms by amateur impressions.

As I suggested in my original post, Gingrich's ideological orientation in the dissertation is roughly that of the Cold-War Council on Foreign Relations foreign policy establishment. This is the bi-partisan imperialist consensus that has ruled American foreign policy for the past sixty years, guiding the policy decisions of such otherwise dissimilar Presidents as John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, as well as of a bevy of Secretaries of State. Belligerant Neo-Conservative American dominationist war-mongering is a right-wing variation of that consensus, fitfully matched on the left by an inchoate opposition to American wars that does not, for the most part, issue from any coherent alternative policy orientation, save in the writings of such figures as Noam Chomsky. One of the delicious ironies of this year's run-up to the 2012 presidential contest, occasionally remarked upon, is that Ron Paul is the one aspirant to the presidency who actually rejects the post-war consensus, exhibiting instead a Washingtonian abhorence of foreign entanglements.

What caught my attention in the Ginfrich dissertation was its pedestrian quality, its lack of intellectual curiosity or imagination. I ploughed through many doctoral dissertations over the course of an academic career that lasted just exactly half a century, and I think I can spot a piece of solid mediocrity when I see one. Gingrich is not stupid. By the standards of the modern Academy he is adequately intelligent. [I remind you that this is an Academy that contains, among other wonders, roughly ten thousand professional philosophers, so the bar is set reasonably low.] But he clearly does not have a sparkling intellect, a genuinely curious mind, a penetrating imagination.

Although I do not myself actually know any Republicans [I don't get out as much as I used to], I gather from the commentary on the web that Gingrich's popularity among folks of that persuasion derives in part from their belief that he would make mincemeat of Obama in face-to-face debates. Gingrich himself has compared such an imagined encounter to the Lincoln-Douglas Debates [although I think he fancies himself playing both parts.] I am quite willing to wager a sizeable sum that Obama would destroy Gingrich, without appearing actually to lift a finger.

J'ARRIVE

2011-12-04T09:06:00.002-05:00

Two quick Southwest flights, a delayed Air France flight, an easy taxi ride on a drizzling Sunday morning, and we are here again in our tiny, perfect 5th arrondissement pied-a-terre. Two shopping trips for staples, a nap, and we are ready to have a light dinner at Brasserie Balzar, famous old watering-hole for Parisian academics, on rue des Ecoles. Tomorrow, when everything is closed in Paris, I shall cook paupiettes provencale, ready-made at the local boulanger. Then the market reopens on Tuesday, and I shall probably try something simple, like quail.

While I was en route, Herman Cain "suspended" his campaign. It is looking more and more like Newt. After a good night's sleep I shall resume blogging. The Newt-dissertation blip on this blog site is almost over, and I remain with all of you, faithful readers and interlocuters.

Perhaps I shall try a very brief micro-tutorial on Durkheim's Suicide. Most of the book is taken up with now outdated statistics, but the theoretical portions are classic.

PERSONAL STUFF

2011-12-02T06:11:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow morning, Susie and I leave once more for Paris -- Southwest to Boston, Air France to Charles de Gaulle. We shall be there for three weeks, returning Christmas Eve. Sunday evening, our first night there, we shall dine at the Brasserie Balzar, on rue des Ecoles, around the corner from the Sorbonne and across the street from the Musee Cluny. As is our custom, we shall attend several free concerts of early music in outlying arrondissements, but I have also taken the plunge and bought two 35 Euro tickets [$46 a piece] for a performace of Bach's Christmas Oratorio at l'eglise de la Madeleine. This coming Thursday, we shall attend a reading at the Village Voice Bookstore by the South African expatriate writer Denis Hirson. Naturally, I shall be doing a good deal of cooking -- quail, duck, rabbit, dorade royale [a fish], coquilles St. Jacques, and the like. But mostly, we will sit in Le Metro, our local cafe, drinking wine or coffee and watching the world go by.

I shall be blogging from Paris, of course. I still have not fixed upon a text for my next mini-tutorial, so any suggestions are welcome.

On another personal note, my diet is now officially over. I managed to lose 19 pounds in the nine and a half weeks that I dieted. I figure I am good for another four or five years, by which time I shall be in my early eighties.

If any of you pay attention to the counter on this blog that totals up visits, you may have noticed a spike in the past several days. I usually get about 500-600 visits a day [at least from those folks who come directly to the blog rather than accessing it in some other way], but two days ago I had 6000, yesterday perhaps half that, and today already more than I usually log in a day. Why? Because my post on Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation attracted the attention of Bruce Leiter and Andrew Sullivan, both of whom mentioned it on their vastly more popular blogs, and a whole bunch of people clicked over. Welcome to all the new visitors. I hope some of you stick around.

Now, some last minute preparations and we are off to Paris.

MR. SMARTYPANTS

2011-12-01T09:41:00.000-05:00

I am a big fan of the evening crime show Bones. Courtesy of Netflix, I have watched almost every episode prior to the present season on my computer. The central character, a forensic anthropologist named Dr. Temperance Brennan [nicknamed "Bones"], is played by the irresistible Emily Deschanel [sister of Zoe Deschanel, for pop music fans]. She is represented in the show as being at the top of her rather narrow profession, and is given to constantly touting her own brilliance, saying such things as "I am a genius so you should listen to me" or "I have a Ph. D., and I am much smarter than you." As you can imagine, I find this exceedingly irritating, but the writers, who are rather good, make it clear that this behavior on her part is an expression of deeply rooted insecurity. [Her parents abandoned her as a child -- her father reappears in her life, played by the now quite mature but still very appealing Ryan O'Neal.] It took me a long time to figure out that this is the writers' idea of how non-academics view college professors.

Now, I spent fifty-eight years of my life in the Academy, starting in 1950 when I entered Harvard as a Freshman and ending in 2008 when I retired from my professorship in the Afro-American Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts. During that entire time, I was surrounded by people virtually all of whom had doctorates and all of whom [with one or two egregious exceptions] would qualify as smart by the standards of the general public. Many of them were genuinely accomplished in their chosen fields, having done distinguished work that earned them the respect and recognition of their peers.

A relatively small number of the people I came to know well in the Academy were truly brilliant, standing out even in the rather selective circles in which they traveled. If I were to make a list of these truly extraordinary intellectuals, it would include -- leaving to one side my sister and my two sons, Patrick and Tobias, all of whom have some claim to being so identified -- the logician Willard van Orman Quine, the economist Samuel Bowles, the linguist Noam Chomsky, and perhaps my old colleague and friend Charles Parsons. I would like to include the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, but even though I have met Sen several times, and he was for a long time a faithful donor to my scholarship organization, I cannot really claim him as a friend. Nor can I include the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, because even though he and I had four or more personal conversations over a number of years, each time we met he could not recall ever having met me before. I had tea at the home of Bertrand Russell in the Fall of 1954, but of course he probably forgot me as I walked out the door. Nor did I ever have the great pleasure and honor of meeting the great evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, even though she and I were colleagues at UMass for some years.

In all of those fifty-eight years, I never heard any of these extraordinary people, or indeed any of the merely distinguished people whom I met, ever say anything as nakedly self-aggrandizing and self-congratulatory as the remarks given to the character Dr. Temperance Brennan in the television show Bones. However, since confession is good for the soul, I should perhaps take this opportunity to admit that on one lamentable occasion I myself lapsed into a pretty fair imitation of Bones.

It happened like this. I served for twelve years as the Graduate Program Director of the newly created doctoral program in Afro-American Studies at UMass. The students all liked me, because I managed to find a Teaching Fellowship for each of them in every one of those twelve years, and because I was their unfailing supporter in the inevitable encounters with the UMass bureaucracy. But they knew perfectly well that I was no kind of scholar of Afro-American Studies, so when they actually wanted to know something, they went to one of my colleagues. I was, for their purposes, in Lenin's immortal phrase, a useful idiot. One day I was talking with Jennifer Jensen Wallach, one of my all-time favorite students, who had consented to allow me to direct her dissertation, even though she knew vastly more about the subject than I. She made some remark that conveyed to my sensitive ears her view of me as just a very nice departmental administrator, and in a fit of narcissistic pique, I blurted out, "You know, Jennifer, people in this department may not realize it, but I am actually a world famous philosopher." Jennifer, who has a rather puckish sense of humor, took to calling me The WFP, and when her first book was published, she dedicated it "To WFP," a fact of which I am inordinately proud.

Which brings me to Newt Gingrich. Gingrich, as everyone is aware, constantly touts his own brilliance, describing himself as having a world-shaking mind, as having written the most important statement of this or that "since Lincoln's Inaugural Address," as being a fount of important ideas. In short, he presents himself as a know-it-all smartypants braggart, which is, if the writers of Bones are correct, just the way professors are viewed by the seventy percent of adult Americans who do not have a college degree. Like Dr. Temperance Brennan, he seems genuinely not to understand how ridiculous this makes him look, and like her, his self-promotion probably stems from a very deeply rooted insecurity. The basic difference between him and the television character is that she is, or is represented in the show to be, genuinely brilliant in her field, whereas Gingrich, as I now know from having read his doctoral dissertation, has a rather pedestrian and mediocre mind by the standards of the Academy. His insecurity is honestly come by, if I may put it that way.

It is beginning to look as though Gingrich may actually win the Republican nomination for the Presidency this year, thanks to Mitt Romney's inability to win over much more than a quarter of the Republican electorate. If that does come to pass, we shall have another eleven months of Newt to kick around. Now, people don't like know-it-all smartypants, and Gingrich seems genuinely incapable of concealing that facet of his personality, or even of realizing the prudence of concealing it. If he does indeed secure the nomination, I think there will be a small voice deep inside him that tells him he has pulled off a vast scam, and his inability to heed that voice will push him to ever more grandiose self-descriptions. The contrast with Barack Obama, who really is very smart [though not, I think, in the league of Quine, Bowles, or Chomsky] and yet is quite modest about his intellectual attainments, should make for some riveting viewing.

A GREAT LOSS

2011-11-28T13:47:00.002-05:00

Representative Barney Frank, who has represented the 4th Massachusetts Congressional District for thirty-two years, today announced that he will not run for re-election in 2012. This is a great loss to the party, the country, and the people. He will be greatly missed. Just as Orrin Hatch is a poster child for the cause of term limits, so Frank is the strongest possible argument against. I still recall with great delight watching on C-Span as Barney took the gavel to preside over the House. The wit and force with which he stifled the foolishness of his Republican opponents was sheer pleasure to watch.

Everyone has a favorite Barney Frank one-liner. Mine was his caustic remark about other members of Congress, at a time when he was the only out-gay Congressman. "There are many gay members of the House," he is reputed to have said, "and I have danced with all of them."

THE TRIUMPH OF ACADEME?

2011-11-27T09:02:00.004-05:00

In the old days, it used to be said in Oxford and Cambridge that those young men who take Firsts become Dons, and those who take Seconds run the government. Academic distinction has not, by and large, been a plus in American politics. Barack Obama is the most academically successful president in quite some time, having graduated Magna cum laude from Harvard Law school [I believe the Harvard Law School almost never awards the degree Summa cum laude.] Bill Clinton did quite well at Yale Law School, though not that well. The assorted Bushes were hardly stand-out scholars, nor was Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan. Jimmy Carter had a very strong record at the Naval Academy, I believe, but Johnson, Nixon, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy were not by any stretch of the imagination scholars. The only president of whom I am aware who earned a doctorate was Woodrow Wilson, who was awarded that degree in History and Political Science by the Johns Hopkins University.

And now comes Newton Leroy Gingrich, who, as recent readers of this blog know, earned a doctorate in Modern European History with a dissertation on Belgian Educational Policy in the Congo. With Gingrich's current standing in the polls and today's endorsement by the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, I think we must contemplate the possibility that once again, one of our own, a certified fellow intellectual, will inhabit the White House.

Let's see. The last President with a Ph. D. scheduled a special showing of Birth of a Nation in the White House, a building, as we all know, that was built by slaves. Perhaps President Newt Gingrich will arrange for a special screening of Mel Gibson's magnum opus, The Passion of the Christ. It is so exciting when real intellectuals pop up in politics.

99 AND 44/100% PURE

2011-11-26T09:56:00.002-05:00

The senior citizens among my faithful readers will recognize the phrase. It was the advertizing slogan of Proctor and Gamble's most successful product line, Ivory Soap. No one had the slightest idea what it meant [or what the other 0.56% was!], but it stuck in people's minds and became a catchphrase instantaneously recognizable.

This old slogan ascended from the depths of my capacious mind as I was reflecting on the Occupy Wall Street Movement, which has just passed its tenth week of life. "We are the 99%" is a political slogan of sheer brilliance. It instantly and unforgettably unites virtually the entire nation against a tiny coterie of what Theodore Roosevelt once memorably called "malefactors of great wealth." Pettifoggers and nitpickers have quibbled with the numerical accuracy of the slogan, suggesting that the top one percent includes people who ought not to be demonized [such as Steve Jobs and LeBron James, or indeed Warren Buffett and Bill Gates], but that just shows that they do not understand the mobilizing power of the well-chosen epithet. "The ninety-nine percent" is what in Hollywood they call "high concept." [a High Concept is a phrase less than a sentence long that captures the idea being pitched by a movie writer to a producer -- "Godzilla meets the Hulk" or "The Wizard of Oz with Jim Carrey playing Dorothy." That sort of thing.]

The OWS Movement has already won. In ten weeks, it is completely changed the focus of the public conversation in America, from debt reduction and Congressional deadlock to income inequality. That is a simply extraordinary victory, achieved completely without the big money backing that launched and sustained the Tea Party Movement.

The response of cities around the nation has been entirely predictable, and for the most part advantageous to the movement -- first puzzlement, then irritation, then legal action, then pepper spray and mass arrests. There is something wonderfully predictable in the responses of the Establishment to a raucous yell, a middle finger, or a gathering that proclaims itself to be against something. From the point of view of a protest movement, the one totally unacceptable response is to be ignored. There is really never any good reason why protestors should not be ignored. The original OWS group took over a park that New Yorkers had never heard of. Had the media taken no notice of them, no one would ever have known they were there. Mayors and Police Chiefs and Governors always say that a protest is a threat to "public order," but the truth is that even a large protest is a good deal less disruptive of anything at all than a medium sized snowstorm, not to speak of a hurricane.

Happily for the forces of progress, the entrenched and comfortable can almost always be counted on to lose their cool after only a few days during which someone, anyone, is calling their bona fides into question. For reasons that go very deep into the psychopathology of power, a violation of social norms of polite behavior is more threatening to the powerful than a calm, reasoned, devastating argument. An unanswerable critique grounded in Marx's theory of exploitation creates not a ripple in the calm waters of institutional domination. But dropping one's pants or painting one's face or even, as during the '68 Columbia protests, calling the President of the University by his first name, drives the powerful wild.

I say "almost always" because on occasion, although happily not often, the powers that be exhibit a modicum of intelligence. I am reminded of Vassar College, which I visited in 1970 to give a talk. Some students, inspired by events on other campuses, had "seized" the Administration Building [which is to say, they had sat down in it and declared the building liberated.] Now, anyone who has spent a career in Academe knows that very little of any importance goes on in a College Administration Building. If it burned to the ground with everyone in it, several years might pass before it was thought necessary to find a replacement. The President of Vassar, learning from the mistakes of Grayson Kirk at Columbia and other fellow administrators, chose to take no notice of the students [who, by the way, slipped out of the building on occasion to attend classes and take exams.] Frustrated, the students issued their final non-negotiable demand -- they insisted that the faculty Senate acknowledge the fact that they were conducting a sit-in.

Now that the OWS Movement has decisively changed the direction of public commentary, where will it go next? Not surprisingly, all the usual suspects have been busy telling the Movement what they ought to do in order to be "relevant." Happily, the very large number of people engaged in one of the many actions folded under the umbrella of the movement seem to be ignoring the advice, and -- what is much more important -- the people giving it. What will the movement become? We shall have to wait and see [or, if we are part of the movement, we shall have to decide.]

The focus of the movement is not a discrete national action or policy, such as a war, but instead is the deepest structural fact about American society, namely far-reaching, institutionally embedded inequality of wealth and income. There are no easy "solutions" to this structural fact, akin to "bring the troops home." To change the shape of the American income pyramid would require a political and economic revolution so far-reaching, so deep, so transformational, that it would be puerile at this point to ask for a seven-point plan.

If you are an active part of the OWS Movement, I say thank you, and well done. If you are a supporter but not an active participant, like myself, then try to find some way to make the support material. We shall simply have to see what develops.

A THANKSGIVING PIE IN THE FACE

2011-11-24T11:09:00.000-05:00

Some of my older readers may recall that in 1987, Allan Bloom, a dyspeptic epigone of the late unlamented Leo Straus, published an angry attack on modernity called the Closing of the American Mind. The book was two parts nostalgia for the classics [Plato, Machiavelli, and such] and three parts cry of horror at the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, Women's Lib, and all things countercultural. It also contained a thinly-disguised sigh of love to Mick Jagger, but of that, the less said the better. When the book appeared, ACADEME, the journal of the American Association of University Professors, asked me to write a review, which I did. Since the Preface to Bloom's book had been written by Saul Bellow, Bloom's colleague on the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, I chose somewhat maliciously to construe the text as a brilliant intellectual novel by Bellow, who had created a wonderfully funny, cranky, bilious U of Chicago professor whose name, "Bloom," was an obvious homage to Joyce. Despite appearing in a rather obscure publication [which I had actually not heard of until they asked me to review the book], the review had something of a success. One sweet but not too bright professor from somewhere in Pennsylvania actually called me to ask whether Bloom was real. She had called the University of Chicago, she said, and had been referred to a Research Assistant when she asked for Professor Bloom. This earnest young man assured her angrily that Bloom was indeed real ["I talked to him this morning."] and said he had been fielding calls all day long from people who thought his mentor was just a character in a novel.

At about the same time, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a respected University of Virginia English professor, published Cultural Literacy, a cri de coeur occasioned by dismay at the lamentable ignorance of today's young people [i.e., people who were young in 1987, which is to say, today's forty-somethings.] Hirsch, ever the earnest academic, actually concluded his book with a long list of names, places, and things that the culturally literate person should know.

Hirsch made much of the fact that young Black men and women in the ghetto had a very dim idea of world geography. He made it sound as though these benighted individuals were so utterly at sea, topographically speaking, that one could almost imagine firehouses, police stations, and corner convenience stores in Harlem filled with children unable to find their way home. I reflected at the time that Hirsch's notion of culture, much like that of Bloom, did not rise much above the level of name-dropping. I was willing to bet that the sheer number of "cultural items" that a ghetto youth could identify, or attach some association to, was on the same order as that for a suburban boy or girl. But the lists, if compiled, would turn out to be very different indeed.

These thoughts are provoked in me by the current contest for the Republican Presidential nomination, which has showcased a know-nothing celebration of belligerent ignorance that apparently flourishes in right-wing Evangelical Christian circles. Hostility to reason is of course not new to the Christian tradition. ["I believe because it is absurd, credo quia absurdem est " as Tertullian is universally credited with having said, although apparently he neglected to do so.] Still and all, the sheer refusal of the Republican base to admit what is, in Jane Austen's lovely phrase, universally acknowledged, has now infected even its standard bearers and political heroes. Sarah Palin flatly rejects the theory of evolution, but when she was pregnant with Trig [let us not even go there!], she underwent the procedure known as amniocentesis, despite the fact that evolution is the theory on which the procedure is grounded. Rick Perry, when asked about evolution, responded off-handedly, "It is a theory that is out there," but bedeviled by painful back trouble, he underwent a rather controversial experimental stem cell procedure, blithely unaware, I guess, that stem cell research, whether on adult stem cells or embryonic stem cells, presupposes the truth of the theory of evolution. The same is of course true of the annual flu shots that people in my age category get each year. Two years ago, on the occasion of Charles Darwin's two hundredth birthday, a poll revealed that only 39% of adult Americans believe the theory of evolution, so I think we can confidently conclude that there are scores of millions of Americans whose doubts about evolution do not stop them from getting flu shots.

Much the same can be said about Young Earthers -- those who, again including Sarah Palin, think the earth is roughly ten thousand years old or less, and claim that humans walked next to dinosaurs. How many of them, when diagnosed with cancer, piously decline radiation therapy on the grounds that the theory on which it is based conflicts with their beliefs about the age of the earth?

The point of all this is that the Republican Party's rejection of knowledge and reason is a political statement, an expression of ressentiment, not really a cognitively substantive declaration that has any implications for daily life. We live in a world in which it is cost-free to use the latest technology while denying the theory on which it is based.

The Bible implies that the sun goes around the earth [otherwise, God, instead of stopping the sun in the sky to give Joshua time to slaughter the inhabitants of Gibeon, would have had to stop the rotation of the earth -- See the Book of Joshua 10:12-14], but I do not hear any devout Evangelicals denying that the earth orbits the sun. These determined know-nothings are not the real danger to our safety and sanity. The real danger is posed by the Paul Wolfewitz's and John Bolton's, who know exactly where Afghanistan is and can name the President of Uzbekistan straight off, and are now plotting openly to take the United States into war with Iran.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

NEWT GINGRICH'S DOCTORAL DISSERTATION

2011-11-22T09:45:00.001-05:00

I may be the only person on the face of the earth who has read, cover to cover, Immanuel Kant's Inaugural Dissertation, Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation, and Newt Gingrich's doctoral dissertation. I do not think this is sufficient to qualify me as a scholar, but with luck it might get me invited to a dinner party.

[Incidentally, I find it somewhat disorienting to have to refer to the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, third in line to the Presidency, as "Newt." Do you suppose he has a sister nicknamed "Eft?"]

Since I am known as a student of the thought of both Kant and Marx, it will not come as a surprise that I have read the first two documents, but Gingrich's doctoral dissertation? What is that about? Well, I have had some unkind things to say about Newt on this blog -- about his pompous, self-inflating bloviating, his appallingly inappropriate self-satisfaction, the sheer vacuity of his utterances. All by himself, he has given self-esteem a bad name. But then I thought to myself: "Gingrich presents himself to the world as an academic. He has a Ph. D., or so I have heard. He even had a college teaching job. I owe it to him as, in a manner of speaking, a colleague to take a look at his dissertation and see what it has to say."

In the old days, a daunting task, but not in the age of digitization. Wikipedia informed me that Gingrich did his graduate work in the Tulane history department; the Tulane website took me to the university's library catalogue; the Duke University Reference Librarian talked me through the download process over the phone [never easy for old guys like me], and there it was: "Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945-1960 A Dissertation Submitted on the Sixth Day of May, 1971 to the Department of History of the Graduate School of Tulane University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Newton Leroy Gingrich." Two hundred eighty-three pages of text, typed and double-spaced in standard dissertation format, five pages of tables, five pages of "selected bibliography" and a one-page biographical sketch of the author indicating that he was awarded a B.A. by Emory University.

Since it would appear that we are going to have Newt to kick around for a while, I decided to read the entire blasted thing, which I did yesterday, from Introduction to Bibliography. It may be some while before anyone else undertakes this task, so I think I owe it to my faithful blog-readers and to the wider cyberspace audience to give a reasonably detailed description of the document. I do not imagine it will sway many votes, one way or another, but it may be, in the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert in The Mikado, a "source of innocent merriment."

Why on earth Belgian educational policy in the Congo? Newt was studying Modern European History, to be sure, but the topic seems rather obscure. The dissertation lacks the typical page of acknowledgements that might offer a clue, but a bit more surfing of the web reveals that the dissertation director, Professor Pierre Henri Laurent, whose name appears on the signature page, was the son of "an eminent Belgian historian, who died during the Resistance; his mother was a distinguished teacher and linguist. Pierre and his older sister were brought as children to the United States by their mother when the Second World War broke out." Mystery solved.

I will have more to say about the dissertation [I must wring some benefit from the hours spent reading it, after all], but you will want to know right away whether this bit of juvenilia, as it were, shows signs of the mature Newt in full bellow, bombastic, pleased to the point of ecstasy by the sound of his own voice, a Larry Summers without the becoming modesty, if I may put it that way.

Not a bit of it! The dissertation is written in a pedantic, serviceable prose, giving no evidence of the Newt that was to emerge as a fully formed Toad. Although the dissertation is written entirely in English, the footnotes give evidence that Gingrich had a quite adequate command of written French. [The only word in the entire dissertation not in English or French is misspelled -- Weltanschauung with only one "u" -- page 205, line 2] Gingrich relies heavily on secondary sources, with especial attention to the work of Ruth Slade and Roger Anstey. However, he has clearly made extensive use of Belgian public documents, including reports of Parliamentary debates. There is no evidence in the text that he traveled either to Belgium or to the Congo, and he seems not to have interviewed any of the principal actors, Belgian or Congolese, even though the dissertation was written only a handful of years after the departure of the Belgians from the Congo.

The structure of the dissertation is straightforward: an Introduction, three chapters on the political and historical background of Belgium's colonization of the Congo, nine chapters on various aspects of the educational institutions introduced by the Belgians into the Congo -- religious education, secular education for the Congolese, secular education for Belgians living in the Congo, education for women, agricultural education, technical education, higher education for the Congolese, etc. -- and a Conclusion.

The political or ideological orientation of the dissertation, if I may put it this way, is roughly that of a Cold War member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Colonization is seen almost entirely from the perspective of the colonial power, not from that of the indigenous population. The rule of King Leopold II, who literally owned the colony as his private property until, at his death, he willed it to Belgium, is widely understood to have been the most horrifyingly brutal colonial regime in Africa. Gingrich acknowledges this fact once in the dissertation. Speaking of the financial pressures placed by the Congo on King Leopold's coffers, Gingrich reports that a "state official told a missionary in 1899 that each time a corporal 'goes out to get rubber he is given cartridges. He must return all those that are not used; and for every one used he must bring back a right hand.'" [p. 15]

But with this sole exception, Gingrich's picture of the Belgian colonial administration is reasonably favorable. As I read his account of the struggles by dedicated Belgian colonial administrators to provide some measure of formal education to the Congolese, in the face of a generally uninterested and neglectful government in Brussels, I was reminded of nothing so much as the writings of John Stuart Mill on India, and the responsibility of cultivated, enlightened Englishmen to bear the heavy burden of stewardship until the non-European peoples are ready for self-rule.

As I have observed, the dissertation is written entirely in English, with quotations from French writers or documentary courses translated in the text, but there is one exception, "évolué," which appears dozens of times in the dissertation. évolué is the past participle of the French verb évoluer, "to evolve." It is the term that was used by the Belgians to refer to those Congolese who learned French, adopted Western dress and styles of social behavior, and became Europeanized. There are several occasions in the dissertation where Gingrich refers to events or statements as "ironic," but he seems not to have been aware of any tingle of irony in his own use of évolué.

Although he makes no effort at all to consult the colonized and give voice to their view of the Belgian rule, Gingrich does at one point, rather surprisingly, quote Father Placide Tempels quite favorably and at some length. [pages 100-101.] Tempels was a missionary priest who wrote an important book called Bantu Philosophy. It is the first acknowledgement by a European author that the indigenous peoples of Africa have complex, philosophically sophisticated conceptions of the world and their place in it. I confess that I was surprised and impressed to see Tempels put in an appearance in Gingrich's dissertation. I was a good deal less pleased by Gingrich's reliance on the always questionable Colin Turnbull.

Gingrich's summary evaluation of the Belgian colonial performance is quite positive, on the whole, and I cannot help but wonder whether this reflects the point of view of his Belgian dissertation director. To give you some sense of Gingrich's perspective, here is a paragraph from the short Concluding chapter:

"The Belgian colonial record left no one guilty and no one innocent. The Belgian leaders had virtually absolute power. By 20th century standards they used it benevolently although without foresight. The Belgian public had abandoned a responsibility which it did not desire in the first place and which had to compete for attention with pressing and far more obvious domestic problems. The only people who suffered were the Congolese and they had suffered far more under Leopold II (and their neighbors still suffer far more under Portuguese and South African rule). That guilt which the Belgians bear is for neglect, oversight, and relatively mild exploitation. If the Congo was not the model colony Belgian publicists pretended, neither was it the disaster news reports from 1960 to 1965 suggested. To have developed a semi-modernized, semi-educated but politically innocent colony was one of the Twentieth Century's lesser sins." [p. 283]

In the academic year in which he submitted his dissertation, Gingrich took a teaching job as an Assistant Professor in the History Department at West Georgia College. I have been unable to find any scholarly publications coming from his dissertation, but my ability to search the databases on the web is rather rudimentary, and someone more skilled may be able to enlighten me. While teaching at West Georgia, Gingrich ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. House of Representatives in the 6th district, first in 1974 and again in 1976. Finally, having been denied tenure at West Georgia, he won the seat in 1978.

The rest, as they say, is farce.

IS THERE METHOD IN THEIR MADNESS?

2011-11-20T19:18:00.001-05:00

I have long thought that one of Freud's signal achievements was giving us a vocabulary and conceptual framework with which to think about behavior that strikes us, on first look, as simply crazy, incoherent, lacking form or structure, and hence incomprehensible. I find myself admiring this achievement as I struggle to understand what is going on in the Republican Party. If I bracket my deep revulsion at the substance of Republican policies, and attempt simply to understand, as a pathologist of politics, what is happening, I find myself stymied. My Marxist conceptualization of class struggle does not give me the slightest assistance in making sense of the momentary popularity of Michele Bachmann, although Richard Hofstadter's famous analysis of The Paranoid Style in American Politics is some help. I struggle to fit the Herman Cain boomlet into what I have learned about the complexities of racial politics from my colleagues in the Afro-American Studies Department at UMass, but his sheer breathtaking mind-numbing ignorance leaves me gasping. Only Rachel Maddow's inspired hypothesis that Cain is a performance art project offers any conceptual hook on which to hang my astonishment.

And now we have the Phoenix-like reemergence of Newt Gingrich. This jumped-up West Georgia College Assistant Professor of European History, who was denied tenure and got himself elected to the House of Representatives from the Sixth District in Georgia, the besotted husband of a young, pretty, blond wife who has spent the last ten years flim-flamming his way to a half-million dollar revolving Tiffany's account, now presents himself to a desperate Republican electorate as the last fleeting alternative to the unspeakable Mitt Romney.

How is one to understand this phenomenon? Is it conceivable, even in a world grown accustomed to superstars who are famous for being famous, that the Republican Nominating Convention in Tampa Florida next August will choose Newt as their standard-bearer? I am, I freely confess, a great-great grandchild of the Enlightenment, a rationalist to the bone, who believes that human behavior, however despicable, is comprehensible. I assure myself therefore that the Republicans could not be so self-defeatingly insane. And yet, and yet.

We are six weeks from the Iowa Caucuses, but there is still Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Kwanza, Christmas, and New Year's Eve to get through, not to mention bowl games and the death of the NBA season, so the attention of all but the most fanatic politics junkies will be diverted from the fate of the Newt. Will I return from Paris on Christmas Eve to find that Newt bestrides the known world like a Colossus? Only time will tell. In the meanwhile, there is an entire pharmaceutical armamentarium of anti-psychotic medications to temper our madness.

KUDOS TO PAUL KRUGMAN

2011-11-20T13:15:00.002-05:00

Idly surfing the web, I came upon a remark made by Paul Krugman on a Sunday talk show. Speaking of Newt Gingrich, Kurgman said, "He is a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like." That is the most perfect description I have ever heard of a high profile politician. Credit where credit is due.

RICARDO'S PRINCIPLES A MINI-TUTORIAL CONCLUSION

2011-11-19T11:29:00.001-05:00

It seems appropriate that I should bring this mini-tutorial to a close with a discussion of Ricardo's brief but extraordinary chapter on Machinery. His argument there, it seems to me, shows him at his very best, while also exhibiting the theoretical and ideological limitations of the Classical school to which Marx directed his most penetrating criticism. Ricardo's purpose in including the chapter is to correct a mistake of which, he says, he had previously been guilty. This in itself sets him off from the common run of theoreticians in a variety of disciplines these days, who think it a death blow ever to acknowledge that they have been mistaken.

The question at issue, Ricardo says in the first sentence of the chapter, is "the influence of machinery on the interests of the different classes of society." Take a moment to examine the phrasing of that question. I venture to suggest that there is not a single established economist in America today, including such liberal icons as Robert Reich and Paul Krugman, who could ever bring himself or herself to write a sentence in which appears the phrase "the interests of the different classes of society." Even to utter such a combination of words would be to elicit hysterical charges of "class warfare," and yet Ricardo writes the sentence with no suggestion that he intends to be provocative or to deviate from accepted norms of polite intellectual behavior. In this, as in many other ways, the mathematically sophisticated discourse of our modern professional economists exhibits a marked falling away from the understandings that the first Political Economists had achieved by the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is instructive in this regard to read Marx's discussion of those early figures in the three volume Theories of Surplus Value with which Capital concludes. Despite his strong disagreements with the best of them -- Quesney, Destutt de Tracy, Smith, Ricardo and the rest -- Marx is extremely respectful of them, and goes out of his way to acknowledge where they have been correct. This stands in striking contrast to his dismissive and mocking treatment of those whom he calls "vulgar economists," like Nassau Senior, for whom he has nothing but contempt.

One of the great advantages of the early Political Economists is that they are writing at the dawn of modern capitalism, and features of mature capitalism that today we take for granted are for them innovations that stand in stark contrast to what has gone before. The very novelty of markets, capitalist enterprises, wage labor, and the rapid introduction of machinery into spheres of production previously dominated by hand labor [or, in the original sense of the term, "manufacture"] prompts them to ask questions that might not occur with such urgency to those theorists who come along when these and other features of a mature capitalism have long since become the norm.

The early nineteenth century saw the rapid introduction of machinery in England, particularly in the textile industry. Power carders, spinners, and looms replaced the hand-operated devices that had for generations been used to turn linen, wool, and cotton into cloth. The introduction of the machinery had two consequences, both of which were devastating to a group of workers who had until then been among the most skilled and best paid in England. First of all, the machinery displaced thousands of weavers, who were thrown out of work and were suddenly destitute, for the purpose of introducing the machines, of course, was that one machine could do the work of many weavers. Second, the machinery replaced the skilled weavers with semi-skilled machine operators or tenders, many of whom were children as young as eight or nine. Weaving had been a skilled craft required a long apprenticeship and the possession of a valuable tools -- the looms and accompanying instruments of the weaving trade. Much of that skill was now internalized, as it were, in the power looms owned by the capitalists and located in factories, no longer in the crofts and cottages of the weavers. Instead of a years-long apprenticeship in the weaving craft, only a few weeks were required to train an unskilled boy or girl to tend a machine.

The workers threatened with redundancy by the new machines reacted swiftly and violently. "Luddites," they were called, after Ned Ludd, a weaver who was said [probably apocryphally] to have destroyed a weaving machine in the late seventeen hundreds. They threw wrenches into the machines, broke them up, and tried futilely to halt the mechanization of the cloth industry. The movement flourished between 1811 and 1816 before being put down by the police, which is to say in the years just preceding the writing and publication of the Principles.

Summarizing the view he previously held on this question, Ricardo writes: "As, then, it appeared to me that there would be the same demand for labour as before, and that wages would be no lower, I thought that the labouring class would, equally with the other classes, participate in the advantage, from the general cheapness of commodities arising from the use of machinery." But now, he says, he has concluded that he was wrong. "I am convinced, that the substitution of machinery for human labour, is often very injurious to the interests of the class of labourers. My mistake arose from the supposition, that whenever the net income of a society increased, its gross income would also increase; I now, however, see reason to be satisfied that the one fund, from which landlords and capitalists derive their revenue, may increase, while the other, that upon which the labouring class mainly depend, may diminish, and therefore it follows, if I am right, that the same cause which may increase the net revenue of the country, may at the same time render the population redundant, and deteriorate the condition of the labourer."

Ricardo defends this new position by working out an elaborate numerical example, which I shall not try to summarize. He draws from his example four conclusions. The first is that "the discovery, and useful application of machinery, always leads to an increase in the net produce of the country, although it may not, and will not, after an inconsiderable interval, increase the value of that net produce [as measured in units of embodied labor -- ed.]" This is actually a very interesting inference, because it is directly contrary to the claim by Marx that an increase in the ratio of Constant Capital ]machinery and such] to Variable Capital [labor] has a tendency to drive the profit rate down [the famous thesis of the Falling Rate of Profit.] For a very long time, a belief in The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall was a touchstone of Marxist orthodoxy, separating the true believers from the Apologists for Capitalism [or the Petit Bourgeois Running Dogs of Imperialism, as I was once labeled by a Soviet journal, Literaturnaya Gazyetta.] However, in 1961, a Japanese economist, Nobuo Okishio, proved that under plausible theoretical conditions, a profitable labor-saving innovation by one capitalist would, when it had been adopted by all the other capitalists in that line of production, inevitably lead to a rise in the profit rate. [See my Autobiography for a nice story about Sam Bowles and Okishio's theorem.]

It is the Ricardo's third conclusion that is especially noteworthy. Writing, keep in mind, at the very time of the height of the Luddite uprising, he says: "the opinion entertained by the labouring class, that the employment of machinery is frequently detrimental to their interests, is not founded on prejudice and error, but is conformable to the correct principles of political economy."

There is a good deal more in the eleven pages of the little chapter on Machinery, but I think this is enough to display the quality and integrity of Ricardo's mind. The theoretical precision of his analysis in the Principles marks a dramatic improvement over that of Smith, as Smith's analysis marked an advance over that of his predecessors.

Before taking leave of Ricardo, let me spend a moment suggesting some further reading for those seriously interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the classical school of Smith, Ricardo, and Marx. The first thing to do, of course, is to read the entire Principles [and, if you have the energy for it, Smith's Wealth of Nations as well.] Naturally, I urge you to read Das Kapital. I prefer the older translation by Aveling and Moore, carried out under the watchful eye of Engels, to the newer Fowkes translation, which is actually more accurate, but loses the extraordinary literary brilliance of the original.

Once you have those under your belt, it is time to move on to the modern mathematical treatment of the thought of Ricardo and Marx. I am, I realize, a voice crying in the wilderness here, but I genuinely believe that the world-wide theoretical engagement by mathematical economists with Marx in the 1960's, 70's, and 80's was exciting and very important. I still believe that it had the potential to create a viable competitor to the standard neo-classical orthodoxy taught in the "best" universities in the United states and abroad.

Some of the key names in this movement are, first and foremost, Piero Sraffa, then Michio Morishima, Luigi Pasinetti, Andras Brody, Gilbert Abraham-Frois and Edmond Berrebi, and -- for a different but brilliant approach -- John Roemer. You will need a command of Linear Algebra to master all but the Sraffa, but then, Linear Algebra is basically second year undergraduate math, so it ought not to be too demanding.

I hope this mini-tutorial has had the effect of encouraging you to read Ricardo in the original. He is one of the great thinkers of the discipline of Economics, a worthy successor to Smith and predecessor of Marx.

RICARDO'S PRINCIPLES A MINI-TUTORIAL PART EIGHT

2011-11-18T11:31:00.000-05:00

There are, in all, thirty-two chapters in Ricardo's Principles, and on this eighth day of my mini-tutorial, I have only managed to discuss the first two. I think we can all agree that another two hundred ten Parts of the Tutorial would be a trifle excessive, so I am going to do a little picking and choosing. In what remains of this tutorial, I shall discuss just two additional chapters, in each of which we find material of the very greatest interest and importance: Chapter V, "Wages," and Chapter XX XI, "Machinery."

Wages first. Ricardo opens the chapter by applying to the special topic of labor the general theory of price that he has developed in Chapter I. "Labour, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labour is that price which is necessary to enable the labourers, one with another, to subsist and to perpetuate their race, without either increase or diminution." [I shall pass over without comment the rather striking use of the word "their."] The market price, Ricardo observes, "is the price which is really paid for it, from the natural operation of the proportion of the supply to the demand; labour is dear when it is scarce, and cheap when it is plentiful. However much the market price of labour may deviate from its natural price, it has, like commodities, a tendency to conform to it."

The "tendency" is explained by Ricardo in the next paragraph, where, echoing Malthus, he asserts that when times are good and wages are above bare subsistence, workers tend to raise up large families, and soon enough [when the children are perhaps ten or twelve, though Ricardo does not say] this increases the supply of labor relative to the demand, and wages then fall to what is required merely to keep the workers alive and allow them to replace themselves with their children when they grow old and die. Thus far, this is straight classical Political Economy of the dismal sort so brilliantly satirized a generation later in the novels of Charles Dickens. But now Ricardo adds a phrase that explodes the simple brutality of Malthus and opens up an entirely new sphere of inquiry. In the very next paragraph, he writes:

"When the market price of labour is below its natural price, the condition of the labourers is most wretched: then poverty deprives them of those comforts which custom renders absolute necessaries." Look at the last five words of the sentence: "which custom renders absolute necessaries." When I first read those words, alarm bells went off in my head. Could he have really meant this, I asked myself, or was it simply a slip of the pen, an unintentionally provocative turn of phrase? Ten paragraphs later, it became clear to me that Ricardo knew exactly what he was saying and intended the reader to construe his words literally. Here is that paragraph -- truly one of the most extraordinary passages in the Principles:

"It is not to be understood that the natural price of labour, estimated even in food and necessaries, is absolutely fixed and constant. It varies at different times in the same country, and very materially differs in different countries. It essentially depends on the habits and customs of the people. An English labourer would consider his wages under their natural rate, and too scanty to support a family, if they enabled him to purchase no other food than potatoes, and to live in no better habitation than a mud cabin; yet these moderate demands of nature are often deemed sufficient in countries where "man's life is cheap", and his wants easily satisfied. Many of the conveniences now enjoyed in an English cottage, would have been thought luxuries at an earlier period of our history."

It is not the employer who "considers" some level of wages "under their natural rate" but the workers, who have become accustomed to, and hence expect, a certain level of subsistence. hat level is determined not by physiology but by custom, which is to say by the beliefs and expectations of the workers. Contrary to the unexamined mindset of both classical Political Economy and neo-classical Economics, labor is not merely a factor input into production like iron, wool, leather, or wood. To his eternal credit, Ricardo sees this and states it unequivocally, even though the implications of this acknowledgement undermine the entire classical [and neo-classical] intellectual enterprise.

We have here nothing less than the eruption into the calm world of the classical Political Economists of Class Struggle. We are all familiar with the story, even though not all of us have learned the significance of that story from Marx. Workers are paid a wage barely sufficient to allow them to live, at whatever level of subsistence has become customary in their time, and to raise a family of children to replace them. When times are hard and employers seek to drive the wage down, the workers respond with all the force they can muster, because they are being asked to work for wages "on which they cannot live." When business picks up and the demand for labor momentarily exceeds the supply, driving wages up, workers are able to incorporate into their daily lives some small measure of what they consider "luxuries" -- some meat once a week with their potatoes and vegetables, some tea, or even coffee. Now a struggle develops between the workers and the bosses over what counts as "subsistence," with the workers insisting that meat once a week is a necessary part of their lives, and hence counts as a component of a subsistence real wage, and bosses fighting against what they call this immoral and irreligious lusting after "luxuries."

This is an on-going struggle, fought on the shop floor and in the streets, with walk-outs, lock-outs, scab labor, and union organizing. At every step of the way, a ten hour workday, a five day workweek, meat in the diet, indoor toilets, medical care, vacations, pensions -- every one is at one point in time derided by the bosses as unnecessary luxury and demanded by the workers as a part of their necessary subsistence. The ebb and flow of this struggle is determined by the relative power of the two adversaries and by the degree of organization and solidarity that the workers can achieve and sustain. Recall the old bumper sticker: "Support Organized Labor, Who Brought You The Weekend."

Speaking in the broadest and theoretically most abstract fashion, what we have here is a political struggle over the definition of social reality. Admiring as I obviously am of Ricardo's clarity of thought [admiration shared by Marx, by the way], I do not wish to give you the impression that he was a closet socialist or a radical reformer. Perhaps I can balance the scales a bit by quoting a passage from the final paragraph of the chapter. Speaking of the Poor Laws, which Ricardo opposed, he wrote:

"If by law every human being wanting support could be sure to obtain it, and obtain it in such a degree as to make life tolerably comfortable, theory would lead us to expect that all other taxes together would be light compared with the single one of poor rates. The principle of gravitation is not more certain than the tendency of such laws to change wealth and power into misery and weakness; to call away the exertions of labour from every object, except that of providing mere subsistence; to confound all intellectual distinction; to busy the mind continually in supplying the body's wants; until at last all classes should be infected with the plague of universal poverty. Happily these laws have been in operation during a period of progressive prosperity, when the funds for the maintenance of labour have regularly increased, and when an increase of population would be naturally called for. But if our progress should become more slow; if we should attain the stationary state, from which I trust we are yet far distant, then will the pernicious nature of these laws become more manifest and alarming; and then, too, will their removal be obstructed by many additional difficulties."

Sigh. For those in search of heroes, I recommend a return to my tutorial on The Thought of Karl Marx.

RICARDO'S PRINCIPLES A MINI-TUTORIAL PART SEVEN

2011-11-17T11:55:00.001-05:00

Ricardo's theory of rent -- widely viewed as the intellectual coup of the Principles -- is disarmingly simple. It goes like this: Start with the premise that there are, in England, a number of different grades or qualities of land being offered to entrepreneurs for rent. The land is graded on its fertility, the degree of its ability to produce corn [i.e., wheat, barley, oats, etc] with varying applications of labor and capital. For the sake of simplicity, we assume also that the corn grown on one parcel of land is indistinguishable from the corn grown on any other parcel, regardless of how much or little labor and capital it takes to grow it. [We have to assume this; otherwise the various corns will command varying prices in the market because of those differences -- an example of comparing apples to oranges, as it were. We also assume, just to allude in a preliminary way to the question raised several days ago by Andrew Blais, that none of this corn is priced in part on the basis of some snob factor, such as a Whole Foodian assertion that it has been raised by happy workers on land that positively enjoyed being cultivated -- a sort of Schmoo claim, for those of you who are old enough to remember L'il Abner, the cartoon strip drawing by Al Capp.]

We also assume that land owners are interested in being paid rent for the use of their land, and will accept the largest payment they can get, even if it should turn out that all they can get is some vanishingly small payment. [This is the kind of continuity assumption mathematically inclined economists always make in order to be able to use their nifty mathematics. Even though Ricardo does not use nifty mathematics overtly, he makes the same sort of assumption.]

Now, the quantity of corn grown is a response to the market demand for corn [not the price, just the quantity]. Smart entrepreneurs will not grow more corn than they can reasonably expect to be able to sell. [Not so smart entrepreneurs go broke, and do not interest us.] So long as that quantity can be more than met by growing corn solely on land of the best quality, the market for land for rent will be a buyer's market. More land being offered than is wanted by the buyers, the landlords will compete to see who succeeds in getting at least something for his or her land [some of the renters are titled ladies, of course.] The price for renting land will fall precipitously, until canny entrepreneurs are paying virtually nothing in rent, for if one of them is charged as little as a shilling an acre a year, he will go to one of the lazy, self-indulgent landed gentry who has failed to find any takers for his land and offer sixpence. This puffed up aristocrat, totally innocent of anything remotely resembling the Protestant Ethic, will snatch up the sixpence, because even sixpence is better than nothing. Under these conditions, the natural price of corn will be determined by the total quantity of labor directly and indirectly required for its production, which is to say the farm labor expended in growing it together with the bits of embodied labor passed along from the farm machinery, seed corn, and other capital inputs.

Now, as Thomas Malthus has explained to us [see above], the working class population [who are the principal consumers of corn, there being so many them and they having no money for anything better] will expand steadily until it starts to press against the available supply of corn. At this point, the relationship between the entrepreneurs and the landowners will shift dramatically. Now, there will be an actual shortage of the very best acreage, and competition for that land will commence. This will have two consequences. The first consequence is that for the first time, the entrepreneurs will be forced to pay a measurable rental on the best land. The second consequence is that some of the entrepreneurs will approach owners of the next best land, and offer them vanishingly small rentals -- tuppence an acre. Those owners, who have thus far been shut out of the rental market by a total lack of demand for their land, will snatch up this nominal fee.

The entrepreneurs face a calculation, which all of them are quite capable of making. It is cheaper to grow corn on the best land, but that corn will sell in the market for the very same price as corn grown on the less good land. What, they must calculate, is the highest rental they can afford to pay before it becomes more costly to grow corn on the best land than to grow corn on the second best land, which requires larger capital inputs but is available virtually rent free?

As population presses on available corn supplies, the second best land will all fall under cultivation, and some entrepreneurs will start seeking out the owners of the third best land. The second best land will start to command a non-trivial rental, while the owners of the third best land, newly entered in the lists, will have to be satisfied with that insulting tuppence per acre. Inasmuch as there is no limit save starvation to the expansion of the ranks of the poor [Ricardo accepts Malthus' argument on this], less and less economically desirable plots of land will be called into cultivation, and an entire hierarchy of rental rates will come into existence, attached to lands of differing degrees of fertility. As before, the very worst land, of which there is always some extra available [or so Ricardo assumes -- his argument requires it] commands in effect no rental at all.

Now comes the kicker. All the corn grown in England is thrown onto a single ferociously competitive market, where each bushel of it commands the same price. This means that it is the conditions of cultivation on the least fertile land that determine the price of corn in the entire market. Contrary to intuition and Adam Smith, rent plays no role at all in the determination of the natural price for agricultural goods. Ta da.

But the entrepreneur is paying rent on the land he employs [assuming he is not using land of the lowest quality.] If rent is not an element in the cost of corn, what is it? Simple: Is a deduction from profits, just as Adam Smith thought. It is a transfer payment exacted by the landlords who, for historical, political, and legal reasons, have a monopoly of an essential input into production. Because they control an input for which there is no substitute, they can exploit that control to siphon off a portion of the profits earned by the entrepreneurs. As population increases, so will rentals, with the result that a larger and larger share of profits will be diverted from productive reinvestment to wasteful luxurious living in the Stately Homes of England. Eventually, the landowners will suck up so much of those profits that economic expansion will be threatened, for growth results from the productive re-investment of profits.

To repeat, because the landowners control an essential component of the means of production, they can exploit the entrepreneurs. A corollary of this conclusion, not drawn by Ricardo, alas, is that if there is any major social and economic class that has no control over any of the means of production, it will be vulnerable to being exploited by the social class that does control the means of production. Enter Karl Marx.

RICARDO'S PRINCIPLES A MINI-TUTORIAL PART SIX

2011-11-16T13:34:00.001-05:00

The search for an invariant standard of value is not really a part of our story, but there is an interesting side to Ricardo's quest that is worth talking about for a bit. What follows is something of a specialist nature, and will perhaps capture the imagination only of the graduate economics students among you, but since I think it is rather fun, I shall indulge myself for the next several paragraphs.

Ricardo had the lovely idea of trying to imagine a sector of the economy in which there is only one commodity. He fixed on the grain, or as the English would say the corn, sector. In that sector, corn is the output. Furthermore, it is, in a manner of speaking, the only input, because the workers eat corn [i.e. wheat] as the staple of their diet and use seed corn as their only capital input [we conveniently ignore the use of shovels, hoes, harrows, and so forth. Just stay with me on this one.]

Now since this is a one-commodity sector, the profit rate is determined without the intermediation of a price system. It is simply the ratio between the corn output and the corn input in the form of real wages and capital. Since competition establishes an economy wide rate of profit, this profit rate in the corn sector, which is just the physical ratio of corn output to corn input, must be the profit rate for the entire economy. And since nothing can affect the price of corn save the conditions for producing corn [level of technology and the like], using corn as money will give us an invariant standard of value against which we can track and measure changes in the prices of all other commodities in the market.

Why on earth is this interesting? Well, one hundred and forty-three years after the publication of the first edition of the Principles, Piero Sraffa [the editor of the complete works of Ricardo] published a brilliant little book called Production of Commodities By Means of Commodities in which he developed a fascinating formal analysis of a Ricardian economic system, using precisely this notion of a single-commodity economy. Sraffa first identified those commodities in an economy which serve, directly or indirectly, as inputs into the production of all other commodities. He called them Basic Commodities. [All the others he called Luxury Commodities.] The wage goods consumed by the workers obviously qualify as Basic Commodities, because every line of production uses labor, and the laborers consume the wage goods. Iron is certainly a Basic Commodity, because every sector in the economy either uses iron, or uses something that is made with iron, or uses something that is made with something that is made with iron and so forth. [For those cognoscendi among you, let me just say that when you take the square matrix of unit input coefficients, substituting the real wage for the money wage, and partially decompose it so that there is a null submatrix in the upper right hand quadrant, the rows of the non-null submatrix in the upper left hand quadrant represent the Basic Commodities. Clear? Humph.]

Sraffa then considered an economy on a maximum growth path, in which all profits are ploughed back into expanded production and none is wasted on luxury production [a sort of Adam Smith dream economy with no landed aristocratic parasites]. He formed the idea of a notional Standard Commodity consisting of bits of each basic Commodity in just the proportions required for balanced growth, and proved that for any economy capable of generating an annual physical surplus, there must be such a Standard Commodity. And then he invoked Ricardo's odd notion of a single commodity economy, arguing that a complex economy on a balanced maximum growth path [what is sometimes called a von Neumann balanced growth path in honor of a nice theorem proved by the genius John von Neumann] is essentially a single commodity economy in which a quantity of the Standard Commodity is consumed as input in each cycle of production, and a larger quantity of the same Standard Commodity is produced as output, the profit rate being simply the ratio between the two as in Ricardo's corn sector.

Isn't that just gorgeous? Well, I think so. Thank you for staying with me. Now back to our regular programming.

You will recall that at the very beginning of Chapter One, Ricardo announces his intention not to concern himself with " rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, [and] wines of a peculiar quality, which can be made only from grapes grown on a particular soil, of which there is a very limited quantity." His interest is in reproducible commodities. But there is one scarce item available in the market that cannot so easily be brushed aside, namely land. There is, at least in the England of the early nineteenth century, a fixed and finite amount of arable land, on the cultivation of which the entire economy [and the population] depends. The price commanded by the input into production is called rent, and unlike the price of wool or farm tools or indeed even labor itself, a rise in rent does not evoke an increase in its production. Rent, as Adam Smith made bitterly clear, is a kind of ransom that the landed gentry exact from the rest of England. The majesty of the law stands behind their refusal to allow entrepreneurs access to the land save at the payment of a rent, even though the entire nation depends upon that access for its survival.

Now, any capitalist engaged in the production of corn and other agricultural goods will tell you that rent is one of his costs of doing business. When he is sitting in his study late at night, tallying up his outlays and comparing it with his receipts to determine whether he is turning a profit, he will list the rent he pays to the landlord in the same column of expenses in which he has entered the money he lays out for ploughs and seed corn and fertilizer and the wages he has paid to his farm workers. They are all costs of production, and so surely they all play a role in determining the price of the corn he sells in the marketplace. This is what came to be called the "adding up" theory of price, which Ricardo rightly recognized as no theory at all, despite its superficial plausibility.

Now the land on which the rent is charged was not originally brought into existence by labor [save for the Labor of the Almighty in the act of Creation, of course], so it cannot be conceptualized in some manner as embodied labor, being passed along imperceptibly to the crops grown on it. This quite obviously poses a very serious problem for Ricardo's revolutionary version of the Labor Theory of Value. The only way in which he can salvage that theory is by demonstrating that, counter to common sense and the universal conviction of previous Political Economists, rent plays no role in the determination of natural price. And that is precisely what Ricardo proceeds to do, in Chapter II of the Principles.

Since I am writing a mini-tutorial for a blog, and not a scholarly paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal, I am at this point going to allow myself an autobiographical indulgence. Clipped to the first page of Chapter II in my copy of the Principles is a yellowing piece of paper, on which I have recorded my thoughts a propos the theory of rent set forth by Ricardo in the chapter. There are three notes, written at different times, two in black and one in red. All three date, I believe, from the late Seventies. I am going to reproduce them here, as an evidence of the workings of my mind. I apologize if this somewhat partakes of the mindset of Mr. Toad in the Wind in the Willows.

The first note reads: "Ricardo, Principles, Chapter II. The theory of rent is a key to the argument of the entire book. But it is somewhat puzzling. It makes sense only if, either there is free, unclaimed land lying about, or else the owner of the marginal land is assumed to have invested capital in it, in the form of buildings, etc., so that he has some incentive to make it available to a tenant farmer at a price which (in Ricardo's view) contains no factor of true rent. If neither of these assumptions is true, it would seem that even the marginal land would command a price -- is that price "rent," or a monopoly price? What is its logical status? After all, if I own a piece of marginal land and there is only sub-marginal land left unclaimed, there may be no tenant farmer willing to pay me for the use of the land; but why ought I to permit him to use the land rent-free?" This is followed at a later time by a notation that reads "See the quote from Adam Smith, pp. 329-30 below, which Ricardo endorses. They see the point." Finally, at yet a later time, I wrote in red, "Whoops. I am, apparently, a 'superficial reader.' See Schumpeter's remark. quoted by Dodd, p. 69, in Theories of Value."

This series of comments is a rather nice representation of my on-going effort to understand and internalize Ricardo's sophisticated argument.

RICARDO'S PRINCIPLES A MINI-TUTORIAL PART FIVE

2011-11-15T12:40:00.001-05:00

You will recall that Adam Smith's attempt at a labor theory of natural price immediately foundered on the shoals of "accumulations of stock." In modern terms, his simple theory was unable to handle differences in capital intensity among the several sectors of the economy. Ricardo makes a significant theoretical advance in the treatment of this problem with a brilliant conceptual tour de force: embodied labor.

Before I explain this lovely idea, let me alert those of you who may actually be reading the Principles with this tutorial to the fact that Ricardo's exposition of the concept of embodied labor gets all tangled up with a quite separate issue -- the search for what the classical political economists called "an invariant standard of value." As Ricardo says, "Two commodities vary in relative value, and we wish to know in which the variation has really taken place." Both Smith and Ricardo thought that in the absence of some commodity whose value never varies, and which could therefore be used as the standard against which the value of all other commodities is measured, we would never be able to answer this question. This is actually something of a red herring, although it led Ricardo, as we shall see in a bit, into some very interesting theoretical territory.

How do we deal with the fact that the trap used by the beaver hunter may require less labor to make than the bow and arrow used by the deer hunter [to recur to Smith's famous little example]? Ricardo replies: when the maker of bows and arrows expends her labor on the making of a bow and arrows, that labor is, as it were, embodied in the bow and arrows. It is carried along [so to speak] when the hunter buys the bow and arrows from the bow and arrow maker [or trades her some deer for the bow and arrow, which from the point of view of the classical Political Economists is the same thing.] As the hunter uses the bow and arrows, bits of that embodied labor are transferred from them to the deer that are killed with their aid. Thus, the killing of the deer has actually required more than just the labor expended in hunting them. It has also required some portion of the labor embodied in the tools of the kill. The same is true of the traps used by the beaver hunter. When the two hunters meet to bargain, since they are rational [even if they are only wearing beaver skins and eating venison], they take into account the full quanta of labor embodied in the products they are offering for trade. Now, this notion of "bits of embodied labor being passed along" is of course a faҫon de parler, a convenient conceptual fiction. With modern mathematical techniques, it is easy enough to express the entire theoretical story without reference to fantastical imperceptible bits of labor. All one need do is set up and solve a system of simultaneous linear equations, or, what is the same thing, invert a square matrix of unit input coefficients. [Never mind.] Ricardo, despite not having those mathematical tools at his disposal, had the genius to intuit the formally correct solution to the problem.

There is, as he quite well realized, much more to the story than this, for the bow maker, when making the bow, uses knives and saws and hatchets and sandpaper and glue and many other tools and materials, each of which is the product of someone's labor in a previous period of time. And of course each of those inputs into production, as we call them, must be thought of as embodying some quantum of labor which is passed along in the production process until the tools wear out or the materials are used up, at which point we say that all of the embodied labor has been transferred and is no longer present them. [Talk about your miracles of transubstantiation! Marx, as I observed in the Weber tutorial, had a field day with the notion of embodied labor. For a full literary, philosophical, ideological, and metaphysical analysis of all of this, see my little book, Moneybags Must Be So Lucky.]

It should be obvious that we can repeat this story at each previous stage in the production process, for the tools used by the bow maker were themselves produced with the aid of tools and materials produced in an even earlier period. It takes very little imagination to recognize that the accumulated bits of labor embodied in some present-day commodity form an infinite series. It should also be clear, although perhaps not exactly obvious, that as the series goes on, extending farther and farther back in time, the bits of embodied labor being carried along become smaller and smaller. Does the sum of this infinite series of bits of embodied labor converge on some finite quantity? Indeed it does, although I do not think Ricardo ever framed the question to himself in quite this fashion. [If you are seriously interested in formal proofs of all the things I am saying in this discursive and casual way, you can consult the Appendix of my book Understanding Marx.]

So, Ricardo's solution of Smith's conundrum was to revise the theory Smith put forward. The new Ricardian Labor Theory of Value asserts that commodities exchange in the market in proportion to the quantities of labor directly and indirectly required for their production, where the quantities "indirectly required" are what we have been calling the bits of embodied labor transmitted from the inputs into the production of the commodities.

According to Ricardo, we are to understand each commodity as requiring, or embodying, some quantum of labor directly applied to it in the present period of production, and assorted quanta of labor indirectly required and transferred to it in the production process from the tools and materials employed. The sum of those various quanta is then the real value of the commodity, and in a fully competitive capitalist market exhibiting the behavioral and knowledge conditions discussed above, commodities will exchange with one another in proportion to the quanta of direct and indirect labor required for their production. This is the mature form of David Ricardo's Labor Theory of Value or Natural Price.

Alas, no sooner had Ricardo enunciated his new theory than he realized that it was not universally true. The problem was this: In some production processes, there is a very rapid turnover on the capitalist's investment. If his factory is producing woolen thread, let us suppose [I say "his" because at the time that Ricardo was writing, virtually all English capitalists were men], there is almost no gap at all between the time when the raw wool is brought to the factory and spun into skeins of thread and the time when the finished thread can be put on the market so that the capitalist can recoup his investment [suitably augmented by profit, of course] and start over again. But a maker of carriages may find that from raw materials to finished carriage is a matter of weeks, or even a month. Even though the amounts of labor directly and indirectly required in the fashioning of one carriage and some quantum of thread are the same, the carriage and that quantum of thread will not exchange equally for one another, for the carriage maker must be compensated for the time during which his capital is tied up in production. Otherwise, the thread merchant will make a greater return on his capital [for it will turn over one hundred times a year rather than twelve], and the workings of the market will force an adjustment in the relative price of carriages and thread. Once those market adjustments have played out, we will find that commodities containing equal amounts of labor directly and indirectly required for their production will not in general exchange as equals in the market.

This is a genuine theoretical difficulty, and Ricardo spent the last few years of his life, after the publication of the first edition of the Principles, unsuccessfully searching for a solution.

The next major theoretical advance in classical Political Economy did not take place for another half century. It was only with the publication of volume one of Karl Marx's hauptwerk Das Kapital in 1867 that a theoretically interesting effort was made to solve the problem left unresolved by Ricardo's Principles. But that is a story I have already told in my tutorial on The Thought of Karl Marx. Those who are interested will find it at box.net, accessible via the link at the top of this blog.

UNITS OF MEASUREMENT

2011-11-14T16:34:00.002-05:00

We have a little cat named Christmas Eve [so named because we got her seventeen years ago on Christmas Eve -- but that is another story.] She weighs a bit more than ten pounds, and is the focus of attention in our little household [the reason we only go to Paris for three weeks at a time is because we cannot bear to be away from her longer than that.] I have now lost roughly eighteen pounds on my diet, with two and a half weeks to go. As I was walking this morning, I reflected that it is as though I had been carrying two Christmas Eves around all the time, strapped to my middection. Put that way, eighteen pounds is really quite a lot. [Since this is principally a political and philosophical blog, I suppose I ought to segue into a discussion of Friedman units, but I shall resist the temptation.]