POETIC INTERLUDE

On Thursday, I shall give the third in a series of eight lectures on the Thought of Karl Marx, at the Osher Lifelong Leraning Institute at Duke University. The reading for that day is the first fifteen pages of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, the great tract penned by Marx in 1848. In an attempt to capture for my students something of the feeling that Marx must have experienced at that time, when faced, at the age of thirty, with the prospect of a thoroughoing political and economic upheaval in Germany, I plan to read to the class the poem that William Wordsworth wrote in 1805, recalling his feelings and those of his compatriots at the news of the French Revolution. Here is the entire text of the poem:

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself 10

A prime Enchantress--to assist the work,

Which then was going forward in her name!

Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,

The beauty wore of promise, that which sets

(As at some moment might not be unfelt

Among the bowers of paradise itself)

The budding rose above the rose full blown.

What temper at the prospect did not wake

To happiness unthought of? The inert

Were roused, and lively natures rapt away! 20

They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,

The playfellows of fancy, who had made

All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength

Their ministers,--who in lordly wise had stirred

Among the grandest objects of the sense,

And dealt with whatsoever they found there

As if they had within some lurking right

To wield it;--they, too, who, of gentle mood,

Had watched all gentle motions, and to these

Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild, 30

And in the region of their peaceful selves;--

Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty

Did both find, helpers to their heart's desire,

And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;

Were called upon to exercise their skill,

Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,

Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world

Of all of us,--the place where in the end

We find our happiness, or not at all! 40

1805.

The fourth and fifth lines are immortal. Would that my sons could feel that bliss just once!

IT IS BETTER TO LIGHT A CANDLE THAN TO CURSE THE DARKNESS

On Friday, I posted a somewhat self-pitying message, tricked out in academic references to C. P. Snow, about my inability, during my long career, to find students who share my desire to unite the insights and methods of mathematics and logic with those of literary criticism, history, philosophy, and other "soft" disciplines. Yesterday, it occurred to me that self-pity is not a terribly attractive personality trait, even in a septuagenarian, so I decided to have another go.

I have always thought that the ideal teaching situation would be to gather a group of dedicated students who were seriously interested in learning, and then to conduct a seminar completely free of the extraneous irrelevances of university education: No entrance requirements, no tuition or other fees, no grades, no credits to earn and enter on a permanent record, no degrees awarded. Just me and the students, engaging with hard, exciting, deep ideas. Now that I am retired, there is no reason why I cannot do just that. All I need is students and a place to meet.

I think [it is not yet certain] that the UNC Philosophy Department will graciously allow me to use one of their seminar rooms, once a week, at a time when a regular seminar is not scheduled there. Now I must figure out how to put the word out in the Triangle community [Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, the Research Triangle, and associated towns and villages]. Then we shall see whether there are eight to fifteen people who want to study Marx's economic, historical, political, sociological, philosophical, anthropological, and psychological ideas with a depth and precision and integration that has not before, to my knowledge, been achieved.

Since the series of meetings -- probably twelve or so in all -- will cost nothing and confer no benefit on the participants save knowledge and understanding, I will feel free to make any demands I wish, however onerous. Anyone who does not want to work that hard will just drop out. I will ask them to read all of CAPITAL, Volume I, the MANIFESTO, portions of the ECONOMIC-PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844 and THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY, and my two books on Marx -- UNDERSTANDING MARX and MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, and other things in addition.

Well, twelve weeks may not do it.

I will expect them, at the very least, to feel comfortable with high school algebra -- I am not crazy, so I will not require Linear Algebra and Differential Calculus, even though those are both standard undergraduate subjects for students who pursue a science/mathematics track.

The course will be open to persons of any age, regardless of their educational credentials or lack of same. There will, needless to say, be not a whiff of ideological correctness. The students will not have to like Marx [that is actually rather hard to do] or agree with him -- or with me. All that is necessary is that they want to understand Marx, as richly and complexly as possible.

We shall see.

THE TWO C ULTURES

Some of you may be familiar with the expression "the two cultures," made popular half a century ago by the Englishman C. P. Snow. Snow, who used the phrase first in a speech, then in an essay, and finally in a short book expanded from the essay, was referring to the intellectual and cultural chasm he observed between the science dons and the humanist dons at Oxford, a chasm that, by extension, divided educated people throughout the English-speaking world. Snow himself was both a science don and a novelist, and hence was well positioned to bridge the gulf between the two groups of intellectuals. No scientist, he observed, would willingly acknowledge not knowing who Shakespeare was, and could be expected at the least to have a few bits and snatches of information about him -- "the Bard of Avon," "Macbeth," "To be or not to be," that sort of thing. But supremely learned, sophisticated, and self-admiring humanists would openly confess, indeed sometimes even brazenly announce, that they had not the slightest idea what the Second Law of Thermodynamics might be, and felt no impulse to find out.

The starkness of the division was heightened in England by the practice [which may no longer be in effect -- I have not checked] of examining boys and girls in what we would consider roughly the beginning of high school, and then sending each one off either into a science/math stream or a literature/classics stream. This determination continued right on through university, with no "General Education" courses to give the scientists a taste for the humanities and the humanists a glimmer of the sciences.

As this brief description suggests, Snow, while claiming that each of the two cultures was ignorant of the other, really thought the split was, if I may combine a political metaphor with an American football metaphor, unbalanced to the right. The humanists were more deeply ignorant of the sciences than the scientists were of the humanities.

Throughout my long teaching career, which lasted fifty-three years and spanned six decades, I have brooded on this chasm between the two cultures, particularly because in my own intellectual work I strive not merely to work in a version of the two cultures but to fuse them seamlessly in order to achieve a deeper and more complex understanding than might otherwise be possible. I began my undergraduate education, in 1950, as a mathematics major, and though I quickly shifted to philosophy, I devoted a good deal of time and energy to the study of mathematical logic. Later on, when I became involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I taught myself Game Theory and studied the physics of radiation and fallout shelters, in order to debate against Herman Kahn and other defense intellectuals. My first teaching job, after getting my doctorate and spending six months on active duty in the Army National Guard, found me teaching European History at Harvard, while also teaching a graduate course on Kant's CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. I next taught undergraduates at the University of Chicago some of the classic texts of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, while also teaching a more advanced course on military strategy and foreign policy and a variety of graduate courses in philosophy. In the course of a long career, I taught Rational Choice Theory to graduate students, introductory microeconomics to undergraduates, and ended up running for twelve years a revolutionary doctoral program in Afro-American Studies.

This broad array of materials has always seemed to me to be seamlessly connected, demanding the same sorts of intelligence, intuition, rigor, and clarity. But to my very great sadness, I have virtually never found students able to draw, with my guidance, on a similar spectrum of disciplinary specialties. The consequence has been that I have never truly found students who can carry on the sort of work I do. If they can handle the math, the literary criticism and sociology and philosophy is a closed book to them. And if they are comfortable with the history or anthropology or literary analysis, they are almost certain to confess, only a trifle shame-facedly, that they were "never good at math."

When I started to study the thought of Karl Marx, I found in him a catholicity of intellect and breadth of learning that I admired, and I formulated the plan of writing a study and explication of his great work, DAS KAPITAL, that would bring into fruitful conjunction the modern mathematical interpretation of his economic theories with a literary, philosophical, sociological, and historical understanding of his devastating expose of the mystifications of capitalist market relations. I did not conceive this as some sort of scholarly analogue to the old parlor trick of rubbing one's stomach and patting one's head at the same time. Rather, I was persuaded [and still am] that only such an integrated approach could do justice to the depth and complexity of Marx's insights.

My friends made it urgently clear to me that there would no readership at all for a book that combined linear algebra equations with explications of Marx's literary metaphors, and I compromised by producing two books, the first of which [UNDERSTANDING MARX] analysed the economics [with the linear algebra consigned to an appendix] and the second of which [MONEYBAGS MUST HE SO LUCKY] dealt with the literary/philosophical dimensions of the first ten chapters of CAPITAL. The joke was on me, alas. The first book had a minor success in certain economic circles, while nobody at all read the second one.

Despite what has been, if one be honest, a career-long failure both to teach and to write in the way I think best, I remain wedded to the belief that an understanding of the complex capitalist world in which we live requires a fusion of the insights from as broad an array of disciplines as one can manage. Perhaps someone out there will pick up the torch.

OMNIUM GATHERUM OF A SCATTERED MIND

1. In less than two weeks, I shall be back in Chapel Hill, beginning my course, at the Duke Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, on The Thought of Karl Marx. As part of my preparation, I sat in Le Metro, our cafe in Place Maubert, and re-read THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. It struck me that it has literally been decades since I last read it -- possibly, as many as four decades! Once again, its sheer brilliance stunned me. And yet, I had never before realized how much it is a young man's cri du coeur. It breathes with confidence, defiance, a sense that this is our historical moment. "Bliss was it that dawn to be alive, but to be young were very heaven." Perhaps I never saw before this distinctive character of the MANIFESTO because when I last read it, I too was young [though not, I imagine, as young as Marx when he wrote it.] CAPITAL is very much a mature author's creation -- fully as brilliant, filled with excoriations of Capital, but measured, less certain that the moment has arrived and is upon us. I wonder whether I shall be able to communicate something of that brilliance and excitement to my students, all of whom, I rather expect, will be my contemporaries.

2. Herewith an account of my latest passage at arms with the bizarre French banking system. Susie and I have a bank account in a French bank, BNP Paribas, which we opened in the big Place de l'Opera branch. [Never mind that in order to gain the right to give them my money, I must maintain an 8,000 Euro savings account in the bank that I may not access.] We need this account because all our bills for the apartment are paid in Euros -- electricity, condo fee, taxes, telephone, cable, internet, insurance -- but all of the Americans who rent the apartment for short periods when we are not there pay us in dollars. There is a BNP Paribas branch in Place Maubert, across rue Lagrange from the cafe, and it even has an atm machine outside where my Bank of America card works. So that is fine.

However, periodically, I must deposit Euros in the account to cover the on-going costs of maintaining the apartment. I do this by taking Euros from the atm, and then entering the bank and depositing them in the account. Simple, right? As if!! Three days ago, after accumulating a little horde of 2000 Euros [I can only take about 600 a day from the atm machine], I walked into the bank to make a deposit. Now, I had a problem, which was, I admit, my fault. I had left my bank book at home, and hence did not have ready to hand my account number. But I had my passport, and I figured that with some fractured French explanation, all would be well. Good luck. The lady behind the counter told me that I would have to go to the branch at which I had opened the account to carry out this transaction. They are branches of the same bank, but that seems to count for nothing.

So, Susie and I took the metro to Jussieu, transferred, and went to the Opera stop, which -- it being the ritzy part of town -- even has an up escalator [but not a down escalator -- one can try the legendary French bourgeois penuriousness only so far.] We went in to the bank and asked to see Mlle Phincth, who, it seemed, was on an extended lunch break. She could see us in an hour and a half. So we crossed Place de l'Opera [always a risky operation] and sat in the famous Cafe de la Paix, drinking kir and watching the traffic go by. [I logged ten different bus lines passing through the Place -- extraordinary.] At 3:30, we were ushered in to see our conseillier. I counted out my 2000 Euros, and was then told that I needed the atm withdrawal slips, to prove where the cash came from. Of course, I hadn't kept them. Who does? This one time, she would make an exception, since I had my passport, but the maximum amount of cash that the bank would accept in any case was 1500 Euros. She took me to a teller, who led me down a flight of stairs, and through two locked doors, to a secret room [where downed American fliers were hidden from the Nazis in WW II, maybe?], equipped to receive -- cash. Back through two locked doors, up the stairs, and finally I was given a receipt. But it was made clear that BNP Paribas did not approve of cash, and in the future all transactions would have to be electronic.

Marx was too pessimistic, thinking it would take a revolution to overthrow capitalism. If he had only been a bit more patient...

3. I have committed myself. Today, at the market, I bought four pounds of beef, cut up into large cubes, a healthy portion of lardon, reduced to cubes, enough mushrooms to sink a canoe, carrots, leeks, and a lovely huge bouquet garni, and I am ready to try my hand at a true French boeuf burguignon. This will either be a spectacular success, or the largest pile of unusable detritus I have ever accumulated. I shall report on the outcome of the experiment.

KARL MARX, LOUIS NAPOLEON, AND ME

For those of us who find, in the writings of Karl Marx, an endless source of inspiration and enlightenment, The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, despite its now somewhat antiquarian interest, holds a special place in our hearts. It is hard, after all, to resist a book that begins, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Marx, who was thirty-three when the great Napoleon’s grandson, Louis Napoleon, seized control of France and proclaimed himself Napoleon III, wrote with all the bitterness of a disappointed lover, for the failure of the uprising of 1848 put paid to his hopes for an imminent proletarian revolution.

If the truth be told, I have never given a great deal of thought to that mid-nineteenth century upheaval, beyond what I could gather from Marx’s densely written analysis of the events, but I did take away from the text the general sense that Louis Napoleon was an egregious clown. Was this a fair and balanced assessment of the man? Frankly, it never seemed to matter very much to me. I was content to leave it to French revisionist historians to produce reassessments of the man and his regime.

Well, the day before yesterday, Susie went to a lecture at a pricey assisted living community that is part of the larger Chapel Hill development in which we live, and came home with the name of a book about the rebuilding of Paris. Since we have a small apartment in the 5^th arrondisement, and love Paris more than anywhere else either of us has ever lived, we both thought it would be fun to read it. Amazon.com very quickly told me that the book is out of print, with second hand copies selling for $70 and up, so off I went to the UNC Chapel Hill library to get one of their copies. [North Carolina has the rather charming rule that any certifiable resident can, for $25, get a card and use all of the services of the university library. Classy.]

I started yesterday evening to read David H. Pinkney’s 1958 monograph, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. To my chagrin, I discovered that the man I had for so long dismissed as the farcical second coming of the tragic Napoleon Bonaparte was in fact the author of the vast transformation of Paris that made it the magical city it is today. With Georges Haussmann [later Baron Haussmann], Napoleon III conceived and implemented the creation of the boulevards, parks, places, streets, and bois that I delight in each time I return to Paris.

I do not for a moment doubt that Marx’s estimation of the man as the protector of bourgeois France is spot on. But I am afraid that I shall never again be able to dismiss Louis Napoleon as merely a buffoon. If that be apostasy, make the most of it!