Saturday, April 03, 2004
TOOTING MY OWN HORN: There are times when I try to deceive myself and pretend that (my) blogging is anything other than sheer vanity masquerading as intellectual and political engagement. And then there are times when I have to surrender the pretense.
I do so now, by calling attention to this, the only thing I've written to be published in a mass-circulation publication. It's not too bad, I think, despite an error introduced by the (generally careful and hard-working) editorial staff (it should be Lady Margaret Hall, not St Margaret Hall); more importantly, it tells the story, all too briefly and clumsily, of a really remarkable woman who deserves attention.
I do so now, by calling attention to this, the only thing I've written to be published in a mass-circulation publication. It's not too bad, I think, despite an error introduced by the (generally careful and hard-working) editorial staff (it should be Lady Margaret Hall, not St Margaret Hall); more importantly, it tells the story, all too briefly and clumsily, of a really remarkable woman who deserves attention.
Friday, April 02, 2004
AND SPEAKING OF PRO-NAZI PHILOSOPHERS ... After all the unconvincing (and often under-informed) talk of the Bush Administration as inspired by, or a pawn of, Leo Strauss and his cabal of acolytes, it's nice to find a serious, well-informed and convincing article relating current US politics to political philosophy. In this case, Alan Wolfe looks at the anti-liberal German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt -- who was the Nazi's leading theorist of jurisprudence, and an unrepentant anti-semite -- not as a direct influence on the Bushies (most of those who explicitly and consciously appeal to Schmitt these days are either Leftist political theorists, or Rightist political theorists associated not with the neo-cons who are credited with influencing Bush's foreign policy, but with the 'paleo-cons' who oppose that foreign policy in favour of isolationism and a more simplistic and defensive nationalism; but more on this in a moment), but as someone whose ideas provide insight into the Administration and its outlook.
Wolfe's article starts out, though -- and in this it perhaps reflects its place of publication, the Chronicle of Higher Education -- with a consideration of Schmitt's current position in the academy. This is in itself an intriguing, because puzzling, story. It seems, at first glance, pretty bizarre that many far-left political theorists -- understandably, and probably admirably and rightly, looking for new theoretical resources and insights in the wake of the shipwreck of Marxism as a practical political system and emancipatory cause -- should embrace not just a Nazi, but a pretty explicit and unrepentant one (Heidegger, too, has of course had a profound impact on left-leaning theorists; but Heidegger's philosophy can be at least arguably divorced from his political follies. The same can be argued in the case of Paul de Man, though, again, there is a counter-argument as well. But Schmitt presents a more difficult case for defense, since he's an explicitly political thinker, and one between whose political theory and political allegiances and practice there is a pretty clear and strong link). The popularity of Schmitt on the European, and to some extent American, far right is less perplexing, and less interesting, to me at least. My own inclination, possibly unjust, is to regard Schmitt's right-wing admirers as fairly clearly neo-fascist. Such people are sufficiently far outside the mainstream, both academic and political, in both the US and Europe, as to make engagement with them less than urgent at this point (though it is probably wise to prepare oneself for the grim prospect of a resurgence on their part). The case of the Left Schmittians seems more interesting to me, both because it is surprising, and because, at least in the academy, such people constitute a more significant (if still far from mainstream) force. So it's worth pausing a moment to consider them.
Why would progressive, Left-wing people, however extreme, embrace Schmitt? And why would they embrace Schmitt rather than another thinker who might serve a similar purpose, without the Nazi baggage? Wolfe notes that Schmitt provides a critique of liberalism which is attractive to those who haven't overcome their allegiance to the 'authoritarian strain in Marxism' represented by Lenin, Gramsci, etc. -- those who actually want something tougher, indeed more brutal and shocking, than less revolutionary and authoritarian Marxist theorists (never mind liberalism, which is completely out of the running). This is I think fair so far as it goes; Schmitt's admirers do seem driven by a deep-seated hostility to liberalism; they embrace the fierce critic of (in Schmitt's term) 'political Romanticism' because they are themselves political romantics -- they have succumbed to the political romance of violence, the longing (tp adapt the title of Bernard Yack's excellent book) for total revolution.
Still, the question remains: why Schmitt? Why not, say, Sorel, who was also a powerful critic of liberalism, democracy, and political moderation, and who was all over the map politically -- ricocheting from anarcho-syndicalism to fascism to Bolshevism -- and whose spirit seems to me rather closer to the anti-globalist, new-New Left, than Schmitt?
There are a number of purely intellectual explanations for this. For many, Schmitt is just a more interesting, compelling, sophisticated thinker than others who argue for similar conclusions. I think that this is probably one reason -- I'd like to think the primary and main reason -- for Schmitt's appeal; but I do have a couple of speculations about additional motivations. One is that Schmitt has the advantage of novelty and foreigness. There is something instantly arresting and captivating in encountering a thinker who, coming from a radically different position, articulates ideas and perceptions that one shares (and perhaps only realises that one shares after one's been exposed to that thinker). Schmitt's fascination for certain Leftists is that he at once their arch-enemy, and their semblable. The other explanation is that to appeal to earlier Leftist theorists who share Schmitt's anti-liberalism and authoritarianism is to appeal to thinkers who supported, or in some cases were directly responsible for, Communist regimes, and thus Communist crimes. Invocation of such thinkers thus involves invocation of the great moral and intellectual failures, betrayals, illusions, and indeed pathologies, of the far Left in the 20th century. But to invoke Schmitt is to invoke the crimes of Nazism -- something which Leftists feel doesn't implicate them at all; indeed, is not anti-fascism one of the great glories of the history of the Left? (Let us forget for the moment the way in which the German Communists in effect helped Hitler seize power by rejecting cooperation with the Social Democrats and liberals, and the Hitler-Stalin pact; enough apologists for Communism certainly do). It may be (and this is not I think a conscious move on the part of the Left Schmittians) that embracing Schmitt provides certain theorists with a way of having their anti-liberal cake, and eating it too.
However, probably the most interesting and, to me, novel aspect of Wolfe's article is the connection it makes between Schmitt and the contemporary American Right. Wolfe claims that 'Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.' Wolfe locates the crux of Schmitt's political message, and his prescience, in his argument that politics is dominated by the irreducible distinction between friend and enemy. Politics is about antagonism -- an intense and extreme antagonism that allows for no compromise. (This is the opposite of the liberal or moderate view that politics, ideally, is all about compromise and at least partial reconciliation).
Wolfe sees a reflection of this uncompromising friend/enemy distinction in the work of contemporary conservative pundits such as Anne Coulter (whose temperamental, as opposed to ideological, fascism should be pretty plain for the eye to see). Wolfe, himself a liberal, also seems to accept Schmitt's argument that liberals will never be able to respond to such attacks in kind, because of their optimistic view of human nature, their suspicion of power, their aversion to conflict and brutality and extremism. Liberals are too nice to be political; politics is for the tough, while they(we)'re wimps.
A further element of Schmitt's outlook is what one might call its groupiness. Schmitt was opposed both to individualism, and to universalism. Individual lives and rights and well-being matters less than the outcome of the all important conflicts; while the very idea of 'the interests of humanity' is politically void, because, as Schmitt observes, humanity cannot wage war because it has no enemies. But politics is all about war -- war between competing, opposed groups. Liberals and conservatives are two such opposed groups, between whom compromise and mutual understanding is impossible, because they see politics in completely different ways; and conservatives, argues the conservative Schmitt, are simply right, while liberals are simply, totally, and incurably, wrong.
Wolfe's exposition of Schmitt's views, while brief, is quite good; and the connection he draws between this analysis and the contemporary behaviour and political fortunes of liberals and conservatives in the US is in many ways compelling. Still, I wonder if he doesn't go too far in accepting a Schmittian analysis, and portraying liberals and conservatives as more absolutely and simply opposed and different than they in fact are. It seems to me that Wolfe, like many political theorists (which by training he's not -- he's a sociologist [CORRECTION: Actually, Wolfe was trained as a political scientist, and currently teaches in a poli sci department, though for much of his career he's held positions in sociology departments), has a tendency to essentialise ideas -- to assign responsibility to abstractions, to forget that labels are no more than labels. People do not act or think in certain ways because they are liberals or conservatives -- or, rather, because there is some essence of liberalism or conservatism, which is within them. Rather, each individual is a compound of various beliefs and proclivities, and we use terms like 'liberal' and 'conservative' to characterise certain of these.
Put in a less highfalutin way, temperament and ideology are different things, and for most people neither is simple. There are a number of conservatives who don't conform to Wolfe's Schimittian paradigm of conservatives (though these days the most visible ones certainly seem to do so), and there are even some liberals who don't fall into Schmitt's portrait of liberalism.
Even if we do treat liberalism and conservatism as ideal types, I'm not sure that Wolfe's characterisation quite captures the essences of these complex beasts. Is it simply true that 'Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops'? This doesn't seem to me to characterise a good many conservatives (and it also seems incomplete to me in not factoring in leftists). Indeed, Wolfe's model of conservatism -- essentially, a manichaen (in the vernacular sense of that word) view in which there are only two sides, only two possible positions, and you're either with us or against us -- seems to me as, if not more, characteristic of radicals as of conservatives (of course, the Bush Administration manages to be both radical and conservative). There is, from Hume and Burke on (actually, no: from Aristotle on) a tradition of conservative thought that prizes moderation (a tradition represented recently by such varied thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, Raymond Aron, and -- yes -- Leo Strauss, all of whom have far more cachet among right-leaning political theorists in the American academy than Schmitt does at present).
Still, these are quibbles with a good article, which provides a fair introduction to a fascinating and troubling thinker, as well as offering an illuminating statement of the import of the current political conflicts in the U.S. between, basically, a moderate libealism and a radical conservatism over whether, in Wolfe's eloquent words, 'whether we will treat pluralism as good, disagreement as virtuous, politics as rule bound, fairness as possible, opposition as necessary, and government as limited.'
UPDATE: Russell Arben Fox has a very good, thoughtful critique of Wolfe's article, which is well worth looking at. There's also a posting on it at Crooked Timber, with a sometimes interesting, sometimes intemperate, discussion going on in response.
Wolfe's article starts out, though -- and in this it perhaps reflects its place of publication, the Chronicle of Higher Education -- with a consideration of Schmitt's current position in the academy. This is in itself an intriguing, because puzzling, story. It seems, at first glance, pretty bizarre that many far-left political theorists -- understandably, and probably admirably and rightly, looking for new theoretical resources and insights in the wake of the shipwreck of Marxism as a practical political system and emancipatory cause -- should embrace not just a Nazi, but a pretty explicit and unrepentant one (Heidegger, too, has of course had a profound impact on left-leaning theorists; but Heidegger's philosophy can be at least arguably divorced from his political follies. The same can be argued in the case of Paul de Man, though, again, there is a counter-argument as well. But Schmitt presents a more difficult case for defense, since he's an explicitly political thinker, and one between whose political theory and political allegiances and practice there is a pretty clear and strong link). The popularity of Schmitt on the European, and to some extent American, far right is less perplexing, and less interesting, to me at least. My own inclination, possibly unjust, is to regard Schmitt's right-wing admirers as fairly clearly neo-fascist. Such people are sufficiently far outside the mainstream, both academic and political, in both the US and Europe, as to make engagement with them less than urgent at this point (though it is probably wise to prepare oneself for the grim prospect of a resurgence on their part). The case of the Left Schmittians seems more interesting to me, both because it is surprising, and because, at least in the academy, such people constitute a more significant (if still far from mainstream) force. So it's worth pausing a moment to consider them.
Why would progressive, Left-wing people, however extreme, embrace Schmitt? And why would they embrace Schmitt rather than another thinker who might serve a similar purpose, without the Nazi baggage? Wolfe notes that Schmitt provides a critique of liberalism which is attractive to those who haven't overcome their allegiance to the 'authoritarian strain in Marxism' represented by Lenin, Gramsci, etc. -- those who actually want something tougher, indeed more brutal and shocking, than less revolutionary and authoritarian Marxist theorists (never mind liberalism, which is completely out of the running). This is I think fair so far as it goes; Schmitt's admirers do seem driven by a deep-seated hostility to liberalism; they embrace the fierce critic of (in Schmitt's term) 'political Romanticism' because they are themselves political romantics -- they have succumbed to the political romance of violence, the longing (tp adapt the title of Bernard Yack's excellent book) for total revolution.
Still, the question remains: why Schmitt? Why not, say, Sorel, who was also a powerful critic of liberalism, democracy, and political moderation, and who was all over the map politically -- ricocheting from anarcho-syndicalism to fascism to Bolshevism -- and whose spirit seems to me rather closer to the anti-globalist, new-New Left, than Schmitt?
There are a number of purely intellectual explanations for this. For many, Schmitt is just a more interesting, compelling, sophisticated thinker than others who argue for similar conclusions. I think that this is probably one reason -- I'd like to think the primary and main reason -- for Schmitt's appeal; but I do have a couple of speculations about additional motivations. One is that Schmitt has the advantage of novelty and foreigness. There is something instantly arresting and captivating in encountering a thinker who, coming from a radically different position, articulates ideas and perceptions that one shares (and perhaps only realises that one shares after one's been exposed to that thinker). Schmitt's fascination for certain Leftists is that he at once their arch-enemy, and their semblable. The other explanation is that to appeal to earlier Leftist theorists who share Schmitt's anti-liberalism and authoritarianism is to appeal to thinkers who supported, or in some cases were directly responsible for, Communist regimes, and thus Communist crimes. Invocation of such thinkers thus involves invocation of the great moral and intellectual failures, betrayals, illusions, and indeed pathologies, of the far Left in the 20th century. But to invoke Schmitt is to invoke the crimes of Nazism -- something which Leftists feel doesn't implicate them at all; indeed, is not anti-fascism one of the great glories of the history of the Left? (Let us forget for the moment the way in which the German Communists in effect helped Hitler seize power by rejecting cooperation with the Social Democrats and liberals, and the Hitler-Stalin pact; enough apologists for Communism certainly do). It may be (and this is not I think a conscious move on the part of the Left Schmittians) that embracing Schmitt provides certain theorists with a way of having their anti-liberal cake, and eating it too.
However, probably the most interesting and, to me, novel aspect of Wolfe's article is the connection it makes between Schmitt and the contemporary American Right. Wolfe claims that 'Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.' Wolfe locates the crux of Schmitt's political message, and his prescience, in his argument that politics is dominated by the irreducible distinction between friend and enemy. Politics is about antagonism -- an intense and extreme antagonism that allows for no compromise. (This is the opposite of the liberal or moderate view that politics, ideally, is all about compromise and at least partial reconciliation).
Wolfe sees a reflection of this uncompromising friend/enemy distinction in the work of contemporary conservative pundits such as Anne Coulter (whose temperamental, as opposed to ideological, fascism should be pretty plain for the eye to see). Wolfe, himself a liberal, also seems to accept Schmitt's argument that liberals will never be able to respond to such attacks in kind, because of their optimistic view of human nature, their suspicion of power, their aversion to conflict and brutality and extremism. Liberals are too nice to be political; politics is for the tough, while they(we)'re wimps.
A further element of Schmitt's outlook is what one might call its groupiness. Schmitt was opposed both to individualism, and to universalism. Individual lives and rights and well-being matters less than the outcome of the all important conflicts; while the very idea of 'the interests of humanity' is politically void, because, as Schmitt observes, humanity cannot wage war because it has no enemies. But politics is all about war -- war between competing, opposed groups. Liberals and conservatives are two such opposed groups, between whom compromise and mutual understanding is impossible, because they see politics in completely different ways; and conservatives, argues the conservative Schmitt, are simply right, while liberals are simply, totally, and incurably, wrong.
Wolfe's exposition of Schmitt's views, while brief, is quite good; and the connection he draws between this analysis and the contemporary behaviour and political fortunes of liberals and conservatives in the US is in many ways compelling. Still, I wonder if he doesn't go too far in accepting a Schmittian analysis, and portraying liberals and conservatives as more absolutely and simply opposed and different than they in fact are. It seems to me that Wolfe, like many political theorists (which by training he's not -- he's a sociologist [CORRECTION: Actually, Wolfe was trained as a political scientist, and currently teaches in a poli sci department, though for much of his career he's held positions in sociology departments), has a tendency to essentialise ideas -- to assign responsibility to abstractions, to forget that labels are no more than labels. People do not act or think in certain ways because they are liberals or conservatives -- or, rather, because there is some essence of liberalism or conservatism, which is within them. Rather, each individual is a compound of various beliefs and proclivities, and we use terms like 'liberal' and 'conservative' to characterise certain of these.
Put in a less highfalutin way, temperament and ideology are different things, and for most people neither is simple. There are a number of conservatives who don't conform to Wolfe's Schimittian paradigm of conservatives (though these days the most visible ones certainly seem to do so), and there are even some liberals who don't fall into Schmitt's portrait of liberalism.
Even if we do treat liberalism and conservatism as ideal types, I'm not sure that Wolfe's characterisation quite captures the essences of these complex beasts. Is it simply true that 'Liberals think of politics as a means; conservatives as an end. Politics, for liberals, stops at the water's edge; for conservatives, politics never stops'? This doesn't seem to me to characterise a good many conservatives (and it also seems incomplete to me in not factoring in leftists). Indeed, Wolfe's model of conservatism -- essentially, a manichaen (in the vernacular sense of that word) view in which there are only two sides, only two possible positions, and you're either with us or against us -- seems to me as, if not more, characteristic of radicals as of conservatives (of course, the Bush Administration manages to be both radical and conservative). There is, from Hume and Burke on (actually, no: from Aristotle on) a tradition of conservative thought that prizes moderation (a tradition represented recently by such varied thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, Raymond Aron, and -- yes -- Leo Strauss, all of whom have far more cachet among right-leaning political theorists in the American academy than Schmitt does at present).
Still, these are quibbles with a good article, which provides a fair introduction to a fascinating and troubling thinker, as well as offering an illuminating statement of the import of the current political conflicts in the U.S. between, basically, a moderate libealism and a radical conservatism over whether, in Wolfe's eloquent words, 'whether we will treat pluralism as good, disagreement as virtuous, politics as rule bound, fairness as possible, opposition as necessary, and government as limited.'
UPDATE: Russell Arben Fox has a very good, thoughtful critique of Wolfe's article, which is well worth looking at. There's also a posting on it at Crooked Timber, with a sometimes interesting, sometimes intemperate, discussion going on in response.
LIFE IMITATING ART IMITATING LIFE IMITATING ...
Sometimes the truth is no stranger, but as strange, as satire (sometimes it's stranger; but that's another story). In a post a few weeks back (on Thurs March 11, to be exact) I speculated on the possibility of political theory taking the theatre world by storm, and suggested, among other possible smash hits, the seering drama of 'Hannah and Martin: A Love Story' (taking my cue from Simon Blackburn's mean-spirited and amusing review of the Arendt-Heidgegger letters in TNR).
Now I read a review in the NY Times of a play at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater called -- Hannah and Martin.
The play further sounds, from the review, very much like what I'd envisaged when I first thought of the idea in jest (which is not to say that the play sounds comical, either intentionally or unintentionally; indeed, it sounds pretty good, and I'm curious to see it).
All of which leaves me feeling very peculiar indeed.
Sometimes the truth is no stranger, but as strange, as satire (sometimes it's stranger; but that's another story). In a post a few weeks back (on Thurs March 11, to be exact) I speculated on the possibility of political theory taking the theatre world by storm, and suggested, among other possible smash hits, the seering drama of 'Hannah and Martin: A Love Story' (taking my cue from Simon Blackburn's mean-spirited and amusing review of the Arendt-Heidgegger letters in TNR).
Now I read a review in the NY Times of a play at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater called -- Hannah and Martin.
The play further sounds, from the review, very much like what I'd envisaged when I first thought of the idea in jest (which is not to say that the play sounds comical, either intentionally or unintentionally; indeed, it sounds pretty good, and I'm curious to see it).
All of which leaves me feeling very peculiar indeed.
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
TERRORISM: As the 'war on terror' continues on its bloody way -- and particularly in light of Israel's recent assasination of the leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin -- it is interesting to read the following thoughts on terrorism. The words come from a speech by Chaim Weizmann to the 22nd Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland, in 1946, but seem to have been the work of Isaiah Berlin, who advised Weizmann on his speech expanded and strengthened Weizmann's initial warning against terrorism.
(This blog seems to be in danger of becoming an all Isaiah Berlin, all the time, venture -- which is probably not a bad thing for me, given that I'm supposed to be writing about Berlin full-time, but may not be the most thrilling for readers)
Weizmann had written 'Terrorism insults our history; it mocks the ideals for which a Jewish society must stand; it contaminates our banner; it compromises our appeal to the world’s liberal conscience'. To this Berlin added:
'It is futile to invoke the national struggles of other nations as examples for ourselves. Not only are the circumstances different, but our purposes, too, are unique. Each people must apply its own standards to its conduct, and we are left with the task of weighing our actions in the scales of the Jewish spirit. Nor must our judgement be dazzled by the glare of self-conscious heroism. Massada, for all its heroism, was a disaster in our history. It is not our purpose or our right to plunge to destruction in order to bequeath a legend of martyrdom to posterity. Zionism was to mark the end of our glorious deaths and the beginning of a new path leading to life. Against the ‘heroics’ of suicidal violence I urge the courage of endurance, the heroism of superhuman restraint. I admit that it requires stronger character, more virile nerves, than are needed for acts of violence. Whether they can rise to that genuine courage, above the moral cowardice of terrorism, is the challenge which history issues to our youth.'
(The quote appears in an article by Henry Hardy (disclosure: my Oxford supervisor), ‘A Deep Understanding’, in the Jewish Chronicle, 26 March 2004, 35–6, and can also be found at the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.
(This blog seems to be in danger of becoming an all Isaiah Berlin, all the time, venture -- which is probably not a bad thing for me, given that I'm supposed to be writing about Berlin full-time, but may not be the most thrilling for readers)
Weizmann had written 'Terrorism insults our history; it mocks the ideals for which a Jewish society must stand; it contaminates our banner; it compromises our appeal to the world’s liberal conscience'. To this Berlin added:
'It is futile to invoke the national struggles of other nations as examples for ourselves. Not only are the circumstances different, but our purposes, too, are unique. Each people must apply its own standards to its conduct, and we are left with the task of weighing our actions in the scales of the Jewish spirit. Nor must our judgement be dazzled by the glare of self-conscious heroism. Massada, for all its heroism, was a disaster in our history. It is not our purpose or our right to plunge to destruction in order to bequeath a legend of martyrdom to posterity. Zionism was to mark the end of our glorious deaths and the beginning of a new path leading to life. Against the ‘heroics’ of suicidal violence I urge the courage of endurance, the heroism of superhuman restraint. I admit that it requires stronger character, more virile nerves, than are needed for acts of violence. Whether they can rise to that genuine courage, above the moral cowardice of terrorism, is the challenge which history issues to our youth.'
(The quote appears in an article by Henry Hardy (disclosure: my Oxford supervisor), ‘A Deep Understanding’, in the Jewish Chronicle, 26 March 2004, 35–6, and can also be found at the Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
UPDATE: You can hear a radio broadcast on Isaiah Berlin, prompted by the release of the first volume of his letters (see below) by clicking on the link here. (The portion on Berlin begins around 13 minutes in). A fairly good interview with the Irish novelist John Banville, who nicely conveys the excitement of Berlin's work (and commends Berlin's biography on Karl Marx, which I'm now re-reading with increased admiration and interest). On the other hand, if I hear the Irving Berlin/Isaiah Berlin story one more time ...
UPDATE II: Reviews of Flourishing -- thus far consistently positive -- continue to come out. There are particularly good ones in the Sunday Telegraph [registration required, but free] by Noel Malcolm (himself the editor of Hobbes' correspondence), by Derwent May in the Times (the opening description of Berlin is particularly good); there is also one in the Daily Telegraph by Andrew Marr, which seems not to be available online yet -- but watch this space.
UPDATE II: Reviews of Flourishing -- thus far consistently positive -- continue to come out. There are particularly good ones in the Sunday Telegraph [registration required, but free] by Noel Malcolm (himself the editor of Hobbes' correspondence), by Derwent May in the Times (the opening description of Berlin is particularly good); there is also one in the Daily Telegraph by Andrew Marr, which seems not to be available online yet -- but watch this space.
Monday, March 15, 2004
PLUG: Flourishing, the first volume of Isaiah Berlin's letters, is to be published in Britain by Chatto and Windus two weeks from today (it's published in the US, with a much less interesting title (Letters 1928-1946), by Cambridge University Press, in May. Another book by Berlin, The Soviet Mind, is to be published by the Brookings Institute Press in April; but is already available on the shelf in Blackwell's.)
This excites me for a number of reasons. One is, of course, my interest in the letters published in this volume, which I've already read through once. Another is the lengthy, interesting, judicious and scrupulously researched explanatory material provided by Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy (who happens to be one of my doctoral supervisors, as well as a friend), which does an exemplary job of not only explaining the letters and putting them into their proper context -- which would be quite enough in itself -- but manages to fashion them into a lively and enlightening narrative of Berlin's early life. The photographs are also great fun, as is Hardy's introduction (which I have to admit delights me in part because there are a few overly generous words in it for a certain young would-be Berlin scholar of my acquaintance).
The book is already receiving reviews, which I'll keep track of here. There's one in the Literary Review by Allan Massie, which is impressive for having appeared before even the advance copies of the book were off the presses. There's also a review in the Financial Times, which is linked to by AL Daily. Unfortunately, this review, by Roy Foster, seems to be restricted to subscribers. I have however managed to get my hands on the text through artful trickery (i.e. Lexis-Nexis); I think it very good indeed, and so have taken the liberty of reproducing the better part (though not all) of it below:
Isaiah Berlin liked to claim that he had been lucky enough to be over-estimated all his life, drily adding "Long may it continue!" This wonderful first volume of his letters will ensure the continuance of his reputation, and it should help clear up that vexed question of over-estimation.
Henry Hardy has edited a dozen collections of Berlin's essays - a great act of reclamation. He has brought the same combination of devotion, scholarship and flair to 600 pages of the political philosopher's correspondence up to the age of 37. The deft interpolation of a wide and suggestive range of evidence from other sources does nothing to dilute or muffle that inimitable voice, described by biographer Michael Ignatieff as "bubbling and rattling like a samovar on the boil". And the content helps establish the case for Berlin as a phenomenon of enduring importance, whose life and thought made a difference to what he called "the worst century there has ever been".
There is a counter argument, aired after Berlin's death in 1997. His lucky and happy existence, his influence in the corridors of power, his disinclination to publish, his dazzling social life and his ability to charm were all held against him in some quarters - especially in conjunction with his politics (although he refused to adopt a formal political stance he moved, more or less, from the liberal left to the liberal right, at least in the view of some embittered leftwingers).
Then there was his deeply held Zionism, and his Gladstonian sense of right-timing. As a philosopher of liberalism, he was sometimes accused of not facing up to inconsistencies in his defence of pluralism. His off-hand irony about himself could be misinterpreted. When Berlin was given a knighthood in 1957 (an honour that he considered refusing), an old friend sent a barbed congratulation putting it down to his "services to conversation".
The flow of conversation is magically preserved here; but so is the intellectual substance, the deep engagement with the world in the dark as well as the light, and the commitment to wielding what influence he could in war as well as peace (the most fascinating section covers his diplomatic career in New York and Washington from 1940 to 1946). Time and again, a reflection springs out of the rush of correspondence that illuminates the reasoning beneath the sparkling and convivial surface:
"I approve of gangs, Stuart (Hampshire) disapproves... I quote my noble 19th-century Russians & maintain that only in nuclei does anything worth-while develop, unless one is an exceptional Dostoyevskian hermit, that one gains enormously from having oneself observed and responded to, that one never knows what one thinks & feels until one says it, that one can only say it in a context & milieu where there is no restraint & absolute confidence and a wall of disinterested friendship protects one from all the things which inhibit one in public, or even when one is alone & therefore open to a hostile (real or imaginary, doesn't matter which) world, & that this civilised inhabited area, where one is free, & spontaneous, & happy can only be created, in the majority of cases, by the establishment of machinery for discussion, & unselfconscious, ungrammatical communication, where standards are not lived up to, and one knows that one's words are valued simply as being one's own, & not for their relevance, content, effects, intentions. Hence my pro-Russian anti-Florentine turns." (to Ben Nicolson, September 1937)
But Berlin was not the kind of secular saint created by some of his hero-worshippers. Hardy's biographical footnotes are enlivened by phrases such as "despised by IB" or "loathed by IB", and the roll- call of betes noires at this stage of his life includes A.L. Rowse, Frederick Lindemann, Lord Beaverbrook, Harold Laski, J.B. Priestley and the first wives of Stephen Spender and A.J. Ayer.
....
He was a late and only child, whose advent was considered semi- miraculous. His parents observed him with an awed and admiring love all their lives, and Hardy uses a deeply moving family memoir by Isaiah's father Mendel. The intense background of Russian Jewishness suffuses the early letters and, indeed, Berlin's whole early life. It does much to explain his sublime self-confidence, which reminded Virginia Woolf of the young Maynard Keynes.
Elected to All Souls at 23, Berlin's absorption into Oxford life, like his later absorption into high society, was complete, but accomplished on his own terms. As he moved from precocious schoolboy to legendary philosophy don to wartime diplomat, he remained oddly unchanged. The marvellous accompanying photographs (which include him, incredibly, on a pony crossing the Gap of Dunloe near Killarney) show him short, decisive, tubby, hawk-nosed, nearly always talking. Even in childhood, the gaze is held by his enigmatic, shining dark eyes, later to be admired by Greta Garbo. Guy de Rothschild's description of him in Washington holds true all through his life:
"The most immediately striking thing about him was his unconventional appearance: his peculiar air of seeming to float in his clothing, a strange face that seemed almost a caricature of his two dominating characteristics: subtle intellect and Russian-Jewish ancestry... Brilliant, original, witty and bold, truly erudite, he was unanimously admired as much for what he was as for what he did, and he was universally recognised as an exceptional, fascinating human being."
....
He had already adopted Alexander Herzen as a kind of intellectual alter ego. Much of his future work would concern Russian thinkers of the 19th century, as well as the development of Romanticism and nationalism, and the idea of historical inevitability. The groundwork for his luminous essays on these subjects, as well as for his famous disquisition on the political implications of the two definitions of liberty (negative and positive), can be traced in his life and experiences as spelled out in these letters.
But, as Berlin himself would have accepted, the roots twine further back. One of Hardy's most intriguing appendices is a prize essay written by the 18-year-old Berlin at St Paul's School in 1928, on "Freedom":
"History moves not in continuous straight lines, but in folds. These folds are not of equal length or substance, but if we venture to examine the points in which these folds touch one another, we will often find strong and real similarities between the points. If we attempt to look through our own age at the layers which are, as it were, in a vertical line below it, we shall see the eighteenth century, and the Roman world in the third century AD, and the Alexandrine culture in the third century BC; the comparison must not be pressed too hard, but the resemblance between these periods and ours is peculiarly profound and precise in this, that the spirit of slavery and convention rests on all."
Eighteen years later, when this collection ends, the grown-up Berlin had looked through the "folds" of history from the vantage of 1946 and seen much darker parallels to his own day. His belief that contradiction and divergence should be seen as central to human existence, rather than something to be eliminated by one system or another, would colour all his future writing - along with his distaste for Utopian social engineering.
He presented these ideas with compelling lucidity decades before they became fashionable. Much of his achievement in the post-war era would be to turn the attention of philosophy from esoteric problems of logic to a consideration of the political issues bedevilling the modern Western world. The fact that he wrote intellectual history with uncompromising clarity may have led some critics to discount its hard-won profundity. The background to Berlin's liberalism, as to his subsequent politics, is demonstrated here, accompanied by the mischievous sparkle and social vivacity which never left him and which enabled him to survive: a determinedly lucky man in an unlucky world.
This excites me for a number of reasons. One is, of course, my interest in the letters published in this volume, which I've already read through once. Another is the lengthy, interesting, judicious and scrupulously researched explanatory material provided by Berlin's editor, Henry Hardy (who happens to be one of my doctoral supervisors, as well as a friend), which does an exemplary job of not only explaining the letters and putting them into their proper context -- which would be quite enough in itself -- but manages to fashion them into a lively and enlightening narrative of Berlin's early life. The photographs are also great fun, as is Hardy's introduction (which I have to admit delights me in part because there are a few overly generous words in it for a certain young would-be Berlin scholar of my acquaintance).
The book is already receiving reviews, which I'll keep track of here. There's one in the Literary Review by Allan Massie, which is impressive for having appeared before even the advance copies of the book were off the presses. There's also a review in the Financial Times, which is linked to by AL Daily. Unfortunately, this review, by Roy Foster, seems to be restricted to subscribers. I have however managed to get my hands on the text through artful trickery (i.e. Lexis-Nexis); I think it very good indeed, and so have taken the liberty of reproducing the better part (though not all) of it below:
Isaiah Berlin liked to claim that he had been lucky enough to be over-estimated all his life, drily adding "Long may it continue!" This wonderful first volume of his letters will ensure the continuance of his reputation, and it should help clear up that vexed question of over-estimation.
Henry Hardy has edited a dozen collections of Berlin's essays - a great act of reclamation. He has brought the same combination of devotion, scholarship and flair to 600 pages of the political philosopher's correspondence up to the age of 37. The deft interpolation of a wide and suggestive range of evidence from other sources does nothing to dilute or muffle that inimitable voice, described by biographer Michael Ignatieff as "bubbling and rattling like a samovar on the boil". And the content helps establish the case for Berlin as a phenomenon of enduring importance, whose life and thought made a difference to what he called "the worst century there has ever been".
There is a counter argument, aired after Berlin's death in 1997. His lucky and happy existence, his influence in the corridors of power, his disinclination to publish, his dazzling social life and his ability to charm were all held against him in some quarters - especially in conjunction with his politics (although he refused to adopt a formal political stance he moved, more or less, from the liberal left to the liberal right, at least in the view of some embittered leftwingers).
Then there was his deeply held Zionism, and his Gladstonian sense of right-timing. As a philosopher of liberalism, he was sometimes accused of not facing up to inconsistencies in his defence of pluralism. His off-hand irony about himself could be misinterpreted. When Berlin was given a knighthood in 1957 (an honour that he considered refusing), an old friend sent a barbed congratulation putting it down to his "services to conversation".
The flow of conversation is magically preserved here; but so is the intellectual substance, the deep engagement with the world in the dark as well as the light, and the commitment to wielding what influence he could in war as well as peace (the most fascinating section covers his diplomatic career in New York and Washington from 1940 to 1946). Time and again, a reflection springs out of the rush of correspondence that illuminates the reasoning beneath the sparkling and convivial surface:
"I approve of gangs, Stuart (Hampshire) disapproves... I quote my noble 19th-century Russians & maintain that only in nuclei does anything worth-while develop, unless one is an exceptional Dostoyevskian hermit, that one gains enormously from having oneself observed and responded to, that one never knows what one thinks & feels until one says it, that one can only say it in a context & milieu where there is no restraint & absolute confidence and a wall of disinterested friendship protects one from all the things which inhibit one in public, or even when one is alone & therefore open to a hostile (real or imaginary, doesn't matter which) world, & that this civilised inhabited area, where one is free, & spontaneous, & happy can only be created, in the majority of cases, by the establishment of machinery for discussion, & unselfconscious, ungrammatical communication, where standards are not lived up to, and one knows that one's words are valued simply as being one's own, & not for their relevance, content, effects, intentions. Hence my pro-Russian anti-Florentine turns." (to Ben Nicolson, September 1937)
But Berlin was not the kind of secular saint created by some of his hero-worshippers. Hardy's biographical footnotes are enlivened by phrases such as "despised by IB" or "loathed by IB", and the roll- call of betes noires at this stage of his life includes A.L. Rowse, Frederick Lindemann, Lord Beaverbrook, Harold Laski, J.B. Priestley and the first wives of Stephen Spender and A.J. Ayer.
....
He was a late and only child, whose advent was considered semi- miraculous. His parents observed him with an awed and admiring love all their lives, and Hardy uses a deeply moving family memoir by Isaiah's father Mendel. The intense background of Russian Jewishness suffuses the early letters and, indeed, Berlin's whole early life. It does much to explain his sublime self-confidence, which reminded Virginia Woolf of the young Maynard Keynes.
Elected to All Souls at 23, Berlin's absorption into Oxford life, like his later absorption into high society, was complete, but accomplished on his own terms. As he moved from precocious schoolboy to legendary philosophy don to wartime diplomat, he remained oddly unchanged. The marvellous accompanying photographs (which include him, incredibly, on a pony crossing the Gap of Dunloe near Killarney) show him short, decisive, tubby, hawk-nosed, nearly always talking. Even in childhood, the gaze is held by his enigmatic, shining dark eyes, later to be admired by Greta Garbo. Guy de Rothschild's description of him in Washington holds true all through his life:
"The most immediately striking thing about him was his unconventional appearance: his peculiar air of seeming to float in his clothing, a strange face that seemed almost a caricature of his two dominating characteristics: subtle intellect and Russian-Jewish ancestry... Brilliant, original, witty and bold, truly erudite, he was unanimously admired as much for what he was as for what he did, and he was universally recognised as an exceptional, fascinating human being."
....
He had already adopted Alexander Herzen as a kind of intellectual alter ego. Much of his future work would concern Russian thinkers of the 19th century, as well as the development of Romanticism and nationalism, and the idea of historical inevitability. The groundwork for his luminous essays on these subjects, as well as for his famous disquisition on the political implications of the two definitions of liberty (negative and positive), can be traced in his life and experiences as spelled out in these letters.
But, as Berlin himself would have accepted, the roots twine further back. One of Hardy's most intriguing appendices is a prize essay written by the 18-year-old Berlin at St Paul's School in 1928, on "Freedom":
"History moves not in continuous straight lines, but in folds. These folds are not of equal length or substance, but if we venture to examine the points in which these folds touch one another, we will often find strong and real similarities between the points. If we attempt to look through our own age at the layers which are, as it were, in a vertical line below it, we shall see the eighteenth century, and the Roman world in the third century AD, and the Alexandrine culture in the third century BC; the comparison must not be pressed too hard, but the resemblance between these periods and ours is peculiarly profound and precise in this, that the spirit of slavery and convention rests on all."
Eighteen years later, when this collection ends, the grown-up Berlin had looked through the "folds" of history from the vantage of 1946 and seen much darker parallels to his own day. His belief that contradiction and divergence should be seen as central to human existence, rather than something to be eliminated by one system or another, would colour all his future writing - along with his distaste for Utopian social engineering.
He presented these ideas with compelling lucidity decades before they became fashionable. Much of his achievement in the post-war era would be to turn the attention of philosophy from esoteric problems of logic to a consideration of the political issues bedevilling the modern Western world. The fact that he wrote intellectual history with uncompromising clarity may have led some critics to discount its hard-won profundity. The background to Berlin's liberalism, as to his subsequent politics, is demonstrated here, accompanied by the mischievous sparkle and social vivacity which never left him and which enabled him to survive: a determinedly lucky man in an unlucky world.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
Michael Ignatieff has a rueful article in the NY Times about why he supported the Iraq war, why he still finds the anti-war case unsatisfying -- and why he also now has second thoughts.
It's a typically thoughtful, balanced, lucid piece, which, as often with Ignatieff, manages to articulate well, if perhaps a trifle over-solemnly, the sort of liberal, humanitarian, yet realistic position I tend to share or identify with. Yet some parts of it do bother me. For instance, this:
'So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences.'
This nicely captures my own attitude at the start of the war -- the attitude which made it impossible for me to either support or oppose the war with any confidence. To decide to support the war despite these doubts was a respectable decision. But Ignatieff only NOW realises that 'intentions do shape consequences'? A decade he spent talking to Isaiah Berlin, and he's just learnt this? That the Bush administration's plans for the invasion and occupation of Iraq were wildly over-optimistic and under-worked-out, and that their commitment to the long hard slog of nation-building was less than clear-sighted and reliable, is not something that was impossible to know a year ago. We could have known it; many of us chose not to. We should have looked closely, not only at the Bush administration's intentions, but at their plans and planning process -- the unedifying spectacle of which has since been so expertly and alarmingly revealed by George Packer (another liberal supporter of the war) in his articles for the New Yorker. But many of us chose to listen, not to the warnings bells sounded by our knowledge of the Bush administration and the evidence of poor and often cavalier thinking on its part at the time, but to the Siren voices of hope -- hope that the time had come when our dream of a free Iraq might actually be realised. We willed the ends so ardently, we believed that the means might be at hand.
Ignatieff recognises all this now, and is admirable in declaring it. Still, I think that he lets us liberal hawks off a bit too easily: the case that we should have known better is, I think, stronger than he makes out.
But the past is past. When it comes to the more pressing and meaningful question of the present, I think Ignatieff is largely right, and puts it about as well as anyone could:
'...If freedom is the only goal that redeems all the dying, there is more real freedom in Iraq than at any time in its history. And why should we suppose that freedom will be anything other than messy, chaotic, even frightening? Why should we be surprised that Iraqis are using their freedom to tell us to go home? Wouldn't we do just the same?
Freedom alone, of course, is not enough. Whether freedom turns into long-term constitutional order depends on whether a vicious resistance that does not hesitate to pit Muslim against Muslim, Iraqi against Iraqi, can drive an administration, fearful about its re-election, into drawing down U.S. forces. If the United States falters now, civil war is entirely possible. If it falters, it will betray everyone who has died for something better.
Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice.'
I agree with all of this. But that first sentence I've quoted reminds me of another passage, which Ignatieff certainly knows and of which he was perhaps thinking: 'The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead.' Isaiah Berlin concluded that moral risk cannot be avoided; he also concluded that this fact did not excuse a cavalier approach to making hard decisions. Now we can only do what we can to extract order and democracy from the chaos and suffering we have, even if with good intentions and in good faith, unleashed. There is still a chance to do so, however unlikely, and however difficult the task; defeatism, and consequent disengagement, is not justified, or tolerable. But failure is a real, and it often seems, likely possibility. If we do fail, all of us who supported, or even failed to oppose, the war in the name of a free Iraq will have to accept that we share some guilt for arrogantly perpetrating an avoidable and irredeemable disaster. And even if a free and peaceful Iraq emerges from all of this, by some miracle of sagacity and toil, we should I think realise that the achievement of noble ends does not wholly expunge the reality of sacrifice and loss along the way. I hope that the US and those who supported its war against Saddam will be able to pat itself -- ourselves -- on the back one day. But we'll be doing so with bloody hands. We may as well admit that.
It's a typically thoughtful, balanced, lucid piece, which, as often with Ignatieff, manages to articulate well, if perhaps a trifle over-solemnly, the sort of liberal, humanitarian, yet realistic position I tend to share or identify with. Yet some parts of it do bother me. For instance, this:
'So I supported an administration whose intentions I didn't trust, believing that the consequences would repay the gamble. Now I realize that intentions do shape consequences.'
This nicely captures my own attitude at the start of the war -- the attitude which made it impossible for me to either support or oppose the war with any confidence. To decide to support the war despite these doubts was a respectable decision. But Ignatieff only NOW realises that 'intentions do shape consequences'? A decade he spent talking to Isaiah Berlin, and he's just learnt this? That the Bush administration's plans for the invasion and occupation of Iraq were wildly over-optimistic and under-worked-out, and that their commitment to the long hard slog of nation-building was less than clear-sighted and reliable, is not something that was impossible to know a year ago. We could have known it; many of us chose not to. We should have looked closely, not only at the Bush administration's intentions, but at their plans and planning process -- the unedifying spectacle of which has since been so expertly and alarmingly revealed by George Packer (another liberal supporter of the war) in his articles for the New Yorker. But many of us chose to listen, not to the warnings bells sounded by our knowledge of the Bush administration and the evidence of poor and often cavalier thinking on its part at the time, but to the Siren voices of hope -- hope that the time had come when our dream of a free Iraq might actually be realised. We willed the ends so ardently, we believed that the means might be at hand.
Ignatieff recognises all this now, and is admirable in declaring it. Still, I think that he lets us liberal hawks off a bit too easily: the case that we should have known better is, I think, stronger than he makes out.
But the past is past. When it comes to the more pressing and meaningful question of the present, I think Ignatieff is largely right, and puts it about as well as anyone could:
'...If freedom is the only goal that redeems all the dying, there is more real freedom in Iraq than at any time in its history. And why should we suppose that freedom will be anything other than messy, chaotic, even frightening? Why should we be surprised that Iraqis are using their freedom to tell us to go home? Wouldn't we do just the same?
Freedom alone, of course, is not enough. Whether freedom turns into long-term constitutional order depends on whether a vicious resistance that does not hesitate to pit Muslim against Muslim, Iraqi against Iraqi, can drive an administration, fearful about its re-election, into drawing down U.S. forces. If the United States falters now, civil war is entirely possible. If it falters, it will betray everyone who has died for something better.
Interventions amount to a promise: we promise that we will leave the country better than we found it; we promise that those who died to get there did not die in vain. Never have these promises been harder to keep than in Iraq. The liberal internationalism I supported throughout the 1990's -- interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor -- seems like child's play in comparison. Those actions were a gamble, but the gamble came with a guarantee of impunity: if we didn't succeed, the costs of failure were not punitive. Now in Iraq the game is in earnest. There is no impunity anymore. Good people are dying, and no president, Democrat or Republican, can afford to betray that sacrifice.'
I agree with all of this. But that first sentence I've quoted reminds me of another passage, which Ignatieff certainly knows and of which he was perhaps thinking: 'The one thing that we may be sure of is the reality of the sacrifice, the dying and the dead.' Isaiah Berlin concluded that moral risk cannot be avoided; he also concluded that this fact did not excuse a cavalier approach to making hard decisions. Now we can only do what we can to extract order and democracy from the chaos and suffering we have, even if with good intentions and in good faith, unleashed. There is still a chance to do so, however unlikely, and however difficult the task; defeatism, and consequent disengagement, is not justified, or tolerable. But failure is a real, and it often seems, likely possibility. If we do fail, all of us who supported, or even failed to oppose, the war in the name of a free Iraq will have to accept that we share some guilt for arrogantly perpetrating an avoidable and irredeemable disaster. And even if a free and peaceful Iraq emerges from all of this, by some miracle of sagacity and toil, we should I think realise that the achievement of noble ends does not wholly expunge the reality of sacrifice and loss along the way. I hope that the US and those who supported its war against Saddam will be able to pat itself -- ourselves -- on the back one day. But we'll be doing so with bloody hands. We may as well admit that.
Thursday, March 11, 2004
NEXT: SPRINGTIME FOR LEO AND -- UCHICAGO? Tim Robbins has written a play depicting a sinister cabal that worships none other than Leo Strauss. Lawrence Kaplan at TNR is not happy about it.
I think the correct response to this, though, isn't annoyance, but amusement. And, if one's actually somewhat sympathetic to progressive causes, sadness that Tim Robbins has made himself appear such a buffoon to intelligent, well-informed, and fair-minded people by buying so fully into the Big Lie about Strauss (a lie I think Kaplan goes a little too far in disputing -- Strauss may not have been the apologist for authoritarian government by deception that he's been made out to be, but he wasn't exactly a cosy liberal either -- or, at any rate, his version of liberalism, being deeply sceptical of many of liberalism's assumptions and moral foundations, and fundamentally pessimistic about modernity as a whole and, in my view, basically inegalitarian,* is a peculiar one. )
Not only am I rather amused -- as well as somewhat bemused -- at Robbins' elevation of Strauss to on-stage iconic presence; I'm also excited by the possibility it opens up: political theorists as the new hot off-Broadway thing. Just imagine -- we could soon be seeing a seering depiction of Thatcherism that features a hilarious double-act by Michael Oakeshott and F.A. von Hayek (and I thought that I'd only be able to experience that spectacle in my strangest dreams), or a three-stage spectacular depicting the picaresque life and dramatic struggles of J-J Rousseau, or the seering romantic drama and world-historical spectacle of Hannah and Martin: A Love Story (which Simon Blackburn has already taken a stab [and I do mean stab] at), or -- naturally -- the life of Isaiah Berlin (which I imagine as a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, for some reason), or Hegel: the Musical -- or, of course, the ultimate: Derrida. On. Ice.
Ok, maybe this is a really bad idea for a cultural trend.
*Though to be fair, few would argue that certain other modern thinkers who were in some respects suspicious of democratic equality, and even deeply elitist in at least some moods -- such as Mill and Tocqueville -- were liberals.
I think the correct response to this, though, isn't annoyance, but amusement. And, if one's actually somewhat sympathetic to progressive causes, sadness that Tim Robbins has made himself appear such a buffoon to intelligent, well-informed, and fair-minded people by buying so fully into the Big Lie about Strauss (a lie I think Kaplan goes a little too far in disputing -- Strauss may not have been the apologist for authoritarian government by deception that he's been made out to be, but he wasn't exactly a cosy liberal either -- or, at any rate, his version of liberalism, being deeply sceptical of many of liberalism's assumptions and moral foundations, and fundamentally pessimistic about modernity as a whole and, in my view, basically inegalitarian,* is a peculiar one. )
Not only am I rather amused -- as well as somewhat bemused -- at Robbins' elevation of Strauss to on-stage iconic presence; I'm also excited by the possibility it opens up: political theorists as the new hot off-Broadway thing. Just imagine -- we could soon be seeing a seering depiction of Thatcherism that features a hilarious double-act by Michael Oakeshott and F.A. von Hayek (and I thought that I'd only be able to experience that spectacle in my strangest dreams), or a three-stage spectacular depicting the picaresque life and dramatic struggles of J-J Rousseau, or the seering romantic drama and world-historical spectacle of Hannah and Martin: A Love Story (which Simon Blackburn has already taken a stab [and I do mean stab] at), or -- naturally -- the life of Isaiah Berlin (which I imagine as a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, for some reason), or Hegel: the Musical -- or, of course, the ultimate: Derrida. On. Ice.
Ok, maybe this is a really bad idea for a cultural trend.
*Though to be fair, few would argue that certain other modern thinkers who were in some respects suspicious of democratic equality, and even deeply elitist in at least some moods -- such as Mill and Tocqueville -- were liberals.
AN EVENING DOWN THE PUB: The other night I found myself standing at the bar in Oxford's Turf Tavern. Looking around me, I realised that everyone standing at the bar was a blogger -- there were Josh and Patrick of OxBlog, Jamie Kirchick, and Annie Rosenzweig (all, appropriately, on my right), and Chris Brooke of Virtual Stoa fame (who I'd not met before, but recognized by his glorious mane) -- who was, of course, to my left (no, really; sometimes these things do work out perfectly like that). It was good to finally meet Chris (who is, incidentally, quite right about Bob Dylan) after e-mailing with him a bit and passing him repeatedly on the street, and to finally meet Jamie after hearing so much about him from common friends.
At the same time, it was all really, really disturbing.
At the same time, it was all really, really disturbing.
STILL NO LAPTOP: The Dell people are being very long about getting the necessary parts to the Oxford Computer Services people; so I'm still dependent on public computers. Once I do get my laptop back (hopefully), I'll be traveling for quite a while. So blog drought to continue, with only very brief interruptions, for the forseeable future.
Friday, February 13, 2004
LOW BLOGGING BEHIND AND AHEAD: I've not been blogging much lately, and won't be for a while yet, both because I've been trying to do better things with my time, and, mainly, because the keyboard on my laptop has died (after I dropped it), and will not be fixed by the helpful, reasonably-priced, but less than rapid Oxford Computing Service folks for some time.
Given the quality of the post I just wrote, below, I think we can all agree this is a very good thing.
Given the quality of the post I just wrote, below, I think we can all agree this is a very good thing.
IT HAPPENS: One truly odd thing I've found about my post-college life is how often I encounter the names of people I was in seminars with staring up at me from the internet, or even from what I still think of as 'real' publications, in the form of bylines. But now this experience has been outdone by an even odder one: seeing one sometime classmate attacking the federal program that pays for the work of another former classmate. Katherine Mangu-Ward -- whom I still remember fondly from several seminars (I particularly cherish the memory of her insisting that the US has a socialist government before the beginning of one class) takes an expectedly jaundiced look at what she and the rest of the gang at the Weekly Standard regard as wasteful programs that have deservedly been axed in George Bush's Federal Budget. One that she highlights is a program having to do with exchanges with former whaling partners, or some such. What the program effectively does, I take it, is provide federal funding for educational programs, internships, etc., for and about the indigenous peoples in Hawai and Alaska, as well as inhabitants of Mass. (and thus provides financial assistance for the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., where my good friend and sometime room-mate [and, way back when, one of the original three Js who started this blog] Jon works). Katherine incisively refers to this as 'whaling education'.
Now, a program that focusses explicitly on former whaling partners does seem like good fodder for the mockery of anti-government conservatives. There are certainly more pressing needs for the money (missile defense! missile defense! Give us money for our ineffectual, highly costly, probably unnecessary missile defense! Yay!). But I do wonder whether educating Americans about the history and cultures of their country -- and particularly about those people who lived (and, yes, whaled -- gosh it's hard to be a liberal and keep a straight face sometimes ...) in what's now the US before we and most of our ancestors did, and whose cultures and populations our nation pretty well wiped out, and whose descendants (in the cases where descendants survive) often live in poverty, their plight and heritage alike unrecognized -- is such an unworthy -- or, indeed, derision-worthy -- goal.
I know that many on the right side of the political spectrum, when they think it over, will agree that recognizing the nobility of our old whaling and trading partners is an important goal, and will, with their commitment to private-donor charity, leap to fill the void left by cuts in government funding. And so, maybe, one day soon, Jon and his co-workers can look forward to receiving a generous grant for their efforts at free cultural education from the overflowing purse of Rupert Murdoch -- who, I'm sure, won't begrudge re-routing a miniscule amount from his well-funded network of organs of right-wing propaganda.
And then we can all be happy; right, kids?
Now, a program that focusses explicitly on former whaling partners does seem like good fodder for the mockery of anti-government conservatives. There are certainly more pressing needs for the money (missile defense! missile defense! Give us money for our ineffectual, highly costly, probably unnecessary missile defense! Yay!). But I do wonder whether educating Americans about the history and cultures of their country -- and particularly about those people who lived (and, yes, whaled -- gosh it's hard to be a liberal and keep a straight face sometimes ...) in what's now the US before we and most of our ancestors did, and whose cultures and populations our nation pretty well wiped out, and whose descendants (in the cases where descendants survive) often live in poverty, their plight and heritage alike unrecognized -- is such an unworthy -- or, indeed, derision-worthy -- goal.
I know that many on the right side of the political spectrum, when they think it over, will agree that recognizing the nobility of our old whaling and trading partners is an important goal, and will, with their commitment to private-donor charity, leap to fill the void left by cuts in government funding. And so, maybe, one day soon, Jon and his co-workers can look forward to receiving a generous grant for their efforts at free cultural education from the overflowing purse of Rupert Murdoch -- who, I'm sure, won't begrudge re-routing a miniscule amount from his well-funded network of organs of right-wing propaganda.
And then we can all be happy; right, kids?
