✭✭✭✰✰: The Rise of Modern Science Explained is an ambitious attempt to understand why it was 16th-century Europe which brought about the Scientific Revolution. I don't think the account is fully satisfactory, but I do think it is on the right track.

Cohen argues modern science emerges from a confluence of three, proto-scientific traditions of creating 'nature-knowledge': "Athens-plus" (rationalistic philosophy which tries to ground all phenomena in a simple foundation), "Alexandria-plus" (a weakly mathematized set of tools to describe natural phenomena), and "coercive empiricism" (where the goal was simply to catalog). Their simultaneous flowering c. 1600 allowed the cross-pollination necessary to create three new practices (roughly identifiable with Huygens, Boyle, and the mature Newton), which together became "science."

This explanation only makes sense if 'nature-knowledge' is a byproduct of credentialing the intelligentsia, rather than an important social function in its own right. Membership in the educated strata, which is needed to perform certain high-prestige functions, is verified by fluency in a canon. This canon must be robust enough that those trained in it seem legitimate intellectuals, but pseudo-science (e.g., an Aristotelian claiming an apple moves towards earth because it contains "γῆ" [elemental earth]) is not a priori worse at this function than real science.

The pay-out of all this is the claim that innovations are clustered at the establishment of canons: after 150 years, the resources available to nature-knowledge are entirely occupied with maintaining/propagating the existing canon, leading to intellectual ossification. Cohen identifies, by my count, eight* examples of canon construction. East Asia, supposedly, developed no significant intellectual paradigms after the Han Dynasty (202 BCE - 220 CE); the West, on the other hand, was in such perpetual crisis that it had many more opportunities to chance into the proto-scientific approaches identified above. This is simply implausible.

Despite my skepticism, I think Cohen makes two excellent points: we should look for the evolving goals within specific, textual discourses; and emphasize the gap between craft knowledge and academic knowledge. Even if Chinese academics really came up with nothing new, that did not prevent commoners from inventing paper, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass. Similarly, Cohen points out how, despite real theoretical breakthroughs, it took until the 18th century for scientists to add anything useful to the activities of craftspeople. This implies that the revolution was predominantly intellectual, rather than economic or practical.

[Re-read]: This installment of the "Oxford History of the United States" is one of the books which has most influenced my understanding of American history. Richard White, a historian of the American West, presents advocates a compelling interpretation: in the wake of the Civil War, the triumphant Republican Party attempted a "Greater Reconstruction" of the whole country, hoping to homogenize the nation on the model of Lincoln's Springfield. That is, positive government action (Homestead Acts, railroad subsidies, tariffs, civil rights) would create the environment where mere individual merit, voluntary association, and contract freedom would allow the republic to thrive without "dangerous classes" (the very rich or permanently poor). This vision utterly failed, and by 1896 the country was warping under the dissonance between ideology and reality.

The cities of the Northeast were filled with permanent wage-workers, many of them Catholic immigrants. The West, given wholesale to corporations for quick integration, stayed corporate. The South both became increasingly racist and fell further behind the North economically. The laissez-faire ("fee-based") mode of government promoted not republican thrift but simple corruption. These crises would give birth to the Progressive Era (with both its successes and its failures).

✭✭✭✭✰: I really liked this detailed biography of the French anti-colonial revolutionary Toussaint Louverture.* Called various "Black Spartacus," "Black Napoleon," or a "Black Jacobin," it is striking how we want to describe him by juxtaposing a European "Great Man" with the adjective "Black." I don't think he would have minded; he intentionally took the universalist tendency in European thought and proved its falsity by trying to apply it to himself. Napoleon's biggest mistake, it has been argued, was not sending Toussaint the letter he wrote confirming him in power due to irrational racism. I cannot think of a better synecdoche than that incident for the Enlightenment as a whole.

The book itself is well-written, really insightful, and contains tons of information new to me (not a surprise in a Wolfson Prize winner). I cannot recommend this book enough for anyone interested in the Atlantic Revolutions, or who just want an engaging introduction to a truly exceptional individual.

✭✭✭✰✰: Clare Jackson, professor at Cambridge, did not write the general history of England I expected (for it has no substantive analysis of society, economics, or culture), nor did she write a systematic political history. Rather, Devil-Land is a history of the perception of political power. Long sections are devoted to negotiations that go nowhere, or describing gifts from one monarch to another. One could read the book without realizing it encompassed the entirety of Shakespeare’s working life, yet several court dances get lengthy treatment. This is not a vapid topic: an age where distances were large and communication slow, perception could become reality far more easily than early modern rulers were comfortable with. The four tectonic regime changes (from Tudor to Stuart, from Monarchy to Republic, from Republic to Monarchy, and from Jacobite to Orangist) are extensively covered, and Professor Jackson makes clear just how anxious the participants over others. I see why it won the 2022 Wolfson Prize, though at the end of the day I am not sure I learned a ton.

The title comes from the fact that admirers referred to England as "Angel-Land”, leading detractors to the inversion “Devil-Land.” Given the century of fear, chaos, and political violence documented here, it's no wonder Jackson chose the latter as the title.

✭✭✭✭✰: American Republics (published just last year) is a strong end to a fantastic trilogy. Alan Taylor again uses his "continental perspective" to emphasized that there was more than one dynamic actor in North America. While some aspects (e.g., commercialization, the party system, intellectual history) are shallower than one would get in, say, What Hath God Wrought, Taylor shines when it comes to interstate conflict. In the past generation, the centrality of slavery to American history has become recognized; Taylor demonstrates that empire and Indian genocide are similarly fundamental. Indeed, as someone hoping to teach this period of history in the near future, the sheer quantity of crimes committed makes it hard to even know how to address it. Can genocide really be only one of several themes, taught right along side evangelical reform, party politics, the Market Revolution, and all the other things that are part of an "Early Republic: 1800 - 1850" Unit? And if not, does that mean the curriculum must be entirely overhauled? I genuinely do not have an answer.

✭✭✭✭✭: Alan Taylor's sequel to American Colonies is accurate, detailed, and thoughtful—but that's not unusual when it comes to this well-explored topic. What makes American Revolutions exceptional, and what makes me want to use it as a core of any lesson I teach on this topic, is its ability to place emphasis in a way which illuminates the gap between the messy events and the version codified in official American mythology. 

The American Revolution was a bad proposition for those who launched it. From Ireland to India, going against the British Empire typically meant you and everyone you loved being murdered by Redcoats. By chance, the American colonies revolted when the metropole was in its worst-ever diplomatic position: the French, Spanish, and Dutch Empires (usually opposed to each other) were all willing to unite in war solely to bloody Britain, while Russia, Prussia, Austria, Denmark-Norway, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire were willing to link up in a "League of Armed Neutrality" to help facilitate. Indicative of how important the international situation was, Taylor points out more than twice the number of French as Americans fought at Yorktown.

Even the luck of winning the war did not end the suffering of colonists: instead of allowing trade to every nation, they were now locked out of Britain's mercantile network. A 30% drop in GDP (the worst depression in America's history) compounded a political crisis about how the costs of the war would be borne. The ultimate outcome, decided by an even narrower band of elites than usual, was to create a powerful federal government. The primary purpose of this new constitution was to prevent the more democratic state governments from soaking the wealthy with the costs of independence. Once established, it proved successful in both protecting the rich and expanding the economy through aggressive government action (negotiating trade treaties, expelling Native Americans, and furnishing a developmental fiscal-military state). None of this contradicts the traditional story, but it is essential for putting it and its consequences in context.

✭✭✭✭✰: I had a professor tell me (though I cannot confirm at this moment) that Dr. David Potter spent literally decades writing this book, which was published posthumously. The Impending Crisis won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize and still serves as a reference work to this day on the major and minor events which led to the Civil War. Within a week of finishing it, I found myself re-consulting it to make sure I understood the exact order of events in the failure of the Crittenden Compromise (it came up in a class I was the substitute teacher for). The depth of archival research, following the moves of key Antebellum politicos down to the hour, makes this a resource I strongly recommend to any teacher of American history.

Professor Potter is no mere chronicler; his goal is to provide an explanation for why, in complete defiance of his understanding of American history, enfranchised white men were unable to find compromise with each other. His careful parsing of events allows him to reject both the crude marxism of Genovese (who saw the war as two irreconcilable modes of production trying to destroy each other) and the inaccurate revisionism of the Lost Cause (which retcons the conflict into "Southern Chivalry" trying to hold off "Yankee Imperialism") by emphasizing the "consensus" present in 19th-century American society. White men were overwhelming native-born, protestant, small-producers, and politically enfranchised within the structures of a moderate democratic republic. The willingness, even eagerness, with which Americans slaughtered each other cannot be chalked up to "civilizational conflict"—it was political.

Consensus history has limitations. It too easily slips into the normative position that non-elites (especially groups not included in forging the original consensus) must first accept its precepts to legitimately participate in politics. Such a perspective causes Potter to be over-sympathetic to those who do evil in a manner consistent with the American tradition, while being quite harsh on those who go outside it in pursuit of good.

✭✭✭✭✭: I was not expecting this general history of North American colonization to be particularly readable let alone excellent. Yet, it reminded me of no other work so much as The Pursuit of Glory, the first five-star book I read this year. That makes sense: apparently (and I only learned this while writing this review) American Colonies is supposed to act as the first volume in a "Penguin History of the United States" series, analogous to the Penguin History of Europe of which The Pursuit of Glory is a part.

Alan Taylor takes a "North American perspective" in structuring the book; that is, he does not narrowly focus on the British/Atlantic seaboard, nor define other areas by their eventual incorporation into the United States. Instead, each region is allowed to matter for its own sake. While many historians claim they are giving "agency" to the indigenous peoples of North America, I think Taylor is the best at actually doing it of any historian I have read. He shows Amerindian societies as dynamic entities which evolved, decided, and divided just like those anywhere else. Despite their diversity, they did operate under certain shared geographic, productive, and demographic restraints which limited their coercive state capacity. With the exception of the Aztecs, non-elites had much more negotiating power vis-à-vis authority in Native societies than European ones. This should not be conflated as being less "developed"—indeed, the lives of most Europeans, hyper-exploited by elites, were worse than their freer American Indian counterparts. In explaining the conquest of the Natives by the colonizers, most accounts focus on weapons of war, infectious disease, and sheer contingency. But Dr. Taylor shows how the asymmetry between societies completely organized as the tip of a spear, with every person (free or enslaved) brought over with a specific role in the conquering order, and societies with a normal spectrum of unity and concerns allowed Europeans to constantly (though not linearly or unidirectionally) ratchet up their control.

The rest of American Colonies is likewise excellent. Despite having taken (very good!) college courses on early America, I still learned a lot about the settlement and development of the Thirteen Colonies. There were great sections international relations, the dead-ends of Dutch and Swedish settlement, and the slave-trade. Environmental history, including the works of William Cronon and Alfred Crosby, is incorporated right alongside better-trod topics like economic history. New Spain, French Canada, and Russian America made sense in their own right, not as colorful prequels to American conquest.

Lunar Linguistics

My current goal is to finish the Duolingo Russian course. I am just about a third of the way through, being in the middle of Unit 21. (The system of 474 "crowns" I was using to track my progress has been replaced with an analogous "path" of 51 units)

Duolingo is not sufficient to learn a language, but I am focusing on it now for a few reasons. One, it costs money. My friends and I realized that if we got a family plan together it would cost us each just $2.50 per month, but even that can add up after awhile. Second, it is self-contained: it requires no outside learning. At some point I want to read books, listen to the news, watch movies, and talk to strangers in Russian—but right now, I do not really have the vocabulary to naturally gain unknown words from context like I do in English (or even written French). When I do get too confused, I can just take a screenshot and text it to my friend Nastya (thank you for all your help, by the way!). Third, Duolingo is fun. It is designed to be addictive like any other game, and thus I get little flashing "You rock!" even when I don't rock. I like that—I am bad enough that learning could be a slog, but every day I get to see my streak get a little longer (now up to Day 35!).

✭✭✭✰✰: W. E. B. Du Bois was born during Radical Reconstruction and died 11 months before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In between, he was one of the world's leading advocates for justice. He helped articulate the radical political current that would end American apartheid, exemplified by—but not limited to—the 1909 founding of the NAACP; he was an organizer and chief intellectual of the anti-imperial Pan-Africanist movement; he participated in the feminist, labor, and peace movements; he helped create sociology as a discipline in America; and wrote both the first history of Reconstruction to consider blacks truly human and the first history of Africans, tout court. The facts that he was the first African-American to receive a PhD from Harvard, or that he studied with Max Weber, or that he won the Lenin Peace Prize, or that he edited The Crisis for a quarter century, or was eulogized by Martin Luther King, or consulted in the decolonization of several nations are all minor details in a life so monumental.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line seeks to give a short introduction to Du Bois, emphasizing the "revolutionary" aspect of his work. His life is too often capstoned with his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, written less than a quarter of the way through his adulthood. Bill Mullen seeks to correct that understanding by showing just how active he was in the succeeding 60 years. No single snapshot of Du Bois' thought can do him justice, as he was an extremely dynamic thinker. At various points he keyed in on Imperial Japan, Woodrow Wilson, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong as allies in destroying the color line; all of these would prove enemies of social justice, so the specific context which drew Du Bois to each has to be kept in mind.

As an explicitly political book, it cherry-picks moments from its subject's life. I do not think Du Bois, as a man who always wrote with an agenda, would fault Mullen for that. While perhaps reductive, Mullen creates a largely correct teleology where Du Bois becomes woke to progressively more injustices (gender along with race, Asia along with Africa, the worker along with the slave), integrating them into one struggle. However, in grappling with Du Bois' central paradox (trying to enact democracy via elite action), Mullen projects his own views onto Du Bois in a way I do not find especially helpful. For a very short introduction, one could do much worse.

✭✭✭✭✰: From 1915 to 1970, the percent of black Americans living in the South decreased from about 90% to about 50%. That is because, over the course of just two generations, about half of the black population physically relocated from Jim Crow states to those without legal apartheid. This "Great Migration" is one of the most important events in American history—an act of mass resistance which remade society. Even a sample of the figures whose parents or grandparents made the trek and were subsequently raised in the North should make clear how radically it shaped American culture:

Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Diana Ross, Aretha Franklin, Michelle Obama, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Serena and Venus Williams, Bill Cosby, Condoleezza Rice, Nat King Cole, Oprah Winfrey, Berry Gordy (who founded Motown and signed children of the Migration to sing for it), the astronaut Mae Jemison, the artist Romare Bearden, the performers Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Prince, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Whitney Houston, Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, the director Spike Lee, the playwright August Wilson, and countless others.

This migration up-ended politics by creating a faction in the Democratic Party beholden to black rights. When the first black workers were coming North, they did so under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, a committed racist. At its half-way point, FDR was slowly inching the party towards integration—he won their votes in crucial Northern states like Illinois, but was never willing to alienate Southern whites by offering them the full benefits of the New Deal. By the end of the migration in the 1960s, the Northern Democratic Party had fully become the vehicle for integration.* As important as federal politics were in ending Jim Crow, the economic aspects cannot be ignored. Southern elites were forced to ratchet down the oppression in order to stem the egress of workers, and mechanization, long put-off in the South due to abundant very cheap labor, was finally invested in.

Isabel Wilkerson, a journalist who interviewed more than a thousand people for this book, does an excellent job documenting what this event was actually like for its participants. Few thought they were changing society; most were fleeing from a cruel regime and seeking higher wages. Wilkerson debunks sociology's habit of "blaming the dysfunction of the inner cities on the migrants": those who made the journey were overwhelmingly likely to be (and stay) employed and married, and they had smaller families than both Southern and white counterparts (disturbingly so—a black immigrant to Chicago was likely to have half as many kids as a comparable Italian or Pole).

The book thus ends on somewhat of a somber note. While the details are elided, the inescapable fact is that the upward trajectory characteristic of this period suddenly peters out around 1970. What Foner calls "the redundancy of black labor"† following the Volcker Shock and globalization meant that those families who did not already have significant equity built up from mid-century redistribution policies (from which most African-American were excluded) were at risk of plunging into destitution. This, not some imagined cultural holdover from slavery, is the origin of the much discussed "urban underclass." Wilkerson also makes a convincing case that the potential for light-skinned immigrants to blend in at will with the Anglo-elite fundamentally insulates them from the economic prejudice that created the "caste" of racial prejudice. My own family is instructive in this: no one could tell my mother (née, Shelly) was actually descended from recent Russian immigrants ("Shchelokovs") rather than, perhaps, some aristocratic cousin of Percy Shelley. Thus, even poor white Americans are averaged into a well-off group, while middle-class and wealthy blacks still resemble and socially reproduce those who look like exploited laborers. In this, Wilkerson comes to an analysis similar to Racecraft [reviewed: below]).

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✰✰: Demosthenes (384 BCE - 322 BCE) was a statesman and orator of Classical Athens. Similar to his contemporary Isocrates [reviewed: September 2022], his corpus of written speeches, preserved primarily for their perceived aesthetic properties rather than historical purposes, is an important source for the fourth century BCE.

This volume's title is a bit misleading: several of the speeches are not by Demosthenes, and at least one "speech" is actually a letter. Still, all of the works are thematically united around the question of what Athens' role should be vis-à-vis the rest of Greece. Twice in the past, the city's democracy mobilized resources far beyond belief, formed a league for mutual justice, and was, as a result, the de facto hegemon of Greece. Twice, it was brought low after it overreached and committed illegal outrages against its allies. Now, having already twice exhausted its treasury, goodwill, and sense of moral certainty, the population is confronted with a choice: will it seek to avoid confrontation with the rising power of Macedonia, or will it risk returning to empire? 

Demosthenes emphatically supports the latter. He wants an imperial Athens, and seeks to find arguments based in history, morality, and practicality to get the Assembly onboard. While he has traditionally enjoyed a high level of prestige as one of the more pro-democracy thinkers of Ancient Greece, I do not like nor even respect him. He is a warhawk for an obviously disastrous cause, he is unable to grapple with Athens' two past failed experiments with empire, and, as Matt Simonton points out in his Classical Greek Oligarchy [reviewed: July 2022], it is only by comparison with true radical oligarchs like Plato that his constant complaints about "the people" seem moderate.

✭✭✭✭✭: People I respect (read: Cornel West) consider the work of the Fields sisters to be amongst the best products of contemporary social science. By combining the disciplines of sociology and history (Karen and Barbara's respective specialties), they have convinced me not only that "race" is not real in the biological sense (duh), but also it is not even real the way many social constructs are real. A civil ordinance (a social construct par excellence) can exist without being tangible, but the Fields sisters see "race" as akin to an entirely fictional entity, such as "witch." Just because people are killed after being labelled a "witch" for (supposedly) poisoning a relative or stealing milk out of a cow does not mean they actually were a witch; indeed, it does not mean witches exist at all! Something entirely outside of the victim actually caused the murder, and the victim was then, after the fact, otherized.

The witchcraft analogy (hence, "racecraft") is very helpful in understanding the Fields' argument about "race." No one has ever been segregated due to "the color of their skin" or "their race"—these are merely the explanations racists give post-hoc, similar to witchfinders labeling their murder victims as "witches." We do not have to take them at their word. The non-biological (and thus non-racial) origin of racism is clearly shown by figures such as Homer Plessy: he is "black" despite not having dark skin or African features.* In the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, being black just means being "a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia." An individual gains race as a result of racism; they do not experience racism as a result of having a race.

The same way an individual's race flows out of racism, it is a demonstrable historical fact that the concept of race followed from racism. To take the specifically American example (though analogous processes occurred throughout the Atlantic World), people saw that the English indentured servants—due to successful past class-struggle, inner-group solidarity, and links o the source of potential future labor back in the metropole—had more leverage to resist the exploitation of the Tidewater ruling class than the African slaves, and explained their resulting disparity in treatment as rooted in a (non-existent) thing called 'race'. Thus, racism against a genetically, culturally, linguistically, geographically, and phenotypically diverse "race" antedates and caused the creation of the racial category of "black."

The most controversial part of the thesis, and the only part on which I am still agnostic, is that the ideology of racism must be constantly maintained. Barbara Fields puts it thus:

Ideologies help insiders make sense of the things they do and see-ritually, repetitively-on a daily basis. An ideology is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, pass on like a germ, spread like a rumor, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of disassociated attitudes. Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its own. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life.

The implications of this view might not be obvious. The authors are positing that racism only exists as long as it explains a phenomena which has a non-racist raison d'être—such as an economic benefit to the ruling class: black slaves are exploited more than European servants; or black proletariat are used as strike breakers against white laborers; or black urbanites have their schools underfunded to subsidize affluent suburbanites. This is in stark opposition to the psychological and attitudinal explanation of racism which predominate today. It is not obvious to me how this debate would be resolved, or why the authors feel so strongly that attitudes which might have once served a purpose could not persist on their own momentum, having been wound so deeply into the social fabric. That will be a question I will need to keep looking into.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Fiery Trial is Eric Foner's Pulitzer Prize winning narrative of Abraham Lincoln's development (both personal and political) with regards to slavery. It is the definitive account of this perhaps over-explored subject, and one which I will likely consult every year I teach the American Civil War. Foner gives into neither hagiography nor cynicism, but offers a fair evaluation of the man:

Lincoln was intellectually curious, willing to listen to criticism, attuned to the currents of northern public opinion... over the course of the war he had developed a deep sense of compassion for the slaves he had helped to liberate, and a concern for their fate. Had he 'considered it too humiliating to learn in advanced years,' one emancipated slave later wrote, 'our race would yet have remained' in bondage'. As the presidency of his successor demonstrated, not all men placed in a similar situation possessed the capacity for growth, the essence of Lincoln’s greatness.

Foner is clear on Lincoln's racism; he was never an abolitionist, and told black jokes until his assassination. As an established leader in Illinois, Lincoln (unsuccessfully) tried to have a black family returned to slavery. To him, racial justice was always secondary to the rule of law, even manifestly unjust law.

The work should not be mistaken for an exhaustive exploration of how slavery ended—the aperture is quite narrowly focused around Lincoln and his choices. It alludes to but does not explore the vital role played by black activists, northern faith leaders, and political cronies in changing the terrain of American politics. In this way, The Fiery Trial could provide ammunition to a top-down, Whiggish version of emancipation unless properly contextualized by other work (such as Foner's landmark Reconstruction [reviewed: May, 2022] or W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction). Judged against its stated objective, it is a thundering success.

✭✭✭✭✭: The Great Leveler provocatively argues that the only force which can be shown to have significantly reduced inequality is violence. Economic development, cultural change, and even political reform have no ability to significantly decrease the outsized share of wealth and income captured by the elite (the vast majority of which cannot be attributed to any greater productivity but rather to inherited or seized rents [non-productive economic extraction]). Even Marxist movements with strong popular backing did not equalize society when they operated within the limits of normal government (e.g., the Sandinistas). On the other hand, the World Wars, Communist Revolutions, and other destructive shocks did demonstrate strong leveling, even when there was no intention to do so. The strongest levelers were total state and system collapses, events which are associated with apocalyptic increases in mortality. The effects largely persisted once mortality returns to pre-crisis levels, though a new elite slowly pulled away in a cycle of increasing power and increasing rent extraction. 

The author does find an interesting corollary to this extremely bleak analysis: the places which experienced leveling from a trauma are occasionally places which don't undergo the trauma. Sweden and Switzerland were neutral in both World Wars, but certain aspects of the conflict (namely: mass mobilization warfare and a concomitant willingness of elites to cede ground) were sufficient to build social-democratic states equal to those in the effected countries. Likewise, the violent Communist land redistributions in North Korea and North Vietnam facilitated a similar (but much less violent) redistribution in South Korea and South Vietnam. I hope further examination of these examples would reveal more room for humans to consciously choose a more equal state-society, as the author hints might have also occurred in (admittedly extremely bellicose) Classical Athens.

Walter Scheidel (whose Escape From Rome and The Ancient Economy I have previously reviewed) is one of the most exciting historians working right now. There are many academics at elite universities putting out impressive-seeming conclusions from large datasets; very few seem to combine statistical and historical literacy at the level Scheidel does. 

Lunar Linguistics

After a summer where I did practically no language work at all, I finally got back into learning Russian. At this moment, my grammar and vocabulary are roughly at a 102 class, while my speaking and listening are even weaker. I am making (at times painfully) slow progress, though.

This month, I had a moment where my Russian actually helped. I caught two boys using a specific slur (Russian speakers can guess the one); horrified someone understood them, they actually stopped! A girl later came up and thanked me, saying "no one has ever told them not to say that before." That's not to mention the trickle of little delights I get from picking up on very basic cultural/linguistic facts (e.g., that 'h' should be said like "g" as it is a transcription of 'гь' in a name, or correctly guessing a student named 'Sofia' goes by "Sonya"). Still, I am still very far from where it is very useful at school, or, for that matter, where my grandparents would like. 

✭✭✭✰✰: Professor Linda Colley is a leading expert on the early modern British state, having written such classics as In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714 - 1760 (1982) and Britons: Forging of a Nation 1707 - 1837 (1992). Her new book (published just last year) The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen is a sweeping investigation into why constitutions proliferated so widely in the long 19th century. She determines that it was primarily the increasing scale* of war which drove this trend, though for more complicated reasons than might be assumed.

It has long been maintained that people can demand more of a state stretched thin by war (e.g., Saint Petersburg, 1905 or Britain's 1942 Beveridge Report). Dr. Colley adds the more provocative thesis that military men use constitutions to rationalize the extraction of money and conscripts needed to wage war. In one of her examples, she points out that 30 out of the 55 men who framed the U.S. Constitution "had seen active military service in [the revolution]". While I agree that this event must be interpreted in a military context, I find it more striking that almost half of the delegates were not military men. After all, this follows a nearly-decade long war in which a very high percent of adult men fought. I point this out because it is exemplary of an aspect which I did not enjoy: Colley's writing. She often undercuts herself by showing weak or countervailing evidence right as she makes an interesting point. To illustrate: it is totally plausible to me that women's suffrage only emerged in low-violence areas; however, pointing to New Zealand, the Russian frontier, and the American West does not adequately demonstrate that point, as two of those had active genocides and the other an active independence movement! 

This tendency of Colley's is not sloppiness, I don't think. Rather, it is because she is part of the (post-New Social History) generation of historians who are opposed to drawing general conclusions. To this group, the biggest faux-pas one could commit is to state anything without nuancing it with contrary evidence. Further, a historian must not invent broad categories to generalize about; quite understandable as a reaction against dangerous nonsense like "Orientals" or "Savages." Instead, they should as accurately as possible detail the specific unique experiences of (hopefully exemplary) individuals. We thus get excellent and fascinating explorations of the Haitian revolutionary-turned-king Henri Christophe, the Tunisian General Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah, the Tahitian King Pomare II as well as less effective sections on Jeremy Bentham, Queen Victoria, and Gouverneur Morris. What we don't get is strong quantitative evidence for her claims about constitutions helping the state wage war, or an examination of under what circumstances they grant international recognition, or how the ideology of constitutionalism spread among common people. Despite her assertions that we need to look at events with "wider context" and pay "closer attention" to untold stories, Colley has stumbled backwards into a neo-Great Man approach: more interesting, more racially and geographically diverse, and not limited to men—but one which either implies only a handful of elites are needed to understand the past, or is totally nihilistic about our possibility to truly uncover anything at all. I think this is why she takes a specific jab at the great systematizer Eric Hobsbawm: he used a (nuanced, unorthodox) marxian analysis to look at world-systemic trends of the sort ignored by Colley, even when they would support her argument.

Despite these criticisms, I think her thesis is insightful and dovetails nicely with other recent scholarship on the dialectic between state and popular power. I understand Fritz Bartel to have argued along this lines: democratic Britain was able to impoverish its industrial belt in a way authoritarian Poland could not; thus it makes sense to me that a similar dynamic would have been in play in the 19th century as well. Further, she pointed me to the truly fascinating letter of Husayn Ibn ‘Abdallah (mentioned above), a former mamluk slave soldier turned administrator, to the American consul on the topic of emancipation. I hope to use this letter as a primary source in the future, as it is utterly fascinating.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is one of the foundational works for our understanding of the ancient economy. The title made me think it would be a paint-by-numbers marxist gloss on the political history of Greece. It is nothing of the sort. It could more usefully be called The Evolving Structure of Ancient Greek Elites, or perhaps The Dynamic Interactions of Economics and Politics in the Greek Mediterranean.

No summary can do this massive book (730 dense pages, including endnotes) justice, but the broad outline is simple and appealing. Starting in the Archaic Period, states enfranchised an increasing proportion of their societies. Athenian democracy is the greatest example of this, but Roman institutions such as the assembly, patronage, and the expectation of public works provided substantial benefits to non-elites. States boasting a large population with some buy-in consistently defeated those without wide bases of support. Eventually, the whole Mediterranean was integrated under a state (Rome) which was well-balanced to structurally compensate non-elites from the fruits of interstate competition.

The end of Roman expansion at the beginning of the Common Era proved to be an inflection point. For the next six hundred years, the lack of expansion or productivity gains created a zero-sum economy inside which elites grew their wealth (one estimate is that senators became five times wealthier from the first to fourth centuries) only at the expense of those below them. There were multiple mechanisms at play (market forces, fiscal policy, the legal system), but all reflected the basic fact that those with money are more powerful than those without it. Lacking an institutional means to fight back (such as democracy, long since defeated), even the lower elite (curiales) became impoverished at the expense of the senator class. In the long run, this left the state vulnerable to invaders. After any defeat of the standing army, Rome could draw on few individuals ideologically, materially, or structurally invested in defending it. Worse still, senators had grown so powerful that the huge amount of land and people (coloni, the hyper-exploited former-free peasantry) they controlled were effectively untaxable.

I am generally skeptical of such grand narratives, even when supported by intelligent argument and copious details (as Ste. Croix does here); but something like this is probably correct in very broad outline. The book would probably be five-star if it was edited down to the best and clearest 180 pages, but its meandering, disjointed, and (at times) tediously detailed form just keeps me from giving it that top rating.

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✭✭✭✭✰: Isocrates (436 BCE - 338 BCE) was a great writer, teacher, and orator* of Classical Athens. The sheer length of his life is astounding: he was born during the Golden Age prior to the Peloponnesian War (making Isocrates a decade older than Plato) and died only after Athens' final eclipse following the Battle of Chaeronea. His corpus of written speeches, preserved primarily for their perceived aesthetic properties, is an important source for fifth and fourth centuries BCE Greece.

This first volume (translated by David Mirhady and Yun Lee Too) includes 15 works on a variety of subjects (e.g., politics, encomium, education, prosecution). While their specific conclusions are not especially compelling to me—I do not think there's much need to restore the Areopagus today—the details Isocrates chooses to highlight provide fascinating incidental details of his world and worldview. Interestingly, some of our best evidence for Greek legal procedures come casual comments made by Isocrates. His political ideology (conservative democracy verging on oligarchy) permeates all his writings, and strongly reinforces the political model provided by Matt Simonton in Classical Greek Oligarchy [reviewed: July 2022]. A couple of short sections (on beauty, the role of institutions, and the exact events of the 403 BCE revolution) were interesting in their own right. Most valuable of all, I found a short section (Nicocles [17 - 19]) which I could potentially use as primary sources for a class.

✭✭✭✰✰: Professor John Darwin's specialty is the 19th and 20th-century British Empire (I believe After Tamerlane was written concurrently with his The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830 - 1970), and the parts of the book surrounding that topic are the strongest. I found convincing the somewhat revisionist argument that Europe's apex was less than inevitable consequence of industrial capitalism (à la Hobsbawm) than the contingent result of industrialization happening during a period of (at times very precariously maintained) peace among the great powers. Instead of merely focusing on the remarkable fact that Europe colonized just about the whole world, Darwin equally emphasizes that each of the world's major regions experienced colonialism in a fundamentally different way.* This demonstrates how sensitive the process was to the exact circumstances of both colonizer and colonized, a valuable contribution to the topic.

The further we get from the long 19th century, the less value I find in After Tamerlane. In the earlier periods, Darwin's interpretations slowly shade into mere descriptions of the various empires—losing their explanatory power in the process. There is a general impression that he is applying broad rules of Great Power politics, but there is no consistent model in the details. Some are teleological (Russia assuming its rightful place in the European state system), and others are just confusing.† The period after the Pax Britannica is also dicey. Current scholarship on the Cold War has tended to de-emphasize the role of Soviet imperial aims in causing countries' opposition to US hegemony, yet Darwin still presents the USSR as the primary actor in anti-systemic action (such as the Korean War). Europe, where I think Soviet imperial aims could validly be seen as the primary driver of conflict, is barely discussed here even when it would be useful for his argument.

✭✭✭✭✰: Just over 20 years ago, Walter Scheidel (author of Escape From Rome [reviewed: May 2021]) and Sitta von Reden collected and commissioned a total of 12 representative essays on our then-current knowledge of the ancient economy. I am going to go through and quickly summarize what I found interesting in each:

(1) The Economies of Ancient Greece by Cartledge: Posits that there is too much emphasis on debating which economic "stage" the ancient world was in, missing that the key debate should be over the degree to which politics, economics, and social issues are mutually intertwined ("embedded" is the technical term); and that this question cannot be answered by merely demonstrating whether the economy was 'primitive' or 'complex'.

(2) Twenty Years after Finley by Andreau: A key point for us in understanding the ancient world is whether we accept the notion that "Other things being equal, a business run by a landlord possessing an aristocratic heritage was not operated in the same way as that of a freedman who had started from nothing."

(3) Traditional & Ancient Rural Economies in the Mediterranean by Halstead: Subsistence farmers cannot really be ranked by how close to nature they are, so trying to show that one series of farming practices are more intuitive/natural/primordial is nonsense; it has always been an evolving practice, not one fixed until contacted by an outside economy.

(4) Olive Production and the Roman Economy by Hitchner: Capital investment in the ancient world made it possible to grow more olives. However, it is not clear how much of this is increasing productivity as opposed to merely expanding output due to more input.

(5) Money and Mythic History by Kurke: A really provocative attempt to read into some of the more confusing passages of Herodotus and Plutarch an ideological contest over whether the middle class is respectable.

(6) Exchange and Society in the Greek City by Osborne: Arrives at Finleyite conclusions that decision-making in Ancient Greece was dominated by non-market concerns, but does so by emphasizing that poor communication/transportation, the extreme politicization of governance, and the existence of certain social institutions all pushed people into economic conservatism through completely comprehensible incentives.

(7) The Price Histories of Some Imported Goods by Reger: Shows that what scant data we have does not line up with a picture of an integrated, Mediterranean-wide commercial market with detectable price cycles.

(8) The Ancient Economy and Graeco-Roman Egypt by Rathborne: Slavery was more prevalent in the imperial core (where citizenship had strengthened the rights for many non-elites, à la Finley) than in the periphery (where serfdom already prevailed), thus complicating the picture that Diocletian's reforms are what brought about unfree labor. The environmentally preserved evidence of Egypt also shows landlords using quite market-oriented thinking; perhaps this is also indicative of the places where evidence couldn't have survived?

(9) Oil and Wine by Panella & Tchernia: Oil and wine were traded.

(10) Rome, Taxes, Rents and Trade by Hopkins: A very provocative essay offering a model for the Roman economy. Key features include: five "planes" of trade (barter, bronze, silver, gold, credit), explaining how value could move much more than numismatic evidence would indicate; that taxes were vital for stimulating trade; that the physical geography of price differences created by Rome's outsized importance also stimulated the empire's network of trade nodes; and that over time the fiscal resources of the state were lessened as an ever-wealthier elite class came to control a greater proportion of a (relatively fixed) rural surplus instead. 

(11) Modernism and the Ancient Economy by Meikle: Tries to argue that a lot of the paradoxical behavior we observe (e.g., hoarding coins instead of investing it) comes from the "predominant" purpose of production being for use rather than exchange. Also, for some reason exploiting wage labor rather than artisanal and slave labor is crucial for this switch. Not clear at all to me what this means or what the evidence for it is.

(12) Framing the Debate over Growth in the Ancient Economy by Saller: It is weird that the ancient economy gets talked about in such binary terms when we all agree on the core facts that while it did not grow at contemporary rates, there was some (slow) per capita growth from greater integration/specialization. This was sharply limited by the glacial pace of technological innovation/adoption. Industrial innovation was slow because there simply was not enough demand from the poor peasant base for it to hit significant scale, and agricultural innovation was slow because... unclear but it's very slow in most societies so why it wasn't in 17th-century Northwest Europe is the real question. 

In addition to the above, this book is making me really consider the importance of communication and transportation for the emergence of capitalism. Several very good books have brought up this point in the context of industrialization (What Hath God Wrought on the commercialization of America, and The Pursuit of Glory on Europe's analogous development), and I am progressively wondering if quantitative changes in the ability of information and goods to travel can, at some point, hit a critical mass such as to qualitatively push an "economy with a market" into a "market economy." Essays 3, 6, 7, 10, 11 and 12 all touched on how, without better communication and transportation, market-oriented investment was much riskier; perhaps to the point of preventing it from becoming predominant?

The reason this matters: Around the year 1750 real per capita economic growth started to increase an order of magnitude faster than it ever had before and has (more or less) not stopped yet, creating our world where things don't have to suck for anyone. Why the Great Divergence began when and where it did is the single most important unanswered question in history. By understanding in-depth a period when it did not occur (the Ancient Mediterranean), we can at least eliminate potential some explanations.

✭✭✭✭✰: In The Year 1000, Yale historian Valerie Hansen presents her interpretation of the c. 1000 word-system through the lens of "globalization." Vikings travel west to America (perhaps all the way to Mexico), south to Sicily and Constantinople, and east to Ghazni in Afghanistan. Ghazni was (coincidentally?) home to the brilliant scholar Al-Biruni, who compared knowledge from every tradition of which he could accurately learn; in the case of calendars, this turned out to include the Islamic, Jewish, Christian, pre-Arab Egyptian, and Greco-Roman, but notably not the Indian or Chinese. In this way we see the vague outline of a bipolar Afro-Eurasia: a Chinese-influenced East (including Japan, the Buddhist Steppe, and Southeast Asia) versus an Abrahamic-influenced West (the Islamic Steppe, Middle East, and super-equatorial Africa, plus North India and Europe). Cradled between is the cosmopolitan melting pot of India and the Indian Ocean. Here emerges syntheses and remixes between indigenous culture and those of the flanking poles. Dr. Hansen traces crucial trade goods, ideas, and state structures as they move between and beyond these core regions. This approach succeeds in showing how different the world was a mere 1000 years ago. To name just one representative example: by putting the anti-Italian riots of 1182 alongside those of Cairo in 996 and of China in 879, Europe is shown to be not a unique outlier but a totally average (if perhaps late-arriving) node on the world market. This alone makes the book a success.

How we got from a world-system where Europe was, along with Central Asia and Africa, a peripheral source of slaves and raw materials to the jaw-droppingly Eurocentric world-system of 1880 (where 77% of international imports went to Greater Europe and 76% of exports left it*) is a question the book inevitably prompts, but Dr. Hansen does not make it a focus.† One step of this process—how Europe (especially the future core of France, Germany, and Britain) went from 'utter backwater' to mere 'lesser-player'—she does explain: cerealization. Apparently, and I am shocked I did not know this sooner, the population of North and West Europe tripled as new agricultural techniques allowed farmers to grow cereals; by comparison, the core Mediterranean lands of the former Roman Empire only increased their population by 50%. This helps explain the complete re-ordering of European politics and economics c. 1000.

Besides the forgivably banal lens of "globalization", my biggest disappoint is that the author does not adequately support a crucial, interesting, and likely true claim of hers: that religion served to divide up the world into geopolitical spheres, with states on average fighting nonbelievers more often than coreligionists. While it is undoubted that religious conflict occurred (such as the Crusades), Hansen (I think) points to just a single case of a ruler rejecting a (contestably) advantageous alliance on religious/ideological grounds. One anecdote does not a world-shaping structure make! This antipathy she sees as crucial for creating regional sub-systems, with more economic, cultural, and political interaction within than across them. Without demonstrating the political force of ideology, this mechanism breaks down.

✭✭✭✭✭: Robert Paxton is the leading expert on fascism. After a half-century of studying its history, he finally tried to write a comprehensive analysis of the infamously slippery phenomenon. His breakthrough is examining the evolving actions of fascist parties instead of over-relying on the writings of its early core of dissident intellectuals, a choice he explain thusly:

Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth century. The other “isms”—conservatism, liberalism, and socialism—were created in an era when politics was a gentleman’s business, conducted through debate among educated men who appealed to each other’s reasons as well as their sentiments. Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings.

This approach allows him to see that fascism had one overriding objective (power followed by war), one core strategy (being brought in by conservatives to avoid compromising with socialists), and one unique tool not available to any other political formation (legitimatized extra-legal ideological violence). That last item is key. Every fascist group was both a "law and order" party and instigators of massive illegal violence, with no apparent contradiction for its supporters—indeed, it was the one group for whom this was ideologically non-hypocritical. Fascists initially gained a following by mobilizing people who supported anti-Left aims (such as strike-breaking and national redemption) but saw existing reactionary movements as temperamentally conservative and self-interested (and thus also unlikely to share the rewards of power). When the state even minimally tried suppressing fascist violence (as it did in the American South under Attorney General Akerman or briefly in Weimar Germany under Chancellor Brüning) its strength crumbled; when it was allowed (through toleration and punishing counter-violence), its strength grew. 

The ability to rally entirely new constituencies to the right gave fascists leverage with—aesthetically disgusted but not entirely opposed—conservative elites facing deadlock against socialist opponents. "In each case [of fascist takeover], it helps to see that political elites make choices that might not be their first preferences. They proceed, from choice to choice, along a path of narrowing options. At each fork in the road, they chose the antisocialist solution." The vital moment is when the "gift of respectability" is bestowed on fascist parties and becomes "available for all antisocialist coalition builders, rewarding violence and an unrepentant determination to abolish democracy." Fascism thus uniquely has a political presence in virtue of its sanctioning of political violence, and this sanctioning spreads to its allies' constituencies. Once in power, fascism maintained both the formal legal structure which demanded deference, and a second (entirely arbitrary) extra-legal structure of political violence. "A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure." Seeing this two-layered power-structure as a positive good rather than a necessary evil is unique to fascism. The friction from the two layers (sometimes called the 'normative state' and the 'prerogative state' respectively) working in tandem provided the impetus for fascism's continuing radicalization while in power. The only way for a state avoid taking on increasingly delusional objectives until it destroys itself in a flurry of violence (as happened to Hitler and Mussolini) is to demobilize the fascist apparatus and relapse into "mere" authoritarianism (like Franco in Spain). 

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✭✭✭✭✰: This very short fifth-century BCE pamphlet (about ~15 pages in translation) was preserved along with some works by Xenophon, and out of convenience has been associated with him ever since. In truth, it was written by someone else who is usually called "The Old Oligarch" or "Pseudo-Xenophon" or "[Xenophon]". That first label well-describes the perspective of the author: during the period of fullest Athenian democracy, he was railing against a system which allowed "bad men" (poneroi), "poor men" (penetes), and "those sympathetic to the common people" (demotikos) to rule the "good" (chrestoi), "noble" (gennioi), and "most capable" (dunatotatoi) [all used synonymously with "rich" (plousioi)]. For this reason, [Xenophon]'s work is not only invaluable for understanding the function and evolution of the Athenian state, but also provides a foundational example of anti-democratic ideology. Its section 1.5, which I will quote in its entirety, would be a great primary source to use in a classroom setting:

In every land the best element is opposed to democracy. Among the best, there is least indiscipline and injustice, and most accurate knowledge of what is good. But among the common people are the greatest ignorance, ill-discipline, and depravity. For poverty tends to lead them into base behavior, as do lack of education and lack of learning because of lack of money, at least in the case of some people.*

What I love about this passage is that it both accurately captures why some people do not like democracy while also offering students many specific points with which they can engage. Maybe students agree that the poor are less educated on average and thus are bad at politics, but they can take that as a reason to increase education instead of disenfranchising the poor. Maybe students disagree that democracy is about "knowing what is good" and think rather it is about ensuring that everyone's interests are represented fairly. Maybe students think not that the rich are on average better but on average worse, and should actually be disenfranchised. Or maybe a student fully agrees with [Xenophon]'s argument, but has to practice defending it to their peers. There is so much here in this source, both to understand the ancient world and to understand the world of today.

✭✭✭✰✰: Our contemporary understanding of the ancient economy is built on a foundation of M. I. Finley's 1973 magnum opus. While much in his account has been disputed, little of it can be ignored.

The core argument of The Ancient Economy is that "the economy" was not a reified, separate thing from "society"; that we should not expect market logic to override other considerations; and that there was no institutional dynamic that would unconsciously sweep a simple quantifiable "revenue vs. cost" calculus to preponderance. The main reason for this is that "there were no theoretical limits in which the state could not legitimately intervene provided the decision was properly taken." A shameful activity which netted profits would not only reduce one's status (a deterrent for most), but would endanger the wealth itself by weakening one's relation relative to the state (a deterrent for even the self-interested). Keeping moderately less efficient tenants makes monetary sense in a world where clientelism helped protect assets from seizure, and focusing on cultivating relationships with other elites tended to be a better use of time than integrating one's farm fully into the market through mutually dependent specialization. A knock-on from this is that Finley sees 'status' follow a clear arc in the Ancient World: from c. 1000 BCE to 200 BCE, there crystalized a three-tier status system (elite/citizen/slave); from c. 200 BCE to 500 CE, the salience of citizenship disappeared, with slaves and non-elite citizens converging into the class of 'dependent'. While Finley puts forward other important arguments (e.g., that the cities in the Ancient World were 'consumer' cities, not 'productive' cities like their proto-capitalist Medieval successors), these have been influential more in how they allowed later writers to articulate their deficiencies than for being accepted.

Finley's life is also indicative of a trauma from which the history profession is still recovering. Born "Moses Israel Finkelstein" (changing his name in the '40s to avoid antisemitism), he was driven out of the United States by government persecution under the pretense of the Red Scare (which also targeted Jews, gays, and those sympathetic to civil rights). He was lucky to be able to continue his work in Britain, but many others were not as fortunate; we will never how many other groundbreaking works were lost before being written, and we should make sure such a tragedy never occurs again.

Context: About halfway through recorded human history (c. 1st millennium BCE), the cuneiform tablet's popularity declined in favor of writing on materials like parchment and papyrus. While I am sure this was nice for the scribes (I would not want one of these for my grocery list), this substantially decreased the amount of evidence available to historians. From then on, almost no texts, unless intentionally passed down and re-written every few centuries, would survive. Thus, virtually nothing from Carthage, Phoenicia, Etruria, and the Achaemenids has made it down to us. This is in sharp contrast with the Greek world of the Classical Era, and even more so Rome. As Mary Beard writes in SPQR:

In the first century BCE we can start to explore Rome, close up and in vivid detail, through contemporary eyes. An extraordinary wealth of words survives from this period: from private letters to public speeches, from philosophy to poetry – epic and erotic, scholarly and straight from the street. Thanks to all this, we can still follow the day-to-day wheeling and dealing of Rome’s political grandees. We can eavesdrop on their bargaining and their trade-offs and glimpse their back-stabbing, metaphorical and literal. We can even get a taste of their private lives: their marital tiffs, their cash-flow problems, their grief at the death of beloved children, or occasionally of their beloved slaves. There is no earlier period in the history of the West that it is possible to get to know quite so well or so intimately... day by day, occasionally hour by hour.

A response to this is to teach history in proportion to our sources: a unit on the Ancient Near East, followed by the Greece (centered in Athens) then Rome. Invisibly, we have created a geographic line complemented with a temporal one: "civilization" (the narrative center of gravity) moves 'West', diverging with an 'East'. This continues in the post-Roman era, with the Byzantine and Islamic Empires (together 2/3rds of former Rome) being now removed from "The West" in favor of Latin Christian Francia; from here, a world-system evolves until its two periods of explosive expansion: first in the 15th/16th century (when Latin Europe conquers much of the world), and in the 18th/19th century (when it experiences industrialization, and with it a second round of military dominance). In this way, the other post-Roman non-Latin states are irrelevant for the story of "the West", which in turn becomes the basic story of the world.

Review: (✭✭✭✭✭) Kostas Vlassopoulos' monograph (adapted from his dissertation) is a punishing attack on the above history. He finds the "polis"—usually defined as the Greek 'city-state'—as the key concept for the false divide between 'West' and 'Orient', and thus the "image of a train which passes from various stations: from Mesopotamia, to Greece, to Rome, to medieval Italy, to Holland, to industrial England, etc. The stations have no importance, no history of themselves: their sole function is to receive and facilitate the train of progress in its journey to modernity. The history of the stations, after the train has departed, is a parochial history, left to specialists, and with little impact on perceptions of what is going on within the tunnel, where the train moves."

Vlassopoulos' most effective example (though he has many great ones) is the fact that we treat the poleis of mainland Greece as somehow fundamentally different from neighboring Phoenician city-states: from the hints we get, they too had something similar to 'citizenship', 'popular participation', and ideological conflict. But, because there is no transmission of texts like Aristotle's Politics, [Aristotle]'s Constitution of the Athenians, or [Xenophon]'s Constitution of the Athenians which explicitly discuss what these were, we implicitly frame them as a pre-political era of development.

Vlassopoulos' proposed solutions are not a panacea, nor are they easy to implement; but they are insightful, and have helped other historians in the 15 years since Unthinking was published. The first is to at least try and represent the areas off the beaten track as equally important to Athens or Rome; there is still some low hanging fruit in our existing sources, if we care to look for it. The second is to use archaeology as much as possible: the lives of the poor, of the non-literate, and the non-urban are better represented here. The third is the one closest to my heart: the use of world-systems rather than sovereign states as the unit of analysis. Economic, cultural, and even political history need not neatly coincide with battles (e.g., the Classical Era going from Plataea [479 BCE] to Chaeronea [338 BCE]), and the typical human condition is to live under some degree of foreign domination. A history of the Classical Mediterranean would still disproportionately center Athens, but much less so than does a straight history of Athens. The fourth is to move beyond Rankean history when necessary, usually dialogue between different periods to fill in the gaps left by our sources. Matt Simonton's Classical Greek Oligarchy [reviewed: below] employs such a method, arguing by analogy to the PRI and Pinochet's Chile for the function of certain institutions. Finally, Vlassopoulos asks us to be open about whatever project we are doing: there is no such thing as a truly universal history, so consciously choose a frame and then build an inclusive story using objective criteria. Vlassopoulos himself has since written a history of "interactions between Greeks and non-Greeks in four parallel but interconnected worlds." I think any sort of K-12 world history has to wrestle with the dual facts of (1) a uniquely European world-domination and "modernization" since 1500 and (2) the contingent, non-racial/cultural/moral roots of this domination; but these are explicitly the the frames for the course I want to design and teach. In this, Vlassopoulos has given me invaluable tools for incorporating Greek history and non-Western perspectives to avoid reifying the "West."

✭✭✭✰✰: This is a scholarly history of Athenian democracy in the Classical Era, and there is a lot to recommend about it. He has a strong command of the sources, and organizes their information into accessible sections. Chapters six and seven (on democracy in the fourth century) were genuinely insightful on how Athens tried to balance different forms of 'people power.' His call towards the end of the book for modern democracies to employ demarchy in crafting laws was both moving and convincing.

Still, there are quite a few points on which Mitchell and I disagree. One of his core arguments, that the war between the classes ended because of compromise on issues like taxation and aristocratic over-representation, does not survive scrutiny; oligarchic opposition seems solely correlated to the unity of the demos, not the "moderation" shown by the democrats. This is part of a pattern of over-emphasizing the importance of aristocratic actors (e.g., Alcibiades alone would have won the Sicilian Campaign) vis-à-vis the "masses." While the contingent decisions specific leaders makes matter (Cleisthenes chose unusually far-sighted reforms once empowered by the demos), Mitchell assumes that they are the prime mover in a way which is just not supported. Similarly, while I think he is spot on in finding the democracy's Achilles' Heel in its bellicose foreign policy, I am also convinced by Arthur Eckstein's argument that there were simply not the conditions for Athens to enjoy prolonged peace (see: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome, 2006). This is apparent in Mitchell's own narrative: rogue actors started wars as often as "the people." The link to democracy is not demonstrated.

It was inevitable that I would find parts of this book disagreeable. Thomas Mitchell is a classicist who came of age when Britain still had colonies in Africa. Despite that gap, I credit him with doing a fairly good job separating his punditry and his history—he confines his hot takes to the "Introduction" and "Epilogue"*—and I am overall impressed he included sections on how slavery was bad and women were half the population (sadly not a given in this field).

*For example: he thinks "egoism" is a useful explanation for recent political failures, as though our politicians suddenly are less virtuous individuals than in previous eras.

✭✭✭✭✰: In his cultural history of Japan since Commodore Perry, Dr. Christopher Harding warns against the common "portrait of an improbably homogeneous place, to which painters are forced to add dashes of 'puzzling' and 'paradoxical' in order to explain away evidence of plurality." Instead, he presents concentric and interacting circles of tension and evolution—interspersing the social forces with detailed explorations of individual experiences. Refreshingly, he does not center Japan's remarkable political and economic history as the phenomenon to be analyzed here; one could be tempted to group in clientelism, zaibatsu, and militarism as somehow "inherent" to the Japanese character, but these have more contingent histories than this explanation allows. Similarly, Harding constants reminds us that the idea of "Japan" (united, homogeneous, and somehow eternal) as an entity was itself a political project. It took a generation of post-Meiji nationalist education to instill the ideology of Emperor Worship into the general population.

What most caught my interest are the remarkable succession of women writers c. 1880 - 1930: Shimizu Shikin, Hiratsuka Raichō, Fukuda Hideko, Kanno Sugako, Yosano Akiko. Hayashi Fumiko in particular seems fascinating, and I think I will try to read her Diary of a Vagabond soon. Two male writers of her era, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Edogawa Ranpo, also created work I am eager to read.

✭✭✭✭✭: It was a breath of fresh air when Matthew Simonton admits in the preface that he "continue to vacillate on whether ancient Greek government can tell us much of anything about how we ought to conduct our political life today." By the end of his study, however, I came to the conclusion he was far too modest: this might be the most thought provoking book about politics I have read in years. His argument (edited lightly for length), is as follows:

Collective action depends heavily upon individuals’ anticipation of others’ actions. This consideration militates against the assumption that groups of individuals with a shared interest will necessarily act upon that interest. This does not mean that collectivities do not exist. However, there was no supra-individual “collective consciousness” of the demos that determined its actions. If the members of the demos were to act together—to challenge an oligarchy, to establish a democracy, to enact policies within a constitutional structure—they had to make a sufficient number of individual decisions to produce group action in the aggregate. This is not equivalent to treating individuals as the homo economicus known from some strong forms of neoclassical economics, in which individual utility, reducible to cash value, determines choice. It leaves open the possibility that a person will act for reasons of self-sacrifice, love, duty, or honor—but insists that it is he or she who is acting, and not some collective entity.

Suppose that of the subjects of an authoritarian regime each is individually willing to join with the others in overthrowing the regime; he or she will openly oppose the regime, however, only if s/he is certain that others are willing to participate as well. The potential problems of collective action are not intractable, and can in fact be mitigated by cultural ties, norms, and other forms of nonmaterial, ideological conditioning. The individuals considered here are not radically alienated from one another; are not self-seeking monads with no consideration of others’ claims or interests; and are frequently able to overcome what would normally be barriers to collective action through socialization, communication, and solidarity. Authoritarian rulers thus have an interest in maintaining their subjects in ignorance of one another’s preferences.

This seems exactly right. Democracy—the rule of society by society—uniquely depends on coordination (not necessarily altruistic) between large numbers of wildly different people. Theoretically, oligarchies should survive if and only if they prevent most people from openly communicating to each other their real beliefs. From here, Simonton brings to bear a wide variety of sources to show that historic (or at least, classical) Greek oligarchy did indeed break popular trust and coordination.

The most interesting aspect of this is that their core techniques (terror, assassination, asynchronous information sharing, clientelism, co-optation) show up as the core techniques of other reactionary states: from the Jim Crow South, to Cold War Latin America, to Nazi Germany, to authoritarian Indonesia. I even think aspects of the framework are applicable to other cases when a small minority (not necessarily 'oligarchic') is able to establish control over a much larger but disorganized population; for example, recent studies of the conquest of New Spain by the conquistadors emphasize the devastating psychological effects of the Alvarado Massacre, despite the deaths only representing a tiny fraction of the potential military muster of the society. If we see this as a depoliticizing and decapitating act, of the sort used by oligarchies against democracies, then we do not need to resort to gun, germs, or steel to explain why the Spaniards won out: there was no sufficiently coordinated resistance before collaboration became the optimal individual self-preservation strategy.

You can tell I am on summer break by the number of books I have been finishing: March/April/May saw ten books total, June (when school got out) six, and now this is my tenth review this month. This is probably a bit skewed because a lot of the books I started earlier I only happened to finish once break started, and because a book in the "A Very Short Introduction" series is going to be a bit quicker than Tony Judt's Postwar.

✭✭✰✰✰: Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction is a collection of short essays on aspects of Egyptology: how we construct chronologies, various interpretations of the role of the 'king', its role in popular culture, and so on.

I think there is value in this work, and I think I would even recommend it to people who knew absolutely nothing about period and wanted an easy read. But for someone who has even a decent familiarity with the history and archaeology of Egypt, there just isn't a ton which is new or interesting. The structuring device of relating each section to the Narmer Palette did not inspire me to incorporate it into a curriculum as a primary source the Amanda Podany's engagement with comparable documents did in The Ancient Near East: A Very Short Introduction [reviewed: below].

✭✭✭✰✰: I had the good fortune to come into possession of several Oxford University Press' "Very Short Introduction" books and am going to weave them in periodically. Given that I just read a few works touching on this topic (Carthage Must Be Destroyed, Salammbo, The Histories, and to a lesser extent The Persians and The Rise of Athens), I figured this would be a good time for African History by John Parker and Richard Rathborne.

Strangely, this is not an introductory history of Africa: for "to provide even the sparest chronological outline of this history as it unfolded across the diverse regions of the continent is way beyond our scope here." Instead, it is an introduction to the field of African history. Most charitably, it reads like a series of essays meant to preempt common issues neophytes have. Not being an expert myself, I appreciated a lot of the points (even if much of it was pretty rudimentary). The most interesting was that the "first modern textbook" on African history was only written in 1962. Prior to Roland Oliver's A Short History of Africa, history was limited to when Europeans showed up. His later book, The African Middle Ages (1981), struck me as mediocre when I read it a couple years ago—now that I have some appreciation for how groundbreaking it was, I should re-visit it with a little more respect.

A description of that older style of African history struck me because it exactly captures what I did not like about Martin Meredith's The Fortunes of Africa [reviewed: September 2021]:

Much of what passed for African history before the 1950s fell within the established tradition of ‘imperial history’, a genre dominated by accounts of the African careers of European explorers, missionaries, proconsuls, and businessmen. Africans themselves tended to be regarded as objects rather than actors in the making and unmaking of European empires.

✭✭✭✰✰: Carthage Must Be Destroyed is a solid one-volume introduction to Rome's most famous rival. That description emphasizes a central fact of Punic studies: beyond a very small number of indigenous texts, the North African civilization's only recorded history concerns its relationships with others. Despite that difficulty, Richard Miles (a historian of Roman History at the University of Sydney) does well. He complements the political narratives of Livy and Polybius with newer discoveries in coinage and votive offerings to trace the interaction of economics and ideology on the state. It is a difficult task to say anything new about Hannibal's failed invasion of Italy, but Miles succeeds in doing so by viewing the campaign as a contest for the legacy of Heracles within the Western Mediterranean World.

This book also makes a nice companion to a couple other works I have been reading recently. The great mercantile power resorted to coinage not to facilitate barter (as classical economists would have it), but rather to pay soldiers; this is exactly the "military-coinage complex" process David Graeber describes in Debt: The First 5000 Years [reviewed June 2022]. Similarly, I cannot help but see the tensions in Carthaginian society between the Elders and the Suffete as mirroring that presented by Matt Simonton in Classical Greek Oligarchy.

✭✭✭✭✰: Gustave Flaubert, after making his reputation with Madame Bovary, became obsessed with classical Carthage. He poured over what its neighbors had written and then, still wanting more, soaked in the landscape and extant architecture during an ambitious series of tours through North Africa and the Middle East. The result was Salammbo, his attempt to capture—down to the tiniest detail—a world lost twenty centuries before.

The novel can only be understood with the context of being both a product of, and a tool for, French imperialism in the Maghreb. Due to its brutal destruction by the Romans, much about Carthage remains unknown. This was even more true for Flaubert, a 19th-century realist novelist turned amateur historian. He filled the gaps with sensual descriptions of decadent luxuries juxtaposed with depraved cruelty. This was less an artistic decision than a (supposedly) rational, even scientific one; generations of European scholars had already proven the unchanging backwardness of the Orient.

Yet, those who totally dismiss Salammbo for its inaccuracies miss something important: it is beautiful. Its violence and its pleasures, its moments of heroism and its moments of ennui, its anxieties and its coincidences; they may not tell us anything about ancient Carthage, but together they tell us a lot about Flaubert's France. This is a world which knew women kept in gilded cages could still feel lust and dream of murder. The horror of sections like 'Moloch' comes not from their grotesque spectacle (though there is plenty of that) but the bleak realism of each individual participant. Would we ourselves be any different in such an environment? Thus, the racial essentialism characteristic of orientalism is missing here; Flaubert constantly reminds us of our shared humanity by forcing intense, often unwanted, empathy to slave and suffete alike.

✭✭✭✭✰: This is a period which has given me quite a bit of trouble. It's a fascinating time, an important time, and one with many great moments and characters. Yet, when one reads (truly excellent) synthesizes like Marc Van de Mieroop's A History of the Ancient Near East, one becomes overwhelmed: "How do you possibly do justice to this civilization without either arbitrary over-simplification or drowning your students in nuance?" Then came along this little book.

Professor Amanda Podany successfully distills 2500 years of history into 168 pages, and in doing so shows the core of what made humanity's first civilization special. The stand-out choice in this regard was how source-centered it was: each of the 30-odd mentioned documents or pictures illustrate a concrete point about the Ancient Near East's development. This is Oxford University Press' "Very Short Introduction" series at its very best, and I came away feeling like I knew what (and how!) I want to teach about this subject in a secondary setting.

✭✭✰✰✰: I read Anthony Everitt’s The Rise of Athens because I mistook it for Thomas N. Mitchell’s Athens (which I have been meaning to read). While Mitchell is a trained classicist with two doctorates, Everitt is just a guy into arts and history. There’s nothing wrong with that—I myself am just a guy into arts and history—but it does explain what felt to me a lack of substance. Of the Spartans, Everitt says:

Spartans did not enjoy gossip and could not stand having to listen to long speeches. They were men of few words—hence our “laconic.” Young Spartans were not to be tempted to make money. They were forbidden to engage in business or to own silver or gold. Gold and silver coins were not struck, and instead only iron bars were used. These were given a very low financial value, so that a substantial sum of money was inconveniently heavy and large to transport easily or to store. There was little point in receiving cash in this form as a gift or a bribe or in stealing it. Citizens lived austere lives and were formidable on the battlefield. Like bees in a hive everyone worked obediently and efficiently for the common good; there were no drones. Sparta would have liked nothing better than to be left alone, but its interests were to be challenged in future years by its polar opposite and rival, the changeable and creative city of Athens.

Current historians are skeptical of almost every concrete claim in here: all humans gossip, the iron money was probably the practical obeloi, and Sparta charted a consistently imperialist foreign policy. Yet this is the most literal interpretation of an important source for this period—Plutarch (c. 46 - 119 CE). I do not think one should ignore Plutarch, but given that he was writing about people 600 years in the past (with a specific moralistic agenda), his work can only be used with care. This is why people train in classics, so they can tease out truth from distortion in these older texts! The early chapters, where written sources are fewer—and thus should be more heavily supplemented with philology, archaeology, and political science—are consistently weak. Instead of seeing how Athens developed out of Attica during the Greek Dark Age (a really interesting story in archaeology), Everitt tells the myth of Theseus. Instead of examining how the democratic revolutions occurred (as, say, Matt Simonton does p. 20 - 25), he lists it as a series of Great Ideas handed down by Great Men. This does a disservice to the past, and it does a disservice to the present.

Despite all my complaints, the book really is fine—just not the academically rigorous text I was anticipating. The later chapters, as written evidence becomes more plentiful, are a bit closer to the truth. Especially when Everitt zooms out (he allows himself only a quarter as many chapters for the fourth century BCE as the fifth), the writing picks up and I found his style actively enjoyable.

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Context: The great Achaemenid Empire tried to conquer the fractious city states of mainland Greece during the Persian Wars (c. 499 - 478 BCE) and was repulsed. While only a relatively minor setback for the Persians, it became to the Greeks their defining moment of greatness. Herodotus (c. 484 - 425 BCE), writing with the same distance to the events as a baby-boomer historian would have to World War II, states his mission to be "preserving from decay the remembrance of the great, wonderful, and glorious actions of the Greeks and the Foreigners." The resulting work was the Ἱστορίαι (transliterated: "historiai"), a long series of oral presentations documenting what Herodotus could learn about why and how the wars were fought. "Historiai" did not mean 'history' in classical Greek, but rather something like 'inquiries' or 'investigations.' It was only due to the tremendous influence of Herodotus, "the father of history", that the word came to its current meaning. A surprising corollary of this is that the English word 'story' is actually descended from historiai and not vice-versa as one might expect.

✭✭✭✰✰: To a modern reader, the lecture scripts (for that is what we have) are a mixed-bag. Part of this is certainly the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" effect, where aspects of Herodotus' methodology which were groundbreaking became ubiquitous and then cliché. Another is how familiar the specific content already is: I cannot tell you how many times I have read the Croesus/Solon exchange or Darius the Great's (supposed) origin story, to the point where I was surprised by how little new material there was in broad sections of The Histories. The earlier (chronologically) sections are particular rough on this account; due to Herodotus' place as the oldest prose historian in the Western tradition, many fields have to make use of his stray comments. Martin Meredith's The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History [reviewed: September 2021] mentions him no less than six separate times (twice as many as Ibn Battuta, for comparison).

Still, there are things which can only be gleaned from direct, primary source reading. One aspect I want to dig into more is Herodotus' naïve views of ethnicity(?): he very much wants to classify people into binary categories, where each people (also translated as "race", "nation") are fundamentally the same and coherent. We know from real life this not how that works. There are spectrums of behavior (a Thracian may live like a Scythian, speak like a Greek, look like an Asian, and be politically subservient to a Macedonian; more importantly, there is not just one "Greek language" or "Scythian lifestyle") with identity being determined by context. Even when he knows these binaries are absurd (such as whether Egyptians "Libyans" or "Asians" since they live on both sides of the Nile), he cannot seem but to believe that there are a definite "true" versions of different people from whom others are just a remix.

I want to shout out Professor Elizabeth Vandiver's "Herodotus: The Father of History" lecture series (and Multnomah County Library for making it freely available), which provided helpful archaeological and philological context to this work.

✭✭✭✰✰: This is less "A History of the Democratic Party" than an interpretation of how its political coalition has evolved in order to inform its options for the present. Professor Michael Kazin sees the party as "cosmopolitans in search of a new majority," and hopes historical context will help them find one. He is refreshingly open about his bias,* something which the field would benefit from more of. Despite his motives, the Georgetown historian is still a professional and does an adequate (if not inspired) job documenting this strange institution.

The book's historical argument is that the Democratic Party has been defined by the airy concept of "moral capitalism", with two main strands: an anti-domination strand (seen in the Jacksonian revolt against the Bank of the United States and anti-monopolism, predominant from 1828 - 1928) and a pro-labor/redistributionist strand (predominant 1928 - 1972). I do not find this concept useful; every American political party could be described as supporting their version of "moral capitalism" (with perhaps the exception of the SPA and its descendants). That said, Kazin does better than most in showing the coherence of 19th-century Democrats. I particularly enjoyed the inclusion of a Hawthorne story, "Earth's Holocaust", showing the way that activists (whether abolitionist, evangelical, prohibitionist, or anti-immigrant—all Whig constituencies) were seen as despotic. Definitely adding that to my "Primary Source" folder for if I ever get to teach APUSH.

After a mostly paint-by-numbers first half mostly focusing around figures who one would meet in any survey of American history (Van Buren, Stephen Douglas, Redemption, Boss Tweed, William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson), one reaches the sections where Kazin's interest clearly lies. The transition is marked by an excellent chapter entitled "It's Up to the Women, 1920 - 1933" wherein Kazin uses the lens of the first post-suffrage generation of professional female politicos (including Eleanor Roosevelt, Belle Moskowitz, and Ruth Bryan Owen) to examine the nadir of Democratic fortunes. Not only is this an inclusive, new, and interesting way to look at the 1920s, I also think it genuinely captures something about how the party shifted its focus to labor/progressivism. In the words of Frances Perkins, it was this period when it became clear to her “that when the Democrats are in power all the bills that I’m interested in get passed, or at least put forward a little bit... [otherwise] they all get sat right on and nothing that I’m interested in gets through.” The second half of the book flew by and was genuinely insightful, adding tons of great examples to a narrative with which many are already somewhat familiar.

✭✭✭✰✰: A solid introduction to the Celts as they were. Barry Cunliffe is a master of the subject (By Steppe, Desert, and Ocean is easily one of my top-five history books), but the work is hampered by its age. Originally written in 1999, our understanding of pre-historic Europe has advanced tremendously in the intervening two decades thanks to archaeology and genetics. While Cunliffe put out the new edition in 2018, it was not especially clear when reading it what was new and what was hold-overs from the original. For example, he is way more favorable to the Anatolian Hypothesis than most scholars; is this because he has a different interpretation, or is this because that is where the preponderance of evidence was in 1999? For this reason, I ended up "closing" my mind to a lot of the information that seemed older, limiting the use I could get out of this book.

The sections which analyze our written history of the Celts holds up especially well, though: we are not getting new Roman or Greek documents. I had no idea that the 4th-century Saint Jerome found the language of Galatia noticeably similar to that of Trier, nor several other signs that there was a contemporary perception of cohesion amongst the peoples from Spain to the Black Sea.

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"Hey August? What is going on with 'monthly manuscripts'? It doesn't seem to really be monthly at all—three out of the last four posts have been under this heading." -No one, I just made this up

Thank you for the observant hate-mail, imaginary person. I just want to clarify: I am trying to make myself read a good amount of primary sources in addition to synthetic/secondary history. This is invaluable for a number of reasons, while the monthly goal is just a means to an end. As of this seventh month I have seven of these posts, but I would expect that I will get a bit further ahead during this summer (now that I am more free and traveling a lot), and to slip back to parity once the school year starts again.

✭✭✭✰✰: The Greek Dark Ages traditionally ends with the works of two master poets: Homer (who I believe to be fictional) and Hesiod (who I believe to have really existed). For both Ancient Greeks and for generations of classicists, the history of civilization began in media res with these preserved words. "Theogony" (English: "God Births") is a sprawling, 1000 line poem about the various primordial forces mixing and matching and mating to create the spirits, nymphs, and gods of Greek religion. Even in Johnson's contemporary translation it comes off more like a grocery list than a poem (though admittedly with some sick lines here and there). The edition has the nice feature of having the Ancient Greek on the verso and the translation on the recto, so I could see she did not have a lot to work with.

"Works and Days" is more down to earth. Hesiod's brother had bribed a chief into unfairly partitioning their inheritance, prompting the poet to elaborate his theory of the divine order of the universe. Men who cheat never prosper, while men who work hard do. People who sew crops in accord with the seasons will be taken care of, while those who don't will starve. Thus it is actually an extension of the previous work, adding how human lives fit into the cosmic whole. It is a comforting tale, and one which must have resonated strongly with Iron Age farmers always uncomfortably close to famine. Probably the most interesting aspect is that, in Hesiod's telling, humankind was allotted our high load of labor as punishment for Prometheus.

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Context: It is hard to describe just how important theater was to classical Athenians. The Dionysia was akin to the Superbowl, if it were also the State of the Union Address. The whole male citizenry—that is, those whose voices decided politics and whose bodies decided war—gathered together for a collective spectacle which would be the shared starting place for any following discussion. The power of this might be approximated by imagining, in a world with no civics class or partisan news network, what it would be like to get everyone to watch exactly one political advertisement without any opportunity for challenge or rebuttal.

Now that I am back on an Ancient Near East kick (which to me includes Classical Greece), I decided to pick up an exciting recent compilation of sixteen new translations* of the most important Athenian tragedies. The book is physically beautiful, and run through with a clear mission to, in my own limited vocabulary, “make compelling, muscular, contemporary translations” of works often obfuscated by distance and dated diction. I read all five of Aeschylus' works in the volume.

✭✭✭✭✭: "The Persians", powerfully translated by J. Romm, is the oldest play to survive. Put on during 472 BCE, it shows the Persian reaction to the 480 BCE Battle of Salamis. It is unique among extant works from this period to treat recent history as though it were of a kind with mythology, the normal subject for Athenian tragedy. The choice to experience the battle through the eyes of the defeated enemy is inspired. How many veterans listened with Atossa to the list of brave men lost forever and thought back to their own comrades? As commentators from Edward Said to Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones [reviewed: below] have pointed out, there is an orientalist discourse which finds its origin here—that despotism might be appropriate for ‘Asia’, but not for ‘Europe’. In actual context, the story is much less noxious. The allegory of two sisters, one yoked one free, serve to justify the triple (and somewhat conflicting) purposes of the production: to foster collective solidarity among the group, to give heart against what might again seem an insurmountable threat, and to allow the veterans of two horrific wars to collectively grieve.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Oresteia trilogy of three plays—"Agamemnon", "The Libation Bearers", and "The Eumenides"—was presented by Aeschylus (and is here translated by S. Ruden) over the course of one day in 458 BCE. From beginning to end, it tells the story of Orestes' mother murdering Orestes' father and his sex-slave (precipitating a political crisis in Argos-Mycenae), Orestes and his sister murdering their mother and her lover in revenge, and finally the Furies (loathers of kin-slaying) chasing Orestes to Athens, where Orestes is acquitted of the crime by a panel of Athenian jurors. Thus, the cycle of intrafamily violence is brought to an end through Athenian civil justice.

All three plays drag at places—I see why their text is excised substantially when performed—but all three also have tremendously engaging, provoking, and linguistically beautiful sections. Some of these are: the second half (783 - 1673) of "Agamemnon"; the Electra/Orestes libation scene (306 - 508) & Orestes/Clytemnestra pre-murder verbal spar (905 - 950) in "The Libation Bearers"; and the conflict at Delphi (34 - 234) & the core trial sequence (397 - 733) in "The Eumenides." The last play has the interesting element of being a "tragedy" with a happy ending (both for Orestes and for the audience who sees how Athenian justice can curtail vigilantism), but also the extremely dissatisfying (to a modern audience) plot point of Athena casting the deciding vote to sanction Orestes murder of his mother on a logic of—roughly—"bros before hoes"† (Athena was considered somewhat androgynous, due to lacking a mother). I wish we could see Cassandra's ghost silently screaming as the right verdict is reached for the absolute stupidest reason.

✭✭✭✭✭: "Prometheus Bound" is the famous middle play of an otherwise lost trilogy. It shows the struggle between the titular Titan (humanity's strong-willed patron) and Zeus (Olympus' despot). Despite all the tortures Prometheus is put through, he resolutely refuses to submit to the logic of 'might makes right'. J. Romm spectacularly renders why Prometheus has been an icon for revolutionaries and artists alike for over two thousand years.‡ The second half is a bit slower, especially if one does not need the characters' exposition.

✭✭✭✰✰: Soldier of the Mist is a beautiful novel. Its conceit is that Gene Wolfe is translating a recently recovered 5th-century BCE scroll left behind by a Latin mercenary, 'Latro'. He is cursed to only know his past by what he can write down before his memory fades. Here Wolfe masterfully evokes an atmosphere: able to conjure pathos based on bare sketches of characters—for Latro has neither the time nor resources to include more—and to make felt a place where Gods and daimones are still a sinister presence.

While the writing is consistently superb, there are a couple instances where a line is taken too directly from Herodotus (Wolfe's clear inspiration for this novel). This is a bit like showing that it is the 1980s by having a character dance Thriller.

From 1800 - 1824 the Democratic-Republican Party so consistently defeated the Federalists that many individuals who might have joined a more successful Federalist Party instead became Democratic-Republicans, diluting the meaning of the brand. Presidents took advantage of their party's growing moderate/semi-Federalist/pro-activism wing to strengthen their position by appointing these men to important posts, an approach smeared as "amalgamating" the two parties into one. Martin Van Buren found amalgamation offensive both to his Jeffersonian ideology, and to his strong belief in rewarding political allies. The failure of Monroe to designate a clear heir led to the five-way power struggle of 1824, ending in the vaguely amalgamationist Adams-Clay coalition beating both the idiosyncratic Jackson and the Jeffersonian Crawford. Van Buren spent the next four years explicitly building an alliance between true-believers (like himself), planters (of both Calhounite and Crawfordian persuasion), and anti-Adams nationalists. Andrew Jackson became the front man for this "Democratic Party", though it was arranged such that his personal beliefs would be tempered by the ideological realities of the coalition. The final ingredient was pragmatism: wherever Van Buren needed to temper Jeffersonian ideals to guarantee victory (such as by support for the 1828 tariff, or via massive cronyism), he did so.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this was Van Buren's stated goal of neutralizing sectional issues (i.e., slavery) as a topic for politics by making both parties require votes from every section. Van Buren's famous letter to Thomas Ritchie [note: I added this to my material to use with students], leader of Virginia's Richmond Junto, is only the clearest example of him framing his ultimate objective this way. He was catastrophically successful: from the time Van Buren was elected to the US Senate in 1821 to the time James Buchanan (his ally in creating the Democratic Party) left the presidency in 1861, each administration had found it politically expedient to ignore anti-slavery, allowing the number of slaves to increase more than two-fold to 4 million.

✭✭✭✭✰: I quite liked Persians. It succeeded in telling the history of one of the world's great empires in an academically-rigorous yet engaging way, incorporating the huge amount of recent archaeological evidence to challenge and nuance the traditional (Greek) narrative. Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones made source criticism and historic reception integral to the exposition rather than an interruption. He shows, for example, that Darius the Great's coup involved rewriting the recent past on a jaw-dropping magnitude. This completely changes how we view this "King of Kings", casting him as a 5th-century BCE Stalin. Similarly, Llewellyn-Jones traces how discourses arising in Greek sources became core to the ideology of the British Empire, and shaping both the oligarchic and the orientalist strands of its domination.

The middle third of the book is wisely dedicated to non-chronological aspects of Persian society such as religion, court etiquette, and architecture. The sections on the lives of slaves and women were especially good. Llewellyn-Jones focuses in on some well-documented non-rulers as a way of illuminating key aspects of Achaemenid society. The Greek doctor/historian Ctesias, the Egyptian quisling Udjahorresnet, and the mighty queen-consort Amestris are all fascinating and informative. My favorite, though, has to be Gimillu: a man who spent two decades on trial for theft without losing his job administering temple resources. How to explain this bizarre career is a topic of active debate amongst historians, but his existence helps to ground this semi-legendary period with quotidian graft with which we are all familiar.

I have (unsuccessfully) been trying to get my hands on an affordable copy of From Cyrus to Alexander for half a decade now, so I am quite happy that Persians has supplanted it as the go-to general volume on the Achaemenids. It also helped re-ignite my interest in the Ancient Near East, now that my deep dive into modern Europe has ended.

✭✭✭✰✰: Perhaps the final installment of the Penguin History of Europe, covering from 1950 to the present, was destined to be unsatisfying—"now" is a rather arbitrary point to end a narrative, and leaves Ian Kershaw without other models to draw on. Instead of presenting a coherent model of the period (as he did in To Hell and Back), Kershaw gives us what amounts to an awkward mix of generalization and specifics, where noise is not well-distinguished from sound. Disproportionate attention is paid to some aspects of Europe (e.g., the 1950s anti-nuclear movement) without clear payoff. The strongest sections are when he has a protagonist, such as Gorbachev, and those he where examines deeper structures.* The early Cold War in particular would have benefited from systematically exploring how the rhetorical and realpolitikal conflicts (largely presented as discrete phenomena) affected each other.

The text prompts quite a few economic questions which, while vital for the history Kershaw describes, are not adequately explored: why Mikhail Gorbachev's common-sense reforms actually hurt productivity, how Margaret Thatcher decreased inflation while putting blue-collar workers on the dole, and what made Yugoslavia develop such stark regional differences.

Kershaw says that this is the hardest book he ever wrote, and I believe him. That's not to say it is bad; it is "merely" good and often insightful (surely better than I could do). I am also beginning to understand why Tony Judt's Postwar [reviewed: March 2022] has such a strong reputation: it integrates a tremendous amount of information with the rough thesis that Europe was, despite its tremendous previous diversity, slowly converging into one society. 

✭✭✭✰✰: This is a fun book, and one I'd recommend to anyone. David Graeber takes the reader on a whirlwind tour across the whole width and breadth of human experience since c. 3000 BCE. I sometimes see this book suggested as a heterodox "introduction to world history", and for that purpose there are worse choices. Debt provincializes Europe prior to the Early Modern Age, giving appropriate attention to the civilizations of China, India, the Near East, as well as to the millions of humans living outside of settled state formations in Africa, America, the Steppe and Oceania. The fact that Graeber is an anthropologist, rather than a historian or an economist, means that he is uniquely suited for making sweeping pronouncements on "humanity" in all its real, lived nuances.

The scope does concern me. No one, not even a brilliant and widely read anthropologist like Graeber, can do justice to everything which has ever happened. Each further example opens up greater potential for error, especially when he wades into speculation about deeper psychology or undocumented preceding events. Works like Debt must be written (and can be extremely generative by providing new perspectives into niche areas), but in 50 years I am sure every sub-field will have a prominent paper demonstrating exactly how Graeber got their subject wrong. This is inevitable, but it stops me from wanting to use very much of it in framing lessons.

Overall, though, Graeber's work seems as well-received as one like this could be, and his approach is a refreshing contrast to how history is usually done. His two core arguments, that human relations are unquantifiable and that debts must not always be paid, are persuasive; taken together, they suggest a radical course for remaking the structure of society.

✭✭✭✭✭: This is a masterpiece—the best work of fiction I have read in years. Each of the three novellas are individually compelling, but it is the dialogue between them elevates the whole to near-perfection.

That said, The Fifth Head of Cerberus is a hard book to explain. There is little agreement about what exactly happens, though most think that there are themes of post-colonialism, identity, and cultural reproduction. It could be a prelude to revolution, a post-script to genocide, or merely the tale of two confused young men from the binary planets of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix. I personally read it as a story of something new (and potentially good) coming from two otherwise dead-end lines: one human but degenerating, the other alien and becoming human. While the narrative's ambiguity could be frustrating were its execution any less than flawless, the shifting interpretations Gene Wolfe forces the reader through somehow compounds rather than erodes its message.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✰: I had failed to finish any primary sources last month; thus this May I made it a priority to tackle something substantial. 

Context: My interest in The Class Struggle comes from the effect it had on world history in the form of the October Revolution. The original plan of Lenin's Bolsheviks was to accelerate worker revolution internationally as a means of bringing about a global communist society. Bizarrely, they had no concrete plans for what that would look like. This did not stop them from overthrowing an already socialist government, because to them all that mattered was hastening the inevitable march of history. Their actions are logical, as long you accept the (obviously wrong) premise that modern industry has exactly one non-contradictory social structure which can stably exist around it. Socialism thus did not even need to be described prior to being built, as any dynamic process of tinkering and change would inevitably allow its discovery via actualization. This insane belief is actually straight out of the (then mainstream) thought of Karl Kautsky, the so-called "Pope of Socialism", author of The Class Struggle.

The Class Struggle: This official SPD treatise is the defining work of Orthodox Marxism. Orthodox Marxism is distinct from what Marx actually believed ("Classical Marxism"); rather, it is Marxism as it was widely understood prior to Stalin's Marxism-Leninism. Beyond Marx, the biggest influence on Orthodox Marxism was actually the biologist Charles Darwin. As Kautsky thought of it, just as long-beak finches eventually become predominant in environments where cactus fruit is plentiful, societies where worker revolt is neutralized (only possible with socialism) would displace those wracked by it (at least once large industrial production comes along). In this way, a leftist version of social darwinism—one much more popular than Herbert Spencer's ever was—became dogma for a generation of labor activists. The analogy to science gives the text a conviction of certainty: "laws of social evolution", "inevitable result", "only thing possible", "the system of socialist production which has become necessary", "social evolution is a modern science", "irresistible economic forces", "actual facts of our system of production", and "the mass of workers who are bound to call into being a social order corresponding to their interests." Kautsky did not quite understand the carte blanche he was giving the far-left when he declared:

"Today there is no longer any question as to whether the system of private ownership shall be maintained. Its downfall is certain. The only question is: 'Shall the system of private ownership be allowed to pull society with it down into the abyss; or shall society shake off that burden and then, free and strong, resume the path of progress which the evolutionary law prescribes to it?'"

But Lenin did. He thought that humane social forms would arise from the mere existence of suitable large-scale production, especially ones built without the deluding influence of liberalism. He was wrong. Russia is still poor, inhumane, militaristic, and—even after the unnecessary death of millions under the USSR—capitalist.

✭✭✭✭✭: The antebellum slave regime was destroyed by the combined force of black resistance and the U.S. Army. No more would the planter class be able to own humans to torture for profit and pleasure. Yet what social order would take its place was left undetermined. Eric Foner's Reconstruction—the most influential single volume on the era, though owing much in turn to W.E.B. Du Bois' prior Black Reconstruction in America—shows how exactly “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” (Du Bois) In particular, Foner traces the messy vicissitudes of politics which eventually left the freedmen without land, military support, or political rights. 

Despite its disappointing end, the revolution of 1860 - 1877 had a lasting legacy. The gang-labor system was permanently broken; share-cropping, far from being a continuation of slavery, was a hard-won concession of independence wrung with great difficulty from former slavers. Over a thousand black men—born both free and enslaved—served in state governments, with 14 elected to the Federal House and three selected for the Senate. Northern radicals, coalesced around Thaddeus Stevens (the "Robespierre" of the "Second American Revolution", in Clemenceau's memorable phrase), who brought state power to bear in enforcing emancipation, social equality, and economic leveling.

That last goal proved the shoals upon which Reconstruction was shattered. The failure of the freedmen to acquire land—specifically because of Andrew Johnson's unilateral decision to return forfeited property to the ex-slavers in an explicit effort to bolster white supremacy—meant that there was a structural disadvantage between them and their former masters. Further, the growing class friction in the industrial North helped crystalize a new ideology of gilded liberalism within the Republican Party: technocratic, positivistic, and elitist. The experience of having the uneducated masses propose such unthinkable schemes as a decoupling of inflation rates from mining yields and public control of utilities led many formerly anti-slavery politicians to fear the rule of black proletariat more than that of confederate planters. While the 1872 fusion of anti-Reconstruction Republicans with Democrats went down to humiliating defeat, by 1876 the willingness to use force to maintain the civil rights of poor southern blacks had faded. Redemption followed. This meant the application of extra-state violence to terrorize the black population into atomized submission, followed by de jure institution of Jim Crow. It would take more than three generations for the legal weapons forged by the Radical Republicans to be again wielded, at the instigation of mass black protest, to begin dismantling this system; a process, as Foner points out in his subtitle, still unfinished today.

Lunar Linguistics

I have officially doubled my Duolingo crowns since my last post (now at 146 out of 474), so now is as good of a time as any to post about my progress.

Overall, I am really enjoying learning Russian. Pronunciation is unsurprisingly my lagging skill: my nice students tell me I'm "almost there!" while the blunt ones tell me (and this is a verbatim quote), "that was really bad." Duolingo as a learning tool can be really hit or miss depending on the course and your goals, but right now I expect that I will finish it before moving onto Memrise (for vocabulary building) and graded readers (for actual practice).

As far as the actual course goes, I find that a little every day is not nearly as effective as a lot every day: in practical terms, I learn more than x4 as much doing 60 minutes than 15 doing minutes. Given that I am a fulltime teacher with other responsibilities, it is taking a real amount of dedication to keep up, but for now at least I am enjoying it.

[Re-read]: Capitalism's spread out of Britain had brought industrialization, democratization, and liberalization to an ever-increasing portion of the world. Yet, by the 1870s, the very forces which had midwifed the Age of Capital: 1848 - 1875 [reviewed: March 2022] began eroding its foundation. National economies which had so recently become insured against the instability wrought by natural disaster had instead become vulnerable to the vagaries of international trade. A downturn, like the one seen after 1873, could break the alliance of 'progressive' industrial classes into liberal owner and socialist proletarian. History has since demonstrated the contingency of that last identification, but for the First and Second Internationals there was little competition for the communities which they were to make their enthusiastic base. Democratization paradoxically strengthened the right in addition to the left. As the vote was extended past the respectable middle class (sure liberals of one kind or another) to the lower-middle (a suitable base for Disraeli's one-nation conservatism) and peasants (more often than not under traditional elite like the German Junkers), the center lost the freedom to act without the wings—it is telling that the British Liberals would be forced to welcome labor into coalition as a discrete faction. In the American South, popular anti-liberalism coalesced into the insurgent Ku Klux Klan, arguably the first fascist force in history. Further beset by worker unrest, Indian revolt, and a dwindling confidence in their own professed ideals, the Republican Party abandoned national reconstruction.

The result of these political developments is a period of near-unbroken war misleading called the "British Peace." The common characteristic of these conflicts is that they were largely one-sided slaughters committed by industrial states against non-industrial states in pursuit of profit and prestige. When technology was evened out—as in the First Italo-Ethiopian War, the Boer War, or the Russo-Japanese War—the Europeans found themselves defeated or at least badly bloodied. This did not stop the success of Europeans from being interpreted racially, though the exact contours of this explanation was contested. A pattern emerged among the most power people grouped by Anglo-Saxon racialists under "colored" of emphasizing their difference from similar but less powerful people: Japanese against Chinese, Western against Eastern Jews, Northern vs. Southern Italians, and Elite vs. Plebeian Argentinians. The World Expos ceremonially reaffirmed who was 'civilized' and who was 'not' by whether they received a full national booth or merely a spot in the exposition coloniale.

The habits of solving domestic squabbles through easy victory had desensitized national leaders to what an all-out European Civil War would mean. There was also something in the air causing millions to be euphoric at the idea of killing and being killed on behalf of something new: a hyper-masculinism, a fear of revolution, a breakdown of order (an equivalent of the KKK was threatening mutiny in the world's "most developed" country), and a feeling that everything dear was already under threat. And to be fair to these millions, it was. The global economy was dissolving the countryside through mortgaging the small-farm, the nation by assigning giant numbers of immigrants a new homeland, and the family by allowing women the opportunity to earn a living independently. Even if the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not become the spark of world war, the comburent of social change still laid beneath an industrializing world-system whose grinding gears made it a matter of when, not if, the structure went up in flames.

✭✭✭✭✰: During the 19th century, Northwest Europe became far and away the richest and most economically productive society in world history. In a real sense, the society that appeared in those years between Manchester and Paris expanded to absorb the rest of humanity. Why industrialization arose then and there is a hotly disputed question, but the answer of economist Brad DeLong—that Northern England offered uniquely high returns for investing in labor-saving technology—is as convincing as any. Yet, this only pushes the question back one step further: why was it then and there that laborpower was so expensive relative to capital? Why not in the larger market of China, the more labor-scarce market of America, the more centrally located market of India, or the more commercial markets of Northern Italy or the Low Countries?

Wood posits that it was capitalism’s emergence which had gradually made English labor uniquely more productive (and, thence, more expensive), as capitalism requires economic actors to reinvest in capital and innovation in order just to maintain (“socially reproduce”) themselves. This explanation rests on a radical sub-claim: that capitalism was a novel institution in human history, only appearing for the first time in the English countryside c. 1350 - 1750. Capitalism is thus distinct from the long established practice of commerce, for a merchant can make a profit merely by means of “truck, barter and exchange” (Adam Smith) without undermining the social order of feudalism. It is only when the post-Black Death class-struggle gave way to a unique system of land ownership that the primary way to increase profit went from quantitatively increasing the land and people under one’s control to qualitatively improving its use. A strip of land in a village which rotated amongst a dozen families helped as a hedge against agricultural crises and as a pledge of solidarity against outsiders, but it also had the effect of diluting the benefits from improvement.

In principle, concentrating each parcel of property into one bundle with one owner makes sense. However, in practice it meant shearing the ‘right of subsistence’ from untold numbers of peasants and forcing many others into competitive market systems which would leave them or their descendants permanently disinherited. No longer would the village women be able to force a wealthy farmer to first offer their grain locally for a “moral” price before trucking it elsewhere for profit, or the homeless have first claim on firewood on the lord’s estate, or the town commons be shared by every family with a pig, or a land-lease be kept below market-rate solely because the family had inhabited the land for generations. Each piece of land would be leased to whoever could pay the most, and thus to whoever could produce most closely to the theoretical maximum, without attention to the social costs of such a choice. Being forced by the threat (and practice) of state violence to relinquish rights that had existed since time immemorial, masses of English peasants moved into towns and cities. If they received work, it was in degrading conditions for low wages—wages which would have gone almost exclusively to buy the food, fuel, and fiber they had been stripped of. I cannot imagine the pain of leaving one’s birth village for such a life, knowing that return would be all but impossible. Yet, by allowing (and forcing) four peasants to do what had been the work of five, by incentivizing landlords to improve their land, and by creating a workforce of low-paid proletarians to do auxiliary tasks (such as crafts, building, or services), England slowly increased productivity in a virtuous cycle of displacement and reinvestment—a cycle which has continued to the present in the form of modern economic growth.

Woods includes several interesting observations about this process: that capitalism began in the countryside and only arrived in towns from the dual shock of cheap labor and cheap food; that capitalism fundamentally differs from feudalism in that alienation and exploitation are divided respectively into political and economic spheres where they had previously been united; that the classic liberal and marxian explanation for the rise of capitalism (bourgeois revolution destroying the remaining fetters on markets) is nonsensical and question-begging; and that much of what we consider “modern” comes from the non-capitalist society of absolutist France. Perhaps most insightful is her examination of Locke's philosophy of property: the English state engaged in a several century process of seizing communal and colonial land under the pretext of 'improvement', of which Locke was looking for post facto justification.

Lunar Linguistics

A month ago I mentioned being completely demotivated to continue working on my French because there was such an obvious need for Russian-language support in my school.* The final straw was when a student asked if she could do an assignment "in my own language" because she found it too fatiguing to keep going in English.

My approach to learning Russian is based on what worked for me with French: (1) get the most basic sounds and patterns through memorization, (2) get a basic grounding in grammar, (3) get the minimum necessary vocabulary to read effectively (a couple thousand words), (4) read progressively harder books. From here, the goal is to have enough grounding that I can get something out of speaking and listening.

My actual routine: I started by using the app "Cyrillic School" to burn the alphabet into my brain, and in a few days I had got it (I was already familiar, unsurprisingly). Then I used Memrise (a flash card site) for about a week to pick up vocab; this was not successful because it required 100% perfection on words memorized without context, which proved too difficult a task. I switched to Duolingo and paid the $13 for premium (it is unusable with ads in my opinion); this went much better because there was more of a spectrum of success and less emphasis on exact spelling before I had intuitions for how words are structured. The way Duolingo tracks progress is by "crowns": a short course like Hindi is 192 crowns, while a long one like Spanish is just over 1500. A crown represents maybe 10 - 20 minutes of work normally, and my goal is was to get 2 - 3 a day without using the gamified shortcuts. As of this moment I have 73 crowns (out of 474 in the Russian Course, or 15%), and am very happy with the progress I have been making. I think I will continue with Duolingo for another month or two, and see if I feel like completing the course before moving onto vocabulary build-up (Duolingo mixes grammar & vocabulary, so while it presents a good soft-introduction to both it needs to be supplemented prior to reading in my opinion).

✭✭✭✰✰: In this book Stephen Kotkin continues the story begun in Stalin: Volume I, Paradoxes of Power. It is rare that I find it compelling to invest in long biographies—the stories of just one individual—when I could be reading works with much greater scope. Kotkin's project sidesteps this problem by using the life of Joseph Stalin (né Ioseb Jughashvili) as a way of getting at the central questions of early Soviet history. Their importance goes far beyond Russia, into the meaning of "work", "democracy", "freedom", "necessity", and "state" in every 20th-century society. Indeed, Kotkin makes the bold claim that "more than for any other historical figure, even Gandhi or Churchill, a biography of Stalin eventually comes to approximate a history of the world", a claim I am coming to support.*

The format of Stalin is ideal to engage in historiographical discourse. Most of it is small, self-contained sections of a couple thousand words addressing a short period of time, along with interpretative commentary. When one already knows the history well, the exact choices for emphasis and juxtaposition are very informative towards Kotkin's opinions. However, when questions are spread out over a long period of time (as invariably the greatest questions involving foreign policy, ideology, and repression are), the format is to choppy for me to follow along while retaining the step in the argument. Eric Hobsbawm avoids this issue by fronting his broad-strokes interpretation, while Richard Evans avoids this by having the stream of information and specifics leave a clear impression. Thus, to read Kotkin straight through is quite a bit harder than to read it piecemeal, and I find there to be less interesting insights than in the first volume. Overall the scholarship is at a very high level, making abundant use of the primary sources made available by the far of the USSR and generations of scholarship on the defunct state. There is one glaring exception: Kotkin's anti-socialism makes him way too sympathetic to Spanish fascists in their war against the Popular Front, and this makes me somewhat uncomfortable in praising this book without caveats.

✭✭✭✭✰: This is my first Pynchon book, and I really liked what I read. It is a post-modern romp through the dark California of the mid-60s: LSD, boy bands, grad students, the military-industrial-complex, and perhaps a continuing feud between two Renaissance Era postal carriers. Our protagonist, the unfortunately named Oedipa Maas,* is struck with grief after the death of her boyfriend. It is her job to make sense of his estate before it is settled (the title comes from the last line, when "Lot 49" is called up to be cried), and in the process stops believing in her ability to discern real from unreal.

I interpreted the book as having, in addition to many funny jokes and interesting ideas, a couple of core motifs: how there are different types of abstract systems that control society, how these have a weird tendency to mirror each other in structure across domains, and how humans have to adapt to these strange coincidences through paranoia, revolution, and/or hedonism. The most important of these to the story—the shadowy Trystero network—feels like an intentional parallel to the internet: it is a structure of information-exchange claimed by everyone from the government to anarchists as a tool for liberation, which in truth recapitulates the same control over us as thermodynamics and economics. Despite being from 1963, I do not think this is mere prescience: Pynchon had previously been an engineer at the exact time and place the proto-internet was being developed.

✭✭✭✰✰: One of the most influential books on the era, Judt offers many compelling synthesizes and explanations for trajectory of a continent since WWII. He knows more than me, and speaks eloquently about the evolution of literally dozens of distinct political systems.

Still, the lack of a conscious thesis leads to a sense of "this is the only way things could have gone." A telling example is in his descriptions of the British versus Scandinavian welfare states. The exact flaws he cites in the former (nationalized industries, universal benefits, and decentralized planning) get glossed as pragmatic features in the latter, seemingly for the sole reason that it worked better in the more radical Sweden. Similarly, the political failure of the British welfare state is variously cited as being that it is (1) too universal, that it is (2) too favorable to blue-collar workers, and that it is (3) too favorable to white-collar workers depending on which supports the narrative of the sub-section. These are mutually exclusive explanations! This sort of annoying equivocation is reinforced by his use of vague (usually nationally-grounded) zeitgeists as justifications for diverging trends. I do believe that "vibes" have causal power in history, but it is hardly the role of the historian to use them to patch holes in their explanatory model without very, very strong evidence in support.

Lunar Linguistics & Monthly Manuscripts

Backstory: In the Fall of 2005, MESC put out a list of the "21 best books in Middle East Studies", compiled from the responses of 52 leading experts. #1 was, of course, Orientalism by Edward Said. #6 was Colonising Egypt by Timothy Mitchell, an account of how Egypt internalized, and became subordinated to, western positivism prior to formal colonization. When I read it in a college seminar, the thesis was dismissed out of hand by most of my classmates—too much Heidegger and Debord for history majors. I too was unconvinced; not out of skepticism but because I frankly did not fully understand the argument being made. 

Recently, I have been again thinking about mentalities and the larger effect they have on history than we can easily demonstrate. Colonising Egypt and its airy thesis came back to me, so I decided to re-examine it. Every time Mitchell made a concrete claim, I went to the footnotes to see if I could ground it in something real. Just a few pages in I encountered a book in the footnotes which sounded very interesting, and I decided to combine my Lunar Linguistics and Monthly Manuscripts goals by reading it to see if Mitchell was making fair inferences from it.

✭✭✭✰✰: Voyageurs et écrivains égyptiens en France au XIXe siècle (English: "Egyptian Travelers and Writers in 19th Century France") by Anouar Louca is a history of Egypt's first intellectual encounter with post-Dual Revolution France, told via the Egyptian students and observers who made the journey west. It is by far the most challenging French-language book I have read to date, mixing academic history, social theory, and many first-hand accounts from Egyptians (hence why I am counting it as a "manuscript" [primary source]). So many little details of a period become clear when heard directly, and I am glad my French is now at the level I can access these voices. Probably the single most interesting takeaway was the gap between how Egypt presented itself and how others presented it: while Egypt submitted its exhibitions to the 1878 Exposition Universelle split into three eras ("Ancient"/"Arab"/"Modern"), Britain (Egypt's now occupier) had a runaway hit at the 1889 Exposition Universelle when it shaved off both inconvenient ends of Egypt's history in favor of inventing a busy oriental "Cairo" street complete with—non-Egyptian—donkeys and women. This made Egypt seem a timeless, backwards source of entertainment rather than the dynamic society which had, for example, been briefly capable of challenging the British monopoly on textile-based industrialization.

Post-script on Language Learning

Despite the fun of, for the first time, actually reading a book never printed in English, I had a moment which further made me question my efforts at improving my French. One of my students—a Ukrainian-American whose first language is Russian—was frustrated with the amount of work she had to do to catch up after falling behind. She asked me the heartbreaking question of "can I just do [this sheet] in my language." It was obvious that the burden of translation was prohibitively exhausting, and the major reason she had fallen behind. Unfortunately, my answer had to be "no", not because the learning necessarily required English but for the pathetic reason that I could not keep her accountable if she wrote in Russian (a language spoken by both my living grandparents). I ended up modifying several of her assignments so she could have fewer final words written, but it was clear that she would have had a better education if her teachers could have just said "yes" to that request when it would be appropriate. A few weeks later, she had accidentally done five times as much work as what was required because she misread the English word "one" as meaning "all." This is simply not fair to her. If I am going to put in x hours a week towards learning another language, maybe it should be one which can allow me to actually teach my most needy students better. To this end, I made myself learn the Cyrillic alphabet this month as an easy first step towards this goal if I do decide to follow through.

I normally would not include plays on here, but seeing Gem of the Ocean last weekend was special. Despite growing up in a very theater-oriented family [see: my sister] and despite being named for him, I have never before seen a play by August Wilson (the "American Shakespeare"). So when I saw that the first of his Pittsburgh Cycle plays was being put on here in Portland, I jumped at the chance to get tickets for me and my partner.

The experience turned out to be amazing. I thought I had high expectations going in, but even those were exceeded. The story was gripping, the characters so funny, and the ideas sublime. It is a genre I believed myself to dislike: people coming on, explaining who they are for ten minutes, and then leaving to further the action off-stage. Yet despite the entire play taking place in one room of one house, the actors were able to make felt the struggles of the whole society felt.

[Re-read]: The capitalist growth of the 17th and 18th centuries eroded the social basis of the Old Order. Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: 1789 - 1848 [reviewed: February 2022] is about the resulting landslide, epitomized by the First Industrial Revolution (centered in Manchester) and the Atlantic Revolution (centered in Paris). Initially the forces run in tandem: popular movements supported nationalism, rationalism, and liberalism against entrenched forces of conservatism. 1848 suddenly ends this pattern by splitting the revolutionary coalition as bourgeois property rights and popular sovereignty finally come into conflict. Elite liberalism thus secedes from the Left, creating the tripartite political system of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism which characterized the industrial world until 1914.

The following Age of Capital is appropriately named: from the failed revolutions of 1848 until the effects of the Long Depression became felt, capitalists (political liberals able to govern to both right and left as convenient) were in the driver's seat of the new world-system. Tendrils of communication, transportation, and control reached out to grab more and more land. Egypt, India, California, Argentina were all incorporated into one system of goods circulation, with London as the beating heart. For the first time ever, there was a global division of specialized agricultural to complement that emerging in industry.

Despite the liberal belief in its own supreme rationalism, the era put on full display the major contradictions of their ideology. The family was one: a place of complete subservience without parliament or constitution, and one where sentiment was expected to trump rational market rates for labor and gifts. Another was the illiberal (super-liberal?) domination exerted in rough proportion to the distance of one's homeland from the World Fairs and Exposition Universelles; this practice was justified by racism, which in turn became "scientific" along with the rest of the liberal worldview. Finally, to the chagrin of bourgeois everywhere, their age of most total control also produced the least lasting art of any in the long 19th century.

The era came to an end after a quarter century of the most rapid change in human history. The date "1875" is arbitrary, and before my re-read I wondered whether it should have been pushed back somewhat. But the years around that date do indeed bear out as in inflection point across the core countries. In the UK, the previously dominant Liberal Party would be on the backfoot from 1874 on. In France, MacMahon's defeat in the 1877 constitutional crisis cemented survival of the republic. The US saw the end of Reconstruction in favor of the two 'red' wars against western natives and northern labor. Japan opened its first railway in 1872, and Russian revolutionaries became disillusioned with the "backwards" peasantry after the 1874 "going to the people." Germany's insecurity over the militancy of labor during the Long Depression led to its banning of socialism in 1879, radicalizing the core movement which would give birth to Orthodox Marxism and the most successful iteration of international socialism. In short, the seemingly invincible march of progress provided strong winds in support of the liberals, but the depression, the first true one since 1848, dispelled any notion that it was inevitable or uncontestable.

Lunar Linguistics

I started this month with two difficult but achievable language goals. The first was to read Jules Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers. The second was to listen to 28 French language podcasts. What I found taught me a lot about myself, and my relationship to language learning.

For the first week I was on track, but from there I quickly ran out of steam. The edition of Vingt mille I bought (left) turned out to be comically huge, with a cover perhaps the size of four DVD cases and the weight of around 12 normal paperback books. Thus I could only read it at home, which meant in practice meant a brief period every night before bed. If I was too tired, or busy, or anything else, I would go several days without reading which made it harder linguistically to catch up, as well as made the already pretty bland story even blander (Note: There is a phenomenon where people who do not fully understand what they are reading find it "boring" instead of confusing, as they don't fully realize how much they are not understanding. I think that is a major part of my issue with this book). My failure to listen to more than a third of the required French audio content is similar: content which requires mental energy is hard to fit into my current routine, while I find most "learning French" podcasts (from Duolingo, Coffee Break, etc.) to have too much English to make me actually listen to the French parts.

This month also saw a record slump in my motivation, and I might just set aside my French in favor of Russian. I am ethnically Russian, as much as an ethnic American is anything.* Recent political events do too play a role: I cannot imagine the amount of people who will be continuing to flee that part of the world in the coming years and decades. But most of all, last week I realized just how useful it would be if I could pick it up. Maybe 10% of my students speak an Eastern Slavic language better than English, and I'm always surprised by how often one of them will nod through my instructions to them before getting a friend to come over and translate. I doubt it will happen, as I won't try unless I think I can seriously follow through, but it's on my mind and sapping my interest in French.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✰✰: This is George Orwell's breakout first book, cataloguing his period of semi-self-imposed poverty in Depression Era Paris and London. It reads like Of Mice and Men, but with less narrative coherence in favor of a pseudo-journalistic style. While many of the anecdotes are massaged for storytelling purposes, it still paints a fairly engaging picture of what poverty meant in the 1930s. It also provides insight into Orwell's development as a writer. Just like every other young person who fancies themselves literary yet lacks imagination, I am attracted to Orwell as a model because he which is good enough to be worth reading but uninspired enough to be approachable (of Orwell's many talents, creativity ranks low).

As a primary source for the period, two further factors stand out to me. The first, the presence of socialism, is fascinating knowing that Orwell would get shot just a few years later fighting on behalf of Republican Spain in a POUM militia. He famously wrote "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it", and, as infamously, the bold portion was Orwellianly omitted in the Cold War introduction to Animal Farm. So when in Down and Out, he claims to have no political allegiance, it is striking how he is obsessed with why the impoverished masses haven't risen up against the rest of us yet. He has many small hints scattered throughout: French waiters don't form trade unions because they believe they are only one lucky streak away from opening their own restaurant; that British police only tolerate pro-conservative graffiti; that calling "bullshit" on a tramp can be risky as they might punch you for calling them a "bolshevik"; those who hate oppressive bosses steal rather than organize; and there are vague rumors of a time the poor fought the rich and lost. Only once does Orwell even come into contact with the organized working-class, and it is in an attempt to scam they for petty cash. It turns out that even this "communist cell" were themselves only scammers, and made off with an even pettier amount of cash from Orwell than Orwell hoped to gain from them.

The second factor is race/nationality. Orwell constantly mentions the origin of the people he comes in contact with, and among his hierarchy "English" invariably rates the best and "Jew" the worst. This is not a new observation—indeed his anti-Irish/Catholic sentiment caught the eye of literary professor John Dolan back in 2005. It reaches such an absurd level that after spending a dozen chapters disproving any of the tramps he has come into contact with would choose their lifestyle over honest work, he casually assumes that American tramps actually do prefer not to work. Similarly, he invents a thief to avoid embarrassing his family by mentioning a girlfriend. Since this thief can be anything Orwell wishes, he choose to make him Italian. While his use of stereotypes never becomes vitriolic, it provides useful context into how omnipresent national stereotypes were in 1930s Europe, and thus why race-baiting proved so effective a political tactic.

[Re-read]: It may be cheating to include "re-reads" on here, but it has been almost a decade since my first (teenaged) run-in with this Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution. Upon revisitation, I can safely say that no book has influenced me more as a historian (historian-adjacent layperson?). Its breadth made me aware of how ignorant I was. Its depth made me realize history's true power. And its goal, to explain how our modern world-system was created, became my own.

In preparation for writing this, I found a review on the Early Americanist's Blog similarly saccharine to the one I was planning. In addition, when I went to go cite it just now, I realized it was written by another of my academic-heroes, the unreasonably handsome Princeton historian Matt Karp. Nothing I can say here would add anything to his post, so please go read that if you want to know more about the book. The one thing I will paraphrase is this Oscar Wilde line Karp aptly applies to Hobsbawm: "His principles may be be out of date, but there is a good deal to be said for his prejudices."

✭✭✭✭✭: Zach Carter's The Price of Peace is a striking work which combines biography, history, and political philosophy to argue for the possibility of a more humane world.

The 20th century saw economics increasingly mathematized, professionalized, and fetishized as a force above and even prior to humanity. The orthodoxy became that laissez-faire, no matter how cruel, had to be followed in the name of "science." This ideology paved the way for dictatorship either through creating its preconditions (Heinrich Bruning's deflationary "hunger chancellorship" immediately prior to Hitler), or as a way of insulating itself from competing definitions of "freedom" (advocated by Milton Friedman in both Chile and South Africa). John Meynard Keynes was the 20th century's most successful critic of this ideology, holding that we must never forget to prioritize human flourishing over theoretical models. To paraphrase, "What does it matter if an equilibrium of high employment will eventually be re-established on its own if the intervening Depression causes a catastrophic war?"

This was not just a cry for suffering to be priced into the market. It was an argument that markets only exists downstream of a society, and would fail when that society failed. Keynes' true magnum opus, the obscure and philosophical A Treatise on Probability rather than the more famous General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, argued that uncertainty may not be reduced to mere calculation. If the economic model predicts that employment will naturally rise over time, that is only because it assumes people will rationally reinvest in anticipation of a larger consumer base spurred by investment. If one instead assumes a pessimistic future, all of a sudden a low-employment, low-investment economy is also perfectly rational. To assume one model over the other is not (and cannot be) "rational" (in the sense economics requires), as the future is an outcome of the choice, not an objectively pre-existing thing which touched by science. Thus the role of economic management is inextricably social (understanding its dialectic with society), political (preventing catastrophe), and even psychological (instilling confidence); but never purely mathematico-scientific. Keynes' most famous insight (that it is simultaneously less cruel and also more efficient to outspend a depression than to let it run its course) comes from his ability to see the present holistically and the future dynamically; yet too often this method is ignored in favor of its specific advice for the crisis of the Great Depression. Keynes would want us to examine what else we have sacrelized (especially within our economics regime). Carter successfully illustrates that when politics subsumes itself to an objective, "scientific" economics, it is merely relegated the power of democracy to those who decide the parameters of the "standard model." They are no less biased, and benefiting from a far smaller share of human experience than the demos as a whole, they are wrong more often than the mass they set themselves above.

✭✭✭✭✭: We did not need another book about Europe through the World Wars, but all the same I am glad we got To Hell and Back. Its author, Ian Kershaw, is best known as the leading biographer of Adolf Hitler, a man he refreshingly admits to finding a boring "unperson [with] as good as no personal life or history." Where others scour for the truth of how many testicles Hitler had, Kershaw is interested in the context, structure, and interpretation of "Nazism" as a social process. It is thus unsurprising that his works ends up both more interesting and more relevant than his rivals.

It is this same approach which makes the penultimate installment of the Penguin History of Europe so exceptional: while providing enough context for a neophyte to follow allong, Kershaw presents persuasive models for the politics of the Belle Epoque, Great War, Interwar, Depression, World War II, and Post-/Cold War. Each individually break away from common banalities to provide strong insights, and in sequence they show how politics evolved dynamically. We should not take it for granted that a man made famous as a biographer should be able to capture such grand schemes, yet Kershaw is able to provide in just a few pages a description of 1917 better than any other I have yet to encounter. Another master-stroke was Kershaw's decision to extend To Hell and Back past the traditional 1945 end-point; by including the crucial post-war years of 1945 - 1949, the temporary upwell of Communist support in Western Europe evaporated into the lasting pattern of the Cold War.

If a novice wanted an introduction to this period, I would recommend this book. If a teacher wanted a comprehensive reference to the period, I would recommend this book. If a historian wanted a consensus interpretation to center in a historiographical article, I would recommend this book.

Despite my clear love of this book, I tried to read it alongside other books on recent European history. I found that this did more harm than good, and I will now try to be more proactive on allowing myself multiple areas of interest at once rather than a dedicated field of focus.

Continuing my progress through the Cornel West Reader (first part reviewed in January 2022), I have read an additional 11 essays (listed below).

I am impressed by what an unequivocally outstanding writer West is. I do not have the vocabulary to exactly describe it, but his style is excellent, with every single word being both essential and appropriate. Even when it is on a topic I am not interested in, it is just pleasant to read West, more so than any other essayist I can recall.

West's essay “Race and Social Theory” (his attempt to lay out competing interpretations of what ‘racism’ even is) is, despite only being a few pages long, uniquely compelling. The subsequent selections, however, do not hold up as well. His engagement with Roberto Unger, “American Progressive Politics Reoriented”, is surprisingly unpersuasive. His similar work, “Parents and National Survival”, feels very much of its time (e.g., panic over juvenile delinquency and trying to outflank the Moral Majority). Yet, even when I disagree with him, the clarity and explicit contextualization of his work makes it stimulating to engage with.

(13) The Insufficiency of Marxist Theory: Neat

(14) Frederic Jameson: Neat

(15) Race and Social Theory: The best treatment of the subject I have read

(16) The Role of Law in Politics: Neat

(17) The Political Intellectual: Neat

(18) A World of Ideas: Neat

(19) The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual: Provocative

(20) American Progressivism Reoriented: Provocative

(21) Parents and National Survival: Dated, mostly dumb, but some interesting thoughts

(22) On the 1980s: Neat. Could make a good primary source for a US History class

(23) Michael Harrington: Neat

✭✭✭✭✰: I really like the thesis of Dedicated. Adapted by Pete Davis from his Harvard commencement speech,* it is an argument that modern society encourages behavior which is antithetical to human flourishing—individual as well as collective. Specifically, it tells each person that it is their responsibility to sample all human experience before deciding what sort of life to live. Not only is such a task impossible (as one cannot experience both 50 years of monogamy and 50 one-year partnerships), it pushes people away from the deep commitments which actually make them happy. This pathology is found in education (where we teach students broad rather than concrete skills), careers (where we discourage controversial, or “limiting” occupations), communities (where there is no expectation of reciprocation for self-sacrifice), and especially civil society (can anyone join either the Catholic Church or the Teamsters without opening themselves up to the same, repetitive comments?). The roots are not in moral weakness but rather the structure of our economy (global, fungible, and knowledge-based) and how we have allowed economic forces to overwhelm other, potentially countervailing, social forces. Thus, Davis believes we need to consciously curate what was once unconsciously established: many people individually dedicated deeply to one thing well without being worried they are missing out. Despite being a self-help book, there is a deeply political message implied here. Davis quotes Father Tischner to the effect that “if you keep planting trees, eventually you will find a changed landscape.“ This is the strategy of civic attrition Tischner labor union (Solidarity) used to topple Poland’s post-war dictatorship.

I do not, however, like the writing style. Somewhere between a TED Talk and Rachel Hollis in tone, the book can easily come off as generic smarmy advice about how, if only you just embrace your dreams, you can have it all. Having followed Pete’s work for a long time, I know that is neither what he believes nor what he is saying, but I think Simon & Schuster convinced him to package his ideas this way in order to reach the largest possible audience. Fair enough—but his book is worse off for it. Similarly, a few of his throwaway lines (e.g., about being Cornel West’s TA at Harvard) open the book up to the unnecessary attack that he is talking to the highly-educated Yuppie class, or some talented tenth of movers and shakers. Again: I know what Davis is actually arguing, but I should not have to do close textual exegesis for a mass-market self-help book in order to endorse its thesis.

Monthly Manuscript

✭✭✭✭✭: The World of Yesterday is the incredible memoir of the writer Stefan Zweig (1881 - 1942). He was raised in "old Vienna", and died in Brazil; in-between, he was briefly the most translated author in the world, at least according to the League of Nations. While his natal Austria was deeply conservative—a thousand year empire whose last real leader (Emperor Franz Joseph I, r. 1848 - 1916) outlasted 17 US presidents—Zweig saw a great deal of value in its opera, coffee shops, glittering avenues, literary circles, and gradualist politics. Still, he is far from fawning. A particularly thoughtful chapter on sex, from elite courtship to prostitution, makes clear how extreme the restrictions on women were:

"Perhaps we can understand how it still seemed criminal, at that time, for a woman to wear any form of trousers for games or sports. But how can we explain the hysterical prudery that made it improper for a lady even to utter the word ‘trousers’? If she mentioned such a sensually dangerous object as a man’s trousers at all, she had to resort to the coy euphemism of ‘his unmentionables’."

This world—Victorian and progressive, internationalist and imperialist, cultured and martial—was murdered by the Great War of 1914 - 1918. Yet to Zweig, it was a slow death. The mass slaughter, the erecting of inter-European barriers, the post-war depression, the increasingly turbulent politics, and the final crisis culminating in the Second World War only affected his day-to-day life here and there. This aspect of history—that it must be lived moment by moment without the benefit of hindsight—is one too readily forgotten. As he writes of the decisive battle between democracy and fascism fought in his birth city:

"As I would like to be a truthful witness, I must paradoxically begin by admitting that I myself saw nothing at all of this... nothing strikes me as more characteristic of the form taken by revolutions today than the fact that I was in Vienna during those historic February days of 1934, and saw none of the crucial incidents going on there, nor did I know the least thing about them while they were in progress"

Stefan Zweig, as a Jew, realized it was time to leave his homeland. It was only in exile that he seriously turned to understanding Nazism. These later sections, trying to grapple just how the world of culture turned to one of violence, stand the test of time. Better than the supposed great theorists of the day, whether Heidegger or Trotsky, Zweig explains how fascism triumphed in Europe: the promise of unity, followed by overwhelming violence to achieve it. Upon completing The World of Yesterday—that is, finishing his project of recording that there was indeed a world before Hitler to which humanity can strive to return—Zweig killed himself, guiltily leaving the task of rebuilding to others.

Lunar Linguistics

Continuing my study of French, I read Le Livre des chevaliers by Yves Meynard. It is the story of a young boy in a small, stifling village who wants to become a knight, and the dozen-odd challenges he overcomes. Meynard does a good job making the cliche interesting, and even moving.

I took a week off from this book when I had COVID, and found that it much harder to read when I got back. I'm not sure if I am just tired or if the French got more difficult or I am misremembering the my level of comfort with the book before, but whichever way I am glad that the story was interesting enough to fight through paragraphs where I was having a hard time.

My other efforts at learning French floundered this month. I tried going to a couple Alliance Française meetings to practice speaking and listening, but it was just boomers who were unable to hide their annoyance at my weak skills.

✭✭✭✰✰: The conclusion to Evans' monumental trilogy on the Nazi regime, The Third Reich at War, leaves me feeling empty. There is nothing wrong with it—Evans is an excellent writer, able to include a tremendous amount of information without becoming muddled. I was excited to learn Victor Klemperer and Luise Solmitz, diarists who I have been with since Coming, survived the war. Yet the sum of its parts does not add up to a greater whole. That is, I truly learned nothing from this book. Six months from now I will know the exact same things I did before I read it: the Nazis are evil, their war was evil, victory for the allies was too slow in coming and even then it was still bloody and horrible. The individual incidents which proved this broader point will either fade, or merely take the place of other, equally-disturbing factoids which previously had lent this knowledge specificity.

Perhaps that is all I need. Fascism has no meaning. It does not fit a narrative, or have a secret weapon. It is an industrializing society's death drive, performed for some non-existent entity (such as the Volksgemeinschaft, or "racial community"). As Evans makes clear, Germany's main opposition to Nazism—besides the consciences of brave individuals of all types—was the working-class into whom "the doctrines of human equality and emancipation [had been for a generation] inculcated by the Social Democratic labour movement." Wherever organized resistance to the Nazis appeared, the descendants of this movement (SPD and KPD) were disproportionately involved. Yet, does this mean anti-fascists should center a political labor movement over other forms of resistance? Perhaps the opposite is true—maybe it was precisely because the main opponents of Nazis were the organized working-classes that Hitler succeeded, and efforts should have been put into strengthening other institutions (commerce, the judiciary, universities, the military, the churches, the police—all important allies to the "National Revolution") against fascism's appeal. There is no way to gain anything from this narrative because such diametrically opposed viewpoints are both valid.

Hence, emptiness.

✭✭✭✭✰: The Pursuit of Power covers the years between Waterloo and Sarajevo, and like the other volumes in this series, it takes a thematic approach. High politics is preponderant but not dominant. Economics, culture, society, technology, and so on are well explored. The only major lacuna is in the near-complete exclusion of the United States (whose economic, cultural, social, and technological development was deeply intertwined with Europe's), but I imagine without a hard line of exclusion it would be difficult to keep the Yankee Leviathan from dominating what is supposed to be Europe's story. A short, later section on the "Americanization of the World" helps with even this small omission. Despite being close to 900 pages, it feels like a breezy 400.

The different ratings between this and its predecessor in the Penguin History of Europe, Tim Blanning's The Pursuit of Glory [reviewed: below], have more to do with their context than quality. Richard Evans is probably the better writer, able to trim without making his prose utilitarian, and the anecdotes of normal people are simply excellent. But what Blanning did—take an extremely disjointed series of events and synthesize them into a comprehensible whole—was not an option to Evans, who was writing on a period already well-synthesized by others (including Christopher Bayly, Geoff Eley, and David Landes). Towering above them all is, of course, Eric Hobsbawm, to whom the book is dedicated. Thus, even if The Pursuit of Power is the best single volume history of this era, it broke little new ground.

Cornel West is one of the great "Men of Letters", and it is a privilege that we get to exist at the same time as him. Did people in the 1930s fully appreciate that they lived contemporaneously with W. E. B. Du Bois? I hope so, and I believe West should be treated no less reverently.

It should thus be clear why I am taking the time to systematically read through the core of his writing, as made available in the 600-page "Cornel West Reader" (1999). The scope is wide, encompassing 51 different selections broken into nine sections plus an introduction and preface. The first three ("I: Autobiographical Prelude", "II: Modernity and its Discontents", and "III: American Pragmatism") comprises 12 essays and stories, and are the topic of this post. 

No writer is as open about their intellectual debts as Cornel West. On just one page (p. 7) he mentions: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Lukacs, Walter Kaufmann, Richard Rorty, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, Michel de Montaigne, Howard Thurman, Miguel de Unamuno, Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, John Dewey, Sheldon Wolin, C. B. Macpherson, T. H. Green, and Friedrich Schiller, in addition to several movements (Neo-Hegelianism, Marxism, Romanticism, abolitionism, women's rights) and institutions (Princeton, Harvard). Four traditions, complementary but also with considerable tension, define his work: (1) the Western Philosophical and Literary Canon, (2) the African-American tradition, (3) the Radical Egalitarian movement, and (4) Christianity. That they cannot fully be reconciled helps explain the creative vigor of West's work. He wants to be an exemplar of black excellence, but humility is prescribed by both the radical egalitarian and Christian ethos. West the political egalitarian believes a better world is possible, while the Christian theologian knows humans are fallen creatures. West loves Kant—as any child of the Enlightenment must—yet Kant denies West as a black man the capacity to have a "feeling that rises above the trifling." This is no mere prejudice, but a result of his enlightened inquiry:

Among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. (Immanuel Kant, 1764)

West's work tries to make sense of these absurdities, and each is worthy of its own detailed review. Yet, in the service of some brevity, I am forcing myself to simply label them either "Neat" (four-star) or "Really made me think" (five-star).

(1) Making of an American Radical Democrat of African Descent: Neat

(2) On My Intellectual Vocation: Neat

(3) Sing a Song: Neat

(4) Ignoble Paradox of Modernity: Neat

(5) Race and Modernity: Really made me think

(6) Black Striving in the Twilight of Civilization: Really made me think

(7) The New Cultural Politics of Difference: Really made me think

(8) Why Pragmatism: Neat

(9) On Prophetic Pragmatism: Really made me think

(10) Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic: Neat

(11) The Limits of Neopragmatism: Neat

(12) Nietzsche's Prefiguration of Postmodern American Philosophy: Really made me think

✭✭✭✭✭: Volume 6 of the Penguin History of Europe might be the most impressive installment of the series yet. Tim Blanning succeeds in both narrating and explaining the long eighteenth century, during which Europe pulled ahead in technological, economic, and political capacity.

Blanning's interpretative choices, i.e., in favor of an agricultural-basis for Europe's rising prosperity and against a revolutionary interpretation of France's success in the 23-year imbroglio of 1792 - 1815, are not only defensible but actively convincing. The shifting alliances of the 1648 - 1788 period never made sense to me until reading this book, and now I feel like an expert on the swings which drove the Great Powers from one alliance to another. I would have preferred a tad more science and philosophy and a bit less cultural history (the section on architecture is about twice as long as ideal), but that more reflects my own interests rather than any failing by Blanning.

From now on, The Pursuit of Glory will provide the backbone interpretation, emphasis, and reference for any lesson I teach on the period.

I started recording my reading in June of last year, and since that time I read 37 books: 10 five-stars, 10 four-stars, 13 three-stars, 3 two-stars, and one La Quête d'Ewilan. Six of those five-stars pertain to the Great Divergence, the still open problem of why Europe and its extensions surged ahead militarily, economically, and technologically c. 1500 - 1900 only to see that advantage erode during the 20th century. Of the remaining four, one was Tooze's excellent analysis of Nazism (Wages of Destruction), Bevin's account of the Indonesian Politocide (Jakarta Method), Piketty's history of inequality and its alternatives (Capital & Ideology), and Ada Palmer's magnificent debut novel Too Like the Lightning.

I am very happy with the consistency of my reading, my success with the Lunar Linguistics and Monthly Manuscript periodicals, and the relative rigor of the works I have chosen. I am excited to finish my march into contemporary Europe, and bring together the unfinished Richard Evans' series with the works of Ian Kershaw, Eric Hobsbawm, and Tony Judt to see if we can start to understand the consequences of "modernity."

For a full list of last year's reviews, see archive.