Dilettante Scholar

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 7, "Myth and Metaphorics"

2011-11-29T13:43:00.001-08:00

77: "[M]etaphorology -- as a subbranch of conceptual history, and like the latter itself considered as a whole -- must always be an auxiliary discipline to philosophy as it seeks to understand itself from its history and to bring that history into living presence. Our typology of metaphor histories must accordingly endeavor to distinguish and work through particular aspects ... of philosophy's historical self-understanding. In the process, it is above all the transitions that will allow the specificity of each metaphor and its expressive forms to appear in sharper focus."

Blumenberg explores the transition from myth to metaphorics in Plato and his followers. Myth in Plato, like absolute metaphors, is not simply a preliminary and inadequate form of reason: it circumscribes and provides answers to those aporias and which resist reduction to reason but are necessary to deal with in order for the argument to proceed.

78: "In myth, too, questions are kept alive that refuse to yield to theoretical answers without thereby becoming obsolete. The difference between myth and 'absolute metaphor' would here be a purely genetic one: myth bears the sanction of its primordial, unfathomable origin, its divine or inspirative ordination, whereas metaphor can present itself as a figment of the imagination, needing only to disclose a possibility of understanding in order for it to establish its credentials."

The myth of final judgment in the Gorgias functions as a postulate which the philosopher is compelled to assent to in order to risk his life on behalf of truth. It is turned to when the hopes of proving that justice will ultimately be done are exhausted.

The myth of the cave from the Republic draws on a background tradition of cave mythology. Its fundamental image is a movement from darkness to light. There are already intimations of this theme in the Prometheus myth of the Protagoras and the cosmological myth of the Phaedo. Blumenberg sees more to the use of this myth by Plato and his successors, however, than anchoring the fundamental narrative of the self-liberation of human reason. Plato's elaboration of the myth allows him to use it as a model which explains, for example, how the Sophist is possible.

According to Blumenberg, the myth of the cave has become an absolute metaphor with the Neoplatonists, Gnostics, and Church fathers. Porphyry (the stand-in Neoplatonist here) -- the cosmos as a cave separated from a transcendent reality which is not reachable by learning alone. Gnostics and church fathers -- salvation irrupting into existence like light into a cave.

Plato's myth of the demiurge in the Timaeus amounts to a constructive model explaining how the world is generated given certain premises. Blumenberg likens it to Descartes' hypothetical cosmogonic model in the Principles. The Church fathers claimed this myth derived from Genesis. This created a problem of assimilating the different consequences of the metaphor of creation by hand in the myth of the demiurge (which is fundamentally constructive and attempts to explain everything) and creation by mouth, which is to say by command, in Genesis (which seeks submission and attempts to explain nothing).

background metaphor - metaphor that implicitly anchors use of terminology
absolute metaphor - metaphor that provides a way of bracketing or provisionally answering otherwise unresolvable questions

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 6, "Organic and Mechanical Background Metaphorics"

2011-11-28T06:50:00.000-08:00

Background metaphorics - background of images that makes it possible to reconstruct and understand seemingly non-metaphorical (and even purely theoretical) statements.

The language of imaginative horizons here is reminiscent of Heidegger and Gadamer.

62-63: "Metaphorics can also be in play where exclusively terminological propositions appear, but where these cannot be understood in their higher-order semantic unity without taking into account the guiding idea from which they are induced and 'read off'. Statements referring to data of observation presuppose that what is intended can, in each case, be brought to mind only within the parameters of a descriptive typology: the reports that will one day be transmitted to us by the first voyagers to the moon may well require us to engage in a more thorough study of American or Russian geography if we are to grasp the selective typicality of these reports, corresponding to the eyewitnesses' (anticipated) background. Faced with an artificial structure of speculative statements, the interpretation will only 'dawn' on us once we have succeeded in entering into the author's imaginative horizon and reconstructing his 'translation'. What preserves genuine thinkers from the crabbed scholasticism of their imitators and successors is that they keep their 'systems' in vital orientation, whereas academic routine uproots concepts and suspends them in idiosyncratic atomism. In undertaking an interpretive reconstruction, we will succeed in reviving such translations, which we propose to call 'background metaphorics', only within the parameters of a certain typology, and this is most likely to occur where a prior decision between opposed types of metaphors -- between organic and mechanical guiding ideas, for example -- has been made. It is not just language that thinks ahead of us and 'backs us up', as it were, in our view of the world; we are determined even more compellingly by the supply of images available for selection and the images we select, which 'channel' what can offer itself for experience in the first place."

Blumenberg argues that the contrast between mechanical and organic metaphors is itself not fixed, but emerges in the post-classical world. The classical machina has a broader meaning than the modern machine, referring to all sorts of contrivances and tricks. Lucretius' machina mundi does not yet have the connotation of automatism that would come with later clockwork metaphors, it merely contrasts the world as contrived or artful in contrast to the Stoic metaphysics of providence. The distinctive use of machine as a concept opposed organism arrives with the French Enlightenment. Blumenberg thinks that this emergence is more than coincidental, given how it serves the materialistic program of Enlightenment thought. (63-64)

For Plato, the universe was both constructed and living. It had to be conceived of as alive because it was understood to move itself, and ability to move oneself was the criterion of life. Mechanical models, like Archimedes' sphere, were seen by classical authors like as inferior imitations which merely demonstrated the rationality which must exist to a superior degree in the original. In Lactantius we see a Christian recasting of the interpretive function of Archimedes sphere: now it shows that the universe can be in motion after an initial impetus without requiring any animation. There is a clear theological interest behind this: reducing the world to a mere mechanism leaves God alone in transcendence. (64-66)

Nicolaus of Cusa characteristically saw Archimedes' model as a projection of the human mind, an invention created in place of divine creativity rather than an imitation of the universe. While an Aristotelian view of technology as mimetic lent itself to organic metaphors, Cusanus' opens a way to distinctively mechanical metaphors. (67)

Descartes abjures the project of understanding what the world or organisms are in themselves. Instead, he proposes to understand them externally, by transferring our knowledge of mechanical devices as hypothetical stand-ins. Having made the metaphorical substitution of machine for world or organism, however, Descartes is also able to substitute a pragmatic view of the aims of inquiry for a theoretical one: since there is a surplus of possible mechanical constructions which could be made to stand in for any natural entity, the choice between them is made on the ground of what works best (and if the model works better than its natural counterpart, then it a truer example of the original function than what is in nature). (68-70)

Blumenberg contrasts the book of nature and clockwork universe metaphors. The output of the clock -- the actual display of time -- is not significant in the use of the metaphor; what matters is its predictable functioning. For the book of nature, on the other hand, the informative content is critical; what is significant in the metaphor is that there is a message that could be communicated. (71)

The clockwork metaphor emphasizes God's initial creative act at the expense of God's continuing involvement in the world. (71-72)

With the book of nature, man remains external to the metaphor, as the intended reader. Human beings are among the things brought under the clock metaphor, however, in the works of Voltaire and Vauvenargues. The French moralists typically indentified the passions with the internal working of the clock, and reason as the display (in a way that hoped to gain assent and accomplish their aims) of those hidden instincts and passions. (72-73)

In The Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl metaphorizes the scientific enterprise itself as a mechanism, and metaphorizes the implicit goal of the enterprise as an ideal textbook which puts together all of its achievements in a coherent whole. (75-76)

Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 9 and 10, "The Chancellor Who Made the Job" and "The Decline and Fall of the Aberdeen Coalition"

2011-10-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

Although it is not a focus of the narrative, the fluidity of British government coalitions of the mid-19th century is striking (and key to the politics of the era, of course). Both the Whig and Conservative tendencies were coalitions more than parties, riven with factions and dissident wings. The Conservatives had Gladstone and the other Peelites who opposed protective tariffs. The Whigs had Palmerston and his like-minded band of foreign-policy adventurists.

When Russell's Whig government collapsed after a falling out with Palmerston early in 1852, the Earl of Derby formed a generally undistinguished Conservative government with tacit support of the Peelites. Disraeli became leader of the Commons as Chancellor of the Exchequer. After a summer election, Disraeli presented a budget which lifted trade barriers but tried to compensate those who would lose from it. Gladstone effectively (although perhaps a bit tendentiously) savaged it, in the process demonstrating his deep command of the budget and bringing down the Conservative government. Lord Aberdeen was called upon to form a new Whig-Peelite coalition government with Gladstone at the Exchequer.

Gladstone's triumphant budget of 1853 secured his place among the first rank of British politicians. He carried it through against considerable initial opposition within the cabinet itself, especially from the two rival aspirants to the chancellorship, Wood and Graham. His budget speech's success derived in part from his mastery of budget history, but even more from his determination to reconstruct government finance in a more rational manner. In a step devised to increase prosperity, he reduced customs duties. He made up for the lost revenue by extending income tax for seven years and also applying to somewhat lower incomes and to Ireland. Since the income tax was unpopular, and Gladstone himself was on record opposing it, the trick was to make this extension palatable. He accomplished this by extending the tax in a way as to put Britain on a path to doing away with it, by setting it at a gradually declining rate (at the end of which it would be expected that greater prosperity would bring in sufficient revenues without it, though from what sources is not clear to me, anyway).

Crimean War -- although he initial supported it, Gladstone could not sustain enthusiasm for war (which was a reversion to more typical form for him). The damage to the Aberdeen coalition was done, however, and the government did not survive the war.

Oxford reform bill -- another subject on which Gladstone changed his mind, for he had opposed the original commission of a report on reform. Gladstone was unusually willing to change his opinions, but not necessarily willing to be seen as having changed. Gladstone constructed and carried the legislation through parliament in 1864 almost unaided. Opened up Oxford to Dissenters (Gladstone himself opposed including this in the bill while supporting it in principle). Replaced government by the heads of colleges by an elected board. Permitted the opening of private halls at the university in order to provide opportunities for less wealthy students to matriculate (without transgressing the independence of the existing colleges). The bad feeling at Oxford about his role in reform ultimately led to his election defeat of 1865.

Civil service reform -- This was an issue that Gladstone (like Oxford reformer Benjamin Jowett) saw as linked to opening the university to talents. Inspired by Wood's Indian civil service reform bill, Gladstone commissioned a report from Sir Charles Trevelyan and Sir Stafford Northcote on opening the civil service to competition. He was unable to make headway on legislation, however, since he had the support of the Peelites but not most of the Whigs. Jenkins thinks that Gladstone missed an opportunity by failing to make a deal to support Russell's electoral reform bill in exchange for Russell's backing for civil service reform -- particularly since Gladstone came around to Russell's position on electoral reform before too long in any case.

The Aberdeen government was finally brought down by disagreement over how aggressively to pursue the Crimean War in January, 1855. In the vain hope of forming a renewed government under Aberdeen, Gladstone refused to accept the chancellorship under any of the possible Whig alternatives to Palmerston as prime minister. This all but handed the job to Palmerston, who Gladstone really didn't want, since it removed a principal virtue of any alternative leadership to his. Then Gladstone ended up accepting the chancellorship under Palmerston after all, only to resign it three weeks later, in conjunction with the resignation of two other Peelite ministers, because of his distaste for the direction of Palmerston's government. It took years for Gladstone's political reputation to recover from the damage done by this incident.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 8, "The Sixties Come Next"

2011-10-29T19:21:00.001-07:00

The key traits of an effective president are expertise in understanding presidential power, a desire to have power, and the grace to deal with the failures and frustrations in attempting to use that power. To get the first requires many years of political experience (although that alone doesn't necessarily suffice), which is why the presidency is no place for amateurs.

The American political system works best when the president is adept and vigorous in pursuing power. In the first place, other actors are depend upon the president to provide initiatives for them to support or oppose. But there is also a correlation between preserving presidential power and pursuing viable public policy. A president's contacts and the pressures he is subjected to give an unmatched insight into the conflicting demands that constrain policy. His efforts to navigate those pressures in a way that does not compromise his power, if done with expertise, tend to lead him to policies that (1) are forward looking, (2) are acceptable to all the stakeholders, and (3) are well timed.

The Sixties seem unlikely to throw up the kind of productive crises that FDR had to work with in the 1930s and 1940s -- the Depression and the Second World War. These crises increased the influence of the president within the political system without destroying it altogether. Neustadt contends that the potential destructiveness of war has priced it out of the market for productive crises. (I think that this understates the usefulness of limited wars for presidential influence.) The president will still face a discontinuity of constituencies with Congress even in the unlikely case of having partisan colleagues in control. Key sources of political conflict Neustadt projects for the Sixties (1) the size and scope of public spending, (2) the influence of the agricultural sector, (3) the influence of labor, and (4) racial integration. All of these will have disparate impacts on local constituencies, which means the president will need to rely on ad hoc Congressional coalitions for support.

Neustadt concludes by (implausibly) contending that the American system is not unique after all -- that other nations face a similar predicament of a single leader who must deal with disparate constituencies (even in parliamentary systems).

Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 7 and 8, "Ladies of the Night" and "The Tremendous Projectile"

2011-09-25T21:20:00.000-07:00

After much foreshadowing of Gladstone's sexual vices, they turn out to have been disappointingly tame. His so-called pornographic tastes amounted to little more than a fondness for suggestive passages in classical and modern literature. He got a thrill out of mingling with prostitutes for the supposed purpose of reforming them, but there was no actual sexual consummation. In any case, Gladstone was plagued with guilt about these things in the mid-century years, and even tried to overcome his habits by flogging himself.

Gladstone's opposition to Palmerston's blockade of Greece (in response to claims arising from the Don Pacifico affair) reflected a cautious internationalism that united All branches of Tory opposition. His contribution to the parliamentary debate in 1850 was significant and effective, but the opposition motion was defeated with most of the Radicals joining the Whigs.

Gladstone next became much involved during a visit to Naples with the battle to free the Neapolitan political prisoner Baron Poerio, though his eagerness for British pressure in this case cut against the principles he enunciated during the Don Pacifico incident. He issued two pamphlets to make his case against the Neapolitan government. These made Gladstone's name among liberals in Europe, although they did discomfit the conservative leader, Lord Aberdeen.

Late in 1850, in response to the Pope's decision to authorize naming Catholic bishops in England, the Whig government cynically introduced the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. The bill made accepting such titles from a Pope a crime -- a measure at variance with traditional Whig support for religious liberty. Gladstone, in another sign of his turn away from theological absolutism towards liberalism, opposed the bill. Gladstone produced another massive, learned oration, but again in vain. The measure passed comfortably, although Gladstone's opposition does not seem to have done him much harm even in his theologically conservative Oxford constituency.

Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 5 and 6, "Orator, Zealot, and Debtor" and "Mid-Century Frenzy"

2011-09-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

Gladstone as orator: the passion, force, and conviction of the delivery was more remarkable than the text -- his arguments were often obscure.

Gladstone suffered a number of personal setbacks in the 1840s. His sister Helen converted to Catholicism in 1842 (bringing out his typical rigid censoriousness on matters of religion). She then succumbed to a deepening opium addition and fled to Germany, where he went to retrieve her back to the family in 1845 (although she took three more years to finally subdue the habit). That same year his religious ally John Henry Newman also became a Catholic. (Jenkins notes Newman's similarities to Gladstone: he was a religious pessimist, an effective, though more delicate, orator, and a resilient public figure.) In 1847, the Hawarden estate's finances were brought low by the failure of his brother-in-law Stephen Glynne's mining and ironworks project at Oak Farm. The Glynne family (including Gladstone) were forced into several years of heroic economy to save the estate.

Peel's decision to take on the issue of Corn Law repeal in 1845 made Gladstone's Newark seat untenable and cost the Conservative party a rupture that was not healed for decades. Gladstone had to resign the seat when he was called into the cabinet, and could not hope for re-election because the local notable who controlled the seat supported protection. (I think this aptly illustrates how British parties of the time were loose, decentralized coalitions rather than true modern parties.)

Gladstone was without another seat until he won election from Oxford in 1847. Since Oxford dons and many Oxford graduates (particularly the clergy) took religious disputes very seriously, this had the effect of deepening Gladstone's entanglement in such issues. It did not cause Gladstone to back down from his increasingly pronounced liberal views on the relation between church and state, however, as he spoke fervently the next year against the exclusion of the Jewish banker Baron Lionel de Rothschild from Parliament.

In 1849, Gladstone spent several weeks in Italy on a characteristically quixotic and futile mission to retrieve Lady Lincoln, who had absconded with her lover.

1850 bought more sorrow for Gladstone with the death of his daughter Jessy. His religious inclinations and affiliations were tested as well when the the Gorham judgment checked the independence of the Church of England. This decision precipitated the conversion of several of his religious allies to Catholicism within the next year.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Ch 5, "Terra Incognita and 'Incomplete Universe' as Metaphors of the Modern Relationship to the World"

2011-09-04T15:03:00.000-07:00

Blumenberg explores how the terra incognita and unfinished universe metaphors shape the modern attitude towards the world. Terra incognita (along with its metaphorical substitutes America and even Africa) refers back to the discovery of unknown and even unsuspected geography early in the modern age and the subsequent exploration of previously uncharted continents. Taking this as the metaphorical model of knowledge meant being prepared to see every advance of knowledge as just a preliminary to making a much greater discovery. This expectation encouraged a disposition to expect and labor for new knowledge, and brought along with it a positive reappraisal of the new and novel, of curiosity, of infinity, and of imagination.

The metaphor of the incomplete universe suggested not only that the world was still evolving, but that it had no fixed end -- so that human beings were free to shape it. The classical conception of the cosmos, with its assumption that all change amounted to the completion of already established forms, proved particularly resilient. Cartesian cosmogony remained wedded to a fixed teleology, which saw the world as it already existed as its end state. Even Kant's conception of a universe in an unending process of change doesn't quite shake free from earlier cosmological ideas -- the worlds in his universe still have a fixed pattern of development and decay, and man plays no active part in it.

Friedrich Schlegel first gives the incomplete universe a pragmatic turn -- an incomplete universe means that life is not futile, that there are tasks for humans to accomplish. Schlegel's insistence on organic metaphor for the incomplete world actually suggests greater resistance to human action than a purely mechanical interpretation.

Schlegel also puts forth the metaphor of "almighty man" as an aggregated force that brings order to the incomplete universe. This raises the question of how the fragmentary forces of individuals are integrated into the task of completing the universe. Modern thought throws up two concepts which answer this question, method and collective. Method is a way of unifying generations of human beings into a single subject of knowledge. Collective is a way of conceptualizing the aggregate of labor that is ready to be deployed to reshape an unfinished world -- and thus, in communist thought, it provides the background assumption of a force that needs an unfinished world to be created by revolution, which liberates society from stasis, in order to be put to use.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 4, "Metaphorics of the 'Naked' Truth"

2011-07-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

Blumenberg follows up on another metaphor used by Lactantius: the nakedness of truth.

This metaphor brings up the issue of the appropriateness of the truth for human beings, who after all are the creatures who have adopted clothing to conceal nakedness. Blumenberg cites Werfel and Kierkegaard expressing distaste for the barbarity of the passion for unconcealed truth.

Augustine and Rousseau use the image of the nakedness of the soul before God (and also, for Rousseau, before his fellow men) to describe a confession of the truth of one's life. Rousseau also uses nakedness as metonym for the natural state of man before his distortion by society, and grounds his political critique on conceptually stripping away humanity's accumulated cultural and technical heritage. Stripping off the disguises of society becomes a common trope of modern political rebels, deployed in turn by bourgeois French revolutionaries and by Marx.

Pascal, responding to Montaigne, takes issue with this kind of critique. For Pascal, the whole point of institutions is that they are made. They are imaginative constructs, and our recognition of and respect for the garb and other conventions of office, rather than reason, is what makes them work.

Another issue that really only comes to foreground due to metaphors is the relationship between truth and happiness. While the Skeptics had deployed many arguments casting doubt on our ability to find truth, and thus the desirability of pursuing it, they had nothing to say about whether it could ever provide fulfillment even if were attained. The Christian tradition of Biblical exegesis, however, had to confront a text in which truth was often conveyed in images. This was seen by Thomas among other medieval thinkers as a form of protection from having to confront unmediated truth.

There was scant support in the Aristotelian tradition for the use of intermediary images to grasp truth, however, and the most faithful (Averroistic) adherents of that tradition were strident advocates for the nakedness of truth, that is, for the idea that truth should be presented without literary adornment. This striving for a pure truth (Blumenberg calls it a will to truth) disturbed humanists who upheld the value of richer figurative expression of truth, which they captured with in the concept of sapientia (wisdom).

In Pico Della Mirandola's letter to Ermolao Barbaro, the Averroist is depicted as desiring to hide the truth from the uninitiated by making it plain and unattractive. But the modern reception of truth as science made any exclusive access to truth untenable, although the expectation of a plain style of presentation remained. Blumenberg cites Bacon and Lessing to show that the naked, undisguised truth was now apprehended as shared, public truth. Lessing, in addition, insists that all truth is equally valuable; it is the formal property of being true that matters, not practical significance, because what matters is that all truth contributes to an overall state of enlightenment.

The development of historical consciousness undermined the assumption behind the naked truth metaphor. Winckelmann first sees historical "disguises" of truth not as superficial decoration but as constitutive of the way truth appears to us. Husserl's appreciation of Galileo's theories as not the naked truth, but a "well-fitting garb of ideas" shows a kind of adaptation of the metaphor to this new perception.

A new skepticism emerges in modern times about the power of truth to provide happiness. One way this plays out is in Lessing's thesis that satisfaction comes in the pursuit of truth rather than in its actual uncovering. Rousseau's contrasting take is that the concealed truth (metaphorically hidden at the bottom of a well) is best left undisturbed, that even pursuit of it is more like to lead to error and unhappiness than satisfaction. We see a culmination of the consequences of this skepticism for the metaphor of naked truth in Kierkegaard, who sees shared, external (and thus metaphorically naked) truth as unable to provide the satisfaction which can only be obtained through truth which provides internal meaning.

Roy Jenkins, Gladstone: Chapters 3 and 4, "A Clumsy Suitor" and "Peel's Apprentice"

2011-05-30T18:58:00.000-07:00

Gladstone rose quickly under the mentorship of the tragedy-struck future prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, becoming a cabinet minister for the first time at just 33.

After a brief spell in power in the minority Tory government of 1835, Gladstone was without office until 1841. He spent most of the intervening years seeking a wife and stirring up religious controversy.

Gladstone spent a couple of years in vigorous and heavy-handed pursuit of two young women of rank who showed no interest in him: first Caroline Farquhar (the sister of an Eton schoolmate) and then Lady Frances Douglas. In time, he came around to wooing Catherine Glynne, the sister of another Eton schoolmate, Sir Stephen Glynne. Gladstone had become used to staying at the Glynne family's Welsh estate at Hawarden for some years, and had become fast friends with the whole family, before he hit upon this more fortunate course. He proposed while on vacation with the Glynnes in Rome just a few days into the new year in 1839, and she finally accepted half a year later in London. Gladstone made Hawarden his primary home for the duration of his life.

In the meantime, Gladstone published his first book, The State in its Relations with the Church, an extremist polemic against religious toleration (with the ironic assistance of several future Catholic converts) and spoke in parliament against renewal of the government grant to the Catholic Irish seminary of Maynooth. Such lapses in judgment put Gladstone on the wrong side of the Tory leadership, including his new mentor William Peel.

In April ,1840, Gladstone delivered his first foreign policy speech to parliament. He spoke in opposition to the Palmerston government's war against China (the Opium War). This was an early sign of Gladstone's tense relationship with Palmerston, whom Gladstone never got on with (seeing him in particular as too decadent) even though he was later to become his political ally.

When Peel became prime minister at the head of a new Conservative majority in 1841, Gladstone ended up with a less prestigious post than he had hoped, the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade. He nevertheless threw himself into his work with energy and intelligence and became a sometimes inconveniently eager advocate of free trade as a result. (He had also had responsibility for railroad regulation, appropriately for an avid if critical early railroad traveller.) He became full minister of the Board in 1843, but soon made characteristically fussy difficulties over increased government support for the Maynooth seminary. Gladstone felt obliged to resign his cabinet post over the issue because of his earlier vocal opposition to support, even though he had changed his mind and would in fact vote for bill when it came up.

Gladstone seemed strangely unmoved by Peel's death in 1850. Jenkins argues that Gladstone may have found Peel uncomfortably close in background and age, and that in light of this he found the space for his own career was limited by Peel's presence.

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 3, "A Terminological and Methodological Cross Section of the Idea of Truth"

2011-05-28T20:16:00.000-07:00

In this chapter Blumenberg takes a break from tracing truth metaphors through time. He notes that this approach presupposes that each chosen appearance of the metaphor has been properly understood in its contemporary conceptual context. He proposes to provide such an accounting for a truth metaphor in one instance -- to show that a "cross section" can be provided at an arbitrary point along a given temporal "longitudinal section." He chooses Lactantius as suitably mediocre thinker to investigate -- one who represents the ideas of his age but poses no threat to overturn them.

Lactantius constrains the effect of the metaphor of the force of truth (vis veritas) with a second metaphor: the truth as God's property, which he has the right to reveal or conceal. In consequence, in the introductory passage to his "Divinae institutiones," Lactantius holds that men are not able to grasp truth simply by their own efforts, and that the pagan philosophers thus failed to find it. The evidentness of truth only makes itself felt when, in an act of grace, God chooses to reveal it. Among other things, the status of truth as a secret of God (arcanum dei) preserves the proper distance between man and God.

Lactantius does not strictly maintain this view strictly throughout his work. He finds all sorts of "advances" of revelation to the pagan philosophers. Since he conceives of truth as homogeneous -- that is, since he has no place for truths which are only accessible through faith -- this means that in principle all of the truth was accessible to the ancient philosophers. This means he has to account for their failure to find it, and he uses a number of metaphors for this purpose. He depicts the pagan philosophers as looking in the wrong direction, because God had not shown them the right one: truth is "above" but they looked for it "below." Or he describes their encounter with truth in terms of of perception, particularly of touch or smell, which lack real certainty. The key point, for Lactantius, is that they lacked the criterion to verify the truths they had. So he is able to hold that truth was widely dispersed -- all sects had at least some part of it -- but was never recognized as a whole because men lacked the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood. Revelation provided the criterion by which truth could be recognized and integrated.

Another way Lactantius depicts the philosophers as leading up to Christianity is by treating falsehood as a kind of world in its own right and the apprehension of falsehood as a separate matter from discerning truth. Then the pagan philosophers can be conceded to have done the easier task -- recognizing what is false -- without being able to find truth. This trope depends upon a reversal of classical predicates: now the false is evident and the true is hidden. Truth compels men with its essential force only when God releases it from concealment.

Lactantius struggles, without real success, to account for the role of rhetoric when truth is supposed to have the power to convince all on its own. His own experience may lead him to feel the power of rhetoric, but his commitment to the compelling force of truth on its own leaves no place for rhetorical assistance.

Roy Jenkins, Gladstone, Forenote to the American Edition and Chapters 1 and 2, "A Liverpool Gentleman?" and "A Grand Tour Ending at Newark"

2011-05-08T13:45:00.000-07:00

Among the reasons I picked up this book was a desire to get a better feel for England in the 19th century, and Jenkins goes some ways towards supplying that in his context-setting Forenote.

He begins with some observations that are common enough. Though Gladstone's 1809 birth came in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, that conflict did not consume the attention of the British government and hardly disturbed the daily life of the upper classes. The rural gentry had prospered from the enclosures and technical advances in agriculture of the previous decades. The wars, by restricting the supply of grain from abroad, only increased that prosperity. When the end of the wars promised to renew grain supplies from abroad, they were cut back by the passage of Corn Law of 1815. Poorer Britons, however, suffered from all these changes, and did not begin to see an improvement in living standards until the second half of the century. In the meantime, government policy until the twenties was strictly repressive.

More novel are his observations on the state of transportation in early 19th century Britain. Improved roads and lighter carriages increased the speed of overland travel to as much as 15 miles per hour -- making possible regular coach line transit from London to Bath in 8 hours and to Liverpool in 20. While this made all of England easily accessible to the upper classes, however, travel to Ireland remained difficult. So Britons from ruling circles -- even those with Irish estates -- rarely went there, and this kept the concerns of Ireland remote.

Just as telling are his comments about how Gladstone was out of step with the brash, boisterous British nationalism of the late 19th century. It was a spirit borne of insecurity, unlike the more subdued but confident national assertion of middle of the century that was Gladstone's true temporal home.

The first two chapters provide more such revelations. The most surprising, for me, was the apparent commonness not just of corrupt election practices (which I had assumed), nor even of appeals of election results for corrupt practices (which I wasn't aware of), but of the success of such appeals (which implies not just judicial independence, but respect for the judiciary and its decisions). His father had two elections appealed, one successfully. His oldest brother Tom was also removed once by appeal, and was once successfully installed by appeal as well.

Early on I also got an impression of how and compact and interconnected the leading circles of British life must have been in the 19th century. Not only is Gladstone surrounded by future men of consequence at Eton and Oxford, but even chance connections like defeated political opponents and future husbands of unsuccessfully wooed brides can turn out to be important figures.

Other notable points: Narrow classicism of the Eton curriculum. Public schools' indifference until the late 19th century to inculcating a standard south England upper class accent. Prime importance of religion in mid-19th century British intellectual life (to say nothing of Gladstone's personal outlook) -- something I have missed by knowing British intellectual life of this period mainly as the Mills, Bentham, and Darwin. The pre-eminence (especially politically) of Christ Church college at Oxford.

Gladstone himself came from a very prosperous Liverpool merchant family. (Jenkins's rough and ready 50-to-1 translation of the family fortune puts it at 25 million pounds in contemporary terms). He had astounding drive and energy, physically and mentally. His upbringing was decidedly low church, although at Oxford he was affiliated with a high church cum Anglo-Catholic circle and this tendency continued to attract him (although he always remained theologically opposed to the Catholic Church itself). He believed firmly in the unity of European civilization, and learned modern languages with typical doggedness to make good on that belief in practice. He began his career on the political right but moved left over time. He first attracted attention for his anti-reform oratory while at Oxford, and he was first elected to parliament as a member from Newark in 1833.

On a telling blindness to the history of philosophy

2011-05-02T21:57:00.000-07:00

I will briefly break from the normal programming on this blog to make an observation about Matthew Yglesias's recent posts on Kant, Christianity, and ethics. Yglesias believes it is a commonly accepted view that moral rules should not demand more than can realistically be expected of human conduct, and he thinks this view is a residue of Christianity transmitted through Kant.

Leaving aside whether this an accurate assessment of common contemporary belief or of Kant (I would say the first is mostly correct and the second is off the mark), I am struck by his lack of historical perspective. He assumes that, but for the existence of Christianity, ethics would never have been disturbed from a pure path of finding abstract rules which we are morally required to follow no matter how difficult this may be in practice. I struggle to see how this seemingly ad hoc potted history can be reconciled with the thought of Aristotle, a really-existing pre-Christian philosopher. Aristotle didn't propound an ethics based on abstract principles. but he certainly anchored his account of good human conduct on behavior that he saw as being realistically achievable.

This is why I wouldn't really recommend pursuing a philosophy degree at Harvard.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 7, "Men in Office"

2011-03-09T18:20:00.000-08:00

There are a few key things a president needs to protect his power. The first is intelligence, especially details of process and policy. Without these, he will not understand the stakes of any choice for his futures choices.

Beyond this, he needs time to see and make decisions. The modern presidency beset by deadlines; to have the chance to preserve his ability to make choices a president needs to get ahead of them, to give himself a buffer. Setting personal deadlines ahead of the one's imposed by necessity is one way to create such a buffer.

Roosevelt fostered competition to gather intelligence and expose the decisions he had to make.
Eisenhower used his staff to shield himself from conflicts of information and perspective.

qualities that enabled Roosevelt help himself to grasp the power stakes in his decisions:
institutional understanding, enjoyment of political power, ambition. confidence

Eisenhower lacked all of these. His Army career did not train him for the methods of political power. He disliked political gamesmanship. He sought national unity rather than any substantive goals. His self-confidence depended upon his self-image as a statesman who stayed above the fray, and thus failed to help him assess the power stakes in his choices.

Eisenhower's focus was usually too broad to give effective direction to his use of power. When he did take personal interest in policy details, however, as in his balanced-budget crusade during his last two years, he tended to lose track of any broader aims.

Truman was open to information from many sources and was eager to make decisions. He was accessible and read documents avidly, but he focused on immediate decisions and their circumstances rather than trying to put together disparate information into a larger context. By temperament he was a judge rather than a chief of intelligence.

Truman sense of power was shaped by his experience -- and sometimes his lack of it. As a former Senator and a party organization man, he placed a value on the prerogatives of Congress and loyalty to subordinates which tended to obscure for him how these restricted his own influence (although he learned largely to dispense with the former). Having never headed a bureaucracy, he had little feel for how his initiatives could be obstructed.

Never having had the ambition or expectation of being president, Truman was unusually sensitive to the difference between the office and its holder. Truman's sense of confidence was tied to being able to see himself perform the role of president, which he saw as initiating and deciding. Since so much was wrapped up for him in playing the role of president, however, he was reluctant to upstage or interfere with subordinates lest he appear to be letting personal preferences get in the way of policy, and this, as was the case with MacArthur, could hinder his sense for power.

Truman had a strong convictions about what to do as president -- he saw himself as the heir and protector of the New Deal and internationalism and the mid-century Democratic coalition. He saw it as his duty to sustain the legacy. While the focus this gave him was sometimes effective, it often led him to strong fixed positions whether or not this put him in the best situation to influence policy.

Overall assessment: Truman and, especially, FDR made effective use of presidential power; Eisenhower, because he was a political amateur, did not.

C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary: Chapter 2, "Against the Current"

2011-02-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

30-31, on the primordial struggle of his youth:

We know nothing, nothing at all, of the results of what we do to children. My father had given me a bat and ball, I had learnt to play and at eighteen was a good cricketer. What a fiction! In reality my life up to ten had laid the powder for a war that lasted without respite for eight years, and intermittently for some time afterwards -- a war between English Puritanism, English literature and cricket, and the realism of West Indian life. On one side was my father, my mother (no mean pair), my two aunts and my grandmother, my uncle and his wife, all the family friends (which included a number of headmasters from all over the island), some eight or nine Englishmen who taught at the Queen's Royal College, all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, the Director of Education and the Board of Education, which directed the educational system of the whole island. On the other side was me, just ten years old when it began.
They had on their side parental, scholastic, governmental,and many other kinds of authority and, less tangible but perhaps more powerful, the prevailing sentiment that, in as much as the coloured people on the island, and in fact all over the world, had such limited opportunities, it was my duty, my moral and religious duty, to make the best use of the opportunities which all these good people and the Trinidad Government had provided for me. I had nothing to start with but my pile of clippings about W. G. Grace and Ranjitsinhji, my Vanity Fair and my Puritan instincts, though as yet these were undeveloped. I fought and won.
This was the battleground. The Trinidad Government offered yearly free exhibitions from the elementary schools of the islands to either of the two secondary schools, the government Queen's Royal College and the Catholic college, St. Mary's. The number today is over four hundred, but in those days it was only four. Through this narrow gate boys, poor and bright, could get a secondary education and in the end a Cambridge Senior Certificate, a useful passport to a good job. There were even more glittering prizes. Every year the two schools competed for three island scholarships worth £600 each. With one of these a boy could study law or medicine and return to the island with a profession and therefore independence. There were at that time few other roads to independence for a black man who started without means. The higher posts in the government, in engineering and other scientific professions were monopolized by white people, and, as practically all big business was also in their hands, the coloured people were, as a rule, limited to the lower posts. Thus law and medicine were the only ways out. Lawyers and doctors made large fees and enjoyed great social prestige. The final achievement was when the Governor nominated one of these coloured men to the Legislative Council to represent the people. To what degree he represented them should not distract us here. We must keep our eye on the course: exhibition, scholarship, profession, wealth, Legislative Council and the title of Honourable. Whenever someone brought it off the local people were very proud of him.
That was the course marked out for me.

Exhibition winner at nine and island schoolboy essay contest runner-up soon after, James seemed destined for the hallowed path to the Legislative Council. He had the ability to do it. But he didn't try. He was pulled away by cricket and English literature. But while cricket was a distraction, it also helped instill the Puritan, public school ethic in him.

34:

I had been brought up in the public school code.
It came doctrinally from the masters, who for two generations, from the foundation of the school, had been Oxford and Cambridge men. The striking thing is that inside the classrooms the code had little success...
But as soon as we stepped on to the cricket or football field, more particularly the cricket field, all was changed. We were a motley crew... Yet rapidly we learned to obey the umpire's decision without question, however irrational it was. We learned to play with the team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill-fortune. We did not denounce failures, but 'Well tried' or 'Hard luck' came easily to our lips. We were generous to opponents and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they did not deserve it. We lived in two worlds. Inside the classrooms the heterogeneous jumble of Trinidad was battered and jostled and shaken down into some sort of order. On the playing field we did what ought to be done.

The school was an artificial oasis from national agitation and racial struggle. Mr. Burslem, the selfless, decent headmaster, represented Britain at its best. The other teachers also behaved fairly and generously, regardless of the color of their pupils, at least to a very great degree. But an education that took Britain as the source and measure of all values, knowledge, accomplishment was ultimately stunting nevertheless. In any case, James found that in Trinidad outside the school, race still mattered a great deal. James was refused admission to merchants' contingent of soldiers to fight in the Great War because of his color. The school, however, where the masters were all outraged at the slight he had suffered, sheltered him from any mental trauma from the incident.

On the artificiality of his school friendships across social and racial divides, 40-41:

My great friend was U__. He was a rather frail boy and somewhat lacking in physical confidence, but he was a left-hander. I took him under my wing. I fielded second slip to him to feeble batsmen and took catches that I never afterwards equalled. I went out to extra-cover for hitting batsmen. Caught James, bowled U__ was a regular feature of the score-sheet in our school matches. That can be a close bond, and we spent countless hours together. But there came a day when U__ left, while I remained behind. Faithful to his promise, he came back to the school to see me. He came before six o'clock to see me playing on the field and then to walk with me the mile and a half to the railway station. He told me about his new life, and I gave him some news of the school. But after the first effusion there was an awkwardness between us. The conversation would stop and we would have to search to begin it again. He came another day to see me to the station and this time it was worse. We had nothing to say to each other, our social circles were too different, and he never came again. He went to Europe to study medicine and years afterwards, when we were grown men, I met him once or twice. We greeted each other warmly, but I was always embarrassed and I think he was too. There was a guilty feeling that something had gone wrong with us. Something had. The school-tie can be transplanted, but except on annual sporting occasions the old school-tie cannot be. It is a bond of school only on the surface. The link is between family and friends, between members of the class or caste.

On bowling, 44:

The ultimate greatness of a bowler is in his head. He has a series of methods of attack at this command, but where he pitches any ball and the ball following, where he delivers one and from where he delivers another, where he quickens the pace and where he slows it down, this is the result of a psychological sensitivity and response to a particular batsman at a particular time on a particular wicket at a particular stage in the game. To watch cricket critically you have to be in good form, you must have had a lot of practice, you must have played it. There were times in our club cricket at home, or when I went round English cricket grounds reporting the matches of the Lancashire team, or when I watched all the Test matches through the season of 1938, these were times when I could sense the course of an over from the way the batsman stood waiting between balls. If you know him well you could see when he was bothered. When Jim Laker writes that he bowled Don Bradman an over and knew that he had beaten him with every ball he is talking about bowling at its highest. In the rout of the Australians in 1956 the decisive factor was not Laker's off-spin. It was that he had them on the run and kept them there.

On batting, 45-46:

Quite early I learnt that, far more than with bowling, a batsman's innings is played more in his head than on the pitch. I have believed this from the days of Wallen until George Headley told me with passion that the ball he feared most was the the loose ball which came after he had been tied down for two or three overs. 'You went at it greedily and made a stupid stroke,' he said over and again. Nor is it the response of any individual. There is a zeitgeist of cricket. A particular generation of cricketers thinks in a certain way and only a change in society, not legislation, will change the prevailing style. More of that to come. First Wallen.
Wallen was a slow left-hander who came into the first eleven one year, opened the bowling, and had an incredible series of analyses, six for 11, eight for 17 and figures of the kind. When we talked about cricket to the girls at the High School even they would tell us: "Cricket! Wallen is the man.' but to the rest of us in the first eleven Wallen was a push-over. We had hit him all over the place for years and we continued to hit him. Our nets were open and at practice the earnest Wallen would place his field and we would drive him through the covers and as soon as he pitched short hook him round. We would go out to him and hit him from the off-stump to square-leg. The more wickets he took in competition matches, the more we hit him. Wallen complained that, contrary to practice, in matches he had a new ball, and undoubtedly he did dip in a bit while the shine was on. I was the secretary and manoeuvered to take a new ball out for practice and saw that Wallen had it just as I went in to bat. I hit him harder than ever. the climax came in the house match when Chinasing (Chinese, not Indian) and I put on 100 for the first wicket against the demon bowler, and that is a lot of runs on a matting wicket. I was a little more cautious (I didn't want him to get me out because I lived at the time in the same town as him, Arima, and we were good friends). But Chinasing drove him continuously. Came Saturday and, sure as day, Chinasing and I stood in the slips and saw Wallen mow down the opposite side.
A great military authority of the eighteenth century stood on a height one day watching his master napoleon carry out one of his audacious manoeuvers and was heard to say that he wished he had charge of the opposing army for but one half-hour. But if he had he would not have had the nerve to guess what Napoleon was doing and take the steps that seemed so easy. So it is with batting. Over and over again in every class of cricket one sees someone walking out with 'What a colossal ass I have been!' written all over him. I haven't the slightest doubt that if an unknown Wallen had played for any of the outside teams he would have got us out and taken his 7 for 15 as usual. David Buchanan, one of the destructive slow bowlers of his day, coached at Rugby and held no terrors for the boys there, who hit him about fearlessly. A great deal of cricket, and big cricket too, is wrapped up in that parcel. Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert, you remember, was slain not by the lance of Ivanhoe but by the 'violence of his own contending passions'.

C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary: Chapter 1, "The Window"

2011-02-21T20:30:00.000-08:00

Childhood. Books on top of the wardrobe and watching cricket through the bedroom window. Landmark experiences: watching the dissolute Matthew Bondman bat and seeing Arthur Jones' cut shot caught at deep point. Puritan spirit of the family sustained by a fear of sinking into impoverished degradation. Family influences. Both grandfathers self-made immigrants from other islands. Convent raised mother, who absorbed puritanism and an indiscriminate love of reading novels. Schoolteacher father, who knew enough of the world to know what was worth reading. Cricket articles from magazines. Vanity Fair (from the age of eight). Bible stories and the the Bible.

James is at his best sketching pen portraits of members of the extended family who peopled his childhood, like Cousin Cudjoe, his aunt Judith, and his maternal grandfather Josh Rudder. James's vivid short profiles not only bring these personalities to life but also illustrate the larger struggles of black West Indians against racism and poverty.

19: "When I did spend time with my parents my father told me about cricket and his own prowess. But now I was older and my interest became tinged with skepticism, chiefly because my mother often interrupted to say that whenever she went to see him play he was always caught in the long field for very little."

28: "Me and my clippings and magazines on W.G. Grace, Victor Trumper and Ranjitsinhji, and my Vanity Fair and my puritanical view of the world. I look back at the little eccentric and would like to have listened to him, nod affirmatively and pat him on the shoulder. A British intellectual long before I was ten, already an alien in my own environment among my own people, even my own family. Somehow from around me I had selected and fastened on to the things that made a whole. As will soon appear, to that little boy I owe a debt of gratitude."

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 2, "Metaphorics of Truth and Pragmatics of Knowledge"

2011-02-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

Blumenberg starts by thematizing the truth value of absolute metaphors. This truth, Blumenberg claims, is pragmatic: absolute metaphors have historically provided a guiding or orienting function with respect to the world as a whole.

Blumenberg suggests that absolute metaphors can no longer perform this function adequately in an era like ours which is conscious of them, and that their function has been increasingly taken up instead by art.

14: "Absolute metaphors 'answer' the supposedly naive, in principle unanswerable questions whose relevance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence."

14: "[W]e ask once again about the relevance of absolute metaphors, their historical truth. This truth is pragmatic in a very broad sense. By providing a point of orientation, the content of absolute metaphors determines a particular attitude or conduct [Verhalten]; they give structure to a world, representing the nonexperienceable, nonapprehensible totality of the real. To the historically trained eye, they therefore indicate the fundamental certainties, conjectures, and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions and inactions, longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences, of an epoch are regulated."

Cosmos is an answer to the question of what the world as a whole is that has proved enormously durable.

Blumenberg's turns to the metaphor of the mightiness of truth to see what a pragmatic approach to its meaning can uncover. He notes first that the power which is attributed to truth is related to an expectation that it is easy to find. He goes on to note that historically the metaphor emerged in the context of a concern with salvation. It is a characteristic first of all of Hellenistic thought and its therapeutic deployment of truth. Blumenberg argues that this new attitude toward the function of truth is the key to the divergence of Classical and Hellenistic thought. Where truth was the goal and consummation of human existence for Classical philosophy, it becomes a corrective in Hellenistic philosophy. Where Classical philosophy had an expansive agenda for truth , Hellenistic philosophy seeks to create a protected sanctuary for those truths which are necessary for salvation. Although Blumenberg does not make this explicit, the classical idea that truth reveals itself does not seem far off from the ease of finding truth implied by the mightiness of truth. The key change is that perspicuous truth is no longer assumed to be universal, but instead is understood to be restricted to a small set of truths.

Patristic thought takes up this economy of truth, and puts out of bounds as unnatural any inquiry which leads neither to salvation or any practical application. These restrictions on theoretical curiosity lent an air of the forbidden and unnatural to the pursuit of new research. With truth robbed of its naturalness, an explicit consciousness of method involved in acquiring truth comes to the fore.

With Francis Bacon, we get the metaphor of the world as a tribunal where the truth is found out and the association of the concepts of truth and labor.

Aristotelean pure reality -> Medieval pure activity -> world possesses truth because of God's creation -> modern conception of the truth as a product of human effort, and the concomitant valorization of the artificial in art and research.

Blumenberg traces the metaphor of knowledge as work in Descartes, d'Alembert, and Montesquieu. Among the consequences of the metaphor is the valorization of the machines and methods used for investigation. Blumenberg claims this drove development of apparatus and technique ahead even of the actual demands for them -- in a sense, new tools and methods created their own demand for use.

Goethe's attempt to revive the Classical harmony of man and nature involves a commitment to truth as open and self-revealing.

(An epilogue from LTG describing the Classical view: "Truth is there and you just have to look at it.")

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Chapter 1, "Metaphorics of the 'Mighty' Truth"

2011-02-16T15:51:00.000-08:00

Blumenberg begins by noting the thinness of the conceptual history of truth, which he relates to the parsimony of its definition within the Western philosophical tradition. He suggests that the metaphors associated with the concept of truth are contrastingly rich and supple. He notes that the metaphor of light is most closely associated with the concept of truth, and then he claims that this metaphor must be seen in relation to the unstated but foundational questions regarding the status of truth. 7: "The metaphorics of light cannot be translated back into concepts; analysis seeks to disclose the questions to which answers are sought and risked, questions of a presystematic nature whose intentional fullness 'provoked' the metaphors, as it were." (This insistence that there is a dialogical, question-answer underpinning to concepts reminds me of Blumenberg's approach to historical systems of thought in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age). Some of these "naive" questions regarding truth: how much truth can we have? how easy is it to get? how much is it good for us to have? 7: "These are all questions that barely a philosophical school has attempted to answer with systematic means; we nonetheless maintain that everywhere in the language of philosophy, indications can be found that answers to these questions have always already been given in a subterranean stratum of thought, answers that, although they may not be contained in the systems in propositional form, have never ceased to pervade, tincture, and structure them."

Blumenberg contrasts the metaphors of truth that forces itself on one to the metaphors of truth that must be forced to reveal itself. The former is characteristic of ancient thought up to the time of Aristotle, and is associated with metaphors of light, openness, and transparency. The latter is associated with the Stoics and their doctrine of cataleptic presentation -- an argument which presents evidence so overwhelming that the hearer is compelled to assent (with the presumption being that one would be wary of granting assent). This is associated with the metaphor of imprinting.

The classical metaphorics of powerful, self-activating truth was taken up later in patristic thought and scholasticism. It survives even into the modern era, but more often in a subsidiary function. The force of truth is an assumption, for instance, of Vico's theory of error, but his focus is on the linguistic means by which human beings resist that force. For Hume, there is a skeptical reversal, in which whatever idea compels us most strongly is what we call true (although his view is made palatable by a rather benign teleology of nature).

Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology: Introduction

2011-02-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

The Cartesian goal for philosophy -- obtaining truth that is both perspicuous and expressed in unambiguous concepts -- implies the twin redundancy of figurative language and the history of concepts. There is no longer a use for them in a system of thought whose concepts provide a complete and definitive account of the world. But the superfluity of metaphor had been a premise of philosophy from Plato onward. Philosophy has seen metaphor as an a mere adjunct, as a tool used to make an argument more persuasive without changing its content, so that, in principle, a metaphor could be replaced by explicit argument. Blumenberg posits the existence of (and will seek evidence for) metaphors that cannot be replaced in this way, because they provide a foundation for philosophical language. He calls these absolute metaphors. He sees them as akin to the symbols of the ideas of reason in Kant's Critique of Judgment. He notes that calling these metaphors absolute does not mean that they are fixed and their functions cannot be replaced by other metaphors; it only signifies that they cannot be reduced to concepts. This fungibility of absolute metaphors means that they can have a history, and that this history underlies the history of concepts.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 6, "Two Matters of Choice"

2011-02-11T19:29:00.000-08:00

Since presidential power depends on the president's ability to make choices, preserving that power means not getting boxed in by previous choices. (This is not Neustadt's metaphor, but I think it is apt.) Neustadt analyzes two presidential choices that went bad in this way: Eisenhower's decision to allow his own Treasury Secretary, George Humphrey, to speak against the budget plan of 1957 and Truman's acceptance of complete conquest of the North as a war aim of the Korean War in the fall on 1950. Eisenhower's decision robbed him of bargaining power because his own budget couldn't be taken seriously as a starting point. Truman's decision undermined his ability to persuade the public that a lesser war aim -- cease fire on a defensible line -- was acceptable.

Neustadt contends that the burden of seeing the stakes of presidential choices for his future power falls on the president alone. The way that his power could be restricted later by his choice may not be obvious from the situation, and his advisers will be of no help because they will see things only from the perspective of their expertise. I think Neustadt overstates this. First, at least some of every president's advisers are not policy specialists, and hence not prone towards blindness to consequences outside a narrow domain of expertise. Second, a president's lost leeway for action on any issue will affect the interests policy specialists in that area, so they would have some reason to be aware of the stakes of decisions for presidential power.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Research" and "The Dance of Death"

2011-01-30T14:32:00.000-08:00

The onset of winter -- all thoughts on Christmas even six seeks out (a freeness with time that Hans has not quite accustomed himself to yet) -- Hans gains temperature, perhaps because of the exertions of his reading -- how little serious reading is done at the sanatorium, and how time is frittered away -- late nights, reading about the mysteries of life and matter -- an interest in the body which has a barely sublimated sexual context.

I am increasingly left with the impression that Hans is not as dull a lad as the narrator had made out in the beginning.

Christmas season -- Hans proposes to break the embargo on talking about and seeing death and dying -- the idea is met with hostility at dinner -- Hans proceeds with his project, pulling Joachim in his train -- first paying respects to the deceased gentleman rider (who Hans had heard coughing his first day) -- from there Hans makes it his mission to visit the dying -- his motives were not strictly charitable; for he also meant to fight for taking a serious and dignified attitude toward suffering, death,and the pursuit of the cure, much against the prevailing atmosphere -- Popoff's seizure at dinner , and the alarmingly rapid (for Hans) return to normal routine after it -- Leila Gerngross -- Fritz Rotbein, the businessman -- the silly Frau Zimmermann ("Overfilled") -- Settembrini's objection -- Tous-les-deux's son Lauro, who made a show of defying death -- Anton Karlowitz Ferge, the Russo-German insurance man who went through pleura-shock and three-colored fainting; a great storyteller --Frau Mallinckrodt, the spurned adulteress, who like the other women saw Hans' visits through the lens of courtship -- Karen Karstedt, an impecunious girl under Behrens' care who stayed in cheap lodgings in the village -- Hans and Joachim take Karen out for excursions to see the winter sports and the movie theater -- Frau Stoehr insinuates, with some justice, that Hans' attentions to Karen are a sublimation of his desires for Frau Chauchat --In February, Hans and Joachim take Karen, who is near her end, to see the graveyard

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 5, "Public Prestige"

2011-01-14T17:27:00.000-08:00

Public prestige means the judgment of insiders about how the public will react to their own reactions to the president. Public figures count on members of the larger public to accomplish many thing they care about. The politicians, in particular, care about getting elected. So they care about how the public will assess their interaction with the president.

Prestige isn't as simple as a raw measure of popularity. Much of the public is usually inattentive, so the esteem in which they hold the president has little consequence. The president's prestige will also vary in different constituencies, and even in regard to different issues.

The president's prestige also affects him more immediately, because he often wants things directly from members of the public, whether votes for himself and his allies or private actions that further his policies (for example, union members' cooperation with Truman's seizure of the steel mills).

Like his professional reputation, a president's public prestige does not guarantee that he will get his way, but it can gain him leeway.

A president's personality comprises a large, but mostly static component of his prestige. The more variable element to his prestige comes from changes in the public image of the presidency, which is to say changes in what the public wants the president to be. These changes are driven by events that affect members of the public, especially negatively, like economic trouble, military conflict, and social unrest. Since presidents have limited influence on such happenings, their prestige depends on their success in managing the hopes of the public. They must teach the public to see their role in a favorable light. But this instruction takes place under four constraints: (1) the public is chronically inattentive, (2) when they are attentive, it is in the context of pressing events not likely to be of the president's choosing, (3) deeds will influence public perception more than words, and (4) how the public understands the president will be influenced by the context of what he has previously done and said. In other words, both events and his own record will compete with the president's attempts to shape public perceptions.

A president's choices of action affect his bargaining power, his professional reputation, and his prestige. Since so much depends upon his choices, a key question is how a president husbands and preserves his latitude to make choices.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Whims of Mercurius", "Encyclopaedic", "Humaniora"

2011-01-07T21:06:00.000-08:00

A stretch of brilliant, warm weather begins a few days into October. Hans' infatuation with Madame Chauchat continues. He avoids looking at or judging her defects, physical and moral, and even tries his hand at simulating some of them, such as slouching and slamming doors. One day, Hans conspicuously gets up from dinner and adjusts the curtains to stop a ray of sun from vexing her, and is rewarded with a look and a smile. But Hans' isn't always so secure in Madame Chacuchat's affections. On another day, he converses with Joachim within her earshot in order to draw her attention, even dragging Hermine Kleefeld into the conversation, but she only gives him a glance that he interprets as one of scorn. Despondent, his temperature drops. Three days later, he overtakes Madame Chauchat on the morning walk and they exchange friendly greetings. His gloom lifts, and so does his temperature.

229-230: "We have as much right as the next person to our private thoughts about the story we are relating; and we would here hazard the surmise that young Hans Castorp would never have overstepped so far the limits originally fixed for his stay if to his simple soul there might have been vouchsafed, out of the depth of his time, any reasonably satisfying explanation of the meaning and purpose of man's life."

Hans' passion becomes evident to everyone at the sanatorium. Hans, in fact, does a great deal to advertise it. One day, he even holds forth on the peculiarities of Madame Chauchat's face to a small audience of fellow patients on the veranda. Hans begins to look forward to the Sunday afternoon wait for letters in front of the porter's lodge because of the excuse it provides him to be close to Madame Chauchat. One Sunday, Settembrini pulls Hans away from the gathering into a side room, ostensibly to announce his participation in the production of an encyclopedia of human suffering. (One might wonder who would read such a thing!) In fact, Settembrini's purpose is to urge Hans to return home from the corrupting influence of the sanatorium -- a suggestion that Hans resists.

On another day, Hans and Joachim are sitting in the veranda garden after dinner when Hofrat Behrens strolls by, and Hans wrangles an invitation to look at his paintings. Hans takes particular note of the portrait of Madame Chauchat -- he even removes it from the wall and carries it about Hofrat Behrens' house during their visit. Hans and Behrens converse at length about the human body: flesh, blood, lymph, its composition (mostly water), its life and death (both processes of oxidation). But the Hofrat becomes downcast and the visit ends when Hans questions the necessity of continuity of form, which for the Hofrat is the distinction between life and death.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Soup-Everlasting", "Sudden Enlightenment", "Freedom"

2011-01-07T19:43:00.000-08:00

An authorial aside at the onset of the recounting of Hans Castorp's bed-rest establishes that henceforth the treatment of time will be telescoped, that much more time will be compressed into a shorter space of narrative. Hans' regular sick-bed regime is described. It is noted that the division of his his days into an unchanging pattern makes them seem shorter, but also makes it seem as if time is not passing at all. Joachim urges Hans to write a letter alerting his relations to the extension of his stay. Hans has some trouble bringing himself to write, but puts himself to it when his three weeks are up and the issue can no longer be avoided. Hans reveals as as little as possible, suggesting that he has been only briefly detained by a bad cold. This becomes part of a pattern of uncovering his true state only gradually, as we learn when he discloses, a week and a half later in a conversation with Settembrini, that he has he has written a second latter attributing further delay to mere suspicion about the condition of his chest. Castorp reveals to Settembrini his increasing alienation from his accustomed bourgeois society as a result of the perspective brought on by illness. Settembrini, alarmed anew, resumes his chiding. He first relates skeptical anecdotes about the diagnoses and cures of the doctors, and then launches a frontal assault on Hans' view that death and disease provide distance from and perspective on ordinary life. At the end of three weeks, Behrens releases Hans from bed rest, but only after he has been reminded -- he seems to have lost track of how long Hans has been confined.

A week later, Hans goes in for his first x-ray. In the meantime, he receives more intelligence about Madame Chauchat. His tablemate, Miss Robinson the schoolmistress, informs him that Madame Chauchat receives a Russian visitor who stays in town, and also that she is sitting for a portrait by Hofrat Behrens. This news distresses Hans, and causes his temperature to spike. He also observes that Madame Chauchat has another admirer at the sanatorium, a young man from Mannheim. Madame Chauchat ignores this other admirer. On the day of the appointment, Madame Chauchat comes in for her x-ray after Hans and Joachim and converses with Joachim in the waiting room. Hans speculates about whether she speaks to Joachim instead of him out of delicacy about their silent flirtation. Joachim appears to have perceived the goings-on between them, and seems uneasy with Madame Chauchat. Hans looks at the insides of Joachim in the x-ray room, at also looks at the skeleton of his own hand.

Some time later -- it must be a few days, for we learn that October is almost upon them -- Hans converses with Settembrini. After first mocking the put-upon pose of some of the young inhabitants of the sanatorium -- he contends that they are in fact enjoying their luxuriant irresponsibility -- Settembrini concludes with a cutting remark about Russians ("Parthians and Scythians"). An annoyed Hans concludes that Settembrini, too, has noticed his commerce with Madame Chauchat. Immediately after the discussion, Hans writes his third letter home, this time revealing that he must be expected to stay for at least the whole winter, and requesting supplies and money to cover his expenses. As he writes, his sense of dread about informing his relations evaporates, and a sense of satisfaction with his self-assertion comes over him.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Temperature"

2010-12-25T10:54:00.000-08:00

Hans Castorp calculates the yearly cost of staying at the sanatorium and finds it is well within his means -- not that he admits even to himself that he did the sums on his own behalf.

It is half a week until Castorp's expected departure, and he has caught a severe cold. The cold drives the story in this section, from his encounter with Fraulein von Mylendonk, his acquisition of a thermometer, his discovery of his fever, and the overknowing and apparently mistaken reaction of his tablemates (who suggest and perhaps think he really has tuberculosis) to Castorp's decision to have an examination, the seemingly challenging look from Madame Chauchat as he is thinking about skipping it, and the final revelation of his diseased state.

Hans Castorp has trouble with time and the thermometer -- at first time goes too slow, and he can't seem to get to the end of the seven minutes. Then he daydreams a little, and the time goes by so quickly that he is already more than a minute over before he realizes it.

Castorp on Hofrat Behrens, and himself (thinking, I guess, of his odd relationship with Madame Chauchat), 174-175: "Settembrini said his joviality is forced, and one must admit that Settembrini has his own views and knows whereof he speaks. I probably ought to have more opinions of my own, as he says, and not take everything as it comes, the way I do. But sometimes one starts out with having an opinion and feeling righteous indignation and all that, and then something comes up that has nothing to do with judgments and criticism, and then it is all up with your severity, and you feel disgusted with the republic and the bello stile --"

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 4, "Professional Reputation"

2010-12-22T19:41:00.000-08:00

Presidential persuasiveness also depends upon other actors' perception of his ability and will to use his advantages. Other Washington insiders form this perception on the basis of the president's past performance. Since every president's performance has its high and low points, what is looked for is a pattern of being skillful and tenacious, or the opposite.

Though a president can't expect to have a reputation for invincibility, he at the very least wants to leave his enemies with as much uncertainty as possible about the dangers of crossing him and his allies with as much certainty as possible about his steadiness if they support him.

The Eisenhower administration's budget prevarications of 1957 are an example of how presidential reputation is diminished. This situation was not permanent, however, which shows that a president has the means to recover a damaged reputation, even if this ability is limited.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 3, "The Power to Persuade"

2010-12-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

American government: "separated institutions sharing powers." (27)

In order to achieve his ends, a president depends on members of Congress, party officials, business and labor leaders, administration officials, and foreign governments who have their own authority and sources of legitimacy. Likewise, in order to accomplish anything all of these must depend at some point, in the future if not at present, on actions that only the president has authority to perform.

The president's power to persuade comes largely from this mutual dependence -- it comes from the ability to bargain.

This analysis is a commonplace except in the case of the executive branch itself. It has not been widely appreciated that the executive itself does not act with one agenda, that other members of the administration and the bureaucracy have goals, authorities, and responsibilities that may conflict with those of the president, and that the president must persuade them to do what he wants.

The president's power to persuade consists in convincing other agents with whom he shares authority that acting as he wants coincides with their own interests and responsibilities.

The Marshall Plan as an example of an initiative where the key actors -- Marshall, Vandenburg, Bevin -- cooperated with the president's goals. Even in this case a great deal of give and take was required from Truman. In fact, he was fortunate that so much was required from Congress, to whom he had the ability to grant concessions to ease the path for the plan, rather than from actors within the executive branch itself, with whom he might not have had the same influence.

Points to a key issue of for presidents: making choices that preserve future influence.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Doubts and Considerations", "Table Talk", "Mounting Misgivings. Of the Two Grandfathers, and the Boat-ride ..."

2010-10-17T17:23:00.000-07:00

The passage of Tuesday is marked with short scenes in which Hans discusses and pays his bill -- Hans' billing week ends on Tuesdays, since had had arrived on a Tuesday -- and then an account of Hofrat Behrens personal history -- he is the widower of a victim of the tuberculosis who had taken the altitude treatment before dying and being buried in Davos, and himself seems to have been afflicted. Hans expresses doubt about whether a fellow-sufferer is fit to approach a disease with the proper objectivity.

Some part of the second week is disposed of -- none too precisely -- in a chapter describing Hans' mounting infatuation with Madame Chauchat and the part that the schoolmistress at his dining-room table, Fraeulein Engelhart, plays in it. Fraeulein Engelhart, observing Hans' interest, becomes Madame Chauchat's advocate while Hans makes himself out to be her critic. She finds out Madame Chauchat's given name -- Clavdia -- and fills in Hans with what is generally known about Clavdia's life story, which doesn't seem to be something we can have any confidence in.

Hans assuaged his conscience about this preoccupation with the thought that he would soon be leaving anyway.

139-140: "Hans Castorp, when he rose from one meal, could straightaway by anticipation begin to rejoice in the next -- if, indeed, rejoicing is not too facile, too pleasant and unequivocal a word for the sentiments with which he looked forward to another meeting with the afflicted fair one. The reader, on the other hand, may very likely find such adjectives the only ones suitable to describe Hans Castorp's personality or emotions. But we suggest that a young man with a well-regulated conscience and sense of fitness could not, whatever else he did, simply 'rejoice in' Madame Chauchat's proximity. In fact, we -- who must surely know -- are willing to assert that he himself would have repudiated any such expression if it had been suggested to him."

The relationship provided the emotional correlate for the physical agitation which Hans had experienced since his arrival.

Clavdia, too, becomes aware of Hans interest. Hans contrives to meet Clavdia's eyes in the dining-hall, and to encounter her in the hallway.

Castorp casts about for somebody to provide a counterbalance to his indulgence. He determines that neither Joachim, with his own preoccupation with Marusja, or Hofrat Behrens, with his probable affliction, would do. He settles on Settembrini. And so a few more days are disposed of, again none too precisely, recounting what Settembrini had said over the course of several conversations and how Castorp had reacted to it.

Settembrini spoke about his grandfather, the lawyer and political agitator (who reminded Castorp of his own grandfather because he dressed all in black, though for opposite reasons, that is, to mourn the imprisonment of liberty by the old regime). Settembrini expounded on his understanding of human history as a conflict between justice, freedom, and knowledge, on one had, and oppression, tyranny, and ignorance on the other. Thus Settembrini saw his father, a humanist scholar, as engaged in the same fight as his grandfather.

The narrator's voice suggests that by subjecting himself to this stream of strenuous moralism, Hans Castorp felt more free to indulge his weakness for Clavdia Chauchat.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Politically Suspect", Hippe", "Analysis"

2010-10-15T18:24:00.000-07:00

Hans' first Sunday is one of the fortnightly Sunday band days -- one of the regular variations in the sanatorium routine that Hans is beginning to discover. Settembrini is late, and Hans chides him. Settembrini responds that he is suspicious of music, because it only stimulates emotions, while words alone can convey reason. Joachim responds that he is grateful for music because it breaks up and organizes time. Settembrini that music can in fact enliven us to the passage of time, but then he says it has the tendency to do the opposite -- to deaden us, to encourage quietism -- and thus he calls it 'politically suspect.'

Monday brings another variation: Krokowski's psychoanalytic lectures on love and sickness. In the morning before the lecture, Hans takes a long, singing hike through the hills -- which proves too much for him. He is exhausted and coughs up blood. He has to take a long, delirious rest before returning to the sanatorium. He daydreams about Pribislav Hippe, a schoolmate who had been a two-year preoccupation is his youth. Hippe's 'Kirghiz' eyes are the hidden memory of which Madame Chauchat reminded Hans.

Hans arrives to Krokowski lecture just after the start -- and finds himself behind Madame Chauchat and her distracting back and arm. The theme of the lecture: suppressed love reappears as illness.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, "Necessary Purchases", "Excursus on the Sense of Time", and "He Practices His French"

2010-10-10T19:57:00.000-07:00

The second day is dismissed in two paragraphs. On the third, it turns cold and snows. Hans walks to the village with Joachim to buy rugs for wrapping up outdoors. On the way back, they have another talk with Settembrini. Settembrini mocks the doctors and patients, which Hans and Joachim silently disapprove of. Hans attributes dignity to sickness and dying; Settembrini objects at length. Hans tells Joachim that he thinks Settembrini cares for the chance to talk beautifully as much as to instruct. He senses a tension with Settembrini about his purchase of the rugs (and he may be right; we have already seen Settembrini's hostility to anything that makes Hans' stay more permanent).

Over a short duration -- a few hours or a day -- time passes more quickly if one's experiences are new and varied, but over much longer periods this seems to stretch time out, while monotony compresses the recollection of even years to very little. These reflections are made in a narratorial excursus, but then are attributed to Hans. (The narrative time of the novel certainly seems to work this way. The passing of a few more days is noted in the sentence which begins the attribution of these thoughts to Hans -- presumably nothing unusual happened in those unexamined days.)

Hans sees his first dying man -- and is impressed with the dignity of his death. He practices the dying man's roll of his eyes, and Madame Chacuchat she is making eyes at her. Hans and Joachim labor to escape from Sister Bertha, the nurse. Hans meets Tous-les-deux, and consoles her in French.

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 2, "Three Cases of Command"

2010-10-09T20:02:00.000-07:00

Sometimes a president can get things done by command. This turns out to be the exception rather than the rule. Presidential commands require five things in order to succeed (to be self-executing, in Neustadt's terminology): personal investment, clarity, publicity, recognized authority.

Three cases: Truman's dismissal of MacArthur in 1951, Truman's seizure of the steel mills in 2007, and Eisenhower's dispatch of federal troops to enforce school desegregation in Little Rock in 1957. In each case, command was actually the outcome of a failure to achieve the desired result by softer means. It was in effect a last resort.

Furthermore, in each case the command did not actually achieve the ultimate policy aim. In firing MacArthur, Truman hoped to avoid a prolongation and extension of the Korean War. But the firing forced the administration to be explicit about its intention not to attempt the conquest of the North, which removed China's incentive to reach a rapid settlement. In the steel dispute, Truman sought to preserve steel production while maintaining price controls, but a strike and price-control breaking settlement were only delayed. In Little Rock, integration of the local schools was not sustained into the next year.

In each case, the real effect of the command was to keep open further policy options that otherwise would have been closed. But the presidents were not able to fully exploit these options anyway.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Herr Albin", "Satana Makes Proposals That Touch Our Honor"

2010-10-09T09:34:00.000-07:00

Herr Albin makes a show of shocking the women with suggestions of suicide during laying-in.

80: "[I]n effect it seemed to him that, though honour might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope. He tried to put himself in Herr Albin's place and see how it must feel to be finally relieved of the burden of a respectable life and made free of the infinite realms of shame; and the young man shuddered at the wild wave of sweetness which swept over him at the thought and drove on his labouring heart to an even quicker pace."

At dinner, Frau Stohr claims to know how to prepare 28 different sauces for fish.

Settembrini and Castorp converse at the after-dinner reception. Castorp babbles about Frau Stohr's sauces and his first impression of Settembrini as an organ-grinder. Settembrini sizes up Castorp's physical, mental, and moral fragility, and urges him to leave right away (an action which Castorp had earlier suggested he might have to take to Ziemssen). Castorp rejects this out of hand -- and perhaps not coincidentally is trying at the same time to recall what Madame Chauchat reminds him of.

Insight from the night's dreams. The silent sister -- a thermometer without it's own numbered scale -- as a metaphor for time. Hans remembers what Madame Chauchat reminds him of (although we don't yet find out).

Hans ends up dreaming about kissing Madame Chauchat's hand. 92: "And at that there swept over him anew, from head to foot, the feeling of reckless sweetness he had felt for the first time when he tried to imagine himself free of the burden of a good name, and tasted the boundless joys of shame. This feeling he experienced anew in his dream, only a thousandfold stronger than in his waking hour."

This concludes ten chapters devoted to a single day.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Satana", "Mental Gymnastic", "A Word Too Much", and "Of Course, a Female!"

2010-10-04T10:13:00.000-07:00

Settembrini -- chatty, impecunious Italian, full of literary allusions, bon mots, and gossip -- an anticlerical freethinker, but at the same time a somewhat old-fashioned literary humanist

a philosophical Hans holds forth on the immeasurability of time -- the idea that time flows evenly is based on the convention that it can be measured by regular movements in space -- but this is arbitrary, time and space don't necessarily have any relation -- we don't experience time as something steady: sometimes it feels fast to us, and other times slow -- we have no direct perception of time, as we do with space

the lying-down cure -- breakfast again --Joachim smitten with Marusja but trying to hide it

beer, extreme drowsiness, a clouded head, and heart palpitations with no emotional trigger for Hans (the body acting without reference to the soul, as Hans sees it)

Hans discovers the culprit who bangs the door: Madame Chauchat, from the good Russian table, with braided hair and narrow eyes, who seems to remind Hans of something.

Herr Blumenkohl takes a break from lunch to use his Blue Peter -- Hans discovers blood on his handkerchief

Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power: Chapter 1, "Leader or Clerk?"

2010-10-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

This is a strategic examination of presidential influence. Key questions: what is the nature of this influence and how do presidents sustain and increase it?

This is an examination of the "mid-century" presidency, which is characterized by an unusual continuity of issues, an unprecedented complexity of policy challenges, and the weakening of political party ties.

Presidents have been burdened both legally and by consensus with a greatly expanded set of tasks. In performing these tasks, they are beset by five constituencies -- executive officials, legislators, supporters, the public, and foreign countries. These tasks and pressures impose a kind of limitation on a president's ability to set his own agenda -- Neustadt calls this clerkship to suggest its conflict with leadership.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Drawing the Veil", "Breakfast", "Banter. Viaticum. Interrupted Mirth."

2010-10-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

Spanish mother of two afflicted sons -- tous le deux

description of Hans Castorp's reaction to hearing the Russian couple's lovemaking -- avoidance, attempted escape, embarrassment -- 40: "And he began to blush through the powder; for what he had all along seen coming was come, and the game had passed over quite frankly into the bestial." -- all from within Hans Castorp's point of view

My impression is that Castorp is light-headed, even giddy, when he discusses meeting the Russians and Tous le deux with his cousin

breakfast room -- Hans Castorp seated looking toward down the length of the room with the door to the front hall behind him to his left -- he became annoyed when the door was slammed

We get only Doctor Behrens' side of a conversation with Hans Castorp and his cousin, and are left to infer how they responded -- he urged Castorp to follow the regimen of the sanatorium.

walking with Joachim, who struggles to keep up -- a whistling pneumothorax and sick young people for whom time has no meaning -- Joachim: "Sometimes I think being ill and dying aren't serious at all, just a sort of loafing about and wasting time. Life is only serious down below." (51-52) -- Hans' cigar disappoints him --last rites for little Hujus, terminal cases who make a fuss on the verge of death, Behrens admonishment to one such, and Hans' protestation in favor of the priority of the dying

Hans Blumenberg, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric" in After Philosophy: End or Transformation

2010-09-17T20:47:00.000-07:00

Related antitheses in philosophical anthropology and rhetoric: man as a rich or a poor creature, rhetoric as the means of communicating truth or of coping with the lack of it.

Formulating the condition of lacking truth as a consequence of an anthropological deficiency implies expanding the domain of rhetoric to include a broad range of conventional interactive behavior.

430-431: "The epistemological situation that Plato imputed to Sophism is radicalized, anthropologically, into the situation of the "creature of deficiencies," for whom everything becomes part of the economy of his means of survival, and who consequently cannot afford rhetoric -- unless he has to afford it. A consequence of this anthropological intensification of the initial conditions is that the concept of a rhetoric that is associated with those conditions must also be formulated in a more elementary of fundamental way. Then the technique of speech appears as a special case of rule-governed modes of behavior that produce something to be understood, set up signs, bring about agreement, or provoke contradiction. Keeping silent, visibly omitting some action in the context of connected behavior, can become just as rhetorical as the reading aloud of an outcry of popular wrath, and the Platonic dialogue is no less rhetorically inclined than the Sophist's instructional discourse, which it opposed by literary means. Even when it is below the threshold of the spoken or written word, rhetoric is form as means, obedience to rules as an instrument."

Philosophical tradition: language as referential, good as what is evident to reason
Rhetorical tradition: language as pragmatic, assumption of the lack of evidentness of the good

The metaphysical tradition has divided the world into two orders -- ideas and nature. Man, awkwardly, doesn't fit on either side of the divide, and in fact seems to be governed by both. This has been solved in the tradition by subordinating one aspect to the other -- and the quashing of this tension means that metaphysics has had no real insight into man.

Rhetoric reflects a fundamental condition of man -- a lack of pregiven structures that order behavior -- action must take the place of automatic processes. What distinguishes man is not language but a deficiency of ready-made behaviors and responses; language is significant for its ability to make up for this deficiency.

433: "Action compensates for the 'indeterminateness' of the creature man, and rhetoric is the effort to produce accords that have to take the place of the 'substantial base of regulatory processes in order to make action possible. From this point of view, language is a set of instruments not for communicating information or truths, but rather, primarily, for the production of mutual understanding, agreement, or toleration, on which the actor depends."

Skepticism creates an opening for coming to terms with the anthropological deficits and determining how to manage them. Blumenberg takes Descartes' provisional ethics -- which was to guide man until the completion of science made a definitive ethics possible -- as an example of the avoidance of this opening. Descartes envisions this provisional ethics as static. Blumenberg notes that this overlooks the possibility of an indefinite delay in accomplishing the project of a complete knowledge. A static provisional ethics avoids dealing with change, fluidity, and indeterminateness in actual circumstances.

435: "The 'method's' promised final accomplishment gets in the way of man's process of self-understanding in the present and also gets in the way of rhetoric as a technique for coming to terms in the provisional state prior to all definitive truths and ethics. Rhetoric creates institutions where evident truths are lacking."

436: "This difference [between persuasion and force] is understood as one of language and education, because persuasion presupposes that one shares a horizon, allusions to prototypical material, and the orientation provided by metaphors and similes. The antithesis of truth and effect is superficial, because the rhetorical effect is not an alternative that one can choose instead of an insight that one could also have, but an alternative to a definitive evidence that one cannot have, or cannot have yet, or at any rate cannot have here and now. Besides, rhetoric is not only the technique of producing such a[n] effect, it is always also a means of keeping the effect transparent: it makes us conscious of effective means whose use does not need to be expressly prescribed, by making explicit what is already done in any case."

The language of shared horizons in the first sentence above sounds strikingly like Gadamer's vision of hermeneutics.

Even science depends on consensus, and hence in a sense rhetoric. But science, as an institution whose work can always be passed on to others, can endure the provisionality of its results indefinitely. Rhetoric assumes a constraint to act.

Rhetoric can substitute a verbal action for a physical one. Cassirer's anthropology sees substitutions of the verbal for the physical as something of a free act of man's symbolic nature, but Blumenberg notes that this creates a discontinuity between what man needs for existence and what his "nature" is. The capacity for symbolic action must be seen in light of its ability to secure man's existence.

On social contract theory as a prototype of an approach that converts what are assumed to be creative expressions of human nature to functional requirements of human existence, 438-439: "What is philosophical about this theory is not primarily that it explains the appearance of an institution like the state (still less that it explains the appearance of the absolutist state), but rather that it converts the supposed definition of man's nature as that of a zoon politikon ['political animal' -- Aristotle] into a functional description. I see no other scientific course for an anthropology except, in an analogous manner, to destroy what is considered 'natural' and convict it of its 'artificiality' in the functional system of elementary human accomplishment called 'life.'"

439: "Man's deficiency in specific dispositions for reactive behavior vis-a-vis reality-- that is, his poverty of instincts -- is the starting point for the central anthropological question as to how this creature is able to exist in spite of his lack of fixed biological dispositions. The answer can be reduced to a formula: by not dealing with this reality directly. The human relation to reality is indirect, circumstantial, delayed, selective, and above all 'metaphorical.'"

Metaphor is not a just a rhetorical ornament, it is the paradigmatic structure of man's rhetorical relationship to reality.

Blumenberg sees this rhetorical relationship extending not just to substituting representations for things, but to substituting actions -- particularly verbal actions -- for other actions which might be more direct and therefore risky. He notes the importance of this for social contexts, and particularly international politics.

Roles are another kind of rhetorical-metaphorical means of managing not just interaction, but identity and self-understanding. (References made to Simmel and Goffman) It works by establishing a framework which retains a sense of consistency and continuity, which is preserved by avoiding contradiction.

442: "The 'agreement' that has to be the goal of all 'persuasion' (even of self-persuasion) is the congruence -- which is endangered in all situations and always has to be secured afresh -- between one's role consciousness and the role expectations that others have of one. Perhaps 'agreement' is too strong a term, because approval would always already go beyond what is called for. Fundamentally, what is important is not to encounter contradiction, both in the internal sense, as a problem relating to consistency, and in the external sense, as a problem relating to acceptance."

Substitution and roles are creations, but unlike artistic production they are not necessarily designed to gain attention. Such creations need to be explicitly recognized in order to affect action, however, and this means that at some point they must have been advocated, campaigned for. I think there is a gesture here toward saying that it is turtles -- which is to say rhetorical conventions -- if not all the way down, then at least as far as is immediately visible. For these rhetorical creations are not just conventions that can be assumed and used, their conventional place is itself the product of a consensus which was arrived at rhetorically.

Blumenberg now introduces an antithesis between rationality -- particularly technical rationality -- and rhetoric: rationality accelerates and "saves" time while rhetoric slows time and delays action. (444-445) The essay turns here to considering rhetoric as a tool for one who does not want to act (or more to the point, react), at least not right away or in the most obvious way. There is an obvious tension with the previous account of rhetoric as the resource of those who are constrained to act -- to the point where a pure delaying tactic like a filibuster is portrayed as belonging to the category of force rather than persuasion (see 437). Certainly Blumenberg is incorporating into his conception of rhetoric here conventions and behaviors which would not be included in it.

These different functions and means of rhetoric, however, simply reflect the different means needed in order to achieve deliberation in different contexts. Rhetoric as a delaying operation serves a characteristically modern need. We are increasingly surrounded with automated processes and rapid access to information. These create momentum for rapid decisions -- or rapid acquiescence to pre-programmed decisions. The rhetorical building of consensus as a ground for action is lost; and different kinds of procedural delays and reviews provide an opportunity to make what is done more a matter of conscious, deliberative action again. There's even a defense here of liberal education for providing a pattern of thinking which isn't just functional and aimed at efficiency.

447: "If classical rhetoric essentially aims at a mandate for action, modern rhetoric seeks to promote the delaying of action, or at least the understanding of such delay -- and it does this especially when it wants to demonstrate its capacity to act, once again by displaying symbolic substitutions."

447 (continuing immediately in next paragraph): "The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason (principium rationis insufficientis)."

prayer as a form of rhetoric -- which presumes a persuadable God -- what an insight!

Rehabilitation of opinion as opposed to the presumed superiority of knowledge or science, 448: "But the principle of insufficient reason is not to be confused with a demand that we forgo reasons, just as 'opinion' does not denote an attitude for which one has no reasons but rather one for which the reasons are diffuse and not regulated by method."

In practical affairs, where endless inquiry is not feasible, it is irrational to expect that decisions can be justified on the basis of complete knowledge. Even scientific advice as it bears on public affairs is liable to be incomplete, and so while the advice may borrow the dignity of science, it still operates on the plane of persuasion as well. (Curiously, I think in America today there is rather too acute a consciousness of the rhetorical entanglement of scientific recommendations (see the short shrift given to global warming), while the proclamations of business leaders are treated as a kind of pure knowledge.)

Public policy depends on postulates about human beings which have not been and possibly cannot be scientifically validated. In particular, much policy assumes that human beings can be shaped significantly by exogenous factors. If anything, however, scientific methodology leads toward a bias in favor of theories favoring endogenous factors -- because such factors are less diffuse and thus easier to isolate and test. (I think this insight is mostly sound, but recent rethinking about the effects of fetal environment on the inheritance of characteristics through multiple future generations shows that methodology allows for more flexibility than Blumenberg appreciated.) Blumenberg considers such postulates of practical reason (and the reference to Kant is explicit here) as part of the rhetoric of ethics -- they enable us to persuade others (and ourselves) that action to improve our lot is not futile.

Man as the "the subject of history" as a rhetorical assumption of modernity. Metaphors of transfer of power make it easier for individuals and groups to persuade themselves that they have the right and the ability to assume the role of the subject of history.

For Blumenberg, rhetoric is not a surplus creative talent that marks out man as having special dignity. It is a way of coping with not always having the fullness of reason available to us. 452: "... I would like to hold to the idea of seeing in [rhetoric] a form of rationality itself -- a rational way of coming to terms with the provisionality of reason."

Blumenberg's critique of Hobbes' assertion of the superiority of "right reason" over rhetoric (and of today's assertion of the need for "critical reason"): First, how can one determine whether right reason is being employed except through the exercise of right reason? In other words, the critique is circular. Second, rhetoric is, after all, something that men have it in their power to control -- unlike the anti-rhetorical absolute dictatorship that Hobbes prefers.

For Hobbes, reason is based on concepts while rhetoric is based on metaphors, but metaphors do not grapple with the things themselves. Blumenberg notes that Hobbes' own theory of concepts is that they are entirely artificial, and thus they have no natural affinity with the things in themselves, either. Moreover, Hobbes own deduction of the necessity of an absolute state depends on mutually incompatible organic and mechanistic metaphors.

453-454: "Now metaphor is in fact not only a surrogate for concepts that are missing but possible in principle, and should therefore be demanded; it is also a projective principle, which both expands and occupies empty space -- an imaginative procedure that provides itself with its own durability in similes."

Classical polarity: rhetoric as art; reality as nature. But reality today is not simple nature, it is nature mediated through artificial processes (and thus mediated through rhetoric, in the broad sense that Blumenberg uses the term). The admonishment to return "to the things themselves" is itself a rhetorical trope. (455: "If reality could be seen and dealt with 'realistically,' it would have been seen and dealt with that way all along.") Such programs fall short on actually providing the things themselves, and end up focusing rhetorically on the illusions which are supposed to have prevented us from getting to reality.

Man's weakness for rhetoric -- his susceptibility to being influenced -- leads to Blumenberg's final point: there is no transparent relationship to oneself, either. 456: "Man has no immediate, no purely 'internal' relation to himself. His self-understanding has the structure of 'self-externality.'" So there isn't any direct access to our true desires and character that stands cleanly apart from rhetoric; self-persuasion is an intrinsic part of our predicament.

The means that we have to understand ourselves are themselves rhetorical, and foremost among these is the contrast with what we are not -- above all, the contrast with God.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Chapter 4: "On the Counterrevolutionary Philosophy of the State (de Maistre, Bonald, Donoso Cortes)"

2010-09-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

The counterrevolutionaries who interest Schmitt are conservative Catholic political philosophers. He picks out their emphasis on the necessity of a decision --starting above all with the necessity of a decision between Catholicism and atheism. This focus allows them to comprehend and puts them in sympathy with the function of the state as decision.

The intensity of this focus on the decision -- and the concomitant support for authoritarianism -- increased from de Maistre at the time of the French revolution to Donoso Cortes in the generation of 1848. This was a consequence of their engagement with revolutionary foes who were far more radical. The battle lines were fundamentally drawn on the issue of whether human nature is good or evil. As the revolutionaries of 1848 were far more committed to the proposition that human nature is good (and thus that the state is unnecessary), the counterrevolutionaries became more strident advocates for the opposite view (and thus also of the need for a decisive, powerful state).

Donoso Cortes characterized bourgeois liberalism as a tendency to discuss rather than decide, though a decision between Catholicism and atheistic socialism, between monarchical and aristocratic authority and popular rule, was necessary. He called the bourgeoisie una clasa discutidora. Socialist thinkers similarly excoriated the incoherence of liberal attempts to combine monarchical and popular rule.

62: "Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortes only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question 'Christ or Barabbas?' with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation. Such a position was not accidental but was based on liberal metaphysics. The bourgeoisie is the class committed to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and it did not arrive at those freedoms from any sort of arbitrary psychological and economic conditions, from thinking in terms of trade, or the like."

In other words, political liberalism, with a commitment to debate and free speech, is prior to economic liberalism.

63: "Donoso Cortes considered continuous discussion a method of circumventing responsibility and of ascribing to freedom of speech and of the press an excessive importance that in the final analysis permits the decision to be evaded. Just as liberalism discusses and negotiates every political detail, so it also want to dissolve metaphysical truth in a discussion. The essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion."

Schmitt sees the political moment increasingly dissolved not just by the unending conversation of liberalism, but also by valorization of technical-economic administration. (65)

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Of the Christening Basin" and "At Tienappels', and of Young Hans's Moral State"

2010-09-06T18:26:00.000-07:00

Hans Lorenz Castorp -- grandfather -- conservative throwback

christening basin -- names of seven generations of owners engraved on the accompanying plate -- one must be Hans Castorp, but this is not made explicit -- gives young Hans Castorp a feeling of change and continuity at the same time -- 23: "A familiar feeling pervaded the child: a strange, dreamy, troubling sense: of change in the midst of duration, of time as both flowing and persisting, of recurrence in continuity" -- the original German is more starkly oxymoronic, and the reference to time is not made explicit

24-25: "The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Councillor: the sober, even godly, civilian habit of a bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-assertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to the perpetual continuity of things, and the perfect soundness of its business signature."

grandfather in the really old public outfit as the true grandfather, and grandfather in his old-fashioned everyday attire as an imperfect expression

funeral - grandfather in his public outfit -- decay

The two years of Hans Castorp's life with his grandfather are captured with just a handful of descriptions: of the house and his grandfather, of the (recurring) scene with the christening basin, of the picture, of being shielded from witnessing his grandfather's struggle with sickness, of his grandfather's laying in state.

Hans spends the remainder of his youth in the charge of his uncle, Consul Tienappel. Tienappel liquidates Hans's father's business and invests the proceeds so that Hans has a comfortable endowment. Hans intended to supplement this by a career in ship design -- a field that he more or less fell into rather than choosing.

Hans has a lethargic disposition -- he respects work, but has no appetite for it. Mann depicts this as a symptom of a more general tendency of an age that lacks conviction of the meaningfulness of its efforts. Another theme: this moral degeneration is linked to physical deterioration. And in fact, Hans becomes sickly and pale while away from home pursuing studies, and his doctor counsels a restorative vacation to the mountains.

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Chapter 3, "Political Theology"

2010-09-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

36: "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development -- in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver -- but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology."

Schmitt does more to justify the affinity of structure than the genealogy. He certainly shows that early modern political thought is saturated with theistic analogies. Schmitt insists that this is more than a historical accident. He thinks that the image of an omnipotent authority is essential to the conception of the state; it is required because law itself must be applied, and requires an authority to do the job. Moreover, he criticizes recent sociologically oriented analysis of the state for attempting to evade discussion of such a unitary personal authority.

In the end, however, he shortchanges the promise to demonstrate the derivation of concepts of sovereignty from theology. He falls back on arguing for the concurrent development of modern conceptions of God and sovereignty.

So he sees a parallel in early modern views of a God who established natural laws and then remained thereafter detached from creation, and of the sovereign as a lawgiver. (This is clearly Schmitt's preferred formulation, but the analogy here seems not too exact -- Schmitt's point about sovereignty is that it required an authority which can never really remain detached, after all.)

He sees an analogous development towards immanence in both fields in the 19th century -- God either doesn't exist or is simply identified with His concrete expression in the world; the sovereign doesn't exist or is identified with the the law or the actions of the people.

Along the way, he notes in passing (see 42 and 52) that legal reasoning has a form which is drawn from medieval thought -- which he finds natural because he holds that medieval thought was juristic rather than scientific in form. But, for me, this raises a question: from where did medieval thought acquire this juristic form? This reveals the problem with holding that modern concepts of the state are secularized borrowings from theology. Law and state didn't emerge for the first time in modernity. They were already present in classical times, and medieval thought took shape against this background. So Modern political thought may seem to have derived its concept of sovereignty from medieval theology only because the horizon is placed at the sixteenth century. In a longer view, the God of medieval thought may already have been shaped by ancient law.

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain: "Foreword", "Arrival" "In the Restaurant"

2010-09-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Rather in the manner of a philosophical treatise, this novel has a foreword, and Mann occupies it by playing with the theme of time. He beseeches his reader to consider the story old, although the setting is quite recent. He takes up this time motif again in the opening passage of the first chapter, as he describes Hans Castorp's trip to Davos. He observes the fungibility (though imperfect) of time and distance, noting that the effect of distance in changing Castorp's preoccupations is similar to the passage of a considerable stretch of time.

Mann makes the scene feel more distant by presenting the protagonist impersonally at the start. From the first paragraph, we find out only that there was a young man on a trip to Davos. After two paragraphs describing the route (in present tense), we finally learn Hans Castorp's name -- and immediately have him put at a distance again with a parenthetical interpolation noting that he has been introduced (a trick which is soon repeated with his uncle Consul Tienappel).

Soon enough, time becomes compressed for Hans Castorp, for his trip ends one stop earlier than he expects -- just as he thinks that the journey will be over soon, it is already over.

Castorp's conversation with his friend Joachim Ziemssen quickly turns to time, too. Ziemssen informs Castorp that the scale of time is different for the inmates of the sanatorium, whose lives have been suspended. For them, Castorp's three week visit feels like nothing more than a day.

Krokowski -- psychoanalysis -- 16: "I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being."

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Chapter 2, The Problem of Sovereignty

2010-08-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

Conventional definition, according to Schmitt, 17: "Sovereignty is the highest, legally independent, underived power."

Schmitt notes a problem with such a definition: in reality, no agent acts with unrestricted, unshared power.

Schmitt's statement of the problem: 18: "The connection of actual power with the legally highest power is the fundamental problem of the concept of sovereignty."

One solution: restrict the analysis of sovereignty to jurisprudence, relegating all issues concerning the actual exercise of power to "sociology." This is the approach of Kelsen and the neo-Kantians. The state is envisioned only as a system of norms, and these norms can only be derived from more basic norms, not from any personal authority. Schmitt concedes that a consistent system of law can be constructed in this fashion, but at the expense of divorcing it from actual laws and norms; this kind of analysis of irrelevant to an analysis of the workings of law and the state. (18-21)

Hugo Krabbe's system makes law rather than the state sovereign. Law is based on men's sense of right. Krabbe uses the term "spiritual" to describe the status of law, which seems to refer to it's basis in ideals rather than particular human authorities. The task of the state is to determine what interests exist and "ascertain" how those interests can be interpreted into law. (21-24)

Association theory, represented by Hugo Preuss, Otto von Gierke, and Kurt Wolzendorff, sees the common life of the people as the primary value. Law is an expression of this common life, and the task of the state is to act as an agent of the people to formalize the law. (24-27)

Schmitt discerns three concepts of form in Weber's sociology of law: as a transcendental presupposition specifying the domain of inquiry, as regularity derived from repeated practice, and as rationalization by professionals aimed at calculability. (27-28)

The theories of Kelsen, Preuss, and Krabbe all require sovereignty to be objective, stripped of any personal authority of command. (29-30) Schmitt argues that personal authority is ineradicable from law. Law can only be realized in a concrete situation, and some authority must decide what the law means in that situation. (30-33) Schmitt claims Hobbes as a precursor in arguing for legal personalism. (33-34)

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Chapter 1, "Definition of Sovereignty"

2010-08-21T13:07:00.000-07:00

Opening sentence, 5: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception."

Key terms: exception, norm, sovereignty, juristic.

Schmitt insists that extraordinary situations are a better measure of the meaning of sovereignty than ordinary ones, because sovereignty is what he calls a borderline concept.

Schmitt puts the terms exception and norm in opposition. Norm, in his usage, refers to established, written law. He contends that such law cannot be an exhaustive account of legally exercised decision making.

6: "When Robert von Mohl said that the test of whether an emergency exists cannot be a juristic one, he assumed that a decision in the legal sense must be derived entirely from the content of a norm. But this is the question. In the general sense in which Mohl articulated his argument, his notion is only an expression of constitutional liberalism and fails to apprehend the independent meaning of the decision"

Central dispute: are decisions which are made outside the existing rule of law, in order to preserve legal and constitutional order, themselves part of the legal order? Schmitt's argument depends on an affirmative answer.

6-7: "The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order, can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state, or the like. But it cannot be circumscribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law.
It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty, that is the whole question of sovereignty. The precise details of an emergency cannot be anticipated, nor can one spell out what may take place in such a case, especially when it is truly a matter of extreme emergency and of how it is to be eliminated. The precondition as well as the content of jurisdictional competence in such a case must necessarily be unlimited. From the liberal constitutional point of view, there would be no jurisdictional competence at all. The most guidance the constitution can provide is to indicate who can act in such a case. If such action is not subject to controls, if it is not hampered in some way by checks and balances, as is the case in a liberal constitution, then it is clear who the sovereign is. He decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it. Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution must be suspended in its entirety."

Schmitt holds that the exception is a fact which recent liberal theorists ("liberal constitutionalists") have tried to wish away. He suggests that only some kind of metaphysical-historical commitment (I'm thinking this means a belief in Whiggish view of progress) would lead one to believe that the exception can be extinguished from governance.

Schmitt claims Bodin as a precursor in this analysis of sovereignty.

8-9: "Bodin asked if the commitments of the prince to the estates or to the people dissolve his sovereignty. He answered by referring to the case in which it becomes necessary to violate such commitments, to change laws or to suspend them entirely according to the requirements of a situation, a time, and a people. If in such cases the prince had to consult a senate or the people before he could act, he wold have to be prepared to let his subjects dispense with him. Bodin considered this an absurdity because, according to him, the estates were not masters over the laws; they in turn would have to permit their prince to dispense with them. Sovereignty would thus become a play between two parties: Sometimes the people and sometimes the prince would rule, and that would be contrary to all reason and law. Because the authority to suspend valid law -- be it in general or in a specific case -- is so much the actual mark of sovereignty, Bodin wanted to derive from this authority all other characteristics (declaring war and making peace, appointing civil servants, right of pardon, civil appeal, and so on)."

Note that Bodin's analysis presupposes that sovereignty is unitary.

Schmitt claims the 17th century natural law theorists in general as precursors, and particularly Samuel von Pufendorf.

The state has certain goals embedded within it, depending on what kind of state it is.

9: "[S]overeignty (and thus the state itself) resides in deciding this controversy, that is, in determining definitively what constitutes public order and security, in determining when they are disturbed, and so on."

Thus the existence of the state presupposes a decision. The decision is prior to the norm.

10: "[E]very legal order is based on a decision, and also the concept of a legal order, which is applied as something self-evident, contains within it the contrast of the two distinct elements of the juristic -- norm and decision. Like every other order, the legal order rests on a decision and not a norm."

I would object that such a decision can exist only in a conceptual and not a historical sense, because no government or state is ever totally formed anew without dependence on existing structures and conventions.

Schmitt contends that the standard used to determine who was sovereign in debates about the old Holy Roman Empire was simply who had the authority to act in cases where no rule had been set down. He points out that Max Seydel's analysis of the sovereignty of the old states within the new German Empire rests on the same assumption: the states were sovereign, according to Seydel, because the Empire was limited by explicit law while the states retained the power to act in extraordinary circumstances.

Schmitt suggests what he means by the exception in two ways. First, the exception is a situation where authority is unlimited. 12: "What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. In such a situation it is clear that the state remains, whereas law recedes. Because the exception is different from anarchy and chaos, order in the juristic sense still prevails even if it is not of the ordinary kind."

Schmitt goes on to describe the exception in terms of the decision, which he holds to be in fundamental conflict with the norm. 12-13: "The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority of over the validity of the legal norm. The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one would say. The two elements of the concept legal order are then dissolved into independent notions and thereby testify to their conceptual independence. Unlike the normal situation, when the autonomous moment of the decision recedes to a minimum, the norm is destroyed in the exception. The exception remains, nevertheless, accessible to jurisprudence because both elements, the norm as well as the decision, remain within the framework of the juristic." I'm not clear if the its in the first sentence refers to the state itself or to the principle of the decision. I take it that what is at stake in the last sentence is that decisions taken in a state of exception still have legal standing; they are true exercises of sovereignty rather than standing outside of it.

13: "Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogeneous medium. This effective normal situation is not a mere 'superficial presupposition' that a jurist can ignore; that situation belongs precisely to its immanent validity. There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists."

Conceding the plausibility of this, isn't it also true that no total exception exists? No decision made in a vacuum of institutional legal order could be in any way effective. There is a lot of law below the level of the constitution or even statutory law -- army and police codes and rules about chain of command, quite significantly -- that need to be depended on especially in a state of exception. So the decision itself always requires a residue of the norm to be put into effect. Since, moreover, the cooperation of these institutions is also a matter of decisions made in the chain of command, this also shows that the decision is not unitary. And all this is to say nothing of the place of informal norms about the conduct in politics which do much to determine the actual paths of events in cases where the law is not explicit.

Schmitt continues directly in the next paragraph (still 13): "All law is 'situational law.' The sovereign produces and guarantees the situation in its totality. He has the monopoly over this last decision. Therein resides the essence of the states sovereignty, which must be juristically defined correctly, not as the monopoly to coerce or rule, but as the monopoly to decide. The exception reveals most clearly the essence of the state's authority. The decision parts here from the legal norm, and (to formulate it paradoxically) authority proves that to produce law it need not be based on law."

An interesting question is what authority consists of for Schmitt.

Schmitt insists that the exception actually reveals more and is more interesting than the norm, which just governs the operation of the state in its boring everydayness.

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 6, "Shipbuilding out of the Shipwreck"

2010-08-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

This quirky chapter combines investigation of shipwreck metaphors in the rhetoric of science with a favorite Blumenbergian topos, the question of what can be expected from reason. Blumenberg finds a characteristically hopeful but modest answer from the 19th century physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, in reference to Darwin's theory of natural selection: it is a plank that keeps us afloat. Here, Blumenberg notes, the actual shipwreck event has been removed from the frame of vision altogether -- it is something that has already happened. In fact, the entire background to the metaphor, the reference to voyages and destinations, has also been so removed. What remains is just survival, though du Bois-Reymond acknowledges that some would take away even that by saying that the plank is but a straw. (73-75).

73-74: "Shipwreck has lost its story setting. What has to be said is that science does not achieve what our wishes and claims had expected of it, but what it does achieve is essentially unsurpassable and suffices to meet the demands of maintaining life."

75: "In the reception histories of metaphors, the more sharply defined and differentiated the imaginitive stock becomes, the sooner the point is reached where there seems to be an extreme inducement to veer around, with the existing model, tn the most decisive way and to try out the unsurpassable procedure of reversing it.
The shipwreck metaphorics seem to have escaped such a reversal, even if the image does seem to be wound backward by considering the shipwrecked man and his efforts to salvage, from what was almost the end of his sea voyage, a Robinson Crusoe-like new beginning of self-preservation."

Paul Lorenzen, in his dispute with the logical positivist Otto Neurath about the difficulties of providing a sound linguistic foundation for thought, resorts to just such a metaphor of shipbuilding from a shipwreck. Neurath had illustrated his position that about the limits of our ability to create language anew by comparing language to a ship on which we are already embarked on an endless voyage, and which can only be repaired as it sails. Lorenzen retorts that the ship had once been built at sea, by our ancestors, from material they found afloat around them. The implication is that it would be possible to jump off the ship and start building anew. Blumenberg remarks that the metaphor actually pulls us a way from such a resolve, however, because of the central position it gives to the security of the already existing ship. (75-78)

78-79: "The demiurgical, Robinson Crusoe longing of the modern age is also present in the handiwork of the constructivist who leaves home and heritage behind in order to found his life on the naked nothingness of the leap overboard. His artificially produced distress at sea does not come about through the frailty of the ship, which is already the end result of a lengthy process of building and rebuilding. But the sea evidently contains material other that what has already been used. Where can it come from, in order to give courage to the ones who are beginning anew? Perhaps from earlier shipwrecks?"

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 5, "The Spectator Loses his Position"

2010-08-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

Now we take up with the shipwreck-with-spectator metaphor in Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer makes the distancing of reason from the turmoil of life the key to his (all-too-Hegelian, according to Blumenberg) philosophy. The human being is both an agent of will, entangled with the pursuit of life, and a subject capable of detachment from this struggle. Appropriately, as Schopenahuer uses the metaphor in his exposition, the distinction between sufferer and spectator is extinguished; man is both at the same time. (59-61)

The distance of the spectator in Schopenhauer's reception of the metaphor is paradigmatically the distance of memory. Because he thinks that we experience pain directly, while happiness is a product of reflection on the absence of suffering, memory is essential to his conception of happiness. (61-63)

Schopenhauer's subject-spectator is also able to look towards the future and recognize that his demise is inevitable, although it is not quite clear whether this too counts in favor of happiness as a withdrawal into contemplation. (63)

Schopenhauer also describes his dual theory of man with another spectator metaphor, this time drawn from theater -- man as one who is both an actor in a drama and a spectator. Schopenhauer depicts the calm distance of the spectator as ultimately an asset to the man of action -- his ideal man is the Stoic. Of course, if the the role of actor is given up entirely, then there is no more life. Blumenberg notes this conclusion had already been drawn by the Enlightenment, which saw calm reason stripped of the passions not as a preparation for action but as its extinction. (64-66)

Heine's story about Boerne is notable for the justification he gives for remaining an unhelpful spectator while his friend ca,me to political grief -- in preserving himself, he was preserving a cultural heritage acquired from Boerne for the future. "This is the frightful formula of all those who refuse the little humanity of the present in order to fulfill the allegedly greater humanity of the future. So the expression used by the poet who sails past the shipwrecked man is of the most singular and frigid precision: ' I was carrying on board my ship the gods of the future.'" (66-67)

Blumenberg sees the reception of the shipwreck metaphor becoming increasingly detached from its original reference to the relationship between man and nature. During the 19th century, the metaphor becomes almost exclusively used to explore the great dilemma of historical knowledge, the tension between objective detachment and human engagement. Burckhardt, in his lecture "On Good and Bad Fortune in World History," holds that the historian must avoid a focus on fortune or misfortune, personal hope or despair, because these have a merely particular, subjective relationship to events. Nevertheless, he sees history as having the unity of a single dramatic narrative for an ideal spectator unattached to any particular interest - though this ideal of pure narrative knowledge can never actually be realized by the historian. (Here, once again, Blumenberg discovers a thinker in danger of becoming the Hegel he is struggling against.) (67-69)

Burckhardt paradoxical seafaring metaphor for historical knowledge -- the historian is a sailor who would like to see the wave his ship is riding, but he himself is the wave. (69-73)

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Preface to the Second Edition

2010-07-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

In this preface (written ten years after the original publication of the book), Schmitt amends his typology of legal theories. He had originally categorized legal theories as either normativist or decisionist. He now adds institutionalism as a third type. I am curious about how well these translate into schools of Anglo-American legal theory. My guess is that normativism, due to its sense of closure, is akin to positivism and decisionism is closest to realism. I am at a loss to make sense of his brief critique of each of these legal theories, but he thinks that, in isolation, all of them are lacking.

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 4, "The Art of Survival"

2010-07-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

Here Blumenberg turns his attention to a kind of political deployment of the shipwreck metaphor. The touchpoint of the discussion is Goethe's reaction to the French victory over Prussia at Jena, as reported decades later by his contemporary Heinrich Luden. Goethe disappointed Luden (as he would disappoint German nationalists again by meeting Napoleon a year later) by adopting an aloof pose with respect to the event, referring to his situation as that of a spectator to a shipwreck.

Blumenberg points out that a younger Goethe had himself once been annoyed by the pose of political spectatorship. He had used the image of Voltaire observing storms in a mirror from his bed to mock a poem of his contemporary Gessner. Essential to understanding this annoyance is that Voltaire portrayed his lakeside residences as havens free from political interference or involvement -- they were part of a pose of autarkic indifference he fashioned for himself.

Blumenberg asks: "What has changed?" His answer takes us back to the purpose behind Lucretius' philosophy, which was to above all to liberate men's minds from fear of natural events. Even the fear of human action that exposes men to disaster can be neutralized, once human action itself is understood as governed by drives and passions that are themselves part of nature. (In fact, Blumenberg sees Voltaire's inclusion of curiosity among men's passions, and thus his nature, as in this sense a step to realizing the full potential of Epicurean philosophy).

Goethe's dispassionate spectatorship, on the other hand, is notable for its disciplined resistance to natural feeling -- its studied artificiality. Goethe observed the battlefield of Jena a year later and discussed the event without betraying any feeling at all. In respect to this, Blumenberg makes an observation about Goethe's stance that is difficult to interpret. "The observer of the battlefield appeals to the ancient poet's comparison precisely in order to protect his history from history per se, insofar as the latter is always, and must remain, the history of others. However, it is no longer possible to put historical catastrophes on the same footing with physical ones." (52) (Why "no longer"? And is this meant globally or just about Goethe?)

At this point, Blumenberg takes an excursus to ask what use Hegel made of Lucretius' metaphor for his philosophy of history. Hegel incorporates the metaphor into account of how reflection transforms perception of the apparent suffering and tragedy in the world. Reflection reveals that these world-historical travails contribute to the deeper rational order of the progress of freedom.

Goethe is not in sympathy with either Lucretius' philosophy or Hegel's. Goethe sees the aim of Lucretius' philosophy -- overcoming the fear of death -- as fundamentally in conflict with being human. In Goethe's invocation of the shipwreck metaphor, the key to the sense of distance is not reflection but rather escape from danger. It is not the spatial distance of an observer in real time, but the temporal distance of a survivor recollecting his own shipwreck.

Blumenberg notes Goethe's temporal configuration of the shipwreck metaphor in another instance -- a consolation letter to his friend Zelter -- and remarks that it again puts the focus on personal survival. He then pursues the peculiar image which concludes Goethe's use of the shipwreck motif in his letter -- "the sea already is hungry for figs again." (56) Blumenberg notes that this classical saying, perhaps taken up via Erasmus, showed up in a number of configurations, but he takes special notice of its use in a story about a sailor who is shipwrecked once carrying a cargo of figs, and demurs taking to the seas again.

Finally, Blumenberg draws attention to another of Goethe's seafaring metaphors -- the metaphor of the ship's trace which disappears behind it, which he uses in his critique of the Enlightenment's expectations of progress.

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 3, "Aesthetics and Ethics of the Spectator"

2010-04-24T16:21:00.000-07:00

I learned from taking notes on the first two chapters that it's hard to get a handle on Blumenberg's approach to his material. It isn't an argument in any usual sense, nor is it a typology or a narrative. His organization is loosely thematic, in that he takes up some variant or aspect of the seafaring metaphor and examines it for some stretch before moving on to another topic. Within his exploration of these topics, he tends to follow the series of treatments chronologically, but not rigidly so. So while there is no overarching account of either the structure or the genesis of the metaphor, there is episodic insight into both. In pursuit of a better understanding of sum of these insights, I will seek to record not just Blumenberg's observations about the different treatments of seafaring metaphors, but the logic of his transitions, insofar as I understand them.

In the image of the shipwreck with spectator, the spectator carries on the ancient ideal of theory as contemplation, but with a new object. Instead of the cosmos, the object of contemplation is man's own consciousness. (26-27)

Lucretius describes the forms of the natural world as being like debris from a shipwreck thrown up from an inexhaustible ocean of atoms -- making the point that man would do well to remain a spectator to these forms instead of trying to comprehend them. The birth of a human being is also depicted as a kind of shipwreck, like a sailor being thrown ashore from the sea. The notion that seafaring is unnatural informs these uses of the shipwreck metaphor. This analogy is metaphorical and literal at the same time -- seaborne commerce really is driven by a refusal to accept all limits to desires as natural limits. Remaining content within the boundaries of natural needs = staying ashore. Wanting and pursuing in excess of those needs = taking to the seas and risking shipwreck. (27-29)

The Enlightenment, by contrast, sees the danger of shipwreck as the price that must be paid in order for their to be wind, and therefore sea commerce, at all. (29)

29: "In complete contrast to this, it will be one of the fundamental ideas of the Enlightenment that shipwreck is the price that must be paid in order to avoid that complete calming of the sea winds that would make all worldly commerce impossible. Through this figure is expressed a justification of the passiones, the passions, against which philosophy discriminates: pure reason would mean the absence of winds and the motionlessness of human beings who possess complete presence of mind."

This formulation of the Enlightenment attitude is taken almost directly from the debate between Herostratus of Ephesus and Demetrius of Phalerum in Fontanelle's Dialogues of the Dead -- with the omission of an explicit reference to the possibility of shipwreck. (The context is that Herostratus, destroyer of the temple of Ephesus, is arguing for an equal claim to fame with Demetrius, who had erected 360 statues in Athens, because the destructive work of the passions is a prerequisite for clearing the ground in order for new human achievement to be possible.) (29-30)

Blumenberg proceeds to another dialogue from Fontanelle's work in which shipwreck is thematized -- the argument between Margaret of Austria and Hadrian about whose death was better. In the case of Margaret, this was an imagined death by shipwreck rather than her actual one. Margaret sees her reckoning with this death, expressed in a poem, as superior because it was not planned ahead of time. Hadrian sees his as superior because his calm acceptance, also expressed in poetry, achieves the classical ideal. Hadrian poses the question whether her poem was not actually composed after her brush with shipwreck, to which Margaret counterposes the question whether his poem was not actually composed well before his death. The dialogue is resolved on the acceptance of moderation even in virtue. Blumenberg finds irony both in the ultimately unacknowledged fact that the poetic ideal was separated from actualization in both cases, and in the exaggerated metaphysical distance of the interlocutors from the human predicament in that they are dead and thus beyond any threat of disaster. (30-32)

A shipwreck metaphor also comes up in Fontenelle's pioneering Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, which imagines the Earth as it would be seen through the higher rationality of an intelligent alien. The work's protagonist, the marquise, boldly wishes for a shipwreck of such aliens on the Earth so she could see what they look like. She has to be warned, none too successfully, that the aliens could reverse the role of spectator and specimen, since they could just as well catch her like a fish as be shipwrecked. (32-33)

Voltaire and his circle focus on the passions as the indispensable moving force in human existence. Candide, for instance, may retreat to his garden in the end. But he does not start with renunciation like Lucretius' spectator. Rather, it is the actual experience of the arbitrariness of shipwreck which extinguishes his passion for believing that things could be better. In the Marquise de Chatelet's "On Happiness," reflection is portrayed as a force that delays action until it is too late to achieve happiness. She counsels that time is short, and feeling and thinking must not be delayed by too much careful preparation -- like a ship always in port being caulked rather than being made use of while it could. For Voltaire, moreover, even the role of spectator with shipwreck is seen as the result of a passion -- curiosity -- rather than, as Lucretius would have it, as an opportunity to dispassionately comprehend one's own security. And he believes that animals share the passion of curiosity. (34-36+)

Voltaire describes himself in his letters as shipwrecked when he hastily escapes from the Prussian king. Compares his feeling of security to that of passengers who are saved from a shipwreck, and look back at their experience from a safe harbor -- but then goes on to express doubt that there is a safe harbor in the world. (37)

Voltaire's Micromegas describes a shipwreck caused by curious alien giants examining what, to them, are tiny vessels -- so small that they are unable to perceive the men in them at all. Through this story, Voltaire hopes to illustrate triviality of human history. Here Blumenberg says that man is removed from the possibility of even being a spectator, as in Fontanelle's story, of more advanced beings , and is only an object -- but in fact it seems he is not even that! (37-38)

Voltaire takes on Lucretius' account of the spectator again in his article "Curiosity" for the Encyclopedia. He shows his revulsion with an analogy to an angel who would use his observation of the sufferings of the damned as an occasion to reflect on his his own imperviousness to suffering; this angel, according to Voltaire, would be indistinguishable from a devil. And he goes on to say that it is his experience and that of others that curiosity rather than taking pleasure in safety drives people to gawk at a shipwreck. (38-39)

Abbe Galiani contradicts Voltaire in a letter to Madame d'Epinay. Curiosity only exists where there is security, he contends, otherwise men would be occupied with his own immediate concerns. Moreover, animals do not share the ability to be curious, because they lack the capacity of detachment from what is strange and frightening, and the sense of security it brings. Galiani forgoes the shipwreck metaphor altogether in his argument, preferring the to illustrate his point with the image of a theater. There, spectator are able to take interest in the drama because they are sheltered and secure. Blumenberg notes that the dangers of the spectacle to which the audience devotes its interest are not even real, so that in preferring this metaphor to that of the shipwreck Galiani aestheticizes what was originally a moral relationship. In suppressing the shipwreck metaphor in this case, Blumenberg also sees an abandonment of the classical implication of precarious human existence in the face of nature. Instead, in his Dialogues sur la commerce des bles, Galiani portrays the relationship between man and nature as a somewhat equal struggle between to indefinite powers. And so seafaring and shipwreck metaphors are made available for use to illustrate the proper prudence of administration informed by the best available evidence. (39-41)

Blumenberg notes that the first appearance of the shipwreck with spectator theme in German comes in Ewald's short poem Der Sturm from 1755. The poem has an intense, present tense description of a storm and shipwreck, with a an abrupt transition to a past tense coda when the topic switches to the "I" which is revealed to have been only a spectator. (41-42)

Blumenberg takes this as an opportunity to revisit Horace's employment of the shipwreck and spectator theme. Here the spectator's interest is justified by an attempt to warn the battered ship to return to port -- the involvement is moral rather than aesthetic. This leads to a reflection on the relative degree of involvement of Cicero's narrator and the narrator of the Greek poet Alcaeus' shipwreck story (which Cicero had used as his model). Although Alcaeus' narrator's experiences the storm aboard the boat, his involvement is in a way both more passive, because it is the perspective of confused immediacy, and more detached, since it is the view of an even that has passed. The orientation of Cicero's narrator, on the other hand, is toward the future, and an attempt to prevent the imminent peril to the ship. In this sense, the view from the Alcaeus' surviving passenger is more that of a spectator, than is the view of Cicero's actual spectator. (42-43)

And from here, we have a remarkably stream-of-consciousness set of transitions. Blumenberg notes that Ewald's poem was written in 1755, the year of the Lisbon earthquake which shattered Leibnizean metaphysical optimism. Then he notes that Herder, in turn, used the shipwreck metaphor in 1792 to describe the relationship between the German public and the French Revolution. He then turns to trace the succession of Herder's use of seafaring references, starting back in 1769. In that year, when he sailed from Riga to visit the Enlightenment thinkers in France, he uses sea exploration as a metaphor for philosophical discovery. On the return voyage the next year, Herder was shipwrecked on the Dutch coast; though it does not seem that Herder himself made this into a metaphor of anything, Blumenberg notes the irony of the sea intransigently asserting its power in light of the previous year's remarks. By 1774, Herder is using the shipwreck metaphor to express the current situation of philosophy in his Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind. In his Letters for the Advancement of Humanity of 1792, he turns this metaphor, and the metaphor of the theater, to the task of accounting for the reception of the French Revolution in Germany. He sees the relationship between the events in France and the German public as a comfortably distant one (secured by the difference of language) akin to that between spectators and actors, or a spectator and a shipwreck. Blumenberg notes that the shipwreck metaphor is deployed with an unusual destabilizing twist, however: Herder suggests that a demon toss the spectator into the sea. Also, as with Galiani, Blumenberg notes that the shipwreck is presented as the superficial level of a more profound metaphor of theatrics. (43-46)

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 13, "The War of Independence"

2010-04-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

The tragedy of Toussaint: he would not face up to the need for a decisive break from France, because San Domingo needed association with France in order to develop, and he believed that black freedom was impossible to reverse in any case.

Napoleon instructed his commander, LeClerc to accommodate Toussaint and the black leaders until he got his army established. Then the black leaders were to be arrested, the black officers dismissed, and the black populace disarmed so that "special laws" -- meaning, according to James, slavery -- could be imposed. The plan required a lot of naivete on the part of the black revolutionary leaders, but excepting Toussaint, Dessalines, and a few others that expectation was well justified.

After Toussaint prevented Christophe from handing over Le Cap to the French, the battle for the town began on February 4th, 1802. The black army retreated, burning Le Cap behind them -- the beginning of a scorched earth policy that the island's defenders would pursue with vigor throughout the war.

Toussaint made little headway raising the mass of laborers, who were disillusion by his policies of accommodation with the white planters. Moreover, the officer's of the San Domingo army themselves vacillated in the face of French demands for submission, and several key positions, including the capital Port-Republicain, were surrendered without a fight.

In the West, Dessalines waged a campaign that combined audacious raids behind French lines with a fighting retreat, and also initiated his policy of massacring all the whites who fell in his hands.

The French tried to use Toussaint's sons to persuade him to give up, but to no avail.

Toussaint's strategy: use his smaller forces delay and harass the French until the rainy season without getting drawn into a decisive battle (with the wet weather would come disease that would deplete the French).

From mid-February, LeClerc's forces marched on Gonaives by converging routes. Christophe and Toussaint fought and orderly fighting retreat in the east, while Maurepas in the northwest and Dessalines in the south halted the French entirely. Just as the black masses were stirring to revolt in the north, however, Maurepas' was left exposed by the unexpected surrender of several of his subordinates who had been alienated by Toussaint's policy of destructive defense. Maurepas, too, submitted to preserve his position as a military leader. The French immediately put him to work leading the suppression of the revolt, with the added aim of undermining his credibility among the black masses.

As LeClerc prepared another offensive, this time aiming to converge on Verrettes, Toussaint struck out into the north to rally the laborers to revolt. He left Dessalines to hold the key fortress of Crete-a-Pierrot. The French suffered thousands of casualties attempting to seize the fort. Meanwhile, the political divide between the sides widened. Dessalines rallied his defenders behind a new cause: independence. French retaliation for Dessalines' massacres increasingly turned the black population in favor of revolt. Toussaint returned south to relieve the siege, but the black defenders broke out before he arrived.

With Crete-a-Pierrot subdued, LeClerc felt able to begin a crackdown on the mulattoes by deporting Rigaud. But Toussaint, hoping to secure a truce, refrained from seeking an alliance with the mulattoes. In the meantime, LeClerc received reinforcements and resumed the offensive against the rebel forces, but all of the French attacks were repulsed.

Toussaint still hoped for a favorable peace with the French, and began secret negotiations with LeClerc through Cristophe, one of his generals. Christophe's decision to surrender his forces -- accepting French guarantees to maintain black officers in their positions -- was a blow to the revolution and the negotiations. Toussaint persisted, however, and came to terms with LeClerc in late April on surrender with the same essential guarantee.

Though all Toussaint's commanders submitted to the deal, this was the key event that made Dessalines lose confidence in him. Dessalines began planning to lead a fight for independence himself. First, by suggesting that Toussaint was conspiring against the French, he goaded LeClerc into arresting and deporting him. This disposed of the only leader who could halt the momentum for Independence once fighting renewed.

In the wake of Toussaint's arrest, black laborers rebelled in some areas of the north, and these scattered rebellions spread and persisted thereafter. The black military leaders did not join the rebellions, and helped to contain them, but in the meantime the white French army was wasting away from disease. In late July, blacks in San Domingo received word that slavery had been reimposed in Guadeloupe, and the rebellions intensified, but the black generals still remained loyal to the French.

Finally, in October, 1802, first Petion, and then Clairveaux, Dessalines and Christophe, joined the rebellion with their troops. LeClrerc died at the beginning of November and was succeeded in French command by Rochambeau, who sought a more aggressive policy. He sought permission to restore slavery (not realizing that Napoleon had already authorized it to LeClerc). Once he received reinforcements, he went on the offensive and also started massacres of the mulattoes. This policy incited the mulatto-dominated South province to revolt. Meanwhile, Dessalines and Petion were bringing the local rebels under their control, training and imposing army discipline on them.

Toussaint died in a French prison in April, 1803.

In 1803, war had resumed in Europe. This was a turning point for the revolution, since there were no further reinforcements from the French, and the national army could buy all the arms it needed from the British. In November, the national army attacked Le Cap. The French fought off the attack. The battle convinced Rochambeau that the French position was too precarious to sustain, however, and he evacuated Le Cap.

On December 31st, the national leaders issued a declaration of Haitian independence. The following October, Dessalines declared himself emperor.

In early 1805, partly at the instigation of the British (who sought to stifle French trade), all the remaining whites in the country were massacred. In consequence, Haiti was isolated from the rest of the world for generations, and its development was stifled.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 12, "The Bourgeoisie Prepares to Restore Slavery"

2010-04-11T15:24:00.000-07:00

Napoleon was determined to subdue San Domingo and restore slavery. His motive was not prejudice (although he had plenty of that) or an eagerness for colonies but profit for his bourgeois supporters. Once his plans to use Russia to strike at British India were foiled, he had no reason to hesitate any longer. Fully aware of the formidable foe he faced, he launched the largest French overseas expedition in history -- 20,000 men -- on 21 November, 1801.

Toussaint continued his policy of appeasing whites, hoping this would convince Napoleon not to invade. He was not able to come to terms with the fact that the die had been cast, that the decision to attack had already been made. Revolutionary blacks became increasingly discontented with Toussaint's policy, and they revolted in the North province in late September. Toussaint harshly suppressed the revolt, and had Moise, whom he suspected of anti-white revolutionary tendencies, executed as well. Toussaint's approach disoriented the black masses who were essential to defending the island while also failing to overawe the white who could disable the island's defense from within.

James contends that if if Toussaint had communicated the prospect of an invasion and the aim of his policies in forestalling it more openly, he could have retained the support of the black laborers. He draws a parallel to Robespierre, who also crushed his left-wing supporters and destroyed his own defense in doing so. But, according to James, Robespierre could only be expected to do this because he was, after all, bourgeois, while there was no difference in political outlook between Toussaint and the masses. Their difference, he contends, was only in the view of how to manage the issue of race in order to secure the interests of the laborers. Accommodation had to be made to the understandable anti-white feelings of the black masses, according to James, in order to sustain their support for revolution -- and there was little to be lost, since the whites within and without could not be won over by further accommodation, anyway.

This seems right as a prescription for policy, but I have to think that James has misapprehended his man here. It strikes me that there was an ideological gap between Toussaint and the masses. In the end, it was not just a vain hope for appeasement that drove Toussaint's policy, but his essentially bourgeois inclinations. He saw promoting and protecting of the rights of property -- albeit without slavery -- as a positive good. And in the end, the black masses were not going to be content as mere laborers.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 11, "The Black Consul"

2010-04-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

Can we just sum this up by stating that Toussaint was bourgeois in both policy and mores?

Toussaint put great stock in the bourgeois virtues of work, education, and sociability. He strove to make the colony productive and to develop the human capital of its people. His methods were authoritarian rather than liberal: for instance, he compelled the black laborers to stay on the estates, while guaranteeing them a share of the produce.

Besides serving the end of economic development, his protection of propertied interests was also designed to forestall conflict with metropolitan France. This was also true of the favor he showed to whites. The black masses remained suspicious of the whites, however, and James argues that Toussaint's signal failure was neglecting to explain his approach to them. I will allow myself to doubt that the masses would have been swayed. In any case, this division between Toussaint's policy and popular attitudes became his key political vulnerability.

Toussaint's ruled as a dictator. He took advice from many people, but made all decisions himself. This arrangement was codified in the constitution he promulgated for the colony. This constitution opened up a new breach with France, since it gave no place to metropolitan France in the rule of the colony at all. Napoleon, meanwhile, refused to acknowledge Toussaint's position as ruler of San Domingo at all -- avoiding an open beach as yet, but refusing to grant legitimacy as well.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 10, "Toussaint Seizes the Power"

2010-04-02T16:15:00.000-07:00

This is a disappointing chapter. James fails to satisfy me on a significant point, the nature of the conflict between the the mulatto-ruled South and the the North ruled by Toussaint. James makes this out to hang upon the personal conflict between Rigaud, who was unfailingly loyal to France, and Toussaint, who was sought to unify the island under his own control in preparation for independence. James even suggests that if Beauvais had been allowed to succeed Rigaud -- a succession which was stymied by the new French governor, Roume, in order to sow division -- unification could have taken place without conflict. But the vigor of the Southern defence belies any such expectation. I think we must understand this level of commitment as rooted in social and economic differences which could hardly have failed to produce an insurrection, no matter how peaceful the initial unification had been.

In any case, here are the main narrative points. (1) Toussaint cut a trade deal with the British. Given the British control of the seas, he could hardly have done otherwise, whatever his intentions towards France. (2) Toussaint conquered the South and dealt unusually harshly with the defeated mulattoes. (3) Toussaint then Spanish San Domingo to bring the entire island under his rule. (4) Toussaint kept the purpose of these actions largely to himself and failed to engage the people on the conflict with France for which he was preparing them.

My ten most influential books

2010-03-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

I saw that Matt Yglesias had listed the ten books that had influenced his thinking the most, and I wanted to try the same thing.

This leaves out something that was really important for me in my youth: the political and cultural periodicals such as the Washington Monthly, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Atlantic Monthly. I started reading most of these in high school, some thirty years ago, and that reading was the key influence in shaping many of my concrete political views.

Most of these books are important because they became a constant touchpoint of reflection. In general, they changed and challenged the frame through which I looked at things more than they changed my mind on any specific thing.

Alisdair Macintyre, After Virtue. Macintyre was such a revelation for me because he demonstrated the necessity of thinking about the social and institutional contexts of ethics, but in the long run the work was most influential for the way I think about art and aesthetics.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. Granted that the the historical divisions Foucault draws are a little too neat and crisp (an issue I was aware of even when I first read the book in college), the pointed questions he raises about knowledge, power, and institutions still shape the way that I think about policy questions.
Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land. This is really cheating, since I had long before read the original articles in the Atlantic which grew into this book. In any case, it really did drive home to me the significance for social policy of the stickiness of social and cultural influences across generations.
Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity. Despite the title, it is not religion which made this book important to me, but it's explanation of the ways that community matters for ethics.
Johns Lachs, Intermediate Man. This short, overlooked work has kept me thinking about the costs of mediated action in modern society ever since I read it in college.
Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters. In addition to how it helped to form my appreciation of the central place of race and civil rights in recent American history, this book also gave me plenty else to chew on. Branch's mordant illustrations of journalists' captivity to conservative spin on civil rights informed my understanding of media long before there were blogs.
Christoper Alexander, et al, The Oregon Experiment. This fortuitously discovered book first introduced me to Alexander's work, which has been the key influence in my thinking about architecture and urban design. The key insights for me are an anthropological approach to assessing the success of buildings and an incrementalist approach to design.
Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I only read this in the last year, but it has been a huge influence in how I think about the how to deal with imperfect progressive party and interest group institutions over the last year.
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Although I never read the whole book until a year ago, I had read bits and pieces of it for two decades before that. The answers Blumenberg gives about the nature of modernity actually matter less for my development than his explicit methodological reliance on philosophical anthropology. This work was the entry way for me to learning something about the German tradition in this field, and if anything the introduction by Robert Wallace was nearly as influential as Blumenberg's text.
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River. I read this for the first time when I was just fifteen, after seeing a review in Time, and something of its vision and its anger has haunted me since.
Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America. Sowell's well-supported argument for the persistence of social and cultural disparities across generation has shaped my support for social policies to reduce inequality (although Sowell inexplicably fails to draw this natural conclusion to his argument).

All right, so my list goes to eleven. Cue the Spinal tap jokes.

Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Chapter 1, "Seafaring as a Transgression of Boundaries", and 2, "What the Shipwrecked Person is Left with"

2010-03-14T21:28:00.000-07:00

Two presuppositions of the ancient use of seafaring as a metaphor for life (8)

1. The seashore is a natural boundary of man's activity.

2. The sea lacks order; it is arbitrary and (in Christian terms) even evil.

Hesiod sees commerce and a desire for gain behind the crossing of this seemingly natural boundary, which opens such voyages to a critique based on alleged immoderation . (9)

Horace portrays shipwreck as a restoration of a natural order where the elements are separated, and man belongs only to the element of earth -- an order that has been upended by man's seafaring. (11-12)

The philosopher Aristippus is shipwrecked on Rhodes. He sees geometrical figures drawn in the sand, and realizes that he is close to civilization -- and he proceeds to go into town and earn his return cost by teaching. He proclaims the lesson of this is to possess no more than what can be saved from a shipwreck, because that cannot be touched by war or turmoil. (12)

Montaigne takes up this theme of what can be salvaged from shipwreck with his dictum "Certainly a man of understanding has lost nothing, if he has himself." According to Blumenberg, this is to be understood not as a refuge into interiority from external pressure, but as self-possession gained through self-examination. (14)

Montaigne's ethics through nautical metaphors: caution (don't stray far from port), awareness of bias towards subjectivity (like the optical illusion of the receding shore from a ship going to sea), steadiness (hold a steady course). (15)

Montaigne as spectator of political tumult. Avoids commitment to a cause as far as possible, because that would put him in danger. "One can almost feel how the skeptic approaches the the secure position of spectator, by raising higher and higher the conditions under which he would still be prepared to allow himself to go down, in what was then a thirty-year-old political situation." Takes pleasure in being a spectator to turmoil, although he feels compassion for those who suffer - compares it to watching a play. (16) (is it relief at being spared or the cathartic emotions of internalizing others suffering that create the pleasure?)

Montaigne does not use Lucretius' description of the shipwreck with a spectator to define his political situation. Blumenberg notes that he has already used it to support his thesis that nothing in nature is useless -- not even uselessness. Here being a spectator -- which amounts to a capacity to keep one's distance -- stands for uselessness, but this distance keeps the spectator alive. In particular, the ability to take malicious pleasure in being able to survive while others perish fosters the ability to stand apart -- and survive. This example is also part of a more general thesis argued by Montaigne: that human institutions require vices in order to work. (17)

Goethe's describes his predicament -- both generally and with regard to the reception of his theory of colors -- as the survivor -- in the latter case the sole survivor -- of a shipwreck. (18) For now this goes nowhere and we take up ...

Pascal's innovative twist on the seafaring as a metaphor for life -- "you are embarked." This dictum, which sets a condition for his wager about belief, excludes the cautious, skeptical path of staying in port recommended by Montaigne. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche follows this up with a further condition -- we have destroyed the land behind us as well, so there is nothing to be done but sail. Yet further, in Zarathustra, Nietzsche adopts the metaphor that not only are we already embarked, but already shipwrecked as well. (19)

Prince de Ligne -- an 18th century precursor to seeing metaphorical shipwreck as a primordial condition, at least of his experience. He claims to have always sought out the reefs, but always to have been saved by hanging on to a plank. (20)

Nietzsche on freely rearranging the debris of the shipwreck as a metaphor for intellectual liberation. (20)

Franz Overbeck on Nietzsche's endeavor as an existentially unavoidable sea voyage (21)

Nietzsche's metaphor for science -- the shipwrecked person finding dry land. Notable that the metaphor is not the spectator's relationship to land. The point is that science, like solid land to the shipwrecked, is a change, and even an unexpected one. Science provides a secure ground for further research -- something that had not been provided by man's thought throughout history. (21-22)

Nietzsche's use of voyages of Columbus and his discovery of a new world as an analogy with his philosophizing. (22)

Nietzsche on understanding Epicurus -- takes Epicurus' happiness to be that of the sufferer who has found serenity, like the seafarer who has come through the storm to find calm seas. Relationship of subject rather than (as with Lucretius) spectator to the storm-tossed ship. Nietzsche regarded the image of shipwreck with spectator as alien to Greek thinking, which Blumenberg calls a "profound insight." (22-23)

But is Nietzsche's insight true? Blumenberg brings up the anonymous Greek distich: "I have found the port. Farewell, Hope and Fortune!/ You have played enough with me. Now play with other men!" (Inveni portum. Spes et fourtuna valete!/ Sat me lusistis. Ludite nunc alios!) He considers its reception in both Casanova and in Alain Lesage's character Gil Blas di Santillana.
In both cases, he finds that the distich lends itself to leaving contemplation of the struggles of other with the game of fate-- the role of spectator -- out of the picture. (23-26)

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 9, "The Expulsion of the British"

2010-03-14T19:06:00.000-07:00

The British wanted out of their costly war in San Domingo, but they were still eager to cause France trouble and deny them the colony if possible. Maitland, their local commander, tried to entice Toussaint into declaring independence, promising that the British Navy would protect San Domingo from any French expeditionary force.

The Directory wanted to keep San Domingo for France, but with Sonthonax's deportation they suspected Toussaint of angling for independence. They sent Hedouville as the new governor to wrest control from Toussaint, and gave him a free hand to intrigue with the mulattoes under the unreliable Rigaud if necessary.

James portrays Toussaint's response as that of a well-informed and cautious statesman. He shows that Toussaint saw through the British offer, realizing that protection would last only as long as England's war with France. He negotiated the British departure from the West Province on favorable terms, and, fully understanding his position of strength, went on to extract full evacuation. James argues, moreover, that Toussaint understood the threat of intrigue with the mulattoes, and had done his best to forestall this by meeting and working with Rigaud. In the end, Hedouville won over Rigaud despite these efforts.

Hedouville forced a break with Toussaint over the latter's pardon of white planters who had fought for the British (and, not insignificantly, the black soldiers who had fought for them). Toussaint resigned rather than bringing on civil war. Hedouville moved aggressively to consolidate his power. He tried to impose limits on the liberty of black laborers and he began to replace black troops with white ones. Hedouville finally came to grief over dismissing one of Toussaint's old subordinates, Moise, from his command. Toussaint came out against Hedouville, and sent the troops under Dessalines to Le Cap to drive him out. Hedouville fled, but on his way out urged Rigaud to defy Toussaint's authority.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 8, "The White Slave-Owners Again"

2010-02-26T16:39:00.000-08:00

Toussaint wanted Laveaux out, though not out of hostility. Toussaint wanted to take over as commander-in-chief. He encouraged Laveaux to return to France as a representative of the colony in the Convention.

Laveaux was needed there anyway as a reliable voice against slavery. With the demise of Robespierre and the Jacobins in 1795, France got a new government more strictly responsive to propertied interests. The merchants and expatriate planters resumed agitation for bringing blacks back under subjection in the name of imposing order.

Sonthonax, who had returned as governor, was both a loyal republican and an ardent supporter of the blacks in San Domingo. His attempt to assert his prerogatives as governor put him into conflict with the mulatto oligarchy led by Rigaud in the South. Toussaint, appreciating that Rigaud remained faithful to the Republic, had advised Sonthonax to leave the situation alone while the colony was at war. But Sonthonax sent a commission anyway to put Rigaud's troops under central control and arrest suspected anti-republican plotters. The two whites among the commissioners sent by Sonthonax handled the situation badly, and ended up provoking a revolt and massacre. Sonthonax's subsequent attempts to reduce the territory under Rigaud's authority yielded only more resistance and led Rigaud to seek support from Toussaint.

The San Domingo colony prospered under Sonthonax's governorship. He was hostile to any reconciliation with the former slave owners - far more so than was Toussaint, who he made commander-in-chief.

17 August 1797 -- Toussaint forces Sonthonax out. This was a sudden turn, which puts in some doubt Toussaint's explanation that he had to move to forestall a longstanding Sonthonax project to massacre the whites of the colony and gain independence. James argues that both Sonthonax and Toussaint would have been well aware of the growing strength of the reactionary allies of the exiled planters in France, and would have come to see that securing the liberty for blacks depended on independence. For Toussaint, however, the safest route to independence was to temporize by making a sacrificial lamb of Sonthonax.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 7, "The Mulattoes Try and Fail"

2010-02-21T21:36:00.000-08:00

The mulatto minority resented the prominence of ex-slaves in republican San Domingo. The mulattoes sought leadership for themselves, and saw independence from France and its revolutionary government as a way to bring about their end. They would have been just as happy to see the return of slavery, as well.

The republican government of the island under Laveaux perceived that the ex-slaves were their most trustworthy allies, and Laveaux especially favored Toussaint. The ex-slaves generally reciprocated this faith in Laveaux and the republican government, and this was particularly true of the astute and well-informed Toussaint.

On March 20, 1796, the mulattoes under Valette staged a coup d'etat in Le Cap; Laveaux and other republican leaders were arrested. Toussaint was ready for the blow. He quickly had his agents raise the black laborers of the district against the coup, and sent a strong detachment from his army to back this up. The coup collapsed in short order, and Laveaux officially raised Toussaint to his second-in-command.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 6, "The Rise of Toussaint"

2010-02-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

The British invaders had ample supplies and cash. The republican forces lacked both, but they prevailed because they made up for this with motivation. The black ex-slaves who comprised the core of their army were fighting to preserve their freedom.

Character and approach of Toussaint -- personally reserved and taciturn, authoritative if not authoritarian, emphasis on direct personal intervention in battles and resolution of disputes and rebellions, merciful to defeated enemies. Became the de facto leader of San Domingo.

Toussaint's political priority was economic recovery. This required reconciliation with white planters and restoration of their estates when possible -- the planters had needed experience and expertise. It also required keeping laborers on the plantations -- the government restricted their movement, although it also imposed regulations on planters to ensure that they were paid.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 5, "And the Paris Masses Complete"

2010-02-17T19:23:00.000-08:00

The Legislative Assembly sent a combined army and National Guard expedition to San Domingo, along with right-wing Jacobin commissioners Sonthanax and Polverel, to enforce mulatto rights and suppress the slave revolt. But the army commander Desparbes conspired with local royalists instead of leading the army against the slaves, thus sparing the revolt while it was still weak.

In the meantime, the Girondin-led government in France went to war against Austria. The royalists conspired for a defeat by foreign monarchies, and the Girondins lacked the nerve to crack down on them, so a new popular revolution in August, 1792 deposed the monarchy, overthrew the Girondins, and created a new parliament, the National Convention. This body was far more representative of popular opinion that its predecessors, and thus more supportive of a thoroughgoing assault on privilege and slavery.

Sonthanax found the whites had already agreed to mulatto rights, and he aggressively brought mulattoes into the government. When news of the August revolution reached San Domingo, Sonthonax backed the local revolutionaries in suppressing the royalists and deporting Desparbes. After this respite, the troops under their new commander Laveaux set about subduing the slaves. War with Spain and England, however, meant he had to be called back on the verge of success to defend the coast.

Galbaud, a new governor sent from France, conspired with the whites who were unhappy with mulatto influence to attempt an overthrow of the revolutionary government. Sonthanax called in and armed the slaves around Le Cap for support, and suppressed the rebellion. Thousands of whites fled, and white domination in San Domingo was broken for good.

Sonthanax was unable to retain the liberated slaves to protect Le Cap, however -- they joined the rebel slaves in the hills. Meanwhile, many of the remaining slaves in the north abandoned their plantations, while the remaining white royalists went over to the Spanish. Lacking any other source of support, Sonthanax declared abolition on August 29, 1793.

The rebel slave leaders all allied themselves with the Spanish and monarchical counter-revolution. James argues, not altogether convincingly, that for Toussaint alone this was a tactical expedient, and his strategic aim of completely liberating the slaves remained unchanged. Toussaint's 1792 offer to Laveaux to come over to the French side in exchange for declaring the slaves free is supposed to be evidence for this tactical flexibility (125). But when Sonthonax did declare emancipation on August 29, 1793, Toussaint still did not switch sides (128-129). James makes out that he failed to do so because Sonthonax lacked the legal authority to emancipate the slaves (137), and shows that Toussaint did finally rally to the French cause when word of the National Convention's emancipation of the slaves reached the island. But this authority had been just as lacking in 1792 as it was in 1793, and in the meantime the British forces with whom Toussaint was allied were sweeping all before them and promising to reimpose slavery. The indifference of the other rebel leaders to liberation is also contradicted by Jean Francois's threat to use the promise of freedom to bolster his forces -- a threat which actually helped provoke Sonthanax's decree in the first place.

From 1793 into early 1794, Toussaint captured most of the northern part of the colony on behalf of the Spanish. A British expedition landed in the West province in September 1793. By the year's end, they had taken hold of all of the west and most of the south. In June, 1794, they captured Le Cap.

February 4th, 1794 -- Convention abolishes slavery in the colonies.

When the news of abolition reached San Domingo in June, 1794, Toussaint switched sides, routed the Spanish (and their rebel slaves allies), and pushed the British back to the West province.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 4, "The San Domingo Masses Begin"

2010-02-09T20:04:00.000-08:00

The slaves revolt, and for James the story is a didactic opportunity; again and again the events are made to illustrate sweeping statements about revolutions and mass movements.

The first sentence of the chapter, for instance, 85-86: "The slaves worked the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement." I suspect there was some intra-leftist dispute about the value of the Haitian revolution which James is scoring points on with this.

87: "The slaves on the Gallifet plantation were so well treated that 'happy as the Negroes of Gallifet' was a slave proverb. Yet by a phenomenon noticed in all revolutions it was they who led the way."

88, on the violence of the revolting slaves being ultimately more restrained than the violence of their masters: "And yet they were surprisingly moderate, then and afterwards, far more humane than their masters had been or would ever be to them. They did not maintain this vengeful spirit for long. The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased." (As far as immediately revolutionary violence is concerned, I think he has a sound point. But then the revolution becomes institutionalized and has its own prerogatives to defend ...)

89: "As usual the strength of the mass movement dragged in its wake the revolutionary sections of those classes nearest to it. Free blacks joined them... The Mulattoes hated the black slaves because they were slaves and because they were black. But when they actually saw the slaves taking action on such a grand scale, numbers of young Mulattoes from Le Cap and round about rushed to join the hitherto despised blacks and fight against the common enemy."

106, on the willingness of the leaders of the revolt to betray their followers back into slavery: "Political treachery is not a monopoly of the white race, and this abominable betrayal so soon after the insurrections shows that political leadership is a matter of program, strategy and tactics, and not the colour of those who lead it, their oneness of origin with their people, nor the services they have rendered."

22 August, 1791: the revolt begins. Organized under the leadership of the voodoo priest Boukman, slaves set fire to plantations throughout the North Cape and killed their masters. Le Cap remained in the colonists' control, but they made no sustained attempt to use their troops to regain control in the countryside.

Toussaint Breda joins the revolution about a month on, with the two sides at an impasse. James sketches his character and attributes, particularly his broad acquaintance with the world and its political and economic forces.

Main leaders: Jean Francois and Biassou. Both imposed tight discipline on their troops. Biassou was more impulsive and hotheaded, Jean Francois cool and deliberate. Toussaint joined Biassou's band as a doctor and close advisor.

Colonists' reaction was to kill slaves indiscriminately, whether involved with the revolt or not. This consolidated the allegiance of slaves to the revolt -- some 100,000 had joined the movement within a few weeks.

In early August, the mulattoes in the West province had also revolted. They were let militarily by Rigaud and Beauvais, both veterans of the American War of independence, and politically by Pinchinat.

Royalists and large whites joined forces with the mulattoes against the Patriots (white revolutionaries) of Port-au-Prince and defeated them in battle. Both the royalist leader de Jumecourt and the Patriot Caradeau offered full rights for mulatto support, but were refused. The mulattoes had the upper hand, and were able to secure an agreement for equal rights with the only major concession being the deportation of their maroons who had joined them.

Rioting in Port-au-Prince instigated by the small white leader Pralotto upended the ratification vote on November 21st. The mulattoes retreated from the city and again joined forces with their rich white and royalist allies, but now the mulatto leaders also brought in the slaves of the West Province on their side. After a sharp battle, with particularly heavy losses among the slaves, the small whites were beaten back into Port-au-Prince and besieged there. In the aftermath, the big whites in the west were eager to cement their alliance with the mulattoes, hoping to put an end to a revolution that they had tired of. But the mulattoes never shared this strategic objective, and still saw prospects for securing their position from the revolution. 110: "The royalists had hoped to use the Mulattos. Now they found that they had been used instead."

Alliances varied from region to region. In the south, after an agreement fell apart (thanks in part to the scheming of Caradeau), mulattoes gained the upper hand against whites, so the whites incited a slave revolt against mulatto rule. In the north, mulattoes were also stymied in their attempts to secure a concordat of rights, so many joined the slave revolt.

The Commisioners sent by the National Assembly arrived in late November and attempted to make peace. The slave leaders were willing to end the revolt and help subdue their followers back into slavery in exchange for the freedom and political rights for 400 leaders -- later reduced even to 60 by Toussaint -- but the colonists refused. This decided for Toussaint that compromise was impossible, that the only way forward was to fight for freedom for the entire slave population.

Late in 1791, the Legislative Assembly (note: elected later than the Constituent Assembly and more left in orientation) in France revived the debate over granting the Rights of Man to mulattoes. Two key factors: (1) increasing suspicion of the Patriot faction, which it had become clear was angling for independence in order to shed themselves of debts (this was especially significant for the maritime bourgeoisie) -- the mulattoes were seen as a loyal counterweight against them; (2) the already agreed pacts between whites and mulattoes in San Domingo.

Decree of April 4th granted full political rights to mulattoes, but changed nothing about the status of slaves. Heeding this, Toussaint starting training the core of a rebel slave army.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 3, " Parliament and Property"

2010-02-06T19:14:00.000-08:00

The big whites were initially the main supporters of the revolution, with the most intransigent leaders coming from the indebted planters, but small whites joined them as news of the events in France reached San Domingo. With white creoles unified in support of revolution, the colonial administration began cultivating ties to mulattoes, who were already facing attacks from the revolutionaries. In response, the small whites redoubled their repression based on a frankly eliminationist ideology. The large whites, alarmed by the the growing political dominance of of the small whites, began to edge away from the revolution and towards closer ties with mulattoes and the administration.

Three provincial assemblies in North, West, and South Provinces; Colonial assembly in St. Marc. Small whites dominated the St. Marc assembly; large planters from the densely populated north plain and Le Cap merchants increasingly withdrew from it and consolidated their power in the assembly of the North Province.

Meanwhile, in France, the Constituent Assembly stalled the issue of mulatto rights throughout 1789 and into 1790. Planters, the maritime bourgeoisie , and conservatives under their influence led by Barnave, resisted action. Even when the assembly issued a decree on the colonies on March 8th, they temporized on the issue of mulatto rights, declining to specify whether mulattoes otherwise qualified by age and property were to be included in the franchise. Abolition of slavery itself was not even on the table, although the fear of it was at the core of the tenacious resistance of the colonists and their advocates to the slightest concession on mulatto rights.

Events in San Domingo: suppression of St. Marc Assembly by royalist colonial administration, abortive mulatto revolt led by Oge, a mulatto who had risen to political prominence in France.

In the midst of growing popular agitation about the king and queen's attempts to flee Paris and the news of Oge's death, the assembly took up the debate on mulatto rights again. After several days' debate, a compromise resolution was agreed on May 15th to grant the franchise to those whose parents were both free and who were otherwise qualified. The appointed colonial commission and the bureaucrats refused to implement the decree, however. In July, the conservatives under Barnave used the flight of the king and queen to seize executive power. They suppressed a subsequent popular revolt in the streets (the massacre of the Champ de Mars) and successfully pushed a cowed assembly to rescind the decree on September 24th.

Amid the to-and-fro of the struggle in France, the struggle between the big and small whites intensified in San Domingo. Moreover, whether inspired by the fighting between the whites or the news about mulatto rights, the black slaves themselves were ready to revolt.

Although James constantly refers conflicts and programs back to class interests, he insists on the capacity of individual actors to shape political outcomes. See, for example, 75: "If the king and queen had been political abstractions and not flesh and blood, they would have lived and died as constitutional monarchs with immense power. But they looked upon all their concessions as merely temporary, and plotted ceaselessly with foreign powers for armed intervention."

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 2: "The Owners"

2010-01-31T21:27:00.000-08:00

Class analysis of the free population

big whites -- planters, merchants, and shipping agents

small whites -- overseers in the countryside; tradesmen, clerks, and the white rabble in the towns -- racial distinction was key to their status

bureaucrats -- representatives of the French crown and, effectively, the interests of the mainland bourgeoisie -- their arbitrary power was resented by the big whites, and so the bureaucrats increasingly aligned themselves with the small whites for support

mulattoes -- increasing prosperous and resented -- many were significant landowners -- the local government steadily increased restrictions on them in the years up to the revolution -- even extermination was mooted, but the mulatto population was too large and potentially powerful for that risk to be taken.

The French government imposed a mercantilist policy -- the Exclusive -- which compelled the San Domingo colony to carry out its trade through France. This provided an immensely lucrative stream of business for metropolitan French manufacturers and merchants, accounting for 11 million pounds out of France's total export trade of 17 million by 1789. (By comparison, Britain's total colonial exports were just 5 million pounds.) It was not just the bourgeoisie that benefited: employment from the trade also supported as many as 6 million Frenchmen. It limited the profits of the islanders, however, and this, together with their debts with French lenders, put them at odds with the mainland bourgeoisie.

British leaders feared the power that France stood to gain from all this wealth, particularly since the island's production was expanding so rapidly (nearly doubling in the six years up to 1789). The British policy for abolition of the slave trade gained its initial impetus from a desire to choke off further expansion of San Domingo's economy. British action included covert support for French abolition activists -- many of whom later became prominent in the revolutionary government.

The rapid growth of San Domingo's output also destabilized the colony, particularly because it required the integration of large numbers of newly imported native African slaves.

Only the big whites initially took part in the political events leading up to the revolution, with a segment seeking representation in the estates. James contends this was a minority, and that many planters (including the expatriates of the Club Massiac) preferred to avoid drawing attention to the colony. In any case, representation was secured when this faction of San Domingo nobility threw their support behind the third estate at the tennis court oath.

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Chapter 1, "The Property"

2010-01-31T16:44:00.000-08:00

The focus here is on the qualitative aspects of slavery in Domingo, and especially the exceptionally brutal treatment of slaves in the colony. The point of this brutality was not just to maximize the output of labor, but even more to forestall revolt by keeping the slaves in a state of terror.

Some notable divisions within slave society:

servant caste and laborers -- the servant caste had a greater tendency to identify with their masters, but it was also members of this group who had the experience and even education that would enable them to provide leadership
creole and African -- native African slaves were a greater threat to revolt
maroons -- slaves who ran away to the hills and lived by banditry

James frequently draws comparisons to or refers to more recent colonial enterprises (especially in the British Empire), either in the text or notes. At times this is confusing, as it's not clear if the reference is intended to fill in gaps in the sources by reference to an analogous situation, or is there simply to provide contemporary relevance. See the footnote on page 16, for example.

The usage of the term creole is somewhat obscure. It is used to refer to both blacks and whites(see pages 17 and 57, respectively, for examples). I gather that it is used to distinguish members of both groups who were natives of the San Domingo colony from newcomers or outsiders (Africans or metropolitan French).

Le Jeune case in 1788 -- a planter killed four of his slaves and tortured two others in pursuit of an imagined poisoning conspiracy. His other slaves brought charges, but these were ultimately dismissed. Demonstrated that, despite the restrictions on the treatment of slaves that existed in law, the slaveowners in fact had total impunity.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 9, "The Elusive Optimal Mix of Exit and Voice"

2009-12-10T21:31:00.000-08:00

In general, organizations do not respond equally well to voice and exit. This is not a problem, as long as an organization is responsive to some form of pressure to which it likely to be subjected. The pathological cases -- where exit is available but not responded to, or when voice is exercised but still nugatory -- call for reform, both by introducing institutional changes to make organizations more responsive to existing forms of pressure, and by persuading members and customers to try the alternative form of pressure.

Hirschman demurs from offering an optimal mix of exit and voice. He thinks that a stable, optimal mix is impossible. The effectiveness of any given recuperative mechanism can decay (just as organizations themselves do). Moreover, recuperation methods suffer from a feedback loop that makes whichever method is primary in a given context more dominant over time and makes the other increasingly neglected and even underestimated.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 8, "Exit and Voice in American Ideology and Practice"

2009-12-06T21:36:00.000-08:00

Central place of exit in American history and self-conception: immigration (exit from former land), the frontier (exit from settled part of America), individual social mobility (exit from lower status groups, even in location).

Emerging black political movements have departed from individual mobility as the ideal -- seen as weakening the ability of the group to advance by depriving it of talented advocates.

Short discussion about why option of exit from the country or from its government seems so stunted despite its otherwise central role. At first cut this boils down to positing high entry costs of immigration. Not very compelling -- most Americans are not immigrants, even if their ancestors were. Then more discussion of peculiar factors that may suppress exit from government positions. the key suggestion is that one's role in government could be seen as especially important and consequential because the country is so powerful, and the consequences of it going astray absent one's influence could be so dire.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 7, "A Theory of Loyalty"

2009-11-20T21:14:00.000-08:00

Question: under what conditions can exit and voice coexist? That is, when will voice still be used even when exit is available?

Answer: when individuals are (1) willing to trade off the certainty of exit for an uncertain prospect of recuperation of the product and (2) confident of their ability to influence the defective firm or institution.

Loyalty -- the attachment to the institution -- comes into play in the first case, but in fact both factors reinforce one another. People who care about an institution will tend to put themselves into a position where they can influence it, and people with influence will feel like they have more at stake.

Loyalty isn't an absolute barrier to exit. It is similar in its effect to a significant transaction cost.

Loyalty is most useful when (1) the use of voice is not straightforward but will require ingenuity and creativity (2) when the deteriorating product has close substitutes. The second case is paradoxical -- it seems irrational not exit when close substitutes are available -- but firms in this condition would have no chance to recuperate were it not for loyalty. Since products, institutions, and social groups are typically unevenly distributed on a scale of quality and prestige, with greater density on the lower end, the second case also means that loyalty is more useful at the lower end of the scale.

In using voice, the loyalist's most effective tool is the threat of exit. So we have the following seeming paradox: ease of exit makes voice less likely, but possibility of exit makes voice more effective. The conclusion which can be drawn from this is that voice will be most likely to be both used and effective when exit is possible but not too easy.

Notes on model of loyalist behavior:

voice increases with deterioration of quality, and curve bends up at points where there would be exit without loyalty and where there is threat of exit with loyalty
once loyal customers exit, they will not return until at least the quality associated with exit without loyalty is restored; the demand curve for exit is separate from the demand curve for return

Leaders of organizations and firms want to reduce both exit and voice. Will use high entry fees and high penalties for exit to make exit more difficult and to promote unconscious loyalist behavior. However, high entry cost induced loyalist behavior will ten to suppress the initial use of exit, but to make it more vigorous once it has started. If the cost of exit is high as well, however, the loss of threat of exit will make voice less effective. On the other hand, organizations where exit is difficult or impossible but entry cost is automatic (e.g., family, country) may actually sustain the most vigorous use of voice because members will see it as their due.

A special case of loyalty among influential members of organizations is brought into play under the conditions that (1) their departure would result in a further decline in quality and (2) they would continue to care about the quality even after exit. The first condition presumes that the departure of influential members has the opposite effect of the exit of market makers in monopoly or monopolistic competition; this is possible because the members play a part in the production of the good as well as its consumption. The second condition is rational under the assumption that full exit is impossible, which is the case for public goods. (Examples: Public schools, political parties, government administrations)

In such cases, members may be even less likely to depart as an organization gets worse, because they feel more strongly that is their responsibility to stick around to prevent things from getting yet worse. (With tongue only halfway in cheek, Hirschman uses the term spinelessness for this behavior). On the other hand, a member who does decide to exit under these conditions is more likely to use their exit as a tool of protest that will initiate continued use of voice from outside of the organization. Hirschman laments, however, that this use of exit by disgruntled public officials has fallen into disuse, replaced by officials treating their exit as a private matter -- one thinks of the stock "spending more time with my family" excuse.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 10, "The Fall of Rome"

2009-11-08T18:16:00.001-08:00

Heather begins by distinguishing local from central Romanness. Central Romanness -- a central court, bureaucracy, and system of law that responded to the interests of the landowning class, and a professional army to protect this order -- died in the 470s. With its demise the great centripetal force drawing the peoples of the west to Roman cultural identity disappeared. But local Romanness -- the cultural and ideological attachment to being Roman -- was slow a-dying. For more than a century after the end of the empire in the West, there was a significant section of elite population who were culturally and even legally Roman.

Heather takes a synoptic view of the three stages of the fall of central Romanness -- 1) the invasions of the late 4th and early 5th centuries; (2) progressively more debilitating carving out of domains within the empire by barbarian groups in the first three-quarters of the 5th century; (3) the final seizure of fully independent kingdoms by the barbarians when the empire was no longer able to stand up to them. He argues that the Huns drove the initial invasions, that their presence helped prevent further invasions in the 5th century and helped the Romans to control the previous invaders, and that the Hunnic collapse threw the balance of power decisively in favor of the barbarians.

The end of the Roman state did take away the incentive for local elites to maintain classical literary education, local civic life, and the other aspects of local Romanness. Military service rather than Romanness became the path to getting ahead.

Although Heather's rejects Gibbons' thesis that internal factors alone were the cause of Rome's fall -- pointing to the survival of the Eastern Empire as a decisive refutation -- he does acknowledge that the military, economic, and political limits of The Roman Empire interacted in decisive ways with the external invaders who brought down the Empire. Militarily, the Romans ability to contain the barbarians was limited because the Sasanian front required a quarter of the Empire's armed force. This military force could not simply be further expanded because there was no way to generate more revenue -- agricultural production was already at its maximum. Politically, the empire was brittle in the face of barbarian invasion because local landowning elites -- the bulwark of imperial support -- had to swing their support behind any new power in their region to retain their property. Moreover, the Empire was beset by demands from a vast breadth of local elites, and to satisfy these demands it had to resort divided imperial rule. It was never possible to really settle the division of power or the management of succession, however, so this dual system was subject to prolonged bouts of instability during which the barbarians were able to press their advantage.

The external factor in the fall of Rome -- the powerful groups of invading barbarians -- depended on integration of Germanic tribes into larger coalitions. This process was driven by fear and opportunity: fear of the power of the Roman state against isolated opponents and the opportunity to seize enormous wealth if sufficient force could be mustered. These factors had actually been at play (along with the increasing wealth of Germania itself) in consolidating Germanic political units for centuries before the invasions.

A couple of notes on the text: (1) There is a fair bit of repetition of ideas and even phrases in the last three chapters -- it could have done with more editing polish. (2) Throughout the work, the maps fail to provide enough detail. There are many significant features referred to in the text (example: the passes over the Haemus mountains) which cannot be identified in the maps.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 9, "End of Empire"

2009-11-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

Heather starts by batting down suggestions of neglect by the Eastern Empire. He argues -- look at those Sasanians over there! and those Huns! -- that Constantinople had a full ledger already, and did well to spare what they could when they could for the West.

That done, Heather recounts the East's final attempt to shore up the West, starting with the installation of a new emperor on the Western throne. (Sidonius is still the main source for events in the West in this period.) The Western general Ricimer had fallen out with his original partner Majorian and then found no support forthcoming for his hand-picked replacement, Severus, so he had to settle with the the Eastern emperor Leo. As a result, the well-connected Eastern general Anthemius was promoted to the purple.

The first order of business was taking out the Vandals in North Africa. Majorian had already given this a go in 461, but the Vandal king Geiseric had destroyed his fleet in Spain. In 468, the combined Empire put together another army and fleet for a landing near Carthage, but the Vandals caught the fleet in an unfavorable wind and defeated it with the use of fire ships.

With the failure of the expedition, the Western Empire had run out of options. There weren't enough resources left to contain the barbarians in Western Europe. The Visigoths seized most of Spain and Southern Gaul, the Franks occupied northern Gaul, and the Burgundians and other tribes picked up smaller slices.

Heather examines the process of collapse though two examples -- one, Noricum, at the periphery, and the other, Gaul, in the core of the empire. In Noricum, the archaeological and literary evidence (the latter coming from the Life of Saint Severinus) shows that for several decades before the final collapse there had been a withering away of the army garrisons, and the abandonment of scattered estates for walled Roman refuge towns. Over time, the refuge towns consolidated and moved further away from the river frontier as security deteriorated.

In Gaul, literary evidence (from the letters of Sidonius, in particular) shows that the conquering Visigothic and Burgundian kings sought and often got support from the Roman landowning elites. The new barbarian rulers needed the Roman landowners to maintain the estates (and possibly provide taxes) and they needed skilled bureaucrats from the landowning class to administer their states. In return, the kings were willing to let cooperative Romans keep at least some of their land.

In Italy, Ricimer fell out with and deposed Anthemius, setting off a further round of musical chairs with the imperial throne. In the meantime, the mostly barbarian Roman army of Italy was getting restive over not getting paid; Odovacar, a general of Sciri birth, took matters into his own hands by deposing the last emperor and distributing land to the soldiers in lieu of pay. (I gather from the notes that Heather's main source on these events is Procopius.)

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 8: "The Fall of the Hunnic Empire"

2009-11-01T20:48:00.000-08:00

The main source describing the demise of the Hunnic Empire is (the freagmentary remainder of) Jordanes' Getica. Jordanes, a Byzantine writing in the mid 6th century, claimed to have drawn his narrative from the Goth Cassiodorus' history from earlier in the century. This is likely true, but it is the source of a main concern in using evidence from the Getica: it is too centered on the Amal-led Goths (who were later Ostrogoths) and biased in favor of the ruling dynasty of those Goths. Heather concludes from reading between the lines of the Getica and pulling in other fragmentary evidence that the Huns suffered a slow bleed of subject peoples from the time of Attila's death, with peoples asserting their independence as they settled on internal leadership. The Gepids seem to have been the earliest to break away (and they confirmed their independence with victory at the battle of Nedao); the Amal-led Goths apparently didn't secede until Valamer had attained internal supremacy in a series of battles. As the Huns lost tribute and military manpower from more and more subject peoples, their position deteriorated to the point where they fled the Hungarian plain altogether for refuge in the Eastern Empire south of the Danube.

Heather argues that the Hunnic coalition was unstable from the beginning. The subject peoples were enrolled in the Hunnic Empire against their will and often treated harshly, but administered largely though their own native leadership. The Huns depended on intimidation and the distribution of the tribute from predation on the Roman Empire to keep the subject rulers in line. The Huns seem to have run into the limit of their ability to extract money from the Romans, however, and the defeat of successive invasions diminished perception of their power and probably reduced their revenue as well. This left the Attila's sons without the wherewithal to keep their vast empire intact.

Heather points out three significant consequences of the Hunnic collapse for the Roman Empire. First, it complicated the situation on the Danube frontier. The Romans now had to manage many frequently conflicting German tribes. Both the victors, who could be strong enough to exact tribute, and the losers, who often invaded or sought refuge in the Roman Empire, created challenges for Roman policy.

Second, the end of the Hunnic threat put Aetius in a precarious position. Power brokers in Roman politics judged that they could now do without his generalship. In fact, the emperor Valentinian assassinated Aetius in 454, only to be struck down in turn by co-conspirator Petronius Maximus the next year. (Petronius lasted for even less time.)

Third, the Huns could no longer be used as a mercenary counterweight to the barbarian groups already established within the Empire. Since the Western Empire itself no longer had the resources to contain them, either, barbarian groups had to be bargained with. From now on, they would play a leading role in the politics of the empire and the imperial succession. Thus Avitus, with the backing of the Visigoths, succeeded Petronius.

Here Heather has some fun taking apart the propaganda of Avitus' son-in-law Sidonius. Sidonius did his best to convince the Romans in Italy that Avitus was in control of the Visigoths rather than the other way around, and that the Visigoths were fine fellows anyway. The senators weren't buying, however, and Avitus was soon deposed by the Italian generals Majorian and Ricimer. From this, Heather draws the further conclusion that there were now too many factions to satisfy in the Western Empire: with the barbarians directly involved, no stable regime could be established

Peter Heather, The Fall fo the Roman Empire: Chapter 7, "Attila the Hun"

2009-10-18T17:19:00.000-07:00

Heather starts out with the Huns' attacks under the leadership of Attila and his (soon-to-be-traduced) brother Bleda in 441. The big shock was the Huns' mastery of siege warfare -- unlike earlier barbarians, they were able to overcome Roman fortifications. The origin of this skill, like most else about the Huns, remains obscure -- our best source, Priscus, survives only in chronologically scrambled fragments from a topical tenth century digest, so even the narrative of the invasion must be reconstructed from other sources.

The main source for the chronology of the Hunnic invasion is the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes. Heather's discussion of the criticism of Theophanes lacks coherence, however. According to Heather, Theophanes says that there were two invasions of the Balkans after 441-442, in 443 and 447. But then Heather says that Maenchen-Helfen's work shows that Theophanes put all of the doings of the Huns in the 440s into an entry for the years 449-450. It's not clear to me what to even make of this criticism. Has it been previously misunderstood what years Theophanes was talking about? Moreover, on the basis of the criticism, Heather claims that we are able to deduce that there was only one invasion -- the one in 447 -- without it at all being clear how he arrives at this conclusion.

In any case, Attila's Huns defeated two Roman armies in 447, and exacted an onerous peace from the Eastern Empire.

Heather turns his attention at this point to the nature of Hunnic society and the sources of its transformation into a military force rivaling Rome. He starts with the figure of Attila, the king of the Huns' empire. Looking through the lens of Priscus' description of his ambassadorial mission to Attila in 449, we get a picture of a shrewd leader: he carefully cultivated his image and exercised power with a deliberate and studied balance of aggression, brutality, and diplomacy.

One key political change in Hunnic society was the very existence of a single king like Attila. Heather points out that evidence from earlier contacts with the Huns, such as Olympiodorus' embassy in 411, shows that such centralization was a break from tradition -- the Huns of previous times had a ranked series of kings. Moreover, he notes, the anthropology of nomadic societies generally leads us to expect dispersed power, since the population is rarely concentrated in one place. Heather argues that winnowing the ranks of kings must have been accomplished largely through violence, as was the case with Attila's killing of his own brother Bleda. Moreover, he notes that the issue of refugee Huns in the Roman Empire that was such a major preoccupation for Attila sheds light on this process, for these refugees seem to have been the survivors of other royal lines.

In addition to eliminating rivals, however, Heather argues that the newly exclusive Hunnic kingship demanded a way to win the loyalty of the rivals' former followers. Heather speculates that this loyalty was essentially bought with the proceeds from an increasingly predatory relationship with the Roman Empire.

The other key transformation Heather points out in the Hunnic Empire was its Germanization. By the time of Attila, the Empire was certainly linguistically heavily Germanized -- even the names of Attila and his key lieutenants seem to have been Germanic. Furthermore, descriptions of Hunnic military campaigns make it clear that they had always included large number of Germanic or other non-Hunnic warriors. Moreover, the archaeological evidence from the area of Hunnic domination shows a much larger number of rich burials that were characteristically Germanic than Hunnic. Heather argues that all this was due to the incorporation into Hunnic control of a great proportion of the Germanic tribes who had not already invaded the Roman Empire. This massively increased the military manpower at the disposal of the Huns.

In 451 and 452, Attila turned this force on the Western Empire. Heather isn't able to do much to clarify the motive for the attacks. None of the grievances noted in the sources appear to be more than pretexts. Moreover, he kept alive a number of similar disputes with the Eastern Empire until settling them just before the invasion, apparently to secure his flank.

A Roman-Gothic coalition led by Aetius beat back Attila's invasion of Gaul in 451. Attila's invasion of Italy in 452 fizzled out under the stress of repeated sieges, harassment from Aetius' forces, and a flank attack into Hunnish territory by Marcian, the new Eastern Roman Emperor. Heather suggests that both campaigns were hindered by common logistic problems. The Huns lacked the wherewithal to supply large armies so far -- in the neighborhood of a thousand kilometers -- from their base in Central Europe. Hunger, disease, and the dispersal of forces to seek food and forage greatly diminished the Huns as a fighting force when they ventured so far afield.

Heather concludes that the Huns' invasions did not directly damage the Western Empire seriously enough to cause its fall, but they did prevent Aetius from containing the barbarians already within the Empire. North Africa, Spain, and Britain all slipped to barbarian control. Combined with the damage that had been done to the remaining provinces in Gaul and Italy, this perilously reduced the revenue of the Western Empire.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 6, "Out of Africa"

2009-10-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Heather begins by describing the political maneuvering that, complemented by able generalship, secured Constantius' ascent to power. The goal of such high imperial politics was to eliminate rivals, but this, crucially, left the empire without a clear line of succession when Contantius died unexpectedly in 421 (given that his son was too young to rule). Twelve years of conpiracy and war ensued, from which the general Aetius emerged as the ruler (not as the emperor, but as more or less a regent for Theodosius, Constantius' son with Galla Placidia). Although the succession struggle was fairly normal by imperial standards, the situation was not: there were unsubdued barbarians in the empire who had a more or less free run while the rivals battled for control of the Western empire.

During this time, the Vandals and Alans crossed the Mediterranean to Africa and assaulted the rich Roman provinces near Carthage. The sources on the barbarian invaders thin out during the struggle to succeed Constantius, so all the details of why and how they got there are somewhat a matter of educated guesswork. Heather fills in a plausible story: seeing that Africa was relatively safe from Roman counterattack, the Vandals made the short passage to the far western provinces of Roman Africa, and then made a beeline for Carthage. The badly outnumbered and outclassed Roman forces in Africa were powerless to stop them.

At this point, Heather takes an excursus into a description of the importance of Roman North Africa, drawing on a range of sources. The remains of the port facilities of Carthage and Ostia bespeak the volume of shipping between North Africa and Rome. The ruins of the city of Carthage and provincial centers throughout its hinterland show how much the region profited from it. The trade was above all in staples like wheat and olive oil, but archaeology shows a variety of other goods, including wine and pottery, were also exported around the empire. Documentary evidence shows that Rome gave easy leases on public lands in North Africa, thus partially accounting for the size and profitability of agriculture there. The profitability of a larger range of cheap exports depended on low-cost transport, which Heather deduces was a result of the documented combination of compulsion and subsidy for the shipping profession.

Returning to Aetius, Heather lists the profusion of challenges facing the new Western leader -- besides the Vandals in Africa, the Suevi in Spain, the Visigoths and rebel local elements in Gaul, and various Germanic tribes along the frontier were all threatening the integrity of the empire -- and describes his response to them. Heather notes that the source material for the era is mostly bare chronicles, but for the European campaigns this is supplemented by a surviving palimpsest of parts of two panegyrics by Aetius' subordinate Merobaudes. From these sources, we know that Aetius secured two key alliances to deal with his challenges during the 430s. He got Constantinople to send an army to Carthage that compelled the Vandals to come to a deal for a peripheral slice of North Africa. He used an alliance with the Huns to subdue the rebels and contain the Visigoths in Gaul (Heather argues that he bought off the Huns with a slice of Pannonia to gain their help.) Finally, he was able to pressure the Suevi in Spain to come to an accommodation.

In 439, the Vandals under Geiseric took advantage of the opening provided by Aetius' preoccupation elsewhere to attack and capture Carthage and the key provinces of Proconsularis and Byzacena. A joint expedition with the Eastern Empire to reconquer the lost territories was called off in 441, and costly peace was made with the Vandals instead. Between the complete loss of revenue from the territory lost to the Vandals and greatly reduced take from what remained in Roman hands, a huge hole was opened in the Roman budget. Literary evidence reveals that this gap could not be filled even by eliminating all the perks granted to the privileged landowning class, and Heather infers that the army must have been drastically cut back as a result. Heather argues that there must have been a compelling reason to accept such a serious blow, and deduces from the sources that the reason was a new Hunnic threat that required the attention of the Empire in both East and West.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 5, "The City of God"

2009-09-28T19:09:00.000-07:00

After a little scene-setting account of the sack of Rome, and a brief note on original sources (Olympiodorus' history is the best narrative, but it is mostly preserved only in partially garbled extracts by later historians), Heather plunges into describing the new wave of barbarian invasions from 405-410: Radagaisus' Goths over the Danube bend and into Italy in 405/406, the Vandals, Alans, and Suevi across the Rhine into Gaul in 406, Uldin's Huns across the middle Danube in 408, and the Burgundians just across the Rhine around 411. Literary sources arguably suggest that all of these peoples can be placed in Central Europe in the period immediately before the invasion. They also report that these invasions were movements of large numbers of people, including many who were not warriors. Archaeological evidence shows a contemporaneous disappearance of the existing barbarian material culture in these regions. The invasion routes, the barbarian groups involved, the size of the movements, and the disappearance of existing cultures together points to a thoroughgoing displacement of the peoples of the Central European plain as the source of the invasion.

Heather admits that the motive for such a huge, rapid displacement can only be speculative, but he comes down on the side that they were pushed out rather than attacking of their own accord. Invading the empire was a huge risk. Roman hostility could be counted on, and success was far from certain -- a point which could only have been reinforced by the defeat of the first of these invasions, led by Radagaisus, in 406. Moreover, we have a plausible propelling force in the Huns, who had caused large scale movements before, and who are known to have occupied the lands of Central Europe from a time fairly shortly after the invasions.

The Vandals, Alans, and Suevi looted their way across Gaul for three years before moving on to Spain, where they finally settled down and replaced Roman rule with their own. During these barbarian peregrinations, the armies of Britain and Gaul revolted against central rule and settled on Constantine III as their schismatic emperor -- a development which was likely related to the failure of the hard-pressed Roman government under Stilicho to come to their aid.

Stilicho's hands were full not just because of Radagaisus, but even more because the Goths in the empire's Balkan provinces had revolted in 395. These Goths were now united under a single leader, Alaric. Their core concern was extracting a more binding guarantee of their permanent status in the empire. Having failed to extract such an agreement from the Eastern Empire, Alaric turned west, invading Italy in 401-402. But Stilicho was no more amenable to a settlement, and succeeded in fending the incursion off.
But in 406 Stilicho changed his tack, and sought out an agreement with Alaric for an alliance against the Eastern Empire. This would seem to be adding another course to an already overfull plate, but Heather argues that Stilicho's plans show that the real interest was a permanent alliance which would supplement the Roman army in the West with Gothic warriors to deal with the emerging threats to Gaul. The key point for Heather is that Stilicho's aims were limited to bringing all of Illyricum under Western control. This was a scaling back from his previous ambition to rule in the East, but it makes sense in terms of coming to a permanent disposition of the Gothic problem in the Balkans, since it would give him the authority to settle the Goths there.

In the event, the crisis erupted in Gaul before Stilicho could deliver on his promise to send Roman legions to join Alaric in the Balkans. Once barbarians were rampaging across Gaul and Constantine was in revolt, the legions could no longer be spared. Alaric, left in the lurch, moved his Goths to the Alpine passes to extort payment from Stilicho. He got it, but the Roman bureaucrat Olympius' conspiracy overthrew Stilicho soon after, and Rome adopted a policy of open hostility to the Alaric.

The extension of that hostility to Goths within the Roman army, however, led many to defect to Alaric. Supplemented by these forces and (probably Gothic) revolted slaves, Alaric invaded Italy again, laying siege to Rome itself in order to secure a deal. In the end, no deal was forthcoming, and Alaric's Goths finally (albeit respectfully) sacked Rome.

Following up on his description of the sack, Heather notes its profound ideological consequences. It led to a vigorous debate between Christians and pagans -- pagans claiming that the sack happened because Christian Rome had been abandoned by the Gods, while Christians argued that pagan Rome, too, had suffered sack and defeat in its history. Augustine followed through with this argument quite radically in The City of God, arguing essentially that there was nothing special, permanent, or divine about the Roman Empire -- that it was just one state among many others.

In contrast to Augustine's indifference, Heather leads into his account of the recovery of the Western Empire over the next decade with Gallo-Roman writers, Christian and pagan, who held fast to the Roman ideal.

The Roman recovery started with the supply-starved Goths departure from Italy to Gaul in 411, under Alaric's successor Athaulf. This freed the new Roman military commander in the West, Constantius, from concerns about leaving Italy uncovered, so he was finally able to take on the rebel emperor Constantine and his successors in Gaul. Against the last of these successors, Jovinus, Constantius had the assistance of Athaulf's Goths. But Athaulf had larger ambitions of his own -- he even married the Western emperor Honorius' captive sister Galla Placidia -- which got in the way of a more permanent settlement with the Goths. Constantius applied pressure by blockading supplies to the Goths in southern Gaul. By 415, the Goths had had enough: they overthrew Athaulf and came to terms with the Romans. In 416-418, Constantius marched into Spain with his new allies and put paid to the Alans and Siling Vandals (leaving just the Hasding Vandals and Suevi in the northwest to survive) before settling the Goths across the Pyrenees in Aquitaine.

As impressive as Constantius' successes were, the Western Empire was still substantially weaker than it had been fifteen years earlier. Britain and parts of Spain had never been recovered, and the tax revenue from much of Italy and Gaul must have plummeted due to the ravages of the invasions. A contemporary army register shows that half of the first-line units of the Western army had been lost, and only about half of the lost units were replaced with new first-line formations. Events of the last two decades had also shown the political fragility of the empire -- local landed elites were quick to cut deals with barbarian invaders to preserve their status.

Peter Heather,The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 4, "War on the Danube"

2009-09-18T20:03:00.000-07:00

The Huns disrupted the 4th century order of barbarian kingdoms in southeastern Europe. Their attacks seem to have persuaded many of the Goths to try their luck at gaining entrance to the Roman empire. The Huns' key weapon was the very long, asymmetric, composite bow. The bow's asymmetry was the real innovation -- it allowed a longer bow, and thus one with more range and power, to be used from horseback.

Goths -- Tervingi and Greuthungi -- arrived on the Danube en masse in 376, and crossed into the empire. Contemporary sources make it out that this was welcomed, at least initially. Heather decides that this calls for extensive source criticism. In the first place, he notes, contemporaries' accounts tended to reflect imperial ideology, which could not accept the idea of barbarians having the advantage over Romans. But in this case there are reasons to think that the Romans were unsettled. The emperor Valens had committed most of his forces to an Eastern campaign, so the Romans did not have the military superiority at the frontier which had been a prerequisite for previous voluntary receptions of barbarians into the empire. The decision to admit only the Tervingi (the Greuthingi crossed the Danube later when the defenses were stripped) and the apparently rapid appeal for military assistance from the Western emperor shows there was a high level of concern. The precautionary securing of food supplies in fortified cities similarly demonstrates that the emperor thought things might go wrong. The apparent terms agreed for the settlement of the Tervingi (which allowed them to settle only in Thrace rather than in a more scattered way) shows that the situation had given them an unusual amount of leverage.

In any case, neither the Tervingi nor the Romans trusted the other side, and both apparently double-crossed the other -- the Goths by joining up with the Greuthungi, the Romans by attempting an assassination of the barbarian leadership. Things turned out badly for the Romans first with a scratch force at Marcianople in 377 and then with a full imperial army at Hadrianople in 378, where Valens attacked the Goths before additional forces from the Western emperor Gratian could arrive. Heather devotes a few pages to explaining the pressures behind Valens impetuousness. The apparent sophistication of the barbarians appreciation of the strengths and weaknesses of the Roman army seems just as notable, however. They understood that the summer heat would take a greater toll on the heavily armored Romans, and maximized their advantage by setting large wildfires too boot.

The Romans proved unable to subdue the Goths in the field, but wore them into a peace by attrition. Still, the terms left large intact settlements of Goths within the boundary of the empire -- an unfavorable situation for the Romans, but one they could hope to erode through the pull of Romanization over time.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 3, "The Limits of Empire"

2009-09-12T15:41:00.000-07:00

Heather starts with the story of a corruption scandal in Lepcis Magna in the late 4th century -- a Roman general refuses to protect the town without bribes, an imperial delegate sent to investigate is suborned, with his own corruption used as leverage against him. This sort of thing, Heather says, is often taken as evidence of late Roman decline. But he casts doubt on this interpretation, citing sources which show that self-aggrandizement and advancement through connections were endemic and even expected in Roman government going back at least to the late Republic.

He draws another lesson from the story: because of the scale of the empire and the limits it imposed on communication, imperial rule was always episodic and superficial. Most of the empire was always several weeks journey away from an imperial court, so the emperor would have few points of contact with or sources of information from distant provinces (and even if more information had been available, the filing system of Roman officials wasn't up to the task of making it usable). Heather reiterates this point with documents from the journey of the early 4th century Roman bureaucrat Theophrastes from Egypt to Antioch demonstrating the slow pace of travel and the limits in regular contact between officials in different provinces.

Heather then takes up the question of whether late Roman society was overburdened by the costs of the 3rd century military buildup. Until a few decades ago, this was the settled view, supported by a broad collection of evidence: decline in inscriptions, decreased willingness to serve in local offices (flight of the curials), laws binding agricultural workers to estates, appearance of references to empty lands in texts.

Heather says this conflicts with recent archaeological evidence (starting with George Tchalenko's investigations of Antioch's hinterlands in the 1950s) that show rural settlement reaching or sustaining its peak level throughout most of the empire in the 4th century (with Italy being the most significant exception). He proceeds to explain away the evidence for a decline: the empty lands cited in documents may never have been settled, restrictions on the mobility of agricultural workers were only enforceable when population density was high, and the fall off in inscriptions and local political participation reflect a shift in the location of interesting positions to the imperial bureaucracy.

After this, Heather looks at the case, put forward most famously by Gibbon, that Christianity diverted resources from productive use and sapped allegiance to the empire. He notes that pre-Christian religious cults also absorbed a lot of resources, so that it isn't clear that this issue was any more significant in a Christianized empire. Moreover, Christianity quickly adapted to ideologically supporting the legitimacy (and even the divine blessing) of imperial rule. The state's ability to entice elites to Christianize in order to advance in official posts shows that the influence of the center had not, in fact, been diminished.

Heather concludes with a discussion of some limitations of imperial Roman government (riffing off the Senate's reception of the Theodosian code). Foremost among these is the added instability and tension from the logistical and administrative requirement for two relatively equal emperors, especially since no firm system of succession was ever worked out. Heather points to ideological conformity as another weakness, although it is not clear why he thinks this is an actual source of weakness of the state rather than just something unpleasant. Finally, he points to the effective restriction of political engagement to a small landed elite and the concomitant focus of the state in serving the needs of that elite. He suggests that this left the vast laboring agricultural majority indifferent to the Roman state, and the allegiance of the landowning elite up for grabs when the state failed to offer protection for their property.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 2, "Barbarians"

2009-09-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

Heather starts with the story of the massacre of Varus' legions by the Germans under Arminius in 15 AD. This incident became the focus of nationalistic German scholarship in the 19th century, which saw in it a key moment in the struggle for German unity and independence. Heather points out that it would be an anachronism to attribute a sense of national unity to the Germanic tribes of this period -- they were just as prone to fight each other as the Romans. Heather also argues that this kind of German resistance did not keep ancient Germania out of the Roman empire. Rather, he argues, the low level of development made the conquest unattractive (although the logistical convenience of the Rhine barrier for garrison resupply was also a factor in favor of using it as the frontier). I think Heather overargues the case here -- the fierceness of German resistance, after all, also affected the balance between the costs and benefits of conquest.

Heather goes on to argue that the main pressure on the Roman frontier in the 3rd and 4th centuries came from the Sasanid Empire in Persia, which he calls a second superpower of the ancient world. A series of defeats at the hands of the Sasanids in the 3rd century pushed Roman emperors to reform the army and increase its size by at least a third. They needed to raise taxes to pay for a larger army, and they also expanded central administration to better manage the increased revenue.

Heather moves on to a discussion of Roman ideology concerning barbarians, introduced by a few anecdotes concerning the Romans relish for slaughtering them. A remark by the 4th century Roman orator Themistius leads in to what Heather sees as the key Roman view about barbarians -- that they were completely driven by desire, and thus irrational. Civilized Romans, on the other hand, were supposed to exercise rational control of their desires. This led Roman intellectuals to view their society as totally distinct from and superior to the barbarians, and even divinely favored.

The earlier anecdotes, however, suggest that loathing for barbarians was a mass phenomenon, too, and that in fact seems a requirement of mobilizing the resources of Roman society to resist barbarian incursions. But Heather's discussion of ideology doesn't explain how this popular disdain was was generated -- I wouldn't expect that the elitist ideology could simply carry over, since in some way it was also involved in justifying elite rule over common Romans.

This expectation of total superiority over the barbarians created difficulties for official propaganda, however, since the results of conflicts were often not so clear cut (or even favorable at all). Heather returns to Themistius throughout the chapter to show the problems he had providing the official spin on a number of different encounters with barbarian adversaries.

Heather brings up Athanaric, the Gothic chief, and Ulfilas, the Gothic Christian religious leader, to demonstrate that the Gothic world was not, in fact, sharply divided from the Roman one. Athanaric understood the Romans well enough to play off factions against one another in attempt to improve the conditions of his relationship with Rome. Ulfilas, a Gothic Christian leader who was actually the son of Roman captives, weighed in on the controversies besetting Christian doctrine as it was officially specified in the Nicene era.

Heather extends his discussion of Roman-barbarian interdependence with a discussion of the alternating aggression and clientage of Germanic kingdoms along the Roman border in the late imperial era. He takes this high degree of interdependence as a jumping off point into a discussion the revolutionary changes in barbarian society.

Heather notes that the Germanic tribal names appearing in Roman texts both changed and diminished in number in the 3rd and 4th centuries. He cites this as evidence of political consolidation. He uses the archaeological findings from German settlements and industrial sites to argue that German agricultural and economic production exploded from the 1st to the 4th century. He adduces archaeological evidence of increasing stratification in burials to argue that Germanic society was becoming similarly stratified. He takes the evidence of large-scale consumption at palace centers to show that political leaders were able to support increasingly large retinues, and he suggests that the power conferred by large collections of armed followers would explain the ability to consolidate larger political units and extract a larger proportion of the economic surplus for a social and political elite. Heather believes that Germanic society was still far short of feudal society in its stratification, however, because even the legal documents from the successor kingdoms show the existence of a very significant class of freemen.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Chapter 1, "Romans"

2009-09-07T15:32:00.000-07:00

Heather starts with the story of a massacre of one and a half second-line Roman legions by the Germanic Eburones in 54 BC. Despite being ambushed in a terrible position by a larger force, the Romans held out all day and fought to the death. This illustration of toughness and prowess, even in defeat, leads into a discussion of the characteristics -- training, cohesion, morale, engineering -- that made the Roman army so formidable. Heather notes that the Romans supplemented military might with prudent diplomacy, and these built and sustained one of the most extensive states in history for half a millennium.

Given the duration of the empire, it is not surprising that Roman society and political institutions changed a great deal. Heather dissents from the scholars who conclude that these changes significantly weakened the empire and led to its fall.

Heather's discussion of the nature of the empire begins with the late imperial rhetorician Symmachus. His relentless networking -- some 900 of his letters survive -- illustrates the workings of an elite Senatorial class. This class was distinguished by a canonical literary education which they believed made them mentally and morally fit to lead -- an outlook which stretched back to the Republican era.

Heather uses the story of Symmachus' embassy to the imperial court in Trier to elucidate some further points. First, as the very existence of such a mission shows, Rome was no longer the political and administrative center of the empire. Military exigency required rule from bases nearer the frontier. (Just one base generally did not suffice because of the length of the frontier, and Heather argues this is the key factor behind the emergence of joint imperial rule.) Nor were Roman senators any longer the pre-eminent political class. This role had been taken over by military commanders and bureaucrats.

Furthermore, Heather uses the city of Trier as an example of the thoroughgoing Romanization of the empire. He points out that the archaeological remains of Trier and other towns of the imperial hinterland show that they had adopted Roman building models and acquired the full panoply of Roman public buildings. Heather argues that this amounts to more than a mere imitation of style; it points, he says, to a wholesale adoption of Roman customs that gave point and purpose to the kinds of private and public buildings they constructed. Heather points to Ausonias, a rhetorician of Gallic birth who rose to the summit of both the scholarly and political world, as an example of the breadth and depth of cultural Romanization.

Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: Introduction

2009-09-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

Heather suggests that he will explain the fall more in terms of external than internal causes. In other words, Rome did not simply fall: it was conquered.

He's not a historian who sees no use in poststructuralism. He points to two salutary contributions of contemporary critical approaches: (1) challenging the stereotype of unsophisticated and unchanging barbarians and (2) understanding the source texts as laden with agendas (although I might have expected historians to understand that already).

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 6, "On Spatial Duopoly and the Dynamics of Two-Party Systems"

2009-08-23T20:45:00.000-07:00

By considering changes in quality not as absolute but as a trade off between preferences of different sets of consumers, Hirschman is able to analyze two-party political systems in terms of voice and exit.

In a monopolistic situation, where its share of the market can't be changed by exit, an organization will seek to produce a contested good at a quality that minimizes discontent.

In a situation where consumers at one end of the quality continuum have no substitute product, but the consumers at the other end are highly likely to defect to a substitute, voice is likely to be exercised only by the customers with nowhere to go. In this situation, profit (or market share) maximization would lead an organization to satisfy the volatile consumers no matter how great the discontent at the other end. But since minimizing discontent does come into play, a party will actually pursue a program at some distance from the desires of voters at the center of a two-party system.

Hotelling model of two-party system: parties will tend to move to the center, leaving voters on the outlying ends of the spectrum poorly served. Despite its pre-eminence, this thesis has not generally been borne out by the behavior of American political parties, which have positioned themselves at some distance on either side of the political center. One way of accounting for this failure lies in the model's neglect of elasticity of demand -- once a party moves far enough away from its base voters, it could begin to lose some of them. (To me, reduced turnout seems the most likely mechanism for this). Hirschman, however, does not find this criticism compelling, and offers a different explanation: the "captive" voters at the extreme ends of the continuum bring their parties closer to them by use of voice.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 5, "How Monopoly Can Be Comforted by Competition"

2009-08-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

Economists' usual concern about monopolies is exploitation: they can limit production to maximize profit. Competition is an effective remedy for this problem. But another issue with monopolies is their potential for slack and decay. In this case exit may comfort a monopolist by relieving it of ts most burdensome customers (thus defusing the potential of voice to remedy the monopolist's deficiencies).

"Lazy" monopolists who welcome exit are found frequently when their market is based on location and a significant disparity in mobility exists between the majority of customers and the more quality-sensitive minority.

Sometimes monopolies can even promote selective exit. Hirschman's example here is from autocratic South American governments which encourage exile for political dissidents. He notes the consequences of this situation by comparing the autocratic politics of Latin America with the consensus-driven politics of Japan, where exit has been made more difficult by geography and a lack of destinations in which an exile could easily assimilate.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 4, "A Special Difficulty in Combining Exit and Voice"

2009-08-19T19:28:00.000-07:00

In some cases, ease of exit entrenches poor quality . Institutions that are relatively impervious to the effects of exit (nationalized Nigerian railway, public schools, corporate management with respect to stockholders are given as examples) are less likely to restore quality if their most active and resourceful customers leave, because these are the customers who could most effectively exercise voice.

Hirschman makes an analysis of exit as a function of consumer surplus. Consumers with a large surplus -- those for whom the product actually holds much greater value than the market price -- exit most quickly when quality declines. A price increase has the opposite result -- consumers with a small surplus are the first to exit.

Hirschman identifies consumers who have a large surplus with those most concerned with quality, and also with consumers who can most effectively exercise voice, or at least have the most to gain by doing so. (This is key to the analysis of the result of a decline in quality).

Consumers concerned with quality will be most willing to exit when better quality (although probably more expensive ) good is available. Price-sensitive consumers will be most willing to exit when a cheaper (although lower quality) good is available. As a result, quality-conscious consumers will be quit to exit in response to deterioration when a better, albeit more expensive, good is available but slow to exit when inferior, although cheaper, goods are available.

Since quality conscious consumers are most likely to exercise voice, this has an important impact on a large class of "quality of life" public services which depend heavily on voice for the maintenance of quality: the gap in the quality of these services between the high and low end will tend to increase. This is especially true in societies with a high level of social mobility. Where exit upward to superior service regimes is restricted, however, consumers have more at stake in improving the quality of their existing services, and the gap will not grow as wide.

Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy: Chapter 4, "The Subject Object Problem in the Philosophy of the Reniassance"

2009-07-19T21:33:00.000-07:00

(I) Background -- the self in ancient and medieval philosophy. Plato -- soul as capacity to grasp both ideas and sensation. Aristotle -- empirical soul as capacity to direct an individual life to its ends, but also a general soul , nous, as the capacity to understand pure thought. In expressing these concepts, both Plato and Aristotle tend towards reifying and thus mythologizing the soul. Neoplatonism takes up the notion of the soul as a thing, and assigns distinct places in its hierarchical order of being for the general and individual soul. Averroism erases true individual subjectivity from this picture by arguing for the unity of thinking; in this view the individual thinks by unifying himself with the absolute intellect. Scholasticism rejects this effacement of the individual subject for reasons both religious -- an individual subject is a requirement for personal salvation -- and methodological -- we experience thought only through individual thinking selves.

Petrarch's assertion of intellectual individuation is essentially aesthetic -- a delight in multiplicity.

For Cusa, intellect can only exist in relation to the sensible. Intellect consists in defining and distinguishing experience. It not the fact of thinking but its distinct content resulting from different concrete circumstances which provides the principle of intellectual individuation.

Ficino's variant of Neoplatonic thought is centered on eros. The traditional Platonic (and also Neoplatonic) conception of eros consists in a striving on the part of the sensible for the ideal -- it is the driving force of all becoming. For Ficino, however, this striving is reciprocated -- God also strives and cares for man and the world. All intelligences in fact take care for the sensible as well as striving for the ideal.

This opens the possibility for true Neoplatonic theodicy -- matter is not pure evil, not the opposite of form, but the necessary concomitant of form in which form is realized. Eros unifies matter and form.

Ficino's doctrine is applied to the philosophy of knowledge by Patrizzi -- knowledge and love both seek to overcome the separation of the ideal and sensible -- knowledge as a stage or aspect of the work of eros.

The doctrine of eros also becomes an explanation and justification of the work of the artist -- unifying form and matter.

Common to these and other recourses to eros by Florentine Platonism is a new awareness of subjective consciousness. This individual consciousness is portrayed, however, as having its basis in a soul which is independent of the body. The revival of Aristotelian psychology by the Paduan school presents, starting with Pompanazzi, a counterpoint to this spiritualism.

Pompanazzi contends that the individuation of consciousness depends on the inseparability of souls from individual bodies. He argues that the soul is a function of the body, namely the function which gives order and direction to the body. In this he does not divide an intellectual soul from an animal soul -- intellect is not separable from life.

(II) Both schools conceived of matter in spirit as substances, and tried to reduce or subordinate one substance to the other. Modern view relates spirit and nature functionally. The models provided by scientific research and a new conception of art both contribute to this shift, because they take thought as a creative act which gives structure to nature which nevertheless remains independent.

Petrarch is an early precursor to this shift -- his poetry recovers nature from the medieval view that it is fundamentally evil -- but this ultimately serves the end of self-contemplation rather than investigation.

A nearer antecedent is the trend toward empirical observation of nature in the Quattrocento and Cinquecento. This is taken up in Renaissance philosophy by Telesio's naive, purely deductive empiricism (which is essentially the same as Francis Bacon's empiricism). But this kind of empiricism does not succeed in providing real order to thinking about nature. Even Telesio's followers -- Pico, Campanella, Giambattista della Porta -- seek order within nature by reference to magical or occult causes. (This tendency is fostered by Renaissance philosophy's conception of knowing a thing as a matter of becoming unified with it, which depends in the end on a commonality of substance.)

151-152: "The theory of nature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries laid the foundation for exact description and exact experimentation; but closely connected with this, we find also the attempts at the foundation of an 'empirical magic'. The difference between 'natural' and 'demonic' magic lies in that the latter is based on the acceptance of supernatural forces whereas the former wants to remain completely within the framework of nature and of its empirical uniformity, claiming for itself no method other than inductive observation and the comparison of phenomena. But, this form of 'induction' does not yet recognize any kind of analytical-critical limitations, such as are presupposed and lie at the base of every genuine 'experiment'. Thus, the world of experience here borders on the world of miracles, and both constantly overlap and merge with each other. The whole atmosphere of this 'science' of nature is filled to the brim with miracles."

152: "To conceive of experience itself as a mere aggregate, to define it, with Campanella, as experimentorum multorum coacervatio, means that there can be no analysis of its elements and no evaluation of the role played by each individual element in the systematic construction of 'nature'. Such an analysis and evaluation could only be made after a separation of the basic elements of experience had been achieved elsewhere -- after an 'inner crisis' had taken place in experience itself. This separation of the 'necessary' from the 'accidental', this distinction between that which obeys laws and that which is fantastic and arbitrary, was brought about not by the empiricism and sensualism of the philosophy of nature but by the intellectualism of mathematics."

Leonardo takes two key steps towards a modern conception of knowledge. He accords honor to sciences according to their achievement of certainty rather than their subject matter. And he views experience not just as something given, but something that can be analyzed and given order to by thought, and particularly by mathematics. Still, Leonardo retained a bias towards conceiving order or form in terms of vision. His notebooks are a combination of close observations and visual thought experiments (which Cassirer, following Goethe, calls 'exact fantasies') -- which aim at truth as a perfection of seeing. Artistic vision is not differentiated from mathematical analysis.

The theory of science in the Renaissance is linked to the theory of art by a focus on the problem of form. The conception of form in the new theory of art exemplified by Leonardo was just as decisive as the use of mathematics for the formation of a new science of nature. Leonardo insisted that artistic creation was not an imposing of form on nature, but a discovery of order and form in nature, and this view of form in nature was taken up directly Galileo and Kepler.

Cassirer considers the historical analogy between the change in ancient thought produced by Plato and the emergence of new theory of science in the Renaissance. In both cases, an earlier attempt at a direct, superficial empiricism is overtaken by a turn to the ideal and mathematical. The earlier natural philosophy of the Renaissance understood knowledge as a unification with the object. The new art and science both sought to establish a distance between subject and object, and furthermore to analyze nature itself into particulars.

The Platonic account of sensibility, however, saw its significance only as a prompting to knowledge of pure form. The new art and science give a different valence to the relationship between formal knowledge and experience. They expect theory to be applied to and validated by experience.

Significantly, for Galileo even movement became an object of knowledge.

(III) Movement is also at the core of Aristotelian philosophy of nature. But movement involves fundamental qualitative differences, since location itself has a substantial meaning for Aristotle. Just as bodies have fundamental qualities which make them what they are, so do places, and movement depends on the harmony or disharmony between things and places. Modern physics, on the other hand, thinks of location strictly in terms of their measureable relation to other places.

Cusa is the key figure in introducing a relativistic conception of movement and place. This conception has its roots in his view of knowledge as measurement and his argument that measurement requires the positing of fixed points. Seeing fixed points as posited necessarily excludes the possibility of any absolute place or movement. But it opens the possibility of thinking about rules which govern the relative change in location between things. Moreover, these can be universal rules, applying the same way to all parts of the world, because the world is conceived as having uniformity.

Aristotelian conception of space is just the conception of a boundary between a bodies and what encloses them. But these boundaries are mutual boundaries with other objects within their own spaces (except the external boundary of the world itself). So empty space is meaningless in Aristotelian terms. The totality of space is an aggregate, not a systematic condition of individual spaces.

The first step towards a systematic conception of space was to look at space as homogeneous. This is the principle which was grasped by Cusa, but only found its realization with Galileo. For Galileo, this homogeneity is a consequence of understanding space geometrically -- looking at nature as a mathematical order rather than as a collection of substances. In fact, there is a reversal of the Aristotelian dictum that activity follows being. Since our knowledge of motion has a perfectly general, mathematical form, which applies the same way to all physical phenomena, all matter must have the same substance.

Not only did mathematics and geometry shape a new view of motion, but motion reciprocally shapes our understanding of mathematics and geometry. Particularly notable is Kepler's analysis of geometrical solids as a product of the motion of curves. Furthermore, the analytic geometry of Descartes and Fermat, with the use of a system of coordinates whose center is strictly conventional, depends upon the prior overcoming of the Aristotelian conception of space.

Parallel to this, we have Bruno's conception of an infinite, homogeneous world. He arrives at not through physics, however, but through his views of the incontainability of human feeling and the human intellect.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 3, "Voice"

2009-06-20T09:22:00.000-07:00

Voice and exit are both optimally effective when exercised by only a portion of the clientele. If expression of dissatisfaction becomes too widespread, it hampers the ability of a firm or agency to respond. (This is not as obviously true to me as the debilitating effect of a too extensive use of exit.)

For any organization, one of these forms of response to deteriorating quality will dominate, and this keeps the other response from ever reaching a debilitating level. For firms in competitive markets, exit is dominant, so a firm would already have been destroyed by exit before voice could create a burden.

Voice can be understood at first approximation as a residual of exit. Voice gets exercised inversely to the proportion of customers who leave: it depends on the inelasticity of demand with respect to quality.

In undeveloped economies with few substitute choices of goods, there is more use of voice. In deeper markets with more choices, exit tends to prevail.

Where exit is the dominant response, any use of voice will be beneficial. The optimal combined response to a decline in quality is an initially elastic decline in demand -- rapid exit -- followed by by an inelastic decline that gives scope to the use of voice.

Voice can also be conceived of as an alternative to exit. In this case, voice is a primary response to declining quality, and exit is only resorted to if voice fails as a remedy. This pattern of response requires that the product or service is originally superior in quality. If it is originally perceived to be very close in quality to its alternatives, then substitutability is high and exit is a stronger option. It also depends upon the perception that voice can be effective in restoring the original superiority in quality.

Exercising voice also takes relatively greater effort than exit. For this reason, voice is not as likely to be exercised by consumers of a large number of different products -- the cumulative cost becomes prohibitive. It is more likely to be used by members of organizations, because the number of groups people belong to is not generally too large, or for bigger purchases, where the cost of using voice could be justified by the expected gain.

The efficacy of voice is also limited in competitive markets with many actors. This makes voice more likely to exercised by members of organizations or participants in markets with few significant participants -- venues where the expectation of effective influence is greater.

Recognition of voice as an available corrective mechanism can prompt efforts to create institutions and mechanisms to make its user easier. This shows an important difference between exit and voice: exit requires nothing more than the availability of a different choice, while the exercise of voice requires creativity. (Hirschman calls it an art.) This creates a bias in favor of exit, because decisions about which option to use are based on past experience. But since the use of voice needs to be adapted for each circumstance, there will likely be exactly fitting past exercise to draw upon.

Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy: Chapter 3, "Freedom and Necessity in the Philosophy of the Renaissance"

2009-05-10T17:49:00.000-07:00

Renaissance philosophers often present ideas through image and myth (Bruno in particular saw this as a requirement of human reason, but Valla and others also take this approach). Cassirer sees this literary form as a key to understanding the way Renaissance philosophy deals with the problem of necessity and free will. It does not offer any new solution or even new conceptual frame to the problem. It shows more interest in leaving the problem in tension than it does in a resolution. Cassirer's suggestion seems to be that the softening of the concepts and distinctions through literary form contributes to the ability to maintain the problem in tension.

There is also an insistence on addressing the problem without reliance on dogma, relying only on human reason. (I think the the modern philosophical tradition would find a tension between the reliance on reason and the use of myth.)

In Pompanazzi, at least, the precision of the Scholastic distinctions used to analyze freedom and necessity is maintained -- even enhanced by insisting on fidelity to original Aristotelean conceptions -- but there is no attempt to reconcile dogma with reason. Pompanazzi does follow Valla, however, in insisting that there is no conflict between foreknowledge of events and human freedom of action, since it is the events themselves which are determined and not their causes. Pompanazzi also resists drawing any ethical consequence from pre-knowledge; he severs metaphysics from ethics.

Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man distinguishes man from every other being by his freedom to create his own nature through action. For everything else but man, being determines action: what a thing is, what it's place is in the order of things, determines what it does, how it acts. For man, on the other hand, his own free action determines what he is. Pico's theme -- that freedom defines man's nature -- is drawn from humanist thought, but he introduces a new element to that tradition by portraying man as a microcosm (a concept developed in the thought of Cusa and Ficino). Man, according to Pico, actually contains the possibilities of all other things in himself, and thus be can become like any of them.

In this, Pico distills the tension characteristic of Renaissance thought -- man must be open to the entire universe, to knowledge of all the world, but hold himself apart from it. The distinction made here between man and world, mind and nature, subject and object is not absolute, because the opposed pairs are also defined by the relationship between them. That relationship is found in acts of willing and knowing. (Cassirer sees this as following the true sense of Platonic philosophy -- both transcendence and participation).

Charles de Bouelles professes a division of the world into levels which illustrates the centrality of this theme -- the simultaneous distinction and involvement of subject and object -- in Renaissance thought. The highest level -- self-reflective knowledge -- also requires the most basic level -- simple being -- as the object of its knowing. (Cassirer sees an influence from Cusa's thinking on the trinity in this, where final unity depends on a process of development.) This metaphysics is also an ethics: man isn't simply given self-reflection, he rises to that level by virtue of his own effort and action.

Allegory of Adam as an expression of Renaissance thought: portrayal of primordial man that focuses on his freedom. Merging with Prometheus myth, focus on man's power to create. Boccaccio: Promethean creation as a second creation of man, which gives him not existence, but his specific character as a creator -- Renaissance philosophy moves away from this trope in increasing seeing man's creativity as a result of his own free action.

98: Cusa and Bruno. For Cusa, ideal of humanity is realized in Christ. For Bruno, ideal of humanity requires idea of autonomy, but this pulls it away from religion.

In the second section of this chapter, Cassirer examines the significance of Renaissance thought's struggle with astrology. Astrology was not vanquished by medieval thought, but it was tamed. Medieval medicine and natural science in particular were saturated with astrological thinking. But astrology was only permitted to be a secondary force, like demons or evil spirits, subordinate to God. Faith kept it in check in systems of medieval thought.

With the strengthening of a worldly outlook in the Renaissance, however, astrological thinking comes more to the foreground. Ficino holds that the stars can influence the bodies of men but not their minds, which I think Cassirer suggests was a respectably conventional view. But concern for the power of the stars remained foremost in his thinking anyway. His ethical work stresses directing ones life in accordance with the possibilities allowed by the constraints of that power. This amounts to a new challenge to human freedom that was characteristic of the trend of Renaissance thought. As the regnum gratiae (rule of grace) wanes, the regnum naturae (rule of nature), which makes its own claims on human freedom, waxes. Since astrology and magic were woven into the early Renaissance conception of natural science, and this fabric was only slowly unwoven and reassembled upon different principles, the struggle for asserting human freedom became for the Renaissance largely an intellectual struggle with astrology.

Pompanazzi grapples with the astrological view by trying to reshape it, to make it methodologically strict. So Pompanazzi accepts as given many reports of miraculous or apparently magical events. But he insists that they are not the result of any special personal or spiritual powers. Instead, they can all be systematically explained by the same forces which shape more ordinary events, and that these regular shaping forces are astrological. Even divine action only occurs through the mediation of the heavenly bodies. In fact, our knowledge of the divine through revelation is itself subject to astrological causality, because the intellectual realm is just as thoroughly within the bounds of systematic natural causes as the physical world.

104: "Here, a logic is operative seeking to deduce a priori the form of astrology as the only one adequate to our knowledge of nature. Astrological causality becomes, to use a modern phrase, the 'condition for the conceivability of nature'. For Pompanazzi, it does not signify a surrender to the world of miracles but actually the only salvation from that world, the only sure guarantee for the unconditional validity of the laws of nature. Though it may seem paradoxical at first glance, we are dealing with a thoroughly 'rational' astrology." (This brings to mind Veyne's study of 'rational' Greek mythology.)

Renaissance philosophy brings forth both a new conception of knowledge, in which everything can be explained in a unified way from natural causes, and a new sense of human freedom; but these conflict. Microcosm motif used as a way out, a way of balancing the demands of both. Ficino's takes up this motif to portray the world as organic, hierarchical, emanatistic. But emanationism and hierarchy are undermined by new cosmological thinking founded by Cusa, which denies that the cosmos is graduated or even centered. So the motif of microcosm is taken up as one of correspondence between man and heavens rather than dependence. So with Paracelsus we have an account of a harmonious correlation between man and the heavens, without either side being strictly superior or uniquely determinative. So there is room for ethics, since man's action has influence, too. This is actually taking up a theme of Ficino's astrology. Ficino held that the influence of the stars circumscribes the life possibilities of an individual, but it leaves choices of direction within the set of possibilities. Man can still choose the direction of his life -- whether he strives for the intelligible or the sensible.

Pico, on the other hand, attacks astrology directly (although is own thought is fairly saturated with magical and astrological thinking). While Neoplatonist-influenced medieval thought gave transcendence a spatial as well as spiritual dimension, and thus portrayed the world as having a hierarchical order, Pico recognized no spatial priority. The hierarchical systems lent themselves to acceptance of stellar influences though occult causation; Pico rejects causation that is not proximate and experienced, and thus demonstrable and verifiable.

The ultimate roots of Pico's objection to astrology are not metaphysical, however, but ethical. The claims of astrology would limit man's scope for self-determination, which Pico insists on in face of all else. He attributes great and even seemingly unfathomable human achievements to human genius rather than external astrological influences. Thus, the Renaissance achievement in breaking the power of astrology (and Pico influences Kepler in particular on this path) was the result of the assertion of human freedom in Renaissance thought.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 2, Exit

2009-03-03T21:43:00.000-08:00

How does exit lead firms to repair lapses in quality? When customers leave, the firm loses revenue. If this loss is large enough, the firm will try to correct the failure. If the loss is too large, however, it will be unable to act. So for exit to work optimally there must, paradoxically, be some inert customers -- ones who will not respond quickly to a deterioration in quality.

In a situation where all producers in an industry produce flawed goods, exit may actually create an equilibrium in which firms do not lose money from lapses in quality. Customers are effectively exchanged between the competing firms as they leave one and buy from another. Exit wastes effort (looking for competing goods) that would be directed more usefully through voice if there were no competition. Effectively conceals the systemic failure in quality.

This assessment (collusive competition obscures poor quality and frustrates improvement in conditions) can be applied to non-economic institutions. Examples: multiparty democracies, competing trade unions.

Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Chapter 1, Introduction and Doctrinal Background

2009-02-26T21:56:00.000-08:00

Fundamental question: how do organizations recover from lapses in efficiency? Options for clients of lapsed organizations roughly break down into exit (withdraw from interaction) and voice (remain but apply pressure).

Key premise: perfect competition is a poor model for organizational behavior, because slack is pervasive in organizations, including businesses. Slack tends to increase entropically until corrected.

Exit: economics. Voice: politics.

Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy: Chapter 2, "Cusanus and Italy"

2009-02-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

Cusa's influence on Italian philosophy must be looked for not in academic philosophy, but in the thought of key practical men and artists, particularly Leonardo and Alberti. His key influence was not in doctrines but in goals and methods. Cusa propels a tendency in Renaissance thought which insists on giving priority to knowledge based on experience. Cusa creates the methodological basis for this direction in thought by portraying measurement as the foundation of knowledge.

With his mystical embrace of nature, St. Francis led the way to a revaluation of the sensible world. The key image which comes out of the resulting mystical tradition is that of the world as a book written by God. Campanella and other natural philosophers looked at this as a matter of sympathetic reaction to nature, so that things in the world are capable of being understood as signs of God as a result of an immediate feeling. Cusa and the scientific thinkers after him looked for truth in mathematically expressed systematic relationships in nature. The success of this scientific development depended on two innovations. First was the use of the vernacular as a means of expression (is this plausible? Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton wrote in Latin.) The second was the emphasis on technical applicability.

The Platonic philosophy of the Florentine academy represents something of a retrogression from Cusa. Cusa sought to reconcile philosophical and religious thought in a single system with neither having superiority. Florentine Platonists -- Ficino and Pico --gradually retreated to restoring primacy of theological interest. However, it still represented a continuation of the theme of the problem of knowledge that had been opened by Cusa.

Beauty central link between God, man, and world for Florentine Platonists. God created world with harmony and order. The mind of man is constituted to judge and know beauty.

Common ground with Cusa’s idea of man as a microcosm of the world. The soul, because it is able to know beauty in all of nature, is an intermediary element between god and the world for Ficino. And this is a dynamic intermediation for Ficino as much as Cusa. For both, man becomes an intermediary by acts of knowing. For Ficino, these acts have the specific character of giving form to nature and acting to improve upon the given form. (This notion was well suited to adoption by the artists of the Renaissance.)

Man is representative of all nature for Cusa, so his redemption implies the world’s redemption. Incarnation for Ficino redeems nature as well as men because it guarantees through man’s redemption that man always has the ability to give nature form.

For both Cusa and Ficino, work of the mind has no end. This infinite seeking for more perfect knowledge is not a defect, but what relates man's efforts to God.

For both Cusa and Ficino, Christ has a similar position -- as humanity in general (Cusa) or the idea of humanity (Ficino). Similar philosophy of history in relation to Christianity -- not seeing a sharp polarity between Christian truth and preceding error, but seeing all religions as having a share of legitimacy in that in some sense they worship God.

Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Introduction and Chapter 1, "Nicholas Cusanus"

2009-02-07T09:11:00.000-08:00

Introduction: Received view is that the philosophy of the the Renaissance did not share in the main intellectual current of the era, which emphasized the individual and distinctive. Rather, its main concerns were inherited theological ones. The burden of this work is to show that there is a unity of direction in Renaissance philosophy, and that this unity is in fact a "Hegelian focus" of the Renaissance as a whole.

Key doctrine of Neo-Platonic mysticism, which is absorbed into Scholasticism: graduated cosmos from the finite (the world of man) to the infinite (God). Cassirer claims that Cusanus does not deviate from this (which seems like a stronger claim than might be justified). His difference is in focusing on our ability to know God. He finds that the condition for knowledge as it was then conceived -- comparison or measurement -- does not exist for man with respect to God. He sees logic as based on concepts of comparison, which can only tell us about the finite. But there is not a finite series of steps to the absolute.

Feeling is not enough either. God must be known to be loved. So then, a new kind of knowing is required: visio intellectualis. A single act. Hold contrary ideas together. Takes mathematics as its launching point. (It's a bit hard to make anything of this from Cassirer's sketch.)

To understand Cusa, he must be seen as a key figure in the reception of Plato, or rather the recovery of the original doctrine of Plato: a sharp distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, with knowledge of this opposition being the key to all philosophy, all thought.

The medieval Scholastic tradition inherited by Cusa, on the other hand, drew mainly from Aristotle and Neo-Platonism. Aristotle rejected Platonic dualism -- his fundamental idea is that processes of development unify the sensible and the ideal. Neo-Platonism tried to bridge the difference between Plato and Aristotle; it reasserted transcendence, but then retracted it with its key concept of emanation (which is adapted from development) -- that the absolute overflows and thus provides form to matter.

Cusa returns to the fundamental Platonic concepts of separation and participation. On the one had, no series of steps based on what is empirically given can lead us to what he calls the Maximum (This truth constitutes knowing ignorance). In fact, the process of reasoning through comparison can never reach any finality. Nevertheless, this process participates in the ideal in that it seeks determinateness, which is the characteristic of what is ideal. So man can at least legitimately aim to make empirical knowledge ever more precise (This is ignorant knowing).

Aristotelean-Scholastic cosmology: a graded order of four changeable earthly elements and an immutable substance of the stars (whose only change is perfect movement). Cusa rejects any ordering of elements because he does not accept that anything in the world can be closer to the ideal than anything else; instead, all bodies are composed of mixtures of elements. Nor does Cusa accept the possibility of perfect movement for anything in creation, which is always marked by imprecision. This leads Cusa to his central cosmological views -- the earth is in motion, and there is no central unmoving point in the universe (there can only be a metaphysical center -- God -- not a physical one).

Each thing in the universe has its own infinitely complex motion centered on itself. Souls have an analogous individuality. This infinite and irreducible individuality is in both cases the mark of the universal. Individuality is not a limitation; it has positive value. Universal order consists in this infinite variety; so existence participates in the ideal through having infinite individuality. From this, Cusa assigns a positive value even to the diversity of religious rites.

Image of picture that seems to look at observers in every direction -- symbol of god's relationship to individuality. Illustrates visio intellectualis -- intellectual vision -- comprised of unified totality of individual relationships to God.

Incarnation seen not as a temporal event, but as something always happening in very soul -- view adopted from German mysticism, devotio moderna.

Sources of Cusa's thought: devotio moderna, Nominalism (via moderna) and Italian Renaissance's recovery of antiquity. Cusa incorporates these into a realization of the individualism characteristic of the age within religion and philosophy. God can only be grasped through the limitation to an individual view; the truth about God is the totality of views, empirical multiplicity.

Cusa's thought develops from emphasis on Platonic concept of chorismos to that of methexis.

37: Cassirer attributes common cosmological views to Cusa and Bruno. In this point in particular it is clear how much Blumenberg's concluding chapters of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age respond to Cassirer. Blumenberg seems to tend to take for granted Cusa's endorsement of multiplicity upon which Cassirer lavishes attention -- his focus is to distinguish the function of this in Cusa and Bruno -- this is the point of taking such care as well to argue that Bruno was not persecuted for these same doctrines, but for the rejection of the Incarnation which was the systematic corollary of infinite multiplicity for Bruno.

For Cusa, the Incarnation is a systematic requirement. Even to understand that we cannot know God implies a relation that must be mediated by something. This something is Christ, as the general self, the universal content, of humanity.

Cusa sees man as a microcosm of nature -- in this sense, man includes all of nature in himself. Necessitates a break from the medieval notion of redemption as liberation from nature. Instead, all of nature is redeemed with and through man.

Knowledge for Cusa is not a reproduction of ideas, but a creative act of an individual mind, an unfolding, a movement along a chain of ideas.Space and time -- or at least the ability to measure and understand them -- are produced by the mind. Positive evaluation of man's embedding in time, his historical nature. Man realizes his particular nature within time, and in so doing reflects God's nature.

Human beings particular creative function is to give, create, attribute value to things. It is only through judgment of a human intellect that anything has value. Positive function of sensible world -- instigator and material of creative human intellectual activity.

Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Part IV, Chapter 3, "The Nolan: The World as God's Self-Exhaustion"

2009-01-25T20:20:00.000-08:00

Bruno's fundamental point of conflict with the church: the Incarnation. To be an adequate expression of God, the world must be infinite. There can be nothing held back that could be added later to fulfill or redeem the world. Moreover, the infinite world has no privileged center which could be the scene for such a redemption. Nor can there be a privileged time at which such a singular event can break in.

However, Bruno doesn't have the uniformly infinite conception of time that he has of space. He sees time, or at least the realization of reason in time, as cyclical. This falls short of making a place for his own liberatory pretensions, much less of providing for modernity's self-understanding of the epochal transition at its birth.

Bruno is not consistent in this view of reason in history, however. He's sees the ability to even arrive at some astronomical knowledge, for instance, as dependent on long durations of observation -- of time in which a tradition of observation is carried out, and so reveals otherwise hidden astral motion. This approaches modern conception of a collective subject in scientific inquiry. Bruno associates this cumulative aspect of inquiry with the metaphor of the ages of man -- our era is already an old one because it draws on all that has come before.

Bruno's reception of Cusa -- behind borrowed forms and means of expression, there is a different systematic logic. Cusa is asserting plurality against a levelled-off Aristotelian tradition -- recovering voices like Epicurus and Protagoras and even admitting the perspectives of other religions. Bruno puts forth criticism of both ancient and Christian religion using the criterion of morality.

(Isn't this picture of shared content but different systematic logic the opposite of Blumenberg's general thesis about the epochal transition -- that there was a shared structure of questions for which a different content of answers was provided?)

Cusa is preoccupied with the threat of theological voluntarism and absolutism to the assurance of stability in the world. Bruno resolves this by taking the world as the exhaustion of God's possibilities.

561: "The problem with which the Cusan had struggled and with which every attempt to come to terms with the late medieval crisis had to deal -- stabilizing the world in the face of its being put into question by theological absolutism -- now is no longer dealt with by means of a relation of image to original, but rather by means of a congruence between divinity and worldliness."

Bruno directly contradicts the view of creation developed and refined in medieval thought -- that creation is God's restriction to a single possibility. This finds a way out of the late-medieval crisis of theological voluntarism and the arbitrariness of creation.

Creation for Bruno is boundless, and contains an infinite number of worlds; all possibilities are realized in it. There is not room in this infinite creation for a supplement in the form of the Incarnation, as there was in Nicholas of Cusa's world whose potential had not yet been fully realized (although this aspect of not being fully realized is only apparent, because time, which provides the gap between creation and completion is an artifact of the human spirit).

(In the course of this comparison (565) Blumenberg recognizes that in this case the epochal transition is revealed in a common set of assertions for which different systematic sets of questions are provided.)

Bruno's rejection of the idea of divine 'personhood' is related to the infinity of the world as well. Nicholas retains divine personhood, but must also retain a finite world as the locus which the (singular) begotten second person completes. For Bruno, nothing that contradicts simplicity is divine. So the medieval attribution of personality to God -- originating in Augustine -- cannot stand. There is no divine self-consciousness, no will. This means God does not will creation and choose what to create; rather, creation is a manifestation of God's nature with nothing hidden or held back. So everything possible must exist, which means the world is infinite and uncentered.

For Bruno, these qualities or the world apply not just to space but also to time. It is a real infinite dimension in which change is always occurring, and thus in which infinite possibilities can come to exist. The reality of time makes it possible for the world to be the infinite correlate -- the immanence -- of the divinity.

The reality of time anchors the fundamental motion of everything in the world, in which only the whole is at rest. This vision of an infinite world with everything in motion within it coordinates Parmenides and a radicalized Copernicanism. There is ultimate uniformity of the world; everything is in motion and changing without any privileged center of that movement.

Nicholas - lack of proportion between creation and divine nature requires the Incarnation to bridge the gap for human salvation. Bruno - lack of proportion between human and divine nature precludes the Incarnation, but God can be immanent in nature because it is infinite, and hence in proportion to Him.

Bruno's Copernicanism challenges an essential metaphysical premise of the medieval scholastic system -- that movement is transmitted from the outer heavens to bodies on the motionless earth. Instead, the earth is already in motion, and the apparent motion of the heavens is really a result of the earth's own motion. So there is no place for astral determination of earthly action.

Even Aristotle's conception of weight, which is supposed to show the affinity of bodies for rest in their proper place, is relativized to a plurality of worlds and turned to the purpose of serving a theory of the internal motion of those worlds.

Bruno breaks from Aristotle's teleological conception of motion -- movement from potential to reality -- to embrace a cyclical view -- potential to real and back to potential to free up space for other actualizations. Motion is fundamentally circular or cyclical, but not perfectly so, since it is infinitely elaborated and complex. But here he transforms Cusa's doctrine of imprecision -- in the absence of unfulfilled teleology, infinite elaboration is no longer a mark of the unbridgeable difference between the actual and transcendent, but rather of the realization of God in the world.

In contrast with Plato and Aristotle, where movement is measured against an absolute and finitely periodic time defined by diurnal motion, time is infinite and formless and movement is seen as the necessary condition for the measurement of (relative) time.

Bruno is akin to Leibniz in seeing worldly bodies having the origin of their motion within themselves, and seeing apparent causal relations as mere synchronicity of independent motion. But Leibniz rejects the reality of infinite space and time and the principle of indifference implicit

in it to preserve the idea of a purposed creation and a personal relation to God -- in this sense he marks a regression from Bruno.

Form for Bruno not external to matter, but produced from it. But matter never has a final form, a destiny; ceaselessly throwing off forms and taking new ones. Man has no special nature, but simply an intensified ability to go beyond nature, to create new forms. This limitless ability to create anew through work -- which is an infinite process not completed in any individual -- makes man like God. Contrast to Cusa, for whom being like God is a definite ideal which is ever more closely approached -- here the infinite process itself of taking man away from animal nature is what makes man like God.

593: "The great symmetry of man becoming God and God becoming man, which the Cusan had set up against the conflict that was breaking out between the medieval consciousness of God and the new consciousness of self, had been destroyed by the third element of the system, the no longer limited world, which Nicholas himself had introduced, with caution, to balance the transcendent infinity."

Blumenberg concludes with an analysis of the conflicting models of pagan metamorphosis and Christian Incarnation. Stories of metamorphosis were prolific, the transition from God to worldly was portrayed as easy and common, but this was also received by the philosophical critique of myth as evidence of deceit, of the immorality of the Gods. Incarnation was exceptional, singular, and it was above all important to remove suspicion of being simply another myth, to guarantee its reality. This guarantee provided a privileged status for man as the motive of the Incarnation. But nominalism removed this privilege by dissolving any claim of human entitlement to the Incarnation, making it a pure act of grace. In this context, Bruno's reassertion of the model of metamorphosis provided a new guarantee, but only of the world, not of man's privileged place in it.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: "Conclusion: Meeting the Challenge"

2009-01-01T18:48:00.000-08:00

Steps for restoring a balance of political power

1) rebuild the breadth of labor unions -- but this will have to be done largely after balance is achieved rather than as a prerequisite. It is impossible to pass the new laws and issue the regulations needed for a labor revival while Republican extremists are in control.
2) Use the internet to organize opposition. Fundraising, e-mail lists, blogs. Powerful and flexible tool for coordination.

Republican corruption and overreach have created an opening for restoration of political balance.
Proposals
1) Remove barriers to increased voter turnout.
a) Reform voter registration: implement same-day registration; get rid of requirement to re-register after moving; restore voting rights for ex-felons
b) Make election day a national holiday

2) Increase the proportion of competitive elections
a) Put redistricting in the hands of non-partisan panels
b) Split state electoral votes by district as well as state (neither this or the preceding should be done only in Democratic states, however -- that would be "unilateral disarmament")
c) Create pure open primaries with top two vote-getters advancing to general election
d) Require free TV and radio airtime for federal candidates
e) Take constituent service out of the hands of Congressmen and have it performed by non-partisan ombudsmen (strongly disagree with this: the vested interest of politicians in reelection gives them a stronger incentive to perform constituent service well, and the incumbency advantage this provides is bearable).

3) Increase transparency and accountability
a) Restore the Fairness Doctrine
b) Start an American tradition of Question Time for the President before Congress
c) Provide a simple yearly prospectus of government spending every year (perhaps with tax returns)
d) Restrict use of closed rules in the House and make sure that existing rules for conference committees can only be waived with a two-thirds vote.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: Chapter 6, "The Center Does Not Hold"

2009-01-01T18:44:00.000-08:00

Political scientists and pundits generally expect centrists to hold sway. This has not happened because the institutional moderating forces have not been as effective as expected.

1) voters -- not only are voters poorly informed, but this ignorance is not random. Republicans strive to make sure voter ignorance is tilted in their favor, which has diluted the effectiveness of voters without strong ideological affiliations as a moderating influence.

2) opposition -- the Democrats are simply not as unified and organized as the Republicans. Senior committee members more autonomous. Campaign funding often depends on special interests with an agenda that cuts against liberal policy. Moderates vulnerable to Republican framing. Lack of institutional control means there is little ability to reward loyalists, while Republicans can reward those who stray. Disproportionate significance of Republican-leaning small states in Senate apportionment creates a large segment of vulnerable Democratic Senators who are especially hard to keep in line.

3) media -- decreasingly effective in exposing the actual effects of Republican policies because of a) focus on entertainment over substance, b) "he-said she-said" model of objectivity, and c) herd mentality in deciding what issues are worth covering. The parallel right-wing media universe also plays an important part in distorting coverage.

4) Republican moderates -- intimidated and bought off.

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: Chapter 5, "The Republican Machine"

2009-01-01T18:41:00.000-08:00

New Republican power brokers (Norquist, DeLay, Rove) are a key to the direction of American politics.Two key facts: (1) their politics is extreme; (2) their power is not necessarily a function of official positions.

The new power brokers have created the high degree of centralization and coordination in conservative politics. From their role as middlemen between activists, politicians, and lobbyists,they impose discipline on all of them to foster a unified (and extreme) agenda. They control the access of interest groups and lobbyists to politicans and legislation, and they also control the access of politicians to campaign money and leadership posts. They determine how much apparent independence supposedly moderate Republicans can show in order to strengthen their electoral prospects.

The coordination makes possible several kinds of "backlash insurance" to protect vulnerable incumbents from the consequences of supporting an unpopular far-right policies.
1) Agenda control - control what comes up for debate in Congress, keep popular and more centrist or liberal issues from getting a hearing, use unified public relations campaign to frame how the issues are presented in the media.
2) procedural manipulation - protect Republicans from unpopular votes on bills by using legislative rules. In the House, Republicans use a closed debate rule to quash moderate of liberal amendments to bills. This can't be done in the Senate,but conference committees are abused in a way that makes the original Senate bill irrelevant, so that Senators can safely vote for popular amendments that will be stricken from the final law.
3) Policy distortion - design legislation so that relatively trivial but popular aspects are most evident (e.g., front-loading middle-class tax cuts) while more significant and very unpopular right-wing measures are obscured (e.g., phase-ins and sunsets for tax cuts that mostly affect the very rich to hide their true extent).
4) Throw lots of money behind incumbents who are still at risk despite other measures.