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

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"

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"

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"

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"

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

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"

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"

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"

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"

(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"

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"

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

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

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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

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.