The Ghost at the Feast

Robert Kagan

At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans could choose one of two paths in the world. One was to confine themselves chiefly to matters within their own borders, or at most within their own hemisphere, and to focus on improving their own society. This approach, mislabeled then and later as “isolationism,” had a long tradition. Washington had laid down his “great rule” in his Farewell Address in 1796, to have with foreign powers “as little political connexion as possible.” Jefferson in his inaugural address in 1801 called for “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations—entangling alliances with none.”

. . . .

Germans’ sense of their racial and civilizational superiority, already a key element of the “spirit of 1914,” would have likely been enhanced by victory over Slavs, Anglo-Saxons, and the West generally. In terms of sheer economic, political, and military power, Germany’s position in the world would have been immeasurably strengthened. A German Mitteleuropa reaching from Belgium to the Balkans, all dependent on and responsible to the rulers in Berlin, including a triumphant Hohenzollern dynasty, would have presented quite a geopolitical and geo-economic challenge to Britain, France, Russia, and even the United States. Even Germans of only moderate ambition during the war envisioned a vast colonial empire—a “German India”—perhaps in Africa that could “yield us all the raw material we need.”

. . . .

That [Republican Senator Henry Cabot] Lodge’s actions with regard to the League [of Nations] were driven by political rather than foreign policy considerations even his sympathetic biographer acknowledges. According to Widenor, Lodge might well have “swallowed the League had he seen therein the means of securing a Republican victory” in 1920. But as it happened, most agreed that the way to defeat Wilson was to defeat his league. Widenor, Lodge, 309. “Many of the men who should have been among the strongest supporters of the League of Nations,” Stimson recalled, had since 1914 become “bitter enemies of Woodrow Wilson.”

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

A Machiavellian does not assume, without examination, the desirability of democracy or peace or even of “justice” or any other ideal goal. Before declaring his allegiance, he makes sure that he understands what is being talked about, together with the probable consequences for social welfare and well-being. Above all, no Machiavellian assumes without inquiry that the various goals are possible. A goal must be possible before there is any point in considering it desirable. It is not possible merely because it sounds pleasant or because men want it badly.

. . . .

Liberty, then—not the rhetorical liberty of an impossible and misconceived utopia, but such concrete liberty as is, when they are fortunate, within the grasp of real men, with their real limitations—is the dominant ideal of Machiavelli, and his final norm of judgment. Tyranny is liberty’s opposite, and no man has been a clearer foe of tyranny. No man clearer, and few more eloquent.

Nervous States

William Davies

Why do bankers and CEOs today earn far more than they can possibly need or really enjoy? The answer to this is found in moral psychology, not economics: their sense of self-worth depends on comparing themselves to each other and to their previous earnings, rather than by looking at their money in the aggregate. The hypocrisy of privileged elites on this issue is palpable. In one’s own day-to-day life, the economy feels like a zero-sum game in which one side wins and the other loses, regardless of what experts might say, a feeling that engulfs the rich just as much as the poor. We are all susceptible to the logic of resentment in our own lives, even those of us who adopt a perspective of cool scientific objectivity toward the lives of others.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Isaiah Berlin, editied by Henry Hardy, and introduced by Michael Ignatieff

[Tolstoy] complains that while the factors which determine the life of mankind are very various, historians select from them only some single aspect, say the political or the economic, and represent it as primary, as the efficient cause of social change; but then, what of religion, what of ‘spiritual’ factors, and the many other aspects – a literally countless multiplicity – with which all events are endowed? How can we escape the conclusion that the histories which exist represent what Tolstoy declares to be ‘perhaps only 0.001 per cent of the elements which actually constitute the real history of peoples’?

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Surely we all use our brains as a whole, not just one hemisphere? Naturally, this is almost invariably the case. My point is a different one: that each hemisphere has inevitably a distinctive ‘take’ on the structure of the world, which is why we have two hemispheres at all. And each ‘take’ appears, when pondered in the abstract, strictly speaking incompatible with the other. They are each internally consistent, but mutually incompossible.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

Gary Lachman

And Paul Ricoeur, a rigorous French philosopher awarded many academic honours with no interest in the occult, has argued that we can best understand Husserl (another difficult no-nonsense thinker) if we can grasp that ‘the intentionality which culminates in seeing’ – Husserl’s ‘perception is intentional’ – is a kind of ‘creative vision’.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

The goal of the Wedge is to separate stimulus from response.

Two Essays on Colin Wilson

Gary Lachman

He may, as some critics have said, have never gotten over Shaw—listening to a radio broadcast of Man and Superman was perhaps the single most decisive event of the young Wilson’s life; and his ‘Victorian’ belief in progress and heroism may seem antiquated amidst our own cool scepticism. But, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, it’s not enough that an idea be fashionable, it should also strive for truth.

Current Reading:

1. E.H. Carr, The Twenty-Year Crisis: 1919-1939 (1939). This is a re-read, and although I’m only partway through, it’s providing rich rewards. It’s a deserved classic. Carr, from what I gather, is a complex figure: arch-realist and long-time Communist sympathizer. Not an expected match! Unless one equates realism with Machiavellianism, cynicism, and tyranny, which is unfair and unjustified as to Machiavelli himself, but spot on, for instance, with Stalin and Hitler.

Wonder Confronts Certainty

Gary Saul Morson

Chekhov, too, was appalled. Commenting on the revolutionaries’ strategy of exacerbating, rather than ameliorating, the epidemic of cholera (the worse, the better), he wrote to his friend Suvorin (on August 1, 1892) that “if our socialists are really going to exploit the cholera for their own ends, I shall despise them. Repulsive means for good ends make the ends themselves repulsive.”

The great danger of revolutionary movements on the left and the right, and the reason we need to wage a two-front struggle against extremism.

The Soul of the World

Roger Scruton

The heart of religion is ritual, and it is a mark of religion that its rituals are meticulous. The wrong word, the wrong gesture, the wrong way of addressing the god—all such departures are not just errors but profanations.

But when rituals and mandatory beliefs are imposed on political groups, the result poisons the political process. Ideologies too often become matters of ritualized, mandatory belief, subject to excommunication from the group—or worse. (See Checkov, above.)

Henry Adams and the Making of America

Garry Wills

Harrison’s blunder [anticipating the War of 1812] had made it certain that Tecumseh would become an extremely effective ally of the British in the impending war, a far more important military figure than Harrison himself—one indeed whom Adams calls “the most powerful American then living”. For Adams, Tecumseh was the American Toussaint.

Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

Neil Postman

Which people and what institutions might be most seriously harmed by a technological solution? This was the question, by the way, that gave rise to the Luddite movement in England during the years 1811 to 1818. The people we call Luddites were skilled manual workers in the garment industry at the time when mechanization was taking command and the factory system was being put into place. They knew perfectly well what advantages mechanization would bring to most people, but they saw with equal clarity how it would bring ruin to their own way of life, especially to their children who were being employed as virtual slave laborers in factories. They resisted technological change by the simplistic and useless expedient of smashing to bits industrial machinery, which they continued to do until they were imprisoned or killed by the British army. “Luddite” has thus come to mean a person who resists technological change in any way, and it is usually used as an insult. Why this is so is a bit puzzling, since only a fool doesn’t know that new technologies always produce winners and losers, and there is nothing irrational about loser-resistance. Bill Gates, who is, of course, a winner, knows this, and because he is no fool, his propaganda continuously implies that computer technology can bring harm to no one. That is the way of winners: they want losers to be grateful and enthusiastic and, especially, to be unaware that they are losers.

A crucial point to consider when thinking about AI.

The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

Christopher Lasch

The privatization of morality is one more indication of the collapse of the community, and a communitarianism that acquiesces in this development, at the same time calling for a public philosophy, cannot expect to be taken very seriously.

Any attempt to base public policy on a clearly articulated set of moral guidelines, of course, invites the predictable objection that moral perceptions are inherently subjective, that it is impossible to arrive at a general agreement about these matters, and that politics and morality therefore have to be strictly segregated. Any attempt to combine them, according to this reasoning, will result in the imposition of one group’s values on everybody else. The most common criticism of communitarianism is that it would lead to the regimentation of opinion, the repression of dissent, and the institutionalization of intolerance, all in the name of morality. Opponents of communitarianism, who include right-wing libertarians as well as left-leaning liberals, cite Calvin’s Geneva, Cromwell’s Puritan Commonwealth, and the Salem witch trials to show what happens when the state tries to enforce morality. The word “community,” in their ears, sounds like a prescription for bigotry and parochialism. It conjures up images of village life out of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis: suspicious, gossipy, complacent, ruthless in its suppression of originality and intellectual freedom. From this point of view, communitarianism appears to threaten everything the modern world has achieved in its progress from provincialism to cosmopolitanism, including the respect for “diversity” that has become the hallmark (we are told) of civilized societies.

The best answer to this indictment is that it exaggerates the difficulty of reaching a common understanding about moral issues.

Money, Sex, War, Karma

David R. Loy

Ironically, I’m busy trying to defend and promote the interests of something that doesn’t exist: my self. (And because the sense of self is not a real self, it’s always in need of defense and support.

This America

Jill Lepore

The last best single-volume history of the United States published in the twentieth century was written by Carl Degler, in 1959. Out of Our Past: The Forces That Shaped Modern America, a stunning, sweeping account that, much influenced by DuBois, places race, slavery, segregation, and civil rights at the center of its story, alongside liberty, rights, revolution, freedom, and equality, was Degler’s first book. (It had plenty of limitations. It contained, Degler admitted, “no mention of the American Indians.”) It was also the last of its kind.

We Are Free to Change the World

Lyndsey Stonebridge

[Arendt] knew perfectly well that it was not true that there was no extreme suffering in America. Abject and degrading misery was present everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labor, she also wrote. However, this misery did not figure in her account because she assumed that it did not really figure in America’s sense of its revolution either. Up to a point, she criticized this omission. Elsewhere, modern revolutions had made human suffering the theater in which they were performed. By contrast, slavery, which she described as the primordial crime on which the fabric of American society rested, did not appear to be part of the spectacle of the revolution at all. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery obscurity is even blacker than the obscurity of poverty; the slave, not the poor man, was “wholly overlooked” (On Revolution 60-61). America’s revolution was deformed from the beginning.

“Deformed” isn’t the term I would use, but certainly it was incomplete. Yet, it was the most successful revolution, the one that most embodied—albeit imperfectly—political liberty and that led to democracy.

America’s New Map

Thomas P.M. Barnett

An international system is made up of structure and norms. Organizations like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank constitute structure, as do military alliances. Norms are most easily identified in the rules propagated and sustained by those organizations. After World War II, America chose to simultaneously transform both elements with its vigorous, visionary leadership. We did not have to do this.

And now Trump and his lackeys have taken to dynamiting the whole system. Fools!

Current & Recent Reading & Watching:

1. Fred Kaplan: Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer (2007). Completed. I thought I knew enough about Lincoln. I didn’t. And what a fascinating and revealing lens by which to understand this complex and admirable figure.

2. Dostoevsky: The Demons. I’m still near the beginning. I’m reading to complete my journey through Dostoevsky’s Big Five (Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers K). It’s not easy reading, but it’s a rewarding investment.

3. Luke Kemp: Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (2025). I’m just getting started, but it’s very promising so far and a likely candidate to join the likes of Joseph Tainter, Peter Turchin, William Ophuls, and Thomas Homer-Dixon in my pantheon of those who address this sad but necessary topic.

4. Merlin Sheldrake: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future (2020). Sometimes we humans are a bit much, and why limit myself to our species? Reading this book allows me to return to my young science-nerd self. I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and it’s proving fascinating.

5. Watching: Sugar: Season 1. Contemporary noir with a twist—and lots of nods to the past.

Enough for now.

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

Politics deals with men, nationals of many countries and heirs to many pasts; its laws are the positively established fences which hedge in, protect, and limit the space in which freedom is not a concept, but a living, political reality.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Socialism—or communism—becomes an ideology only when it pretends that all history is a struggle of classes, that the proletariat is bound by eternal laws to win this struggle, that a classless society will then come about, and that the state, finally, will wither away. In other words, ideologies are systems of explanation of life and world that claim to explain everything, past and future, without further concurrence with actual experience.

Great Delusion

John J. Mearsheimer

A political ideology, on the other hand, is a systematic body of concepts and principles that explain how a particular society, or the international system more generally, should work. In other words, it is prescriptive; it provides a blueprint for how a political order should operate. Ideologies are inherently normative in nature, although every ideology has theory behind it, which explains in good part the significant overlap between these two concepts. Ideology, for that reason, might be called normative theory, as opposed to explanatory theory.

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

Political history is the history of political thought: not ‘political theory’, but the thought which occupies the mind of a man engaged in political work: the formation of a policy, the planning of means to execute it, the attempt to carry it into effect, the discovery that others are hostile to it, the devising of ways to overcome their hostility, and so forth.

War and Peace and War

Peter Turchin

[Robert] Putnam [of Bowling Alone fame] points to a “striking correlation between low social capital at the end of the twentieth century and slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century. The more virulent the system of slavery then, the less civic the state today. Slavery was, in fact, a social system designed to destroy social capital among the slaves and freemen. Well-established networks of reciprocity among the oppressed would have raised the risk of rebellion, and egalitarian bonds of sympathy between the slave and free would have undermined the very legitimacy of the system. After emancipation the dominant classes in the South continued to have a strong interest in inhibiting horizontal social networks. It is not happenstance that the lowest levels of community-based social capital are found where a century of plantation slavery was followed by a century of Jim Crowe politics. Inequality and social solidarity are deeply incompatible.” It was, thus, the rise of inequality and especially of its ugliest form, slavery, that began corroding Roman asabiya during the second century B.C. If social solidarity began its decline during this period, however, it does not mean that the Roman state declined in all other ways at the same time. “Decline” is not only nonlinear, it is also multidimensional.

Political Tribes

Amy Chua

Universal brotherhood is incompatible with gross inequality.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

[T]he way in which to study a nation, to understand it, to predict what will happen to it, requires first of all and primarily an analysis of the ruling class. Political history and political science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes, their origin, development, composition, structure, and changes.

The Shipwrecked Mind

Mark Lilla

[Eric Voegelin & Leo Strauss] like many of their contemporaries, thought it urgent to explain the collapse of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism in terms of a calamitous break in the history of ideas, after which intellectual and political decline set in. They, like many of their contemporaries, thought it urgent to explain the collapse of democracy and the rise of totalitarianism in terms of a calamitous break in the history of ideas, after which intellectual and political decline set in. In his voluminous writings on religion and politics, Voegelin eventually settled on ancient religious gnosticism as the force that set the West on its disastrous course. Strauss developed a subtle and much deeper account of the history of Western philosophy, built up from careful studies of thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche. In his view, Machiavelli was responsible for the decisive historical break within the philosophical tradition, turning it from pure contemplation and political prudence toward the willful mastery of nature. Though their accounts of Western intellectual history were incompatible, they both helped to shape the historical imagination of American intellectuals on the right. This episode is not without its ironies.

The Cambridge Companion to the Federalist

Jack N. Rakove and Colleen A. Sheehan, eds.

““The Interest of the Man”: James Madison’s Constitutional Politics by Larry D. Kramer

In essence, Federalists wanted a monarchical social order without a monarch and with an aristocracy based on wealth and accomplishment rather than birth. As Gordon Wood has observed, Federalists believed in democracy, “but not our modern democracy; rather, they believed in a patrician-led classical democracy in which ‘virtue exemplified in government will diffuse its salutary influence though the society.’” [Gordon Wood].

The True and Only Heaven

Christopher Lasch

Modernization theory, the critics say, ignores the independent role of the state in social change. It treats the state merely as a product of underlying social forces, ignoring its capacity for autonomous initiative. The theory underestimates the importance of political conflicts in determining the course of historical events. It puts too much emphasis on internal forces in developing countries and overlooks the extent to which the early advantages seized by the West rested on the exploitation of colonial possessions. Military conquest underlay economic expansion in the sixteenth century, and the discipline required by large-scale industrial organizations was first worked out in military establishments and only later applied to the factory. The modern state’s dependence on military power may help to explain the continuing influence exercised by the nobility, allegedly displaced by the rise of commerce and industry.

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff

Tolstoy’s interest in history began early in his life. It seems to have arisen not from interest in the past as such, but from the desire to penetrate to first causes, to understand how and why things happen as they do and not otherwise, from discontent with those current explanations which do not explain, and leave the mind dissatisfied, from a tendency to doubt and place under suspicion and, if need be, reject whatever does not fully answer the question, to go to the root of every matter, at whatever cost. This remained Tolstoy’s attitude throughout his entire life, and is scarcely a symptom either of ‘trickery’ or of ‘superficiality’.

A Calendar of Wisdom

Leo Tolstoy, translated by Peter Sekirin

All events, whether in the lives of human individuals, or human societies, have their beginnings in thought. Therefore, to fully understand other people and other societies, we must look beyond previous events to the thoughts which gave rise to them.

Very much like Collingwood: all history is the history of human thought, and events are expressions of those thoughts.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

As the authors of one important paper in the area put it, ‘the simple action of pressing a switch has many possible interpretations – the actor could be turning on a light, deleting critical files from a computer, or even turning off a life-support system’.⁠76 Full marks to the left hemisphere for being able to work out that a switch is being pressed; but surely when we say understanding, we mean more than that. We in fact mean all that is hidden under the deceptively short word ‘why’ – the answer to which could be as long as a novel [or a history—sng]. Understanding, in this case, really means understanding; the mere identification of an action could, after all, be well enough performed by a computer, without any understanding being involved. Understanding the motivations of an action means understanding what it is to be a living human being, and working out what makes sense in a context as wide as our lived experience – and it comes by virtue of the right hemisphere. This is not just a ‘stage’ in a serial process: it is something that begins at the start of understanding the what of the action, and is rapidly and reverberatively revisited by the right hemisphere over the time course of milliseconds, reassessing the situation, to the point where we ‘see’ what is going on.

Also very in tune with Collingwood’s thought.

Win Your Case

Gerry Spence

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” We cannot understand human conduct without understanding others, and we cannot understand others without first becoming acquainted with ourselves.

The Lost Art of Scripture

Karen Armstrong

The Greeks expressed their unease with this secularised psychology in the genre of tragedy, which depicted the hero operating simultaneously on two levels, human and divine.

May we say that we humans are buffeted and constrained by circumstances as we act in the world, while the divine may be manifest in our thoughts, our ability to rise above our circumstances to imagine and act.

After Virtue

Alasdair MacIntyre

Kant retains its negative characteristics; reason for him, as much as for Hume, discerns no essential natures and no teleological features in the objective universe available for study by physics. Thus their disagreements on human nature coexist with striking and important agreements and what is true of them is true also of Diderot, of Smith and of Kierkegaard. All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which define his true end. But to understand this is to understand why their project of finding a basis for morality had to fail.

The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939

E.H. Carr

Theories of social morality are always the product of a dominant group which identifies itself with the community as a whole, and which possesses facilities denied to subordinate groups or individuals for imposing its view of life on the community. Theories of international morality are, for the same reason and in virtue of the same process, the product of dominant nations or groups of nations.

Grand Strategies

Charles Hill

Rhetorical advocacy creates the political space essential to law and order. This case marks the shift from the state of nature’s anarchy to the order of civil society.10 Justice will be carried out not by individuals on behalf of families or clans, but by the state. Irrevocably, capital punishment will from this point forward be a matter for the state to decide in accordance with open procedures centered on the jury. This makes the death penalty the foundation stone of civilization, for only when a victim’s kin are convinced that the state will exact justice in response to murder will they entrust that power to the state.

Political Order and Political Decay

Francis Fukuyama

China was the first world civilization to establish a nonpatrimonial, modern state, which it did some eighteen centuries before similar political units appeared in Europe.

The Price of Peace

Zachary D. Carter

But the Jackson Hole speech also sketched an economic history and a theory of social change that were fundamentally at odds with the work of John Maynard Keynes and his disciples. The General Theory was a book about, among other things, inequality and social progress. The central problems of the twentieth century, Keynes argued, were best solved by alleviating inequality. Enterprise and economic growth were driven not by the unique genius and vast fortunes of the very rich but by the purchasing power of the masses, which created markets for new ideas. To put people to work, governments needed to create systems of support for the poor and the middle class, not new favors for the rich.

On Freedom

Timothy Snyder

For humans, time can resolve itself into subjective moments that we experience and then can remember. We lose time by not focusing, by not encoding moments from the flux. Simone Weil thought the “quantity of creative genius of an epoch” was measured by attention span. By her measure (and our own), we are becoming stupider.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

The past exists only in our memories, the future only in our plans. The present is our only reality.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

No ship is unsinkable, and long experience has taught prudent mariners to provision lifeboats and practice abandoning ship against the eventuality of shipwreck. We should do no less by bequeathing posterity the tools it will need to erect a new civilization from the ruins of the old.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

To talk in terms of “market failure” understates the force of the point. What is at stake in the response to pandemic threats is not just a vast amount of economic value. What is at stake are basic questions of social order and political legitimacy.

The Great Leveler

Walter Scheidel

There is no repertoire of benign means of compression that has ever achieved results that are even remotely comparable to those produced by the Four Horsemen.

Strangers in Their Own Land

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Purchased political influence is real, powerful, and at play, I think, but as an explanation for why any of us believe what we do, duping—and the presumption of gullibility—is too simple an idea.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

No object is material, in the metaphysical sense of the word, except so far as scientific thinking conceives it so; for materiality means abstractness, subjection to the formulae of mechanical determination and mathematical calculation, and these formulae are never imposed upon any object whatever except by an arbitrary act which falsifies the object’s nature. This only appears paradoxical when we fail to see the gulf which separates the commonsense materiality of a table, its sensible qualities, from its metaphysical materiality, the abstract conceptual substrate of those qualities.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[T]here are emergent phenomena from the whole interconnected system at the hemisphere level, and neuroscience increasingly recognises that we should think in terms of complex widespread networks.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

There is a developing acceptance by psychology and the social sciences that human universals clearly do exist.

The Soul’s Code

James Hillman

“In non-linear systems [and surely a life is a nonlinear system] tiny, seemingly trivial differences in input can lead to huge differences in output.… Chaotic systems are not predictable [and surely unpredictability, too, is a characteristic of life] but they are stable in their irregular patterns.”23 Chaos theory gives great importance to “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”

What Every Novelist Needs to Know About Narrators

Wayne C. Booth

In any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the other characters, and the reader.

The Soul of the World

Roger Scruton

Whatever we think of it, we must acknowledge that evolutionary psychology cannot give a complete picture either of our states of mind, or of the universe that is represented in them.

End Times

Peter Turchin

Jacques Mallet du Pan, who had the misfortune of living through not one but two revolutions (in his native Geneva in 1782 and then in France in 1789), formulated this observation as a dictum: “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.”

Anger, Fear, Domination

William A. Galston

Most people, and most politicians, believe that hope and fear are opposites and that hope is an antidote to fear. Aristotle dissents: when people feel fear, he contends, “some hope of salvation must endure concerning the matter over which they anxiously contend.… For fear renders people apt to deliberate, yet no one deliberates about hopeless things.”12 Yet there is a kind of fear—terror—that makes deliberation and action flowing from it all but impossible.

Nervous States

William Davies

There is no representation, just mobilization, with an authenticity of emotion that technocrats and elites apparently lack.

The Vocation Lectures

“Politics as a Vocation”

Max Weber

[A]n opposing trend is to be found in the development of modern bureaucracy into a specialized, highly qualified, intellectual workforce that has undergone a lengthy preparatory period of training. This workforce has a highly developed sense of professional honor with an emphasis on probity. Without that sense of honor the risk of terrible corruption and vulgar philistinism would loom over us like fate. This would even threaten to undermine the purely technical activity of the state apparatus whose importance for the economy has constantly grown and will continue to grow, particularly with the increasing trend toward socialization.

Today we see “terrible corruption and vulgar philisinism” in the MAGA leaders of so many departements of the U.S. government. Weber would be astonished—as should we.

The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

Gordon S. Wood

Indeed, it is only in the context of this sense of uncertainty and risk that the Americans’ obsessive concern in 1776 with their social character can be properly comprehended. They knew only too well where the real source of danger lay. “We shall succeed if we are virtuous,” Samuel Adams told John Langdon in the summer of 1777. “I am infinitely more apprehensive of the Contagion of Vice than the Power of all other Enemies.” Benjamin Rush in 1777 even expressed the hope that the war would not end too soon: “A peace at this time would be the greatest curse that could befall us… Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.” Several more military campaigns were needed, he said to John Adams, in order “to purge away the monarchical impurity we contracted by laying so long upon the lap of Great Britain.”

Oh, my! What would these Founders think of us now? Maybe we can’t handle liberty? I refuse to accept this, but it’s not a claim without merit.

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky

George Steiner

James* admitted that there were “fine compensations” for the thinness of the American atmosphere. He alluded to the immediacy of physical nature in its more eloquent moods, to the writer’s contact with a broad range of types, and to the sense of “wonder” and “mystery” which comes with meeting men who cannot be placed in any of the distinct categories of a fixed society. But James hastened to add that this absence of hierarchies deprived an artist of “intellectual standards” and of the touchstones of manner. Instead, it committed him to a “rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility.”

*William or Henry? I’ll guess Henry and leave it at that.

Wonder Confronts Certainty

Gary Saul Morson

Unlike utopias and saints’ lives, realist novels do not presume they possess the absolute truth. The realist novel speculates in categories of ignorance, makes its home in uncertainty, and dwells in the land of opinion. The author never claims to have understood everything about a person. She presents her own beliefs as challengeable. They derive not from divine revelation, mathematical proof, or scientific demonstration, but from experience. They are not definitive, and what they offer is not perfect knowledge but unformalizable wisdom. Because they are open to challenge, they invite conversation.

. . . .

If one does not understand people this way, one does not write realist novels, although one might compose works belonging to other genres of long fiction like the extended allegory (Moby-Dick), the satire (Joseph Andrews), the adventure story (King Solomon’s Mines), the fantasy (The Lord of the Rings), the mystery (The Moonstone), or the utopia (Looking Backward, 2000-1887). Each of these genres concerns itself with something other than the specificity of individuals.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Robert M. Pirsig

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.

On Writing

Stephen King

Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him).

The Language Animal

Charles Taylor

Of course, Hobbes and Locke did talk of sticking to our original definitions, but we should cut them a little slack, in order to get to the crucial issues for us today. We need to update them to take account of Saussure, just as contemporary philosophy has updated them to take in the findings of Frege. The HLC authors thought of language as a capacity we could build up one term at a time (cf. Condillac’s “just so” story of the origin of language). Introducing a term meant tying some name to a particular phenomenon. But Saussure took account of the fact that terms get their meaning in contrast to others; “red” has the meaning it does because of its contrast to the other color terms that we use. It would be quite different if we didn’t have “orange” for instance. So instead of understanding the linguistic code as a set of pairs linking word and thing, we have to see it as a relation between, say, differentially defined sounds (the signifiers) and differentially defined phenomena (the signifieds). “In language there are only differences without positive terms” [Dans la langue, il n’y a que des différences, et pas de termes positifs]. We carve out contrastive distinctions in the indefinite range of possible phonetic sounds, and line them up with contrastive distinctions in the phenomena we speak about.

. . . .

We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introduces a dimension of strong value. Language can only be explained through a radical discontinuity with the extralinguistic.

Of course, this argument of Wittgenstein may be taken as showing only that an agent must have some grasp of an articulated language, even if it only an intramental grasp, if he/she is to make sense of these distinctions; whereas Herder’s expressivism asserts the necessity of a behaviorally enacted language in words and deeds. The necessity of this latter has to be shown in order to clinch Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language. The basic thesis is a genetic one, that we could never have the silent, monological, inner language if we hadn’t first acquired the language capacity in its expressed-enacted form. I will return to this below.

. . . .

The chimps learned signs one by one, but words can’t be acquired in this way. A word only makes sense within a whole language; just as our sense of what we can say is always bounded by our recurrent experience of what cannot (yet) be said; and our grasp on particular things and situations exists on a background of the larger whole of which these things and situations are segments. There is a triple holism here, which is quite absent in the signing capacity that chimpanzees master.

But even if one is comfortable with the continuity approach, and is willing to accept reductive accounts of our moral and aesthetic judgments, the great complexity and subtlety of our power to encode information in language cannot fail to impress. And there is, indeed, a philosophical temper which combines an inclination toward mechanistic reduction with an enthusiastic appreciation of this complexity and subtlety, a temper widely shared in analytic philosophy and cognitive science.

And indeed, the coding power is awesome. It contrasts strongly with another way that we humans can convey information, through mimetic gesture. This latter is holistic and iconic; whereas descriptive language is analytic and combinatorial.

Cosmic Connections

Charles Taylor

Words cannot explain music. But words and meaning can magnificently combine in a higher, fuller Music, as Mallarmé claimed.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

Symbolism is thus intellectualized language: language, because it expresses emotions; intellectualized, because adapted to the expression of intellectual emotions. Language in its original imaginative form maybe said to have expressiveness, but no meaning. About such language we cannot distinguish between what the speaker says and what he means. You may say that he means precisely what he says; or you may say that he means nothing, he is only speaking (where speaking, of course, means not making vocal noises, but expressing emotion). Language in its intellectualized form has both expressiveness and meaning.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

I am not the first to have surmised that referential language originated in something other than the need to communicate. The philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who in 1772 published one of the most important and influential essays on the origins of language, noticing that what I would call the ‘I–thou’ element in communication at the most intuitive level, the empathic force that is present in music, is hardly characteristic of human language, concluded that ‘language appears as a natural organ of reason’. That might require qualification, since, as I have emphasised, reasoning goes on without it; but what he points to here is the importance of language primarily as an aid to a certain particular type of cognition. Nearer our own time, the distinguished American neuroscientist Norman Geschwind ventured that language may not, after all, have originated in a drive to communicate – that came later – but as a means of mapping the world. I would agree with that and go further. It is a means of manipulating the world.

Understanding the nature of language depends once again on thinking about the ‘howness’, not the ‘whatness’. The development of denotative language enables, not communication in itself, but a special kind of communicating, not thinking itself, but a special kind of thinking.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation

Frank R. Ankersmit

So this is what the linguistic turn basically looks like for (historical) representation. Language does have here an autonomy with regard to the world that empiricism could not possibly allow for. However, this is not because of an underdetermination of theory by fact (as was the case with Quine) but because language if used representationally privileges meaning over truth so that truth follows meaning instead of the reverse. In historical representation truth is born from meaning.

Visions of Politics

Quentin Skinner

[The] cardinal assumption of positivistic philosophies of language was that all meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meanings of sentences must be given by the method of verifying the assertions contained in them. Quine cast doubt on this whole approach with his insistence that there is no such ‘unvarnished news’ to report. So did Wittgenstein when he first emphasised the multifarious ways in which languages are actually used, and went on to argue that we should stop asking about the ‘meanings’ of words and focus instead on the various functions they are capable of performing in different language games.

. . . .

Raymond Williams’s Keywords. It is Williams’s central contention that a study of ‘variations and confusions of meaning’ may help us to improve our understanding of matters of ‘historical and contemporary substance’. If we take ‘certain words at the level at which they are generally used’ and scrutinise their developing structures of meaning ‘in and through historical time’, we may be able ‘to contribute certain kinds of awareness’ to current social and political debates, and in particular an ‘extra edge of consciousness’. But what kinds of awareness can we hope to attain from studying the history of key words?

Modern Philosophy

Roger Scruton

Remember Frege’s theory, according to which the reference of a singular term is an object, and that of a sentence a truth-value. Instead of ‘reference’ logicians often use the term ‘extension’ (borrowing a word from the nineteenth-century logician, Sir William Hamilton). This does not express quite the same idea as is expressed by Frege’s term ‘reference’; but it captures what we need for logic. The extension of a name is an object, of a predicate a class, of a sentence a truth-value. Extensional logic is the logic that issues from the assumption that the extension of a complex term (such as a sentence) is fully determined by the extension of its parts – in the way that the truth value of p & q is completely determined by the truth value of its components, and the truth value of ‘Mary is angry’ is fully determined by the fact that ‘Mary’ refers to Mary, and ‘angry’ to the class of angry things. In extensional logic, the law of substitution is universally valid. This says that terms with the same extension can be substituted for each other without changing the extension of the whole.

Writing Tools

Roy Peter Clark

Fear not the long sentence. Take the reader on a journey of language and meaning.

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

This “light comma” style is often praised as “modern, streamlined, clean” (rather than “fussy and old-fashioned”), but Chafe shows how it actually increases the work that readers must do in order to extract meaning from a text. For when writers follow the older rhetorical tradition and use more commas, they help signal a bit of the prosody of speech and thereby increase the transparency of their [written] language. By signaling the boundaries of normal processing units [intonational phrases] they relieve readers of the necessity of creating those boundaries for themselves, and thus allow the ideas behind the language to show through without interposing the language as something else to pay attention to. [In contrast, a writer who follows the modern style and uses fewer commas] forces his readers to create their own processing units.

Why Argument Matters

Lee Siegel

At the end of his life, Socrates stripped argument down to its essence as a type of transcendent fusion of language, meaning, feeling, and action.

The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt

. The relationship between state and society was determined by the fact of class struggle, which had supplanted the former feudal order. Society was pervaded by liberal individualism which wrongly believed that the state ruled over mere individuals, when in reality it ruled over classes, and which saw in the state a kind of supreme individual before which all others had to bow. It seemed to be the will of the nation that the state protect it from the consequences of its social atomization and, at the same time, guarantee its possibility of remaining in a state of atomization. To be equal to this task, the state had to enforce all earlier tendencies toward centralization; only a strongly centralized administration which monopolized all instruments of violence and power-possibilities could counterbalance the centrifugal forces constantly produced in a class-ridden society. Nationalism, then, became the precious cement for binding together a centralized state and an atomized society, and it actually proved to be the only working, live connection between the individuals of the nation-state.

The Jewish Writings

Hannah Arendt

Precisely because they were neither part of class society nor the state ‘s politically active governing clique, the Jews were oblivious to the increasing tension between state and society at the same time that they were driven toward the center of the conflict because they stood between the two as part of neither. Politically naïve enough to believe that their true lack of interest in power would be seen and accepted for what it was, they were taken completely by surprise when twentieth-century political antisemitism rose to power on the basis of charges of a Jewish world conspiracy.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

By “SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM,” Pareto means the general state and structure of society, considered dynamically, at any given moment. That is, the term refers to the state of society insofar as it involves the interplay of those forces that both determine what it is at any given moment, and at the same time, through their operation, work to change its state and structure. What are these forces that determine the social equilibrium, that make society what it is and bring about changes in society?

Defenses Against the Dark Arts

John S. Nelson

Modern ideologies and postmodern movements typically appear partly in conventions of individual performance: postures, gestures, habits, phrases, standards, choices, assumptions, associates, manners, demeanors, tastes, questions, sensibilities, and so forth. There are distinctive styles of liberal action, socialist behavior, and conservative conduct.

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

Liberals, to put it in summary terms, took society to be competitive and conflicted. They distrusted power and questioned customary authority. They believed in human progress and social equality, with its requirement of civic respect for all. They had high expectations of political action.

The Declaration of Independence

Carl Lotus Becker

The existing social order, the particular nation with its political organization, its law, its speech and literature, was thought of as the necessary product of the social process, as the product of history; and thought of therefore as the state of nature par excellence, as the only valid expression of God’s purpose, or as the concrete realization of a mysterious Reason of Nature superior to any mere individual reasoning, a kind of transcendental Vernunft enclosing and reconciling within its cloudy recesses the verdicts of innumerable and conflicting Verstande.

Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy

Hannah Arendt

It is precisely this problem of how to organize a people into a state, how to constitute the state, how to found a commonwealth, and all the legal problems connected with these questions, that occupied him constantly during his [Kant’s] last years.

Collingwood’s The Idea of History

Peter Johnson

If we have nothing to fear from future generations then, on at least one theory of obligation, apart from our immediate successors, we have little reason to take the future into account. Since Collingwood’s political philosophy lacks a theory of social justice (he does not try to develop a theory of inter-generational justice along, say, the lines made famous by John Rawls), we might expect his theory of progress to do some work in this direction.

In Collingwood’s hands progress is a special case of re-enactment. Newtonian science lives on in Einstein, ‘but re-enacted here and now together with a development of itself that is partly constructive or positive and partly critical or negative’ (IH [The Idea of History] 334). When we add to this Collingwood’s thought that the past remains encapsulated in the present in the form of evidence, it is reasonable to assume that Collingwood thinks of historical generations as overlapping. Of course, in one obvious sense all generations overlap because each single generation shares the scene with its immediate predecessors and successors, but Collingwood’s point is broader. Historical re-enactment dependent on the evidence concerns the past and it is important because it counters the ‘optical illusion’ (IH 328) of taking the present as the litmus test of the past.

Great Delusion

John J. Mearsheimer

Schmitt writes: “One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to their anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by nature good.” Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1976), p. 58.

The Project-State and Its Rivals

Charles S. Maier

Despite many historians’ treatment of capitalism as an all-encompassing causal framework, my own view is that the political system, based on the resources of power, whether accumulated by force or consent, remains conceptually independent.

1984

George Orwell

In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

Does this describe the contemporary U.S.? In no small measure, I fear.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The historian’s business is with fact; and there are no future facts. The whole past and present universe is the field of history, to its remotest parts and in its most distant beginnings. Over this field the historian is absolutely free to range in whatever direction he will, limited not by his ‘authorities’ but by his own pleasure. For the maturity of historical thought is the explicit consciousness of the truth that what matters is not an historian’s sources but the use he makes of them.

The Idea of Nature

R. G. Collingwood

[Giordano] Bruno’s thought resembles Spinoza’s in so many ways that it has been described as stopping short of Spinoza’s complete position only because Bruno was an unsystematic and desultory thinker, more rich in passion and intuition than in method and logical perseverance. But this is not the whole truth. Spinoza’s cosmology presupposes the whole mechanistic theory of the universe, which Bruno’s has not yet envisaged.

Both Bruno and Spinoza are fascinating thinkers, but Bruno is of the Renaissance, with one foot still in the medieval worldview, while Spinoza is clearly within the realm of (early) modernity.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“The real, then,” explained [C.S.] Peirce, “is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”

But our “community” today is in disrepair and under attack by nihilist ideologies. We need to repair and rebuild our community of knowledge.

Plato’s Revenge

William Ophuls

Chaos theory ties together all that we have discussed. First, the cosmic process is everywhere similar: the basic principles of order are universal, and self-organization reigns in nature from microcosm to macrocosm. Second, the fundamental character of that process is nonlinear; the mechanical is at best a special case, at worst an aberration. Third, what we observe as physical is actually the manifestation of something mental: “invisible templates” that create standing waves in the stream of space-time. It would seem that modern physics has indeed, just as Heisenberg said, “definitely decided for Plato.”

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

The pervasive sense of risk and anxiety that hung around the world economy [as a result of the Covid pandemic] was a remarkable reversal. Not so long before, the West’s apparent triumph in the Cold War, the rise of market finance, the miracles of information technology, and the widening orbit of economic growth all together appeared to cement the capitalist economy as the all-conquering driver of modern history.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Although clearly not a traditionalist, Trump has positioned himself as an enemy of postmodernism. Traditionalists therefore hired Trump as their “bouncer” or cultural bodyguard. And when hiring a bouncer, one may be inclined to overlook his arrest record.

To update this quote, we’d have to refer not to Trump’s “arrest record;” we’d need to refer to his “conviction record.” But, alas, we should have—in addition to his 33-count felony convictions—two removals from office after his two impeachments. We now suffer greatly for this lack of judgment by the Senate.

Inventing the Middle Ages

Norman F. Cantor

[Carl] Erdmann’s second dissertation was a study, The Origins of the Crusading Ideal. It was published in 1935 (English translation, 1977) and was regarded as a work of very superior quality. If it had not been for his political views, it would have soon gained for him a university chair. It is a book written in a totalitarian society [Nazi Germany] in the shadow of political terrorism and is therefore written in code. But its meaning is clear. The title should be “The Crusading Ideal and the Perils of Fanaticism.” It is a study of the corruption of high spiritual ideals through their involvement with political fanaticism. It is an account of the perversion of Christianity by transmutation of its missionary impulse into holy war. The lesson for the Germany of the 1930s was obvious, and in spite of the circumspect style and coded reticence, Erdmann did not fool the Nazis. They blocked his appointment to a university job, and in time they got rid of him.

We in the U.S. are coming all too close to this situation in our colleges and universities.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The domesticated primate, inside the social reality-tunnel, is a trivial fragment of the potentials for experience and intelligence innate in the 110,000,000,000-cell human biocomputer.

We are, as a species, underachievers.

Waste Land

Robert D. Kaplan

History, once again, is a series of hinges. Even if the trends are bad, as I have certainly enumerated, better and worse outcomes are always available.

A stunningly simple and—=should be—obvious truth. Binary thinking often proves a curse.

The Tragic Mind

Robert D. Kaplan

Action by definition lacks the subtlety of intellectual argument. And while the leader will be judged in hindsight, at the moment he acts he knows only the facts as they are available to him. While the evidence will be at best partial, the decisions that arise from it are irrevocable. This is why bravery is intimately connected with leadership.

The Culture of Narcissism

Christopher Lasch

The real value of the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime is that it can be handed on to future generations. Our society, however, has lost this conception of wisdom and knowledge. It holds an instrumental view of knowledge, according to which technological change constantly renders knowledge obsolete and therefore nontransferable.

The Soul of the World

Roger Scruton

Environmental degradation comes in just the same way that moral degradation comes, through representing people and places in impersonal ways, as objects to be used rather than as subjects to be respected. The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable.

Our civilization (now virtually worldwide) tends far too much to be users rather than serving as caretakers.

Illiberal America

Steven Hahn

In the eyes of a contemporary journalist [in the 1920s], the Klan was “the most vigorous, active, and effective force in American life, outside business.”

Into the Woods

John Yorke

Every utterance reveals something of the melting pot of desire, culture, background, worldview, status, social codes, gender, subconscious fears and upbringing – the crucible from whence they came.

America’s New Map

Thomas P.M. Barnett

The US political scientist Robert A. Pape examined the demography of the 377 Americans arrested following the January 6th Insurrection. Besides being 95 percent White and significantly older than your typical protestor, the group displayed a strikingly similar background: “Counties with the most significant declines in the non-Hispanic White population are the most likely to produce insurrectionists.” This is nostalgia weaponized per the logic of the Great Replacement Theory.

The Promise of Politics

Hannah Arendt

Families are founded as shelters and mighty fortresses in an inhospitable, alien world, into which we want to introduce kinship. This desire leads to the fundamental perversion of politics, because it abolishes the basic quality of plurality, or rather forfeits it by introducing the concept of kinship.

The problem with the “fraternity” in the French motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!”?

The Cambridge Companion to the Federalist

Jack N. Rakove and Colleen A. Sheehan

To Hamilton the key to a functioning fiscal system was always to minimize friction, to employ methods of taxation that were considered legitimate by the taxpayers and therefore gave rise to no opposition. “It might be demonstrated,” Hamilton said at one point, “that the most productive system of finance will always be the least burthensome.” Duties on trade constituted such a system as long as they avoided taxing basic consumer items. The citizen-taxpayers could then choose either to buy an item and pay the duty levied on it or abstain from consumption and not pay the tax. In other words, there was a voluntary element to such tax administration, which accorded well with republican ideas of rule by consent.

For “duties,” you can read “tariffs.”

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

To move from a focus on things as the ultimately important constituents of reality, to one in which processes are the important entities, requires a shift in our perception of space. We relinquish the idea of causation as strictly ‘bottom up’, from parts to wholes: we come to accept that whole systems contribute to the properties of their parts.⁠ The first is the only one that makes sense to the left hemisphere; in its view the whole can be understood only if we understand the parts. It takes the right hemisphere to understand that the parts can be understood only in the light of the whole.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

[O]ne of Rousseau’s most important conclusions: inequality results from people’s efforts to be thought of and treated as superior. Whatever the supporting role of factors such as population growth, intensive agriculture, and beneficent environment, hereditary inequality does not occur without active manipulation of social logic by human agents.

Compare this with the Scruton quote below.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

The birth of the social sciences can be located at the moment when all things, “ideas” as well as material objects, were equated with values, so that everything derived its existence from and was related to society, the bonum and malum no less than tangible objects. In the dispute as to whether capital or labor is the source of values, it is generally overlooked that at no time prior to the incipient Industrial Revolution was it held that values, and not things, are the result of man’s productive capacity, or was everything that exists related to society and not to man “seen in his isolation.” The notion of “socialized men,” whose emergence Marx projected into the future classless society, is in fact the underlying assumption of classical as well as Marxian economy.

The Ingenuity Gap

Thomas Homer-Dixon

What knowledge can the social sciences offer to help policy-makers do their job? Can they—especially economics and political science—help us design better institutions for this dauntingly complex new world? At the APSA meeting, I knew I would have the chance to observe state-of-the-art political science. . . . .

Adapted from an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval and carved into the southeast wall [of the Jefferson Memorial], it reads:

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.

Jefferson had understood that institutions must change with changing circumstances. Today, his statement seems more pertinent than ever.

Amen.

History Man

Fred Inglis

[Collingwood’s] best-known aphorism “all history is the history of thought,” which he took to mean that political theory is not an interminable anecdote summarising a sequence of remarks on politics made by consecutive theorists—by seven league boots from Plato to Nato, as the old joke has it—but is “the thought which occupies the mind of a man engaged in political work: the formation of a policy, the planning of means to execute it, the attempt to carry it into effect, the discovery that others are hostile to it, the devising of ways to overcome their hostility, and so forth.” [Colliingwood’s Autobiography, p. 110.]

Keep this in mind when reading the following quote from Waltz.

Man, the State, and War

Kenneth N. Waltz

R. G. Collingwood once suggested that the best way to understand the writings of philosophers is to seek out the questions they were attempting to answer. It is here suggested that the best way to examine the problems of international political theory is to pose a central question and identify the answers that can be given to it.

Collingwood was not just suggesting this analysis for philosophers, but for all human thought, including actions.

Roger Scruton

Mark Dooley

[F]ollowing Hayek, Scruton denounces the very idea of ‘social justice’, saying that in its name ‘any amount of injustice can be inflicted’. Why so? Because those who subscribe to that idea refuse to countenance the fact, as Xanthippe [a character in a Scruton dialogue] puts it, that ‘the justice of a state lies in its procedures alone’. In her view, a state is just to the extent ‘that justice is done in it; and justice is done when impartial judges give judgment according to natural law’, no more, no less. It is simply not the job of the legislator or the judge to use the law as an instrument for social engineering.

I dissent. “Natural law?” Only? While impartiality, fairness, and adherence to the law are crucial for a judicial system, ideas of justice need to expand beyond the courts into legislation, which, like it or not, must take notions of justice into account.

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

Moral systems are the product of collective agreements enforced through social norms, peer pressure, and the expectations of the larger community. And the effectiveness of these cultural agreements depends on a communitarian ethos—a binding sense of solidarity that emphasizes the sacrifice of the self for the sake of the larger group.

The Project-State and Its Rivals

Charles S. Maier

[T]wo major themes occupy this history. The first is the rise and eclipse—final or not no one can say; this history must remain unresolved—of what I term the activist project-state. The project-state was a political unit that consciously aspired to inflect the course of history. If large enough, it wanted to play a leading and perhaps hegemonic role in international society. No matter what its size and power, it aspired to change social and economic relations in a profound way and not just to prolong administrative continuity. Project-states had a transformative agenda; they were based on authoritarian and even totalitarian as well as liberal and democratic coalitions seeking to reform sclerotic institutions or societies that seemed unacceptably unequal.

History of Political Philosophy

Leo Strauss (Editor), Joseph Cropsey (Editor)

The true crisis was, rather, that the West, under the influence of its highest intellectual authorities, no longer believed in itself, in its purpose, in its superiority. For Strauss understood the modern West to be constituted by a specific purpose or project: the construction of a universal society of free and equal nations of free and equal men and women enjoying universal affluence, and therefore universal justice and happiness, through science understood as the conquest of nature in the service of human power. [EPILOGUE “Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy” by Nathan Tarcov and Thomas Pangle.]

Conservatism

Edmund Fawcett

In liberal form, economic democracy protects everyone from wealth. It also offers protection for wealth from state and society. Since 1945, democratic liberalism has presumed economic democracy, though the strength of the latter (more market? more society?) is fought over. (See “hyper-liberalism.”)

The problem today is the protecting “everyone from wealth.” Wealth is a primary (and probably the primary) determinent of power in our society. With the brologarchs and other plutocrats we have today, the problem is excessive power in the hands of a few, who can buy influence. The wealthy always fear the poorer among them, but there’s not immediate threat of that today in the U.S.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

And it is indeed up to you [the “grandchildren”]; your elders are probably irredeemable. While we may have left you with little in the way of resources, your task is not hopeless. In the end civilization is not something material, it is spiritual. Be inspired by the beauty of the cosmos to invent a way of being devoted to feeding the soul instead of filling the belly. Rediscover the spiritual abundance that resides in material simplicity. Learn again that the only wealth worth having lies in the treasury of the human heart.

. . . .

That industrial civilization is being strangled by a slowly tightening noose of ecological scarcity has been apparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence without prejudice. Sadly, this patent reality continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.

As an elder, I refuse to concede that we should leave this mess unaddressed for the next generation to fix, even though the elder-in-chief and his ilk would have us do so.

Writing During the Apocalypse

Ed Simon

We can remember stark changes and dark omens within our own lifetimes, with Brady and Isen noting that we are in a “time when the majority of us can still remember when things were more stable … We are forced to confront, in strange and sometimes painful ways, how much those places have changed.”

Who is young enough today not to know how the world has changed? In my seven decades, these changes are patent and disturbing. How do fools delude themselves that everything is hunky-dory?

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

What really struck me most in the article was its novel argument that WITs [Worldviews, Institutions, & Technologies] are the primary “unit of selection” in the evolution of our societies. In other words, by carrying a society’s information and structure through time, a dominant WIT plays a role in society analogous to a gene in a biological system. Whether the WIT survives or is replaced by a less dominant WIT depends on the “fitness” it confers to its social system— that is, on the extent to which it helps that system reproduce itself in its larger environment.

Our current dominant WITs are serving us poorly and threatening our continued well-being, to put it mildly.

In Europe’s Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

The Jewish middleman minority was seen by many in the local elite as a mass of hostile Bolshevik sympathizers. The Jews, to them, represented the evils of capitalism and Communism at the same time. This was during a period when Romania was in the course of losing the historic territories of northern Bukovina and Bessarabia to Soviet Russia.

A terrific book about Romania, a fascinating nation. (We lived there for about two years.)

The Ghost at the Feast

Robert Kagan

The idea of the League of Nations as an “eminently practical scheme” runs counter to the mythologies that have grown up around Wilson and the League over the past century. Yet a good number of Americans in Wilson’s day had latched on to the idea of a league as the best solution to a complex problem: how to bring American power to bear for the preservation of peace in the present without making ironclad commitments to go to war in the future. Long before Wilson came to embrace the idea, it was the Republican statesmen—Taft, Lodge, and Roosevelt—who were the League’s first and most enthusiastic spokesmen.

Sometimes political positions are taken—and changed—for the most personal and unprincipled reasons. Et tu, Teddy!

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman

The central reason this [revelatory, speculative, or metaphysical] knowledge is rejected is that it fails to meet the criteria of “real” knowledge set by modern science. Since its beginnings in the seventeenth century, modern science has focused on the kind of “facts” that can be grasped by the senses and proven by measurement. It abandoned the religious explanations for the world, which posited an unseen God behind the universe; accepted only that which it could see and touch; and brought an acute analysis to the phenomena of the physical world. Gradually, and with increasing certainty, it came to the conclusion that the only knowledge worth knowing was the kind that could be quantified. Physical laws that could be observed and measured would, it believed, account for everything, and the belief that anything else was needed or that anything could escape the necessities imposed by these laws was abandoned.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

Speech is an expression of man giving shape and order to the world, something, [Ernst] Cassirer suggests, that also comes through in art. ‘Like all the other symbolic forms,’ Cassirer writes, ‘art is not the mere reproduction of a ready-made, given reality. It is one of the ways leading to an objective view of things and of human life. It is not an imitation but a discovery of reality’.

The Fellowship

Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski

In Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), the third Earl of Shaftesbury described the poet as “a second Maker, a just Prometheus under Jove”: this definition would circulate widely among the Romantics. Coleridge advanced the metaphor by positing a primary and secondary imagination—a terminology that surely influenced Tolkien’s account. The primary imagination, argued Coleridge, is the power of the mind to perceive, regulate, and give form to the inchoate raw data of perception, just as God brings order out of chaos: “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception … a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”; the secondary imagination takes the world perceived and shaped by the primary imagination, scatters it, and reassembles it as art: “The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will … it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.”

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Whatever the placebo effect actually is, the medical community agrees that its results are subjective. And while that subjectivity is often cast as its most critical weakness, there’s a case to be made that subjectivity is also its greatest strength.

Kinds of Power

James Hillman

Whatever the method—logical, empirical, phenomenological—we have to use language. A method persuades us by the power of its language, its rhetoric, defined as “the art of persuasion.” Therefore, if we can get at the ideas embedded in the language about power, unpack the persuasive ideas that affect our thought and behavior, we shall be as close as we can get to knowing the components of power. All day long, terms like “control,” “prestige,” “ambition,” “charisma,” “authority” cross our lips without much thought and enter into judgments that determine our decisions, and our relations with colleagues.

Building Great Sentences

Brooks Landon

Rhetoric is about the best ways of getting and holding attention with language, and shaping that attention to achieve particular outcomes.

Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric

Ward Farnsworth

Rhetoric is a vast, old, and honorable discipline. It may be defined most broadly and simply as the use of language to persuade or otherwise affect an audience.

The Presence of the Infinite

Steve McIntosh

Communications that persuade through ethos are those perceived to be the most sincere or pure, or those coming from a wise source that is “without guile.” Pathos is the method that stirs the emotions of the audience, moving them through appeals to their passions or fears. Communications that persuade through pathos are those that fire up the audience or inspire them to act by appealing to their deepest loyalties. And, finally, logos refers to the actual message of the communication, which usually takes the form of a good argument or a compelling reason that has the power to convince or otherwise entice the audience into agreement.

. . . .

Comparing Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion with the premises of the evolutionary method, we can detect the influence of goodness, beauty, and truth on his overall categorical scheme. Specifically, ethos is most closely connected to the virtue or goodness of the speaker; pathos employs style or beauty to move the audience; and logos is about the actual message content or truth of the communication itself.

The Science of Conjecture

James Franklin

While it is true that Aristotle presents rhetoric as primarily an art of persuasion—an argument “is persuasive (pithanon) because there is someone whom it persuades”—the whole tenor of the book is to distinguish sharply between arguments that ought to persuade (studied by dialectic) and sophisms (studied by rhetoric strictly so called).

Why Argument Matters

Lee Siegel

In the “good” Aristotle, you’ve got your ethos—the credibility, character, or status of the speaker; your pathos—the reader or listener’s emotional condition; and your logos—the linguistic and logical properties of the argument itself. Aristotle’s three principles are often applied in later careers within various spheres, realms of life that Aristotle also instructively lays out. They are the “deliberative,” which Aristotle defines as a political speech before a parliamentary assembly, but which applies to any address made to a group—an academic committee meeting, the board of one organization of another, the local PTA. The “judicial” is a court of law. The “epideictic,” a ceremonial speech, seems particularly relevant to our otherwise unceremonial time. It levels blame or confers praise, using as its central means of persuasion a characterization of its target’s behavior as dishonorable or shameful.

Words Like Loaded Pistols

Sam Leith

Aristotle identified three different lines of argument, or persuasive appeal, into which the process of invention divides. Thanks to my constitutional childishness, they have always sounded to me like the names by which the Three Musketeers really should have been known: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos.

Rhetoric

Richard Toye

[The] key term for the old rhetoric was “persuasion” and its stress was upon deliberate design’, [Kenneth Burke] wrote. ‘The key term for the “new” rhetoric would be “identification,” which can include a partially “unconscious” factor in appeal.’

Saving Persuasion

Bryan Garsten

Political theorists tend to focus on reasonable dialogues of justification rather than passionate exchanges of rhetoric. While actual politicians have not abandoned persuasion (how could they?), they prefer not to acknowledge their art. They understand that when they hear an argument described as “described as “rhetorical,” it is being either decried as manipulative or dismissed as superficial. In both theory and practice today, the reigning view of rhetorical speech is that it is a disruptive force in politics and a threat to democratic deliberation.

This book aims to challenge that conventional wisdom. Its guiding motivation is the thought that a politics of persuasion-in which people try to change one another’s minds by appealing not only to reason but also to passions and sometimes even to prejudices-is a mode of politics that is worth defending. Persuasion is worthwhile because it requires us to pay attention to our fellow citizens and to display a certain respect for their points of view and their judgments. The effort to persuade requires us to engage with others wherever they stand and to begin our argument there, as opposed to simply asserting that they would adopt our opinion if they were more reasonable.

FEDERALIST NO. 40

On the Powers of the Convention to Form a Mixed Government Examined and Sustained

For the New York Packet Friday, January 18, 1788

MADISON

To the People of the State of New York:

THE SECOND point to be examined is, whether the convention were authorized to frame and propose this mixed Constitution.

The powers of the convention ought, in strictness, to be determined by an inspection of the commissions given to the members by their respective constituents. As all of these, however, had reference, either to the recommendation from the meeting at Annapolis, in September, 1786, or to that from Congress, in February, 1787, it will be sufficient to recur to these particular acts.

The act from Annapolis recommends the “appointment of commissioners to take into consideration the situation of the United States; to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the Constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union; and to report such an act for that purpose, to the United States in Congress assembled, as when agreed to by them, and afterwards confirmed by the legislature of every State, will effectually provide for the same.”

The recommendatory act of Congress is in the words following: “Whereas, There is provision in the articles of Confederation and perpetual Union, for making alterations therein, by the assent of a Congress of the United States, and of the legislatures of the several States; and whereas experience hath evinced, that there are defects in the present Confederation; as a mean to remedy which, several of the States, and particularly the State of New York, by express instructions to their delegates in Congress, have suggested a convention for the purposes expressed in the following resolution; and such convention appearing to be the most probable mean of establishing in these States a firm national government1:

“Resolved, That in the opinion of Congress it is expedient, that on the second Monday of May next a convention of delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States, be held at Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose of revising the articles of confederation, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein, as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed by the States, render the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union.”

From these two acts, it appears, 1st, that the object of the convention was to establish, in these States, a firm national government; 2d, that this government was to be such as would be adequate to the exigencies of government and the preservation of the Union; 3d, that these purposes were to be effected by alterations and provisions in the articles of confederation, as it is expressed in the act of Congress, or by such further provisions as should appear necessary, as it stands in the recommendatory act from Annapolis; 4th, that the alterations and provisions were to be reported to Congress, and to the States, in order to be agreed to by the former and confirmed by the latter.

From a comparison and fair construction of these several modes of expression, is to be deduced the authority under which the convention acted. They were to frame a national government, adequate to the exigencies of government, and of the Union; and to reduce the articles of Confederation into such form as to accomplish these purposes.

There are two rules of construction, dictated by plain reason, as well as founded on legal axioms. The one is, that every part of the expression ought, if possible, to be allowed some meaning, and be made to conspire to some common end. The other is, that where the several parts cannot be made to coincide, the less important should give way to the more important part; the means should be sacrificed to the end, rather than the end to the means.

Suppose, then, that the expressions defining the authority of the convention were irreconcilably at variance with each other; that a national and adequate government could not possibly, in the judgment of the convention, be affected by alterations and provisions in the articles of confederation; which part of the definition ought to have been embraced, and which rejected? Which was the more important, which the less important part? Which the end; which the means? Let the most scrupulous expositors of delegated powers; let the most inveterate objectors against those exercised by the convention, answer these questions. Let them declare, whether it was of most importance to the happiness of the people of America, that the articles of Confederation should be disregarded, and an adequate government be provided, and the Union preserved; or that an adequate government should be omitted, and the articles of Confederation preserved. Let them declare, whether the preservation of these articles was the end, for securing which a reform of the government was to be introduced as the means; or whether the establishment of a government, adequate to the national happiness, was the end at which these articles themselves originally aimed, and to which they ought, as insufficient means, to have been sacrificed.

But is it necessary to suppose that these expressions are absolutely irreconcilable to each other; that no alterations or provisions in the articles of the confederation could possibly mould them into a national and adequate government; into such a government as has been proposed by the convention?

No stress, it is presumed, will, in this case, be laid on the title; a change of that could never be deemed an exercise of ungranted power. Alterations in the body of the instrument are expressly authorized. New provisions therein are also expressly authorized. Here then is a power to change the title; to insert new articles; to alter old ones. Must it of necessity be admitted that this power is infringed, so long as a part of the old articles remain? Those who maintain the affirmative ought at least to mark the boundary between authorized and usurped innovations; between that degree of change which lies within the compass of alterations and further provisions, and that which amounts to a transmutation of the government. Will it be said that the alterations ought not to have touched the substance of the Confederation? The States would never have appointed a convention with so much solemnity, nor described its objects with so much latitude, if some substantial reform had not been in contemplation. Will it be said that the fundamental principles of the Confederation were not within the purview of the convention, and ought not to have been varied? I ask, What are these principles? Do they require that, in the establishment of the Constitution, the States should be regarded as distinct and independent sovereigns? They are so regarded by the Constitution proposed. Do they require that the members of the government should derive their appointment from the legislatures, not from the people of the States? One branch of the new government is to be appointed by these legislatures; and under the Confederation, the delegates to Congress may all be appointed immediately by the people, and in two States [Connecticut and Rhode Island] are actually so appointed. Do they require that the powers of the government should act on the States, and not immediately on individuals? In some instances, as has been shown, the powers of the new government will act on the States in their collective characters. In some instances, also, those of the existing government act immediately on individuals. In cases of capture; of piracy; of the post office; of coins, weights, and measures; of trade with the Indians; of claims under grants of land by different States; and, above all, in the case of trials by courts-marshal in the army and navy, by which death may be inflicted without the intervention of a jury, or even of a civil magistrate; in all these cases the powers of the Confederation operate immediately on the persons and interests of individual citizens. Do these fundamental principles require, particularly, that no tax should be levied without the intermediate agency of the States? The Confederation itself authorizes a direct tax, to a certain extent, on the post office. The power of coinage has been so construed by Congress as to levy a tribute immediately from that source also. But pretermitting these instances, was it not an acknowledged object of the convention and the universal expectation of the people, that the regulation of trade should be submitted to the general government in such a form as would render it an immediate source of general revenue? Had not Congress repeatedly recommended this measure as not inconsistent with the fundamental principles of the Confederation? Had not every State but one; had not New York herself, so far complied with the plan of Congress as to recognize the principle of the innovation? Do these principles, in fine, require that the powers of the general government should be limited, and that, beyond this limit, the States should be left in possession of their sovereignty and independence? We have seen that in the new government, as in the old, the general powers are limited; and that the States, in all unenumerated cases, are left in the enjoyment of their sovereign and independent jurisdiction.

The truth is, that the great principles of the Constitution proposed by the convention may be considered less as absolutely new, than as the expansion of principles which are found in the articles of Confederation. The misfortune under the latter system has been, that these principles are so feeble and confined as to justify all the charges of inefficiency which have been urged against it, and to require a degree of enlargement which gives to the new system the aspect of an entire transformation of the old.

In one particular it is admitted that the convention have departed from the tenor of their commission. Instead of reporting a plan requiring the confirmation of the legislatures of all the states, they have reported a plan which is to be confirmed by the people, and may be carried into effect by nine states only. It is worthy of remark that this objection, though the most plausible, has been the least urged in the publications which have swarmed against the convention. The forbearance can only have proceeded from an irresistible conviction of the absurdity of subjecting the fate of twelve States to the perverseness or corruption of a thirteenth; from the example of inflexible opposition given by a majority of one sixtieth of the people of America to a measure approved and called for by the voice of twelve States, comprising fifty-nine sixtieths of the people an example still fresh in the memory and indignation of every citizen who has felt for the wounded honor and prosperity of his country. As this objection, therefore, has been in a manner waived by those who have criticised the powers of the convention, I dismiss it without further observation.

The third point to be inquired into is, how far considerations of duty arising out of the case itself could have supplied any defect of regular authority.

In the preceding inquiries the powers of the convention have been analyzed and tried with the same rigor, and by the same rules, as if they had been real and final powers for the establishment of a Constitution for the United States. We have seen in what manner they have borne the trial even on that supposition. It is time now to recollect that the powers were merely advisory and recommendatory; that they were so meant by the States, and so understood by the convention; and that the latter have accordingly planned and proposed a Constitution which is to be of no more consequence than the paper on which it is written, unless it be stamped with the approbation of those to whom it is addressed. This reflection places the subject in a point of view altogether different, and will enable us to judge with propriety of the course taken by the convention.

Let us view the ground on which the convention stood. It may be collected from their proceedings, that they were deeply and unanimously impressed with the crisis, which had led their country almost with one voice to make so singular and solemn an experiment for correcting the errors of a system by which this crisis had been produced; that they were no less deeply and unanimously convinced that such a reform as they have proposed was absolutely necessary to effect the purposes of their appointment. It could not be unknown to them that the hopes and expectations of the great body of citizens, throughout this great empire, were turned with the keenest anxiety to the event of their deliberations. They had every reason to believe that the contrary sentiments agitated the minds and bosoms of every external and internal foe to the liberty and prosperity of the United States. They had seen in the origin and progress of the experiment, the alacrity with which the proposition, made by a single State (Virginia), towards a partial amendment of the Confederation, had been attended to and promoted. They had seen the liberty assumed by a very few deputies from a very few States, convened at Annapolis, of recommending a great and critical object, wholly foreign to their commission, not only justified by the public opinion, but actually carried into effect by twelve out of the thirteen States. They had seen, in a variety of instances, assumptions by Congress, not only of recommendatory, but of operative, powers, warranted, in the public estimation, by occasions and objects infinitely less urgent than those by which their conduct was to be governed. They must have reflected, that in all great changes of established governments, forms ought to give way to substance; that a rigid adherence in such cases to the former, would render nominal and nugatory the transcendent and precious right of the people to “abolish or alter their governments as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness,” [Declaration of Independence] since it is impossible for the people spontaneously and universally to move in concert towards their object; and it is therefore essential that such changes be instituted by some informal and unauthorized propositions, made by some patriotic and respectable citizen or number of citizens. They must have recollected that it was by this irregular and assumed privilege of proposing to the people plans for their safety and happiness, that the States were first united against the danger with which they were threatened by their ancient government; that committees and congresses were formed for concentrating their efforts and defending their rights; and that Conventions were elected in the several States for establishing the constitutions under which they are now governed; nor could it have been forgotten that no little ill-timed scruples, no zeal for adhering to ordinary forms, were anywhere seen, except in those who wished to indulge, under these masks, their secret enmity to the substance contended for. They must have borne in mind, that as the plan to be framed and proposed was to be submitted to the people themselves, the disapprobation of this supreme authority would destroy it forever; its approbation blot out antecedent errors and irregularities. It might even have occurred to them, that where a disposition to cavil prevailed, their neglect to execute the degree of power vested in them, and still more their recommendation of any measure whatever, not warranted by their commission, would not less excite animadversion, than a recommendation at once of a measure fully commensurate to the national exigencies.

Had the convention, under all these impressions, and in the midst of all these considerations, instead of exercising a manly confidence in their country, by whose confidence they had been so peculiarly distinguished, and of pointing out a system capable, in their judgment, of securing its happiness, taken the cold and sullen resolution of disappointing its ardent hopes, of sacrificing substance to forms, of committing the dearest interests of their country to the uncertainties of delay and the hazard of events, let me ask the man who can raise his mind to one elevated conception, who can awaken in his bosom one patriotic emotion, what judgment ought to have been pronounced by the impartial world, by the friends of mankind, by every virtuous citizen, on the conduct and character of this assembly? Or if there be a man whose propensity to condemn is susceptible of no control, let me then ask what sentence he has in reserve for the twelve States who usurped the power of sending deputies to the convention, a body utterly unknown to their constitutions; for Congress, who recommended the appointment of this body, equally unknown to the Confederation; and for the State of New York, in particular, which first urged and then complied with this unauthorized interposition?

But that the objectors may be disarmed of every pretext, it shall be granted for a moment that the convention were neither authorized by their commission, nor justified by circumstances in proposing a Constitution for their country: does it follow that the Constitution ought, for that reason alone, to be rejected? If, according to the noble precept, it be lawful to accept good advice even from an enemy, shall we set the ignoble example of refusing such advice even when it is offered by our friends? The prudent inquiry, in all cases, ought surely to be, not so much from whom the advice comes, as whether the advice be good.

The sum of what has been here advanced and proved is, that the charge against the convention of exceeding their powers, except in one instance little urged by the objectors, has no foundation to support it; that if they had exceeded their powers, they were not only warranted, but required, as the confidential servants of their country, by the circumstances in which they were placed, to exercise the liberty which they assume; and that finally, if they had violated both their powers and their obligations, in proposing a Constitution, this ought nevertheless to be embraced, if it be calculated to accomplish the views and happiness of the people of America. How far this character is due to the Constitution, is the subject under investigation.2

PUBLIUS

The Ghost at the Feast

Robert Kagan

[Reinhold] Niebuhr set out the maxims of the new [post-war] era: “balance of power politics” were not “sufficient to guarantee the world’s peace”; Europe was no longer at the world’s “strategic center” and could no longer maintain order in a “total world”; Britain no longer had “sufficient power to manipulate a balance of power alone”—in short, that there was no alternative to the consistent exercise of American global power and influence.

. . . .

Latin and Caribbean politics, like that of most peoples at all times, tended to revolve around strong individuals and clans who competed in winner-take-all struggles for power. Frequent rebellions and political instability retarded economic development. Where a single ruler managed to hold power for an extended period, as with Díaz in Mexico or Zelaya in Nicaragua, the economy might improve but the benefits were not widely shared. The poor and political opponents generally suffered from repression, which eventually led to revolution and began the cycle all over again. This confirmed the Americans in their belief that true stability and progress required democracy and constitutional government, but this prescription, whether right or wrong, proved hard to export without imposing it by force. To later critics, the expressions of benevolence uttered by the likes of Roosevelt, Root, and Wilson were mere façades for imperialism. They weren’t, but for those on the receiving end of American policy it didn’t make that much difference. The North Americans spoke often of “Pan-Americanism,” but for many in the region, “Pan-Americanism” was a synonym for North American hegemony.

. . . .

[I] was true that the existence of a generally benevolent Royal Navy allowed Americans to save themselves the expense of building a larger navy to protect their coastlines and the approaches to a canal, but Americans certainly had the means to build such a navy had they thought it necessary. What Britain and the Royal Navy had provided, however, was the underlying security structure for a worldwide trading, finance, and communications system from which the United States benefited more than anyone. British naval power made it possible for the revolutions in transportation, communication, and commerce to knit the world’s economies together, facilitating foreign investment, the interpenetration of markets, the relatively free exchange of goods and comparatively easy transfers of money, all of which characterized the modern international economic order that significantly raised the standard of living for all those who took part in it.

The U.S. Navy provided this service after WWII. The problem with this function is that it invites involvement in foreign intrigues and disputes in faraway places with little strategic significance to the naval power. It also tempts leaders into displays of power and prestige, again with little immediate strategic value. On the other hand, it allowed greater trade and general economic well-being. To gain a benefit, you pay a price.

Shutdown

Adam Tooze

In general, the net effect of tax and welfare systems in all countries is to reduce inequality at least to some degree. However, welfare can also serve a conservative function. Indeed, the historic purpose of the welfare state as it emerged in Bismarckian Germany in the 1880s was precisely that—to preserve the social status hierarchy across the vicissitudes of sickness, old age, and, eventually, unemployment.34 That was the principal logic of spending in 2020. The crisis affected the entire economy. No one was to blame. Everyone should be made whole. So the range of potential claimants on state support exploded.

The Cambridge Companion to the Federalist

Edited by Jack N. Rakove and Colleen A. Sheehan

Essay by Colleen A. Sheehan

Publius’s conception of how the human mind works, including particularly his recognition of the independent operation of the opining faculty, distinguishes his understanding of the nature of man from that of Hobbes and present-day moral relativists. This includes most contemporary political scientists, whose professionally-sought standard of value neutrality is grounded in the view that the claim of human “reason” is merely a pretense for personal values, self-interest, male dominance, and/or power. Publius’s conception of human nature is anti-Hobbesian and in this regard pre-modern, for Publius recognized that what is distinct about human beings is their capacity to reason about true and false, just and unjust, right and wrong.

The autonomy and freedom of the human mind constitute the essential precondition for the great experiment in self-government. Publius believed that, by nature, human beings possess the capacity to govern themselves, but whether they – or in the present historical case, Americans – would succeed in realizing that potential, was the epochal trial at hand.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

Machiavelli’s amoral “Prince,” who knows no law beyond his own will and power, is made to bear the whole burden of the Catholic polemic against the modern world. It must be admitted that Machiavelli is the first of a long line of moral cynics in the field of international relations.

Niebuhr makes a common but discouraging mistake about Machiavelli, confusing the man’s entire body of work with the “Machiavellianism” of the popular imagination.

Collingwood’s the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Collingwood considers the a priori imagination to be central to history so there must be an equivalent certainty concerning objects of possible understanding in the past.

Darwin’s Cathedral

David Sloan Wilson

For any particular feature of human behavior and psychology, try to understand it as a genetically evolved adaptation to a feature of the ancestral environment. Then try to imagine the psychological mechanism as a specialized module.

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

[In] different ways Scheler, Cassirer, and Berdyaev, arrived at the same conclusion: that it is impossible to explain man adequately in terms of his place in society, his animal origins, his physical constitution, or the deterministic laws it is subject to. Each argued that man’s essence is creative, that human consciousness brings a new dimension, a new world, into being, and that any attempt to reduce this to the laws that govern the physical world is not only doomed to failure, it results in a world empty of all meaning and value.

The Language Animal

Charles Taylor

Lenny Moss comments on this tendency among some cognitive theorists to understand the specifically human capacities in terms of our superior information-processing abilities, and the corresponding hope that we can produce machines which can match our achievements. This seems to ignore utterly the role of affect and affective bonding in the evolution of humanity.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

In the battle of man versus nature, nature always wins.

. . . .

Now we are masters at repairing physical injuries. Break a leg or show up in the emergency room with a gunshot wound, and you’re pretty likely to survive. Yet for all those achievements, Western medicine is pretty darn bad at managing chronic illness.

Can we really blame this huge (and growing) set of problems on “medicine?” I think not. Most of the problems are, at their root, problems of behavior, of choice. At best, our health care system, when it comes to chronic diseases, is an enabler, allowing us—the patients—to continue harmful behaviors with reduced or delayed consequences.

Plato’s Revenge

William Ophuls

To speak only of language, human beings inhabit a largely semantic reality made up of the linguistic categories of their culture. It is a closed loop. We tend to perceive only what we have words for, so what we have words for is what we habitually perceive. Our fundamental cultural assumptions are so deeply embedded in language that we are effectively imprisoned by them. As Ludwig Wittgenstein said, language frames our reality so completely that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

[The] right hemisphere’s particular strength is in understanding meaning as a whole and in context. It is with the right hemisphere that we understand the moral of a story, as well as the point of a joke. It is able to construe intelligently what others mean, determining from intonation, and from pragmatics, not just from summation of meaning units, subject to the combinatorial rules of syntax, as a computer would.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

To understand the real meaning, we cannot take the words at face value nor confine our attention to what they explicitly state; we must fit them into the specific context of Dante’s times and his own life. It is characteristic of De Monarchia, and of all similar treatises, that there should be this divorce between formal and real meanings, that the formal meaning should not explicitly state but only indirectly express, and to one or another extent hide and distort, the real meaning.

Shades of Leo Strauss here? (No known connection that I’m aware of.)

Visions of Politics

Quentin Skinner

[The] problem of detecting irony arises, in other words, as a problem not about meaning but about illocutionary acts.

More Than Allegory

Bernardo Kastrup

[T]he meaning and emotion evoked by these perceptual experiences aren’t necessarily shared: they arise in our private inner realm alone. Two people observing the exact same outer events may conclude different things from, and react emotionally in different ways to, the images. As such, meaning and emotion aren’t part of the consensus. To convey meaning or emotion to another individual, we even have to first translate them into consensus images—such as gestures, facial expressions, spoken or written words, etc.—in the hope that these images will then evoke the same meaning and emotion in the inner realm of another. Meaning and emotion cannot be directly shared the way the images of consensus reality are.

Metaphysical Animals

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman

Elizabeth [Anscombe’s] patient explanation in which she compared Wittgenstein’s interest in human life to Aristotle’s: ‘The special importance of language does not, then, flow from its being a particularly grand isolated phenomenon. It arises because speech is a central human activity, reflecting our whole nature – because language is rooted, in a way that mathematics is not, in the wider structure of our lives.’ This is why studying language is ‘an investigation of our whole nature’.

. . . .

‘The meaning of “offensive” is not found solely in the dictionary but in human life: to give its meaning would be to describe not just the rules of etiquette and offence, but the social life of human animals, how hierarchy is achieved and sustained, how relationships are built and sundered.’ Mary too is weaving in lessons from Wittgenstein: ‘Language has to be rooted in the complexities of real life, not imposed on it from outside as a calculus derived from axioms.’

Vernacular Eloquence

Peter Elbow

Language usually gets its meaning into the minds of listeners or readers when it embodies movement or change through time. Putting this crudely: stories tend to help us experience a meaning better—even a conceptual meaning—than purely conceptual language.

. . . .

This discussion takes us not just to clarification of meaning, denotative and connotative, but also to most of the literary and theoretical issues that are central to literary analysis: tone, irony, the narrator’s voice, reliable narrator, and so on. We can even discuss deep cultural assumptions (e.g., sexism, individualism) by exploring why the text asks to be read in certain ways—and why other ways of reading it go “against the grain” of the text and perhaps of the culture that supports it.

The Language Animal

Charles Taylor

Merleau-Ponty sees speech and gesture as “inhabited” by meaning; but the primary role of meaning is to make us “inhabit” the world.

. . . .

Of course, Hobbes and Locke did talk of sticking to our original definitions, but we should cut them a little slack, in order to get to the crucial issues for us today. We need to update them to take account of Saussure, just as contemporary philosophy has updated them to take in the findings of Frege. The HLC authors thought of language as a capacity we could build up one term at a time (cf. Condillac’s “just so” story of the origin of language). Introducing a term meant tying some name to a particular phenomenon. But Saussure took account of the fact that terms get their meaning in contrast to others; “red” has the meaning it does because of its contrast to the other color terms that we use. It would be quite different if we didn’t have “orange” for instance. So instead of understanding the linguistic code as a set of pairs linking word and thing, we have to see it as a relation between, say, differentially defined sounds (the signifiers) and differentially defined phenomena (the signifieds). “In language there are only differences without positive terms” [Dans la langue, il n’y a que des différences, et pas de termes positifs].2 We carve out contrastive distinctions in the indefinite range of possible phonetic sounds, and line them up with contrastive distinctions in the phenomena we speak about.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

It is an absolute presupposition, in other words a matter of ‘faith’. Galileo is deliberately applying to ‘nature’ the principle which Augustine laid down with regard to the Holy Scriptures, the book par excellence ‘written by the hand of God’: that whatever doubts may arise about the meaning of this or that passage, it has a meaning, and the meaning is true (Conf. xii. 23–4).

FEDERALIST NO. 39

The Conformity of the Plan to Republican Principles

For the Independent Journal Wednesday, January 16, 1788

MADISON

To the People of the State of New York:

THE last paper having concluded the observations which were meant to introduce a candid survey of the plan of government reported by the convention, we now proceed to the execution of that part of our undertaking.

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government. If the plan of the convention, therefore, be found to depart from the republican character, its advocates must abandon it as no longer defensible.1

What, then, are the distinctive characters of the republican form? Were an answer to this question to be sought, not by recurring to principles, but in the application of the term by political writers, to the constitution of different States, no satisfactory one would ever be found. Holland, in which no particle of the supreme authority is derived from the people, has passed almost universally under the denomination of a republic. The same title has been bestowed on Venice, where absolute power over the great body of the people is exercised, in the most absolute manner, by a small body of hereditary nobles. Poland, which is a mixture of aristocracy and of monarchy in their worst forms, has been dignified with the same appellation. The government of England, which has one republican branch only, combined with an hereditary aristocracy and monarchy, has, with equal impropriety, been frequently placed on the list of republics. These examples, which are nearly as dissimilar to each other as to a genuine republic, show the extreme inaccuracy with which the term has been used in political disquisitions.

If we resort for a criterion to the different principles on which different forms of government are established, we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic. [My italics.] It is sufficient for such a government that the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people; and that they hold their appointments by either of the tenures just specified; otherwise every government in the United States, as well as every other popular government that has been or can be well organized or well executed, would be degraded from the republican character. According to the constitution of every State in the Union, some or other of the officers of government are appointed indirectly only by the people. According to most of them, the chief magistrate himself is so appointed. And according to one, this mode of appointment is extended to one of the co-ordinate branches of the legislature. According to all the constitutions, also, the tenure of the highest offices is extended to a definite period, and in many instances, both within the legislative and executive departments, to a period of years. According to the provisions of most of the constitutions, again, as well as according to the most respectable and received opinions on the subject, the members of the judiciary department are to retain their offices by the firm tenure of good behavior.

On comparing the Constitution planned by the convention with the standard here fixed, we perceive at once that it is, in the most rigid sense, conformable to it. The House of Representatives, like that of one branch at least of all the State legislatures, is elected immediately by the great body of the people. The Senate, like the present Congress, and the Senate of Maryland, derives its appointment indirectly from the people. The President is indirectly derived from the choice of the people, according to the example in most of the States. Even the judges, with all other officers of the Union, will, as in the several States, be the choice, though a remote choice, of the people themselves, the duration of the appointments is equally conformable to the republican standard, and to the model of State constitutions. The House of Representatives is periodically elective, as in all the States; and for the period of two years, as in the State of South Carolina. The Senate is elective, for the period of six years; which is but one year more than the period of the Senate of Maryland, and but two more than that of the Senates of New York and Virginia. The President is to continue in office for the period of four years; as in New York and Delaware, the chief magistrate is elected for three years, and in South Carolina for two years. In the other States the election is annual. In several of the States, however, no constitutional provision is made for the impeachment of the chief magistrate. And in Delaware and Virginia he is not impeachable till out of office. The President of the United States is impeachable at any time during his continuance in office. The tenure by which the judges are to hold their places, is, as it unquestionably ought to be, that of good behavior. The tenure of the ministerial offices generally, will be a subject of legal regulation, conformably to the reason of the case and the example of the State constitutions.

Could any further proof be required of the republican complexion of this system, the most decisive one might be found in its absolute prohibition of titles of nobility, both under the federal and the State governments; and in its express guaranty of the republican form to each of the latter.

“But it was not sufficient,” say the adversaries of the proposed Constitution, “for the convention to adhere to the republican form. They ought, with equal care, to have preserved the federal form, which regards the Union as a confederacy of sovereign states; instead of which, they have framed a national government, which regards the Union as a consolidation of the States.” And it is asked by what authority this bold and radical innovation was undertaken? The handle which has been made of this objection requires that it should be examined with some precision.

Without inquiring into the accuracy of the distinction on which the objection is founded, it will be necessary to a just estimate of its force, first, to ascertain the real character of the government in question; secondly, to inquire how far the convention were authorized to propose such a government; and thirdly, how far the duty they owed to their country could supply any defect of regular authority.

First. In order to ascertain the real character of the government, it may be considered in relation to the foundation on which it is to be established; to the sources from which its ordinary powers are to be drawn; to the operation of those powers; to the extent of them; and to the authority by which future changes in the government are to be introduced.

On examining the first relation, it appears, on one hand, that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a national, but a federal act. [Italics in the original.]

That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors; the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a majority of the people of the Union, nor from that of a majority of the States. It must result from the unanimous assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no otherwise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a federal, and not a national constitution.

The next relation is, to the sources from which the ordinary powers of government are to be derived. The House of Representatives will derive its powers from the people of America; and the people will be represented in the same proportion, and on the same principle, as they are in the legislature of a particular State. So far the government is national, not federal. The Senate, on the other hand, will derive its powers from the States, as political and coequal societies; and these will be represented on the principle of equality in the Senate, as they now are in the existing Congress. So far the government is federal, not national. The executive power will be derived from a very compound source. The immediate election of the President is to be made by the States in their political characters. The votes allotted to them are in a compound ratio, which considers them partly as distinct and coequal societies, partly as unequal members of the same society. The eventual election, again, is to be made by that branch of the legislature which consists of the national representatives; but in this particular act they are to be thrown into the form of individual delegations, from so many distinct and coequal bodies politic. From this aspect of the government it appears to be of a mixed character, presenting at least as many federal as national features.

The difference between a federal and national government, as it relates to the operation of the government, is supposed to consist in this, that in the former the powers operate on the political bodies composing the Confederacy, in their political capacities; in the latter, on the individual citizens composing the nation, in their individual capacities. On trying the Constitution by this criterion, it falls under the national, not the federal character; though perhaps not so completely as has been understood. In several cases, and particularly in the trial of controversies to which States may be parties, they must be viewed and proceeded against in their collective and political capacities only. So far the national countenance of the government on this side seems to be disfigured by a few federal features. But this blemish is perhaps unavoidable in any plan; and the operation of the government on the people, in their individual capacities, in its ordinary and most essential proceedings, may, on the whole, designate it, in this relation, a national government.

But if the government be national with regard to the operation of its powers, it changes its aspect again when we contemplate it in relation to the extent of its powers. The idea of a national government involves in it, not only an authority over the individual citizens, but an indefinite supremacy over all persons and things, so far as they are objects of lawful government. Among a people consolidated into one nation, this supremacy is completely vested in the national legislature. Among communities united for particular purposes, it is vested partly in the general and partly in the municipal legislatures. In the former case, all local authorities are subordinate to the supreme; and may be controlled, directed, or abolished by it at pleasure. In the latter, the local or municipal authorities form distinct and independent portions of the supremacy, no more subject, within their respective spheres, to the general authority, than the general authority is subject to them, within its own sphere. In this relation, then, the proposed government cannot be deemed a national one; since its jurisdiction extends to certain enumerated objects only, and leaves to the several States a residuary and inviolable sovereignty over all other objects. It is true that in controversies relating to the boundary between the two jurisdictions, the tribunal which is ultimately to decide, is to be established under the general government. But this does not change the principle of the case. The decision is to be impartially made, according to the rules of the Constitution; and all the usual and most effectual precautions are taken to secure this impartiality. Some such tribunal is clearly essential to prevent an appeal to the sword and a dissolution of the compact; and that it ought to be established under the general rather than under the local governments, or, to speak more properly, that it could be safely established under the first alone, is a position not likely to be combated.

If we try the Constitution by its last relation to the authority by which amendments are to be made, we find it neither wholly national nor wholly federal. [Italics original.] Were it wholly national, the supreme and ultimate authority would reside in the majority of the people of the Union; and this authority would be competent at all times, like that of a majority of every national society, to alter or abolish its established government. Were it wholly federal, on the other hand, the concurrence of each State in the Union would be essential to every alteration that would be binding on all. The mode provided by the plan of the convention is not founded on either of these principles. In requiring more than a majority, and principles. In requiring more than a majority, and particularly in computing the proportion by States, not by citizens, it departs from the national and advances towards the federal character; in rendering the concurrence of less than the whole number of States sufficient, it loses again the federal and partakes of the national character. [Italics original.]

The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national. [My italics.]

PUBLIUS

I’m tempted to write that Jon Elster is the most interesting man alive. But this would be hyperbole and perhaps might even reduce your potential esteem for his work. So, no, Jon Elster is not the most interesting man alive. But he is, I’ll suggest, the most interesting social scientist alive. Now there’s a hill I can defend.

I have no credentials for the claim that I make—I’m no expert on contemporary social science. I have only a political science major from a half-century ago. But I have read a good deal (but by no means all) of Elster’s books. I don’t know how I happened upon them, but once exposed, I was hooked. Not by his conclusions, which have shifted over the years, such as his opinion of rational choice theory, but what has remained constant is his determination to understand how individuals, societies, and polities work, to understand the “mechanisms” by which human actions and behaviors come about. In pursuing his projects, he displays (not ostentatiously) his capacious mind. He draws upon contemporary social science, yes, of course, including economics. And he draws upon literature, such as the works of Jane Austen and the Princesse de Cleves; he draws upon Homer and Roman moralists; he draws upon La Rouchcaufaud; he draws on Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx; and he draws on perhaps his favorite, Tocqueville. And don’t believe for an instant that this is an exhaustive list; it’s an abbreviated highlight reel. To say that Elster has read widely (and incorporated what he’s read) is as much of an understatement as my claim that he’s the most interesting man alive is an overstatement, which is only true if you’re looking for someone with a comprehensive appreciation of how we humans function in our world.

So enough with the wind-up, here’s the pitch. America Before 1787 is the second book in a projected trilogy. The first work is France Before 1789: The Unraveling of an Absolutist Regime (2022). (I’ve read a chunk of this book but haven’t yet completed it; one does not wolf down such rich, meaty fare.) Elster had indicated that he will publish a third volume that will provide a comparative study of the conventions that produced the American Constitution and the French Constitution. (The anticipated title of this work: 1787 and 1789: The Making of Two Constitutions.)

Elster explains his project:

I also hope that my amateur status as historian can be partially offset by my competence as a social scientist. The book is in fact programmatic, as an attempt to practice the union of history and psychology. These are, in my opinion, the two main pillars of the social sciences. As in volume 1, the emphasis will be on individual psychology and political institutions.

In the preface to the first volume (p. x) I wrote the following, which applies equally to the present book:

The book is written in three layers. The first is the main text, where I summarize my main claims and suggestions. The second consists of the footnotes where I cite my sources. The third consists of the footnotes where I pursue some theoretical issues in more detail. (Some footnotes serve both functions.) Hence the footnotes are intended to bridge the gap between two scholarly communities, by pointing social scientists to new explananda and historians to new explanations.

. . . .

Two anonymous reviewers made useful and constructive comments. Both emphasized that the present volume is not a traditional historical narrative. This is true. The book is intended to provide a toolbox of richly documented mechanisms that can serve in the construction of narratives. In volume 3 I shall attempt to provide a more continuous narrative.

Elster, Jon. America before 1787: The Unraveling of a Colonial Regime (pp. xi-xii). (Function). Kindle Edition.

And what are his “main claims and suggestions?” For instance:

An important part of the story I shall be telling in subsequent chapters concerns the beliefs of agents on each side of the Atlantic about those on the other side—about their motivations as well as about their likely actions or reactions. . . . . Here, I shall consider a subset of British beliefs about America to make some conceptual points about belief formation. Sometimes, the British calculated that the Americans would react to British policies along the lines of rational self-interest, and were proven correct. . . . Responding to incentives is indeed a paradigm of self-interested rationality. Yet the British miscalculated dramatically the impact on Americans of the Tea Act. Commenting on the Boston Tea Party, Lord North said in Parliament:

“that it was impossible for him to have foreseen the proceedings in America respecting the tea; that the duty had been quietly collected before; that the great quantity of tea in the warehouses of the East-India company, as appeared by the report of the secret committee, made it necessary to do something for the benefit of the company ; that it was to serve them that nine-pence in the poundweight draw back was allowed ; that it was impossible for him to foretell the Americans would resist at being able to drink their tea at nine-pence in the pound cheaper.”

. . . .

In other words, North neglected the possibility that the tax was not merely an injury—as citizens the Americans might view the tax as an insult.

Id. p. 8-9.

Elster goes on to explain, using Lord North as an example, that there is a profound uncertainty inherent in political action.

North was not wrong in asserting after the fact that it was impossible to foresee the effects of his measures; he was wrong only in assuming, before the fact, that he could. In other words, he neglected the fundamental and radical uncertainty that is a pervasive, if very often underestimated, feature of political life. This neglect, although irrational, is intelligible, since the psychological state of uncertainty can be very unpleasant. Some individuals may be characterized by what Otto Neurath called “an emotional disposition for which the elimination of doubt means a release from a feeling of displeasure.” We may think of this disposition as uncertainty aversion, related to, but distinct from, inaction aversion.

The impact of the Tea Act illustrates the attitudinal difference and behavioral divergence between economic man and political man. One cannot assume, however, that the motivations of the latter will always trump those of the former.

. . . .

Emotions are manipulable by leaders, transient, and with a short half-life, whereas interests are more permanent. Only when the former are activated can they trump the latter.

In the context of Anglo-American conflicts, the impact of emotions can be illustrated by considering three ways of trying to force compliance: deterrence, compellence, and punishment.

Id. 9-10.

I could go on at length with further examples of how Elster dissects psychological, sociological, and political actions and behaviors, but I trust you’ve gained at least a sense of that from the quotes above. The body of the work applies these insights and considers how various mechanisms may have operated in the lead-up to the Revolution, during the Revolution, and after until the eve of the Constitutional Convention. I write “may have operated” because Elster doesn’t see psychological or social mechanisms as deterministic. They are too varied and often countervailing to allow certainty about any predicted outcomes. Also, humans often act from a strategic perspective; we play games, as it were, trying to outguess an adversary about what moves to make to maximize one’s position in a competition, such as the competition among the European powers to control North America and the colonists’ ideas to the contrary.

While Elster eschews the mantle of a historian, he nevertheless draws widely and frequently on contemporary sources, especially David Ramsay’s early and still well-regarded The History of the American Revolution (1789), Ramsay’s two-volume account covering the causes and course of the Revolution as a whole. Ramsay was a participant and observer of the War. Elster also cites letters and other writings by the Founders and by British officials, including, notably, Edmund Burke’s wise—but often ignored—counsel. In short, Elster gets down into the nitty-gritty of the tangled history of this era to test his explanatory schema. As someone who’s been attempting to bone up on my history of this era, Elster’s examination of a wide series of events proved a valuable bonus.

In sum, this book provides a two-fer: a good deal of history about the era before, during, and after the Revolutionary War, and a demonstration of how the insights of Elster’s social science toolbox apply to those events, giving us greater insights into what was happening as events unfolded. It’s a deep and thorough analysis of value to anyone who wants to understand the American Revolution and to anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of the mechanisms that define individual and group actions—in short, to learn how our world works.

The Constitution of Knowledge

Jonathan Rauch

“The real, then,” explained [Charles Saunders] Peirce, “is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”

Are we not currently destroying communities capable of generating a “definite increase of knowledge?” It’s not total, but the attacks are well underway.

. . . .

[T]he world of reality-based (“mainstream”) journalism: the universe of people who gather facts, cultivate sources, organize investigations, sift documents, triangulate viewpoints, develop stories, check stories, edit stories, decide to publish or not publish stories, decide whether to follow or debunk stories published elsewhere, evaluate mistakes and publish corrections, and train other people to do all of those things.

Certainly my preference.

I Should Have Seen This Coming

David Brooks in theatlantic.com

Yes, we have reached a point of traumatic rupture. A demagogue has come to power and is ripping everything down. But what’s likely to happen is that the demagogue will start making mistakes, because incompetence is built into the nihilistic project. Nihilists can only destroy, not build. Authoritarian nihilism is inherently stupid. I don’t mean that Trumpists have low IQs. I mean they do things that run directly against their own interests. They are pathologically self-destructive. When you create an administration in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his voracious ego, stupidity results. Authoritarians are also morally stupid. Humility, prudence, and honesty are not just nice virtues to have—they are practical tools that produce good outcomes. When you replace them with greed, lust, hypocrisy, and dishonesty, terrible things happen.

Compare with the Pierce quote.

Parable of the Talents

Octavia E. Butler

It seems inevitable that people who can’t read are going to lean more toward judging candidates on the way they look and sound than on what they claim they stand for. Even people who can read and are educated are apt to pay more attention to good looks and seductive lies than they should. And no doubt the new picture ballots on the nets will give Jarret an even greater advantage.

Up From the Depths

Aaron Sachs

The Dial [which Lewis Mumford edited around the time of WWI] claimed direct descent from the Transcendentalist magazine of the same name, founded in 1840 by Emerson and Margaret Fuller and their circle of friends. But the New England Transcendentalists were never dragged to “inquisitorial State hearings” during a Red Scare the way Mumford’s editorial colleagues were in the summer of 1919, while Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer “kept on with that series of vindictive violations of civil liberties” known as the Palmer Raids. Starting in 1917, with the passage of the Espionage Act, partly in response to the Russian Revolution, and continuing with the Sedition Act and the Alien Act in 1918, the federal government had gradually created a new surveillance regime that targeted almost all forms of dissent. Not just possible abettors of the German enemy but virtually any groups or publications that expressed sympathy for communism or anarchism or even labor activism were now subject to a kind of sanctioned terror. Federal agents pulled newspapers and magazines from the mails, confiscated files from raided offices, and arrested, jailed, and sometimes even deported any leftist “radicals” whom they could charge with having “revolutionary intent.”

The Ghost at the Feast

Robert Kagan

Parties and politicians have been known to shift their positions for partisan purposes, but no shift was more dramatic than the Republicans’ turn on foreign policy in these months. Until the 1918 election, Republicans had been the internationalist party, the party of global responsibility, the party that had favored entering the war to defeat militarism and defend “civilization,” the party bubbling with ideas for a World League for the Peace of Righteousness, for a League to Enforce Peace, for a United Nations. It was the party of the Theodore Roosevelt who had asked Americans to “take a risk for internationalism.” But in the process of opposing Wilson and the League, Lodge and his colleagues had radically shifted. The Republican Party became the party it would be for the next quarter century, the party that equated internationalism with Bolshevism, the party of “Americanism” and insular nationalism, the party of rigid abstention from world politics, the party of William Borah. Republicans treated the League as if it were a European plot for world domination. They depicted France and Great Britain not as loyal allies who deserved American support but as greedy imperialists trying to bully and ensnare the United States in their wily scheme.

Again, note the destruction of norms and values wrought by WWI. This switch, of course, seems very familiar today, as it’s happened once again. Trump and Vance are not only switching sides, but they’re also trying to resurrect the Red Scares of post-WWI, post-WWII (the Cold War), with even less grounds than the originals.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

We come to realize that character dissolves into stories about character. We become characters in these fictions; this implies that the very idea of character also becomes a fiction—and therefore vastly important, for it generates imagination much as her image in this chapter provoked our imagination to invent fictions about her character and about the idea of character.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas S. Kuhn

Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.

Science is, after all, a human enterprise, and despite all the safeguards that have been built to clarify its inquiries, it’s still subject to our innumerable human foibles and limitations.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

The thesis to be examined is that, in some way not yet clearly defined, imagination contrasts with sensation as something active with something passive, something we do with something we undergo, something under our control with something we cannot help, a making with a receiving. I am being purposely vague, because I am trying at present merely to restate a common-sense idea which, as common sense holds it, is nothing if not vague.

On Liberty

John Stuart Mill

The practical principle which guides them to their opinions on the regulation of human conduct, is the feeling in each person’s mind that everybody should be required to act as he, and those with whom he sympathizes, would like them to act.

Sounds a lot like Kant to me.