Steve Reads

…and I think I have finally found a window during which I can do without them.

I will be on vacation — lord be praised — from the 25th of this month until the 3rd of May. During the first chunk of that, I will be on the beach in North Carolina. During the second bit, I will be at a friend’s wedding in Madison, Wisconsin. I want to be entirely free of electronics during that time: no computer, no iPhone.

The last time I tried to do this, it didn’t happen: I needed the phone to coordinate travel with my girlfriend, with whom I was going to meet up in Northampton. This time around, I’ll be with her every minute, and I won’t need to coordinate with anyone. So I’m going to go phone- and computer-less. It is going to be awesome.

If you need to get in touch with me for emergency purposes, you can call Stephanie’s cell phone. I’m not going to publish that number here. I am storing it with my parents. If you want Stephanie’s number, you can call my parents and ask for it. Their home number is (802) 985-2971; their cell numbers are (802) 999-4679 and (802) 999-4680. (They’ve given me permission to list those numbers.) I’ll give them all our emergency contact info; if you really, really, really need to get in touch with us, they’ll know how.

So I’ll be off the grid from the 25th to the 3rd. Get all of me that you can in the meantime; I may decide, like Coriolanus, that “There is a world elsewhere.” Namely in North Carolina and Madison.

I am particularly excited to be starting Louis D. Brandeis’s Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use It, right after I finish Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. I hereby invite my vast readership to join with me. Your various libraries must have a copy of it. If they don’t, move to Boston, whose libraries do in fact own copies of it.

Thanks to Eric Rauchway’s excellent Edge Of The American West blog for the tip.

(I’ve had a crush on Brandeis for a really long time. Not to brag, but I’ve known that his middle name was “Dembitz” since I was so tall.)

I expected to be far more shocked by this book than I was. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown up in a world where Henry Kissinger’s view of statecraft is the predominant one, and that Kissinger is broadly Machiavellian. People normally use that word to mean “deceitful” or somesuch, but here it may be defined as “being realistic about means when ends are fixed.” The goal is for a new prince to maintain control over his state. With that goal in mind, how exactly is he to achieve it? Likewise, if you’re an American secretary of state, the goal is to keep the United States safe; how might you do that? Assume the goal is fixed, the means variable. If this is the way you think about things, Machiavelli is your man.

(If you’re raising your hand at this point and wondering how secretly bombing Cambodia makes the U.S. safe: yes, I know.)

What follows is a pamphlet-sized taxonomy of states, and how to govern them. Is the prince turning a pre-existing republic into a principality? He’s going to have a hard time with that: the people will be used to their freedom, and will not willingly submit to the prince’s rule. Did the prince have to kill the head of a family to assume the throne? Well then he’ll want to kill off the rest of that family as well; otherwise he’ll have a long line of people waiting to destroy him.

And so forth. It’s a remarkable little book, and quite fun to read. A large part of what makes it so fun is that it’s so clearheaded: Machiavelli ticks off types of states, types of governments, and the best ways to respond to each. At each step, he gives an example or two from the previous couple hundred years of Italian governance and war, and an example or two from the Roman Empire or Sparta. Indeed, if anything is missing from the casual empiricism of Renaissance writers, it’s any examples from a 900-year window starting at the Roman Empire and ending just before the Renaissance. They also don’t wander very far beyond Europe; they may touch on Turkey a bit, only long enough to frown on “Oriental despotism” or whatnot.

I’d love to see a modern writer in the Machiavellian tradition, attempting exactly the same taxonomy with modern knowledge. We’ve had centuries of wars and coups since Machiavelli’s time, we know more about the history of Rome and Greece, and we’re aware of continents outside of Europe. What would Condoleezza Rice write about practical statecraft?

Kissinger’s Ph.D. thesis, by the way — A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822 — is a beautiful piece of work. It’s a detailed analysis of the diplomacy that led Europe’s previously warring nations to band together and put France in its place after Napoleon’s defeat in the early 19th century. It’s definitely in the tradition of The Prince, though too focused on a single era to really capture the Machiavellian spirit.

Reading The Prince — finally! — reminds me that there was a period when I was obsessing over books of early American history and political philosophy, and on Florentine history. My books-read list suggests that this period started around August of 2006 with Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, proceeded through Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, and really ended with Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. I read Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Change on James Grimmelmann‘s recommendation, as a counterweight to Burckhardt, but it wasn’t connected to the “foundations of American political philosophy” thread.

So I don’t know what ever happened to that obsession. My to-read list contains 10 books of Florentine history, and I’ve got a few in queue at the library:

• Baron, Hans. Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, The.
• Najemy, John M. Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513-1515
• Strauss, Leo. Thoughts on Machiavelli. (A good many of you will probably groan at the sight of a Strauss book on this list. I know, I know.)
• Whitfield, J.H. Discourses on Machiavelli.

Not to mention that I went right from The Prince into Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy. So maybe I can get some fire under this obsession this time around. I’ve been looking for something to obsess on after economics.

P.S.: I’m embarrassed to read my reviews of The Machiavellian Moment and The Creation of the American Republic. They don’t really say anything. I like to think I’ve learned how to write book reviews since then. Maybe now is the time to go back and reread those books. At least in the case of Pocock, I explicitly said that I didn’t understand what was going on.

I’ve been using a friend’s Jstor account for a few years now, through his or her university. This morning, it seems, I no longer have access to his or her account. So I wonder: would any of you nice folks be willing to provide me with a Jstor username/password?

P.S. (April 12, 2009): Oh, score. I can get Jstor through the Boston Public Library.

I tried; I really did. But there is no way I am going to make it through 500 more pages of what amounts to a torture taxonomy, when the first 120 or so were so excruciating. Torture and Democracy is, quite clearly, the definitive book on torture methods, how they spread, which nations practiced which techniques, and when they did so. It is also an unbearable read. I’m sure it is a handy book to abbreviate any number of debates-that-shouldn’t-be — such as, for instance, whether the U.S. ought to be waterboarding people. If it ever comes to that — if I somehow end up face to face with someone who thinks waterboarding is a fine thing — I may return to individual chapters of Torture and Democracy. Reading the book in its entirety, though, is beyond my powers.

I do wonder what effect writing that book had on Darius Rejali. I just can’t imagine that one can make it through writing a torture encyclopedia unscathed.

David Brooks on “The End of Philosophy”. I invite my philosopher friends to begin vomiting … now.

A coworker the other day recommended the Sarasa Ensemble, particularly their album of Bach cantatas. It does not disappoint; I’ve been listening to it obsessively this week. It is also now proving an excellent way to start the day at work.