1. I’m learning that everything Bill Gardner writes is worth reading, and comes from a place of urgent humanity. Today’s story is no exception.
2. I’ve also learned recently that if you try to interact with the medical system without a doctor on your side — and maybe even then — you’re screwed. I’ve actually learned this in many contexts over the years (particularly the context of childbirth), but I’ve lately been re-learning it — either from my own experience or that of others — weekly as of late.
Author: stevereads
It occurred to me today that being the banker to a world-historical figure is a pretty big deal on its own. I’ll be lucky if anyone’s writing about me more than a century from now; Gerson Bleichröder (later von Bleichröder) has that honor, as a man who financed Otto von Bismarck’s rise to power. I’m now interested in reading more about Bleichröder, including a book that Pflanze cited heavily, namely [book: Gold and Iron].
Now then. I see that there’s a review of [book: Gold and Iron] from 1977. It’s on the [mag: New York Review of Books], to whose website I don’t have access. Do any of y’all?
The basic question in here is how it happens that false ideas continue to be believed for many years after they’ve been comprehensively refuted. This is a terrifically interesting question, of course. Hamilton goes about answering it with a few scholarly examples:
1. The Weber thesis that the capitalist spirit is inseparable from Calvinism.
2. The idea that the Nazi party’s support in 1930s Germany came from the lower middle class.
3. Michel Foucault’s thesis in [book: Discipline and Punish], that the Western world had replaced punishment of the body (torture, drawing and quartering) with comprehensive control of the mind. Foucault claimed that the design of this mind control originated with Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a prison from which prisoners could be watched at all times.
Hamilton’s interest is mainly in the reasons why false ideas persist, but the book is rather overloaded with detail from each specific example. It turns out, for instance, that Weber’s work contains a basic numerical error (the sum of the entries in a particular table row not equaling 100%, as it should have) that propagated through multiple editions and was quoted in multiple other works. It also contains a lot of hasty generalization, such as assuming that Benjamin Franklin speaks for all Puritans and their descendants. It’s kind of a silly book, so why do people continue to cite its conclusions?
Oddly enough, Hamilton only addresses this question at the beginning and end of the work; the middle is a very deep dive on the data from each case, demonstrating that Weber was wrong (or at least that his argument remains unproven), and that Hitler’s support only appears to have come from the lower middle class if you ignore the effect of religion (Catholics voted against Hitler, Protestants for).
These middle bits are interesting, but, if I’m envisioning most readers correctly, you came to this work for the conclusions about why false ideas persist generally. You’re looking for a “theory of idea contamination,” perhaps. And the deep dive on the data doesn’t necessarily help with this broader theorizing. Bad ideas persist because, for instance, their inventor is too prestigious to contradict. Even physics has suffered this problem, as Richard Feynman explained:
> We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
>
> Why didn’t they discover the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of–this history–because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong–and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
>
> But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves–of having utter scientific integrity–is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.
The middle parts of Hamilton’s book *are* valuable if you might have believed that ideas like Weber’s or Foucault’s were not subject to quantitative scrutiny. Hamilton does a fine job showing that Bentham’s prison idea never went anywhere — certainly not far enough to have become the basis for anyone’s design of a society — and more to the point that Foucault rejects ordinary standards of argument. Hamilton shows that, Foucault’s desires aside, there’s no reason to reject the usual standards of logic and evidence. It’s a model of how critique should work.
For most readers, I would suggest skipping the Weber bit (unless you’ve come to his book convinced that the Protestant ethic was somehow vital to capitalism), reading the Foucault bit for its effortless dissection of [book: Discipline and Punish], and spending lots of time on the first and last sections; those are the analytical sections that help us understand why bad ideas persist, and how institutions can be shaped to prevent their spread.
This is fine, but … isn’t this what insurers are for? If one hospital on one side of Boston charges much less than another hospital on the other side of Boston, then shouldn’t my insurer be willing to pay me to use the cheaper hospital?
Similarly: shouldn’t my insurer be willing to fly me to another state or even another country, if the cost of airfare plus the cost of the foreign medical care is less than the cost of the local medical care? And if I refuse to fly to India for dental surgery, shouldn’t my insurer say to me, “Fine, but you need to pay us a fee for not having taken the cheapest equivalent medical care”?
I’m not saying this is necessarily desirable. But it’s puzzling that the brave new world of medical care involves my sitting on the phone for hours, rather than letting my insurer take care of it. Paging Corey Robin…
So this is really interesting: the more data Medicare releases on provider payments, the better. But there are real concerns about patient privacy here. I remember when I was a wee undergraduate at CMU, Professor Fienberg was working on how to release raw data from the Census Bureau without revealing personally identifiable information. You can imagine the problem like this: in towns like the one I grew up in in Vermont, revealing that “the average black person” earns a certain sum of money could well mean that you’ve just revealed John Smith’s income; there just aren’t that many black people in Vermont.
As I understood it at the time — note here that my understanding is many years out of date — the Census Bureau had a couple ways of releasing its multidimensional contingency tables. First, it would only publish data in a given cell if the number of observations in that cell was above some threshold (that is, if the cell didn’t uniquely identify John Smith). I believe they also applied some scaling factor to every cell, deliberately obfuscating it so that any summary statistics from the table would come out right, but raw data were all incorrect.
These problems get harder if you’re able to combine, say, Census Data with data that you get from credit-card companies or data from (as above) hospitals. The more data you can agglomerate, the less anonymous any one source is, no matter how hard you try. I’m sure there are lots of people, all around the country, working very hard to de-anonymize various databases for marketing and law-enforcement purposes.
Point being just that, while releasing raw Medicare data would be terrific (the AMA’s comment in that link that people wouldn’t know what to do with all that raw data, and would take it out of context, is thoroughly disingenuous), there are difficult problems to surmount first. I wish them luck. I should check to see where Professor Fienberg’s work has taken him; the last update I got was more than a decade ago.
Having now finished this book, I don’t entirely get what the big deal is. The argument runs as follows:
- There is a certain spirit that is vital to the life of capitalist societies. It is, roughly speaking, the spirit of the (idealized) Ben Franklin: work for its own sake, working for a calling, diligently saving, etc. It’s this spirit that Weber proposes to trace to its roots. He is explicitly not trying to chase down the origins of business, of industrial production, etc; as he notes, these have all existed in other times and places.
- This spirit comes from Calvinism specifically, less so from Lutheranism, and still less from Catholicism. Specifically, Calvin and his heirs transmuted Catholic monastic asceticism into a “worldly asceticism”. That is, rather than prove your devotion to God through quiet scholarly contemplation while holed up in a monastery, you proved that devotion by steady work toward a calling.
- Whereas Catholicism enables you to sin on Monday and be forgiven for it on Sunday, thereby leaving you free to sin again the next day, Calvinism requires a life that consistently and strategically aims at the greater glory of God. A Calvinist life is more totalizing, one might say, that Catholicism. It is thereby more in line with the requirements of capitalist life, where businessmen make plans that aim at the rational maximization of profit.
I think there’s an “only if” hidden in here that Weber doesn’t argue, but which would seem vital to the whole project. If the story is simply that “Protestantism carries with it a certain rationalizing spirit, and it also happens that capitalism requires this spirit,” then that would seem to be either a) confusing correlation with causation, or b) a nice coincidence that makes a fun story, nothing more. If there’s no “only if” here — if Weber isn’t telling us that capitalism requires Protestantism of a certain sort — then the story isn’t so interesting. Yes, these two strands of Western civilization sat comfortably alongside one another, but what of it?
To argue the only-if, Weber would have to show that non-Protestant societies simply lacked a fundamental piece, and that they would always be lacking an important piece of the capitalist spirit. Because again: suppose it happens that Confucian societies either a) develop the spirit that Weber calls classically Protestant, or b) don’t develop the Protestant spirit, but go on to successfully build capitalist societies. Then what happens to Weber’s story? I submit that it becomes much less interesting; it becomes a story of two developments — Calvinism and capitalism — that happened at the same time. Which is just not all that world-historically interesting a coincidence.
I could be missing something important here, but I don’t think I am. Much of [book: The Protestant Ethic] is devoted to spinning out this historical tale, so that the story from about Luther’s time to that of Franklin comes through with no gaps. But that just doesn’t seem so interesting to me. Its lack of interest reminds me a lot of Clark’s [book: A Farewell to Alms], which tries to argue that the Industrial Revolution began in England when it did because the English had genetically (sic) developed the bourgeois virtues (saving, breeding less) under ruthless selection pressure. Even granting this facially absurd premise, what of it? Does it mean that when Korea industrialized in the 1970s, it had also attained genetic superiority? If not, then, again, Clark is just telling us a nice story with no relevance beyond its time. That seems to be where Weber has left us.
What Uwe Reinhardt said. In short: if you think that it’s an outrage that you have to pay more for your health insurance so that everyone can pay the same premium, including women and the elderly and the sick, then you should have been upset at the existing system of employer-based health insurance. Women and the old and the sick *at your company* are also paying the same premium as you, even though they likely go to the doctor more.
Reinhardt doesn’t even touch on the other obvious fact: one of these days you will be sick. One of these days you and your spouse may want to have a child. One of these days you will be old. When that happens, you’ll benefit from the same community rating that supposedly harms the “bros” today.
Did this country at some point lose the notions that we’re all in this together, that we’re sharing burdens, and that we’re all only one accident away from catastrophe? The phrase is “there but for the grace of god go I”; a just society protects everyone from unexpected, uncontrollable disaster. I hope we can relearn this.
Someone is wrong on the Internet. In particular, today my friend Paul sent me a link to this guy, who credulously buys someone’s argument that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + … equals a small negative number. This is completely false, but it’s false for reasons that trip up a lot of people, so I think it’s worth spending some time on.
This is the same genre of argument by which you can “prove” that 1 = 2. So here’s the first step in arguing against it: think to yourself, “If I find this nonsensical, then it’s probably nonsense.” That’s really an okay way to feel. But people are scared of math, so they often think, “Well, mathematics says a lot of crazy things, so what do I know?” They’re likely to blame mathematicians for being unrealistic and for endorsing absurd conclusions just because their axioms made them say so.
The next step is to ask why mathematicians *don’t* just follow their axioms off a cliff. 1 is not equal to 2, and mathematicians know it. But who knows, maybe some abstruse chain of reasoning would lead a mathematician somewhere absurd. The reason that doesn’t happen is that *mathematics eventually has to collide with the real world*. Eventually physicists are going to use mathematics. Eventually engineers are going to build buildings; if they prove that a steel beam can handle 2 tons of weight, it damn well better not actually be 1 ton of weight. Mathematics is used in all sorts of real contexts. Logic cannot be used to lead us to unreasonable conclusions.
Now, mathematics is nice, because it consists of axioms and logic. You start with some axioms, and you follow some logic, and you get a conclusion. If the conclusion is absurd, then it must be because either the axioms were wrong or the logic was wrong. So you only have a small number of places to check for mistakes. (As opposed to your gut, which is less subject to verification.)
But infinity is weird, right? Surely infinities can do weird things. That’s absolutely true, which is why a couple hundred years of mathematicians and philosophers, starting with Isaac Newton and Bishop Berkeley, worked very hard to create a set of tools that allow us to talk about infinity in a sensible way that makes it hard for us to trip ourselves up. This is what calculus is, and why calculus is one of the monuments of Western civilization. It’s not just a very useful collection of tools used in everything from humdrum contexts like building buildings to literally heavenly pursuits like astronomy, though it is that. It’s also a philosophical marvel that makes the infinite comprehensible to mere finite humans. It is a way of keeping our language precise and avoid getting in hopeless muddles, even when we’re talking about incomprehensible vastness.
The basic trick that the essayist and the video creator are (mis)using, and the trick that lands them in such a muddle, is the following. We start with this:
x = 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + …
and we add another copy like so:
2x = (1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + …) + (1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + …)
Then we write them on separate lines and shift things, like so:
2x = (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
+ (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
= (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
+ (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
Nothing too complicated, right? We just shifted everything down a line and over by a couple of spaces. Great. Now, goes the argument, we see that every +1 on one line is paired with a -1 on the next line, or vice versa. From this they conclude that
2x = 1 + (-1 + 1) + (-1 + 1) + … = 1 + 0 + 0 + …
And that equals 1. So then 2x = 1, which means x = 1/2.
Your intuition should tell you that this is absurd. The sum up to the first term is 1. The sum up to the second term is 0. The sum up to the third term is 1. And on we go, back and forth, forever. The sum never settles down at a single value. Your intuition should tell you this, and your intuition is correct.
Another way to respond to this essayist’s nonsense is to use his argument against him. Take the same chain of reasoning as before: we put the definitions of x and 2x on separate lines, except this time we shift everything ahead *two* positions rather than just one. Like so:
2x = (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
+ (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
= (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
+ (1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + …)
Again, nothing suspicious about this, right? Only this time, the same chain of reasoning — that we pair the row above with the row below — leads us to conclude that
2x = 1 - 1 + (1 + 1) + (-1 + -1) + (1 + 1) + (-1 + -1) + … = 0 + 2 + -2 + 2 + -2 + …
which lands us back where we started. If just shifting things around by an arbitrary amount leads to wildly varying results, then your intuition should tell you that something is probably wrong with the “shifting” method.
Basically everything in that essay and that video reduces to this “shifting” trick. By repeated application of the method they end up concluding that 1+2+3+4+5+… equals a negative number. It doesn’t, which is obvious. Your intuition doesn’t fail you here.
The actual answer is that talking about the sum of this series makes no sense, because it has no sum. If a sum is going to eventually settle down to something nice and finite, the terms have to get smaller. Here the terms aren’t getting smaller; they’re just oscillating. Likewise, the terms in 1+2+3+4+5+… aren’t getting smaller; they’re increasing. So that sum doesn’t converge either, and for a different reason: it’s blowing up, and will grow without bound.
The mathematical answer is that if a sum “diverges” like this one does, then you can’t arbitrarily rearrange terms in it and expect the sum to keep working out. Your intuition should tell you that the problem with 1+2+3+4+5+… isn’t the sort of problem that can be solved by just shifting things around; the problem with that sum is that *you’re adding things that keep getting larger*. No amount of shifting things is going to make that sum up to something nice.
Indeed, the 1-1+1-1+… example is one that they give you in calculus textbooks to show you that we can’t treat infinite sums the way we treat finite ones. The example shows that you need to be much more careful with infinities. It shows you that the logic and axioms you thought were sensible for finite quantities don’t quite work out for infinite ones.
Your intuition does, then, need help sometimes. In particular, it regularly fails when it’s faced with infinities. But there are times when your intuition leads you the right way, and mathematics can help you confirm it.
There are other examples that are facially similar but differ in crucial ways from this 1-1+1-1+… nonsense. There’s a mathematical proof, for instance, that .99999…=1. That happens to be true. The basic intuition there is that if I can bring two numbers as close together as I want, then those two numbers are indeed equal. If I am standing a foot away from you, and tell you that I’m going to halve the distance between us, then halve it again, then continue halving it forever, then — assuming we both live forever — I will eventually be standing 0.00000… inches away from you.
This can be proven rigorously. It’s important to note, though, that it can be proved entirely with finite numbers. I never need to use an “actual infinity” to prove to you that this works. All I need to say is that, essentially, I have a recipe for coming close to you. The recipe is “at every step, close half the distance between me and you.” Then you challenge me: “I bet you can’t get within 1/4 of a foot of me.” I reply, “My recipe will get me there in two steps: after one step I’m 6 inches away, and after two steps I’m 3 inches away.” So you say, “Fine, but I bet you can’t within an inch of me,” to which I reply, “My recipe will get me there in four steps: after 1 step I’m 6 inches away, after 2 steps I’m 3 inches away, after 3 steps I’m 1.5 inches away, and after 4 steps I’m 3/4 of an inch away. At that point I’m within an inch of you.”
You see what’s happening. I never actually say anything about how “after an infinite number of steps, I’m 0.000… inches away from you.” Instead I just show that I have a recipe that will get me as close as you could wish, in a finite number of steps. That is what we call a “limit” in calculus. The labor that went into making that word intellectually coherent is one of our species’s greatest accomplishments.
So please: use your intuition here. And if you question whether your intuition is the proper guide, learn a little bit of math. The mathematics of infinities is both spectacularly beautiful and really fun. Maybe in subsequent posts I’ll give some examples of how fun it is.
__P.S.__ (same day): This is an excellent response to the #slatepitch quackery, also via my friend Paul.
Synopsis: I had a thought this morning, and pretty quickly realized that someone has likely written on just this idea. So in keeping with my axiom that I want to behave such that people who know more about things than I do don’t think I’m a jackass, I’m looking here for pointers to people who’ve written about this.
So the idea was that, when you’re looking at something like the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, the literal meaning of the text is basically entirely beside the point (assuming we know what “literal meaning” means blah blah blah). The meaning of the Constitution is the meaning that people have ascribed to it over the years. If people behave as though the equal-protection clause applies to gay people, then that’s the meaning of the text for those people. If people behave as though the Bible says that gays have committed an offense against god, then that’s the meaning of the text for those people.
Different communities might then have different meanings for the same text. Some meanings might be enforced at gunpoint (e.g., Court decisions affirming the right of gay people to marry). Others might be dominant through historical accident. But the point is that you can’t escape power relations: the meaning of a text is a sociological/political fact, not a syntactic one.
I could probably argue the other side if you asked me to. I could, for instance, argue that all of the above does violence to what ordinary people mean by the word “meaning”. But then this “ordinary meaning of the word ‘meaning'” is, itself, a sociological fact blah blah blah. You see how this could very quickly start to involve crawling up your own butt. But anyway, this is just what came to mind, and I’m sure that a bazillion people have written on it. Can anyone recommend any good reading on the subject?
I was looking for a book about all the things that everyone is supposed to already know about the French Revolution. What, exactly, is a Jacobin, for instance? How about a sans-culotte? Well, now I know. (Those are essentially the Jesuits of the French Revolution, and the Tea Party, respectively.)
Given that the middle 80% of the book — and hence the middle 80% of the French Revolution — was essentially one group massacring another group until the tables turned and the first group was massacred, I can’t say that I *entirely* understand what happened. That’s not Doyle’s fault, and I’m not entirely sure it’s mine, either; I think it may be the Revolution’s fault. The fact that no one could keep track of who was in power, and that a lot of people’s heads literally rolled between 1789 and 1802, likely explains a lot of why Burke and friends were so vehemently anti-French, and why those who disliked Jefferson *really* disliked Jefferson. (They thought Jefferson a Godless Communist before that term had crystallized.) The French Revolution was a devastating, paralyzing, anarchic, at times hopeful, often disappointing, polarizing, world-historical unleashing of forces, and it drew violent support and violent derision.
Doyle is very focused on serving the needs of people like me, who need to know the basic timeline and the most important actors, which doesn’t really allow him to linger on any one topic very long. I wanted to know much more about Robespierre, for instance. He may well be a tragic figure in all of this — Doyle pretty clearly thinks so — though I think the Brits normally look upon him quite differently. In brief, Robespierre was the proto-Jacobin — an idealist of the Revolution, perhaps its main ideologue, and apparently a splendid orator. He was also, seemingly, one of the main architects of the Terror.
To be honest, it’s hard for me to distinguish between one endless episode of bloodletting (90% of the Revolution, seemingly) and an even more orgiastic one (the Terror). Much of the bloodletting during the Revolution was seemingly just a concerted attempt to end the anarchy by trying to establish a monopoly on violence. Then there were what we’d call “purges” if we were describing the Stalinist era: people killing off the “counterrevolutionaries”, where by “counterrevolutionary” we mean “the other guy.”
From the modern perspective I think it’s one of the main questions we’re going to run up against: how earnest were the revolutionaries and the various bands of counterrevolutionaries? That is, when they were slaughtering the others in droves, did they really believe they were the true bodyguards of the Revolution and that the other side wanted to bring about a return of the Bourbon monarchy? Did the later terrorists really believe, for instance, that Robespierre was going to destroy the Revolution? Or was it all just a convenient way to kill someone while seeming noble?
Some British reactionaries (a term, like “terrorist”, that the French Revolution created — there was nothing to react against before there was a revolution) foresaw from the beginning that all this democracy would become anarchy, which would be swept aside by a charismatic general who would establish a monopoly on violence. That did, indeed, come to pass, starting with Napoleon’s coup on the 18th Brumaire. (Brumaire was one of the months of the Revolutionary calendar. Now I understand a historical allusion in the title of an essay by Marx. I assume everyone in the 1850s understood the allusion without the aid of a Doyle.) Of course Napoleon is a mind-bogglingly fascinating story on his own, which Doyle can only just touch on.
I’m left with more questions than answers. Napoleon seemed to conquer Europe unimpeded — nearly magically; how did that happen? How did one man possess legitimacy that all the Jacobins and republicans before him had lacked? And indeed, how does legitimacy even work? It’s a social process: everyone believes that the king is the legitimate source of all authority, so he is; as soon as people stop believing that, legitimacy can fall apart quickly. Understanding legitimacy means understanding groups (the “legitimators”, let’s call them) rather than understanding the thing being legitimized (the “legitimee”?).
That’s why I really need to learn about the French Revolution from the perspective of someone living in the middle of it — something like the Pepys of Paris. I need to understand how the bulk of humanity — the peasants, say — experienced it, and whether the separation of Louis XVI’s head from his body was a cataclysmic event that suddenly shifted everyone’s understanding of how power and authority worked.
Louis didn’t actually lose his head until 1793, by the way, three-plus years after the Bastille fell. He’d been a virtual prisoner in his palace in the intervening years, delicately negotiating with the republicans and occasionally trying to foment royalist rebellion. In retrospect it can seem like the king’s days were numbered just as soon as the “internal logic” of the Revolution started to spin out, but it’s really hard for me to believe that there *is* any such logic, [foreign: a priori]. In any case, I had never really solidly grasped that the king’s death came a good long while after the 14th of July, 1789. There are a lot of facts like that which are now much clearer to me, thanks to Doyle. The timeline from the French Revolution to the present day that I’m building in my head slowly comes into focus. Roughly:
A couple years prior to 1789: the Bourbons lose control of their finances, with their rock-star finance minister, Jacques Necker, periodically brought in as the savior who can fix the debt and end the people’s starvation.
Soon thereafter: Necker finally falls, there are bread riots, etc.
1789: the Bastille falls
1792 – 1795: the National Convention rules
1793 – 1794: the Terror
1793: the king is decapitated
1795 – 1799: the National Convention is replaced by the smaller Directory
1799: Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power from the Directory
1802: Napoleon is made First Consul for life, and the Revolution effectively ends (and with it many of the Revolution’s ideals)
1802 – 1815: Napoleon conquers large parts of Europe and, among other things, ends the Holy Roman Empire
1815: Napoleon finally defeated at Waterloo. Congress of Vienna establishes tentative 19th-century order in Europe.
1815-1848: Monarchy restored in France.
1848: Revolution all over Europe. Second Republic declared.
1871: Franco-Prussian War leads to Napoleon III being captured. Monarch overturned, Third Republic declared.
1871 – 1941 or so: Third Republic
1941 – 1945: Vichy France
1945 – 1958: Fourth Republic
1958 – now: Fifth Republic
The final chapter of Doyle’s book puts the Revolution in breathtaking world-historical perspective. The whole book is worth reading just to understand the chaos of the Revolution, but the final chapter seems necessary for anyone who wants to understand how we’re still, today, living in the world the French Revolution created.
__P.S.__: in an appendix, Doyle writes that “Scornful British contemporaries … rendered [the months of the Revolutionary calendar]: Slippy, Nippy, Drippy; Freezy, Wheezy, Sneezy; Showery, Flowery, Bowery; Heaty, Wheaty, Sweety.”
__P.P.S.__: Lots of books that Doyle cites in the bibliography go on the to-read list:
* “The classic treatment [of the Revolution’s origins] is G. Lefebvre, [book: The Coming of the French Revolution] (Princeton, 1947), the best general work by the other great twentieth-century master whose detailed researches underlie much of what subsequent scholars have achieved.”
* “The most up-to-date, well-researched, and stimulating general survey is at present D.M.G. Sutherland, [book: France 1789-8115: Revolution and Counter-Revolution] (London, 1985).”
Steve Reads 