Steve Reads

Author: stevereads

Telling Massachusetts patients how much their health care will cost — January 23, 2014

Telling Massachusetts patients how much their health care will cost

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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…

Medicare releasing data —

Medicare releasing data

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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As I understood it at the time — note here that my understanding is many years out of date — the Census Bureau had a couple ways of releasing its multidimensional contingency tables.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.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — January 18, 2014

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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Having now finished this book, I don’t entirely get what the big deal is. The argument runs as follows:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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 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 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.

The war on the bros —

The war on the bros

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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.

1+2+3+4+5+… does not equal a negative number —

1+2+3+4+5+… does not equal a negative number

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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.

Scholarly research semiotics-or-something bleg — January 14, 2014

Scholarly research semiotics-or-something bleg

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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?

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution —

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

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An oil painting, presumably by someone like David, of someone holding a bow and arrow.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, 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, 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, France 1789-8115: Revolution and Counter-Revolution (London, 1985).”
Shipments of babies to Paris, sure, sure … wait, what? — January 12, 2014
Business confidence? How about middle-class confidence? — January 10, 2014

Business confidence? How about middle-class confidence?

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I’ve thought for a while that the focus on business confidence — specially, businessmen’s purported inability to make forecasts about the future, because policies ostensibly keep changing out from under them — came at the expense of *everyone else’s* confidence. Here’s an example by the banker Bob Rubin from today, via Paul Krugman:

> The US recovery remains slow by historical standards even if recent signs of improvement are borne out. One reason is that our unsound fiscal trajectory undermines business confidence, and thus job creation, by creating uncertainty about future policy and exacerbating concerns about the will of Congress to govern. Business leaders frequently cite our fiscal outlook as a deterrent to hiring and investment.

To be very specific about it: suppose you believe that you’ll lose your job tomorrow. That’s going to change your behavior today, isn’t it? It’s going to cause you to save a lot of money in the bank(assuming you have money to save), rather than spend it. In a world without universal health insurance, fear of job loss might, for instance, make you head to the hospital and the dentist’s office for all the checkups you’ve been avoiding.

I’ve not put together the economic model, but I could easily see a story under which the effects of consumer uncertainty dwarf the effects of business uncertainty. Businesses, owing to their economies of scale, can prepare for policy uncertainty more easily than I can prepare for unemployment. Really large businesses can engage in hedging schemes, wherein they’re protected from rises and falls in interest rates, for instance. I cannot so easily prepare for the loss of my job. And in an environment of high involuntary unemployment, employers have an advantage over me: they have more people waiting in line for every job opening. So my uncertainty over the future, and my ability to hedge against downturns, would seem to get worse during recessions.

But now imagine that there’s a strong social-safety net, such that, whatever else happens, you’re going to be able to get medical care even if you’re unemployed. Imagine that unemployment insurance is so strong that you breathe a little more easily and sleep a little more soundly at night. (For that matter, imagine that everyone gets a guaranteed minimum income.)

Imagine a safety net so strong that you could consider starting a new business without fear that you would impoverish your family.

Imagine that your kids’ school offered them free lunch, regardless of their income level (thereby removing the stigma of poor kids receiving free lunch), 365 days a year; that would remove the uncertainty over whether they’d be fed; in turn this would, it’s fairly easy to imagine, reduce your fear and increase your freedom of action.

Imagine that, no matter which neighborhood you lived in, you could live free of fear that your kids would be hit by stray bullets, and you could send them to whichever school was best for them (in Boston, you could live in Roxbury and send your kids to school in Brookline). You could choose to live anywhere in this world without fear. That would remove some more uncertainty from your life.

My strong suspicion is that Bob Rubin doesn’t care about these things, because he doesn’t have to. Bob Rubin’s class cares about interest rates far more than it cares about involuntary mass unemployment. Bob Rubin’s class lives in neighborhoods without fear. Bob Rubin’s class has the spare money to start new businesses without fear of their failing. The only sort of uncertainty that Bob Rubin’s class cares about is the uncertainty in interest rates.

Let’s aim for a society where the bulk of middle-class people both a) understand the real sources of uncertainty and b) don’t come to identify our needs with those of the bankers. Their needs are not ours. Their fears are not ours.

French Revolution reading plan — January 5, 2014

French Revolution reading plan

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I read Hobsbawm‘s “long nineteenth century” series years ago, but I probably wasn’t ready for it. And it’s very British, in the sense that it just sort of ambles around for a while; I’m sure it has a plan, and I’m sure that someone who came at it with a different background would get more out of it than I did. Other very British works, like The Victorians (a gift to me, on the occasion of my 30th birthday, by the sadly departed Dan Weinreb), or Gellner’s astonishing Nations and Nationalism, work great, so I don’t know what my problem with Hobsbawm was.

Anyway, so I picked up Carlyle on the French Revolution the other day and made it literally one page before realizing that this was not the book for me. Whereupon I turned to Google.

So now on the list:

Palmers Twelve Who Ruled is my single most favourite book on the French Revolution. He does precisely what I was just talking about. He doesnt do it for the tens of thousands Im more interested in the tens and the hundreds of thousands but for the 12 who ruled. Hes incredibly good at giving you a sense of what these people are confronted with, the incredible difficulty of their situation and the unbelievable stress of the circumstances they find themselves in. Hes just fantastic at recreating that atmosphere and, as a result, forcing you to sympathise with these men. His position is much closer to my own position. He sees this as trying to do something really important, coming up against enormous obstacles in the course of trying to do it, failing, but completely understanding why this would happen in this particular way.

This should help me understand the period up to the Congress of Vienna (covered so ably in Kissinger). It’s not much of a jump from there to Bismarck — such a short jump, in fact, that I may know everything I need. And I’ve got there to World War I covered. Then maybe I’ll be able to re-digest Hobsbawm and Gellner as thoroughly as they deserve. And I dunno, maybe Hegel and Kant would fit well into this reading plan. Unsure. Check back later.