2014-02-18T18:00:13+00:00

Corey Robin knocks another one out of the park

February 18, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

…with this achingly beautiful piece, a followup to his earlier column which said that socialism converts hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. It starts like so:

> Socialism wont eliminate the sorrows of the human condition. Loss, death, betrayal, disappointment, hurt: none of these would disappear or even be mitigated in a socialist society. As the Pirkei Avot puts it, against your will you enter this world, against your will you leave it. (Or something like that.) Thats not going to change under socialism.
>
> …
>
> But what socialism can do is to arrange things so that you can deal with and confront these unhappinesses of the human condition. Not flee from or avoid them because youre so consumed by the material constraints and hassles of everyday life.

It gets better from there. Please go read.

Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, Social Security: The Phony Crisis

February 15, 2014/stevereads/1 Comment

I should never forget about Dean Baker. He and Paul Krugman are in the same corner, constantly taking a numerical hatchet to conservative presumptions about the economy. In [book: Social Security: The Phony Crisis], Baker and Weisbrot show conclusively that conservative ideas about privatizing Social Security just don’t make numerical sense. The stock market, for one, won’t guarantee huge returns unless the economy as a whole is growing at a stellar rate; and if the economy is growing at a stellar rate, then each of our pocketbooks will be engorged; and if each of our pocketbooks is engorged, then we should have no trouble funding Social Security far into the future.

I learned about Baker and Weisbrot’s book when Diamond and Orszag cited it. They devoted literally just one footnote to Baker and Weisbrot, and referred to them in the body of the text (not by name) as liberals who reject all efforts at privatization. They did this so that they could then position themselves as the reasonable centrists. I understand why they might have done this — they were writing during the Bush Administration, after all, when maybe they hoped they could placate their enemies by giving them half a loaf — but it turns out, having read Baker and Weisbrot, that Diamond and Orszag got it all wrong. Reading Baker and Weisbrot, the conclusion seems inescapable that there really is no Social Security problem at all. I really wonder what the four authors, put together in a room, would say to each other. I wonder if Diamond and Orszag would say, “Yeah, we know, but we had to say what we said when we said it.”

I want to buy copies of [book: Social Security: The Phony Crisis] for everyone I know. We’ve had the same ideas hammered into our brains for 30+ years by now: Social Security is going broke; we can’t afford the good life for all our citizens; taxes are too high. It’s important that someone occasionally step up and remind us that these aren’t facts; they were ideas invented by people who have an agenda that they’re trying to sell.

Most every page in [book: Phony Crisis] contains at least one idea that’s so clear, and so well-supported numerically, that I felt dumb for not having thought of it myself. How about this, for instance: people get so concerned that the country will have an intolerable burden on its hands as the Baby Boom generation ages, and the ratio of retirees to workers increases. But no one seems to be concerned about another population that contributes nothing to the GDP, namely children. We invest lots of money in children in the form of schooling, yet no one seems concerned that they’re going to bankrupt the country; we rightly believe that investing in children will make the country wealthier in the future.

So the number we ought to be looking at is the so-called “dependency ratio” — the size of the population that contributes nothing to GDP (retirees plus children, basically), divided by the overall population. FRED, my favorite source of data, comes to the rescue:

You can juggle various indicators of what we’re trying to measure (namely: how much of a problem is the aging of the population?), but that’s kind of the point: these things can be measured, at least in a back-of-the-envelope way; and the more back-of-the-envelope counterexamples each of us has in our heads, the more immunized we’ll be against nonsense.

There’s another broad point that this book tackles: when we argue over seemingly abstruse accounting problems, such as whether to use chained CPI to measure inflation, we’re not just talking about arcane math; we’re talking about people’s real lives. You might think that someone else is engaging in a technical discussion, but there are real ethical choices buried in those numbers. The main ethical question is: are we in this together, as a society, or are we instead just libertarian billiard balls engaging in market transactions with each other? This really isn’t just accounting; it’s about nothing more or less than how a 21st-century democracy cares for its citizens over the industrial life-cycle. If you choose to tune out, and choose not to learn math, that’s your right, but the other side is making different choices.

Baker and Weisbrot are happy warriors in this battle. Their book ought to be in everyone’s coat pocket.

George Packer’s piece about Amazon is terrible

February 14, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

I have a deep love for George Packer’s work, going back many books. [book: Blood of the Liberals] is one of my all-time favorite books, though viewed in the context of the other books and articles he’s written, it’s condescending: *his* deep desire to find a liberalism that can appeal to the common man is somehow at odds with everyone else’s. Likewise, when George Packer came to oppose the War in Iraq, *his* ultimate decision to oppose it was thoughtful and well-meaning, whereas everyone else’s was reflexive and irrational.

The piece on Amazon is a long string of [foreign: ad hominem]s, including the requisite slam on engineers: “Everyone there is so engineering-oriented. They dont know how to talk to novelists.” That one example, it seems to be, contains the key to what’s wrong with the whole piece: throughout the piece, you ought to be asking, “Compared to what?” People with an engineering focus can’t talk to novelists, sure. So I assume Random House is filled with artsy types who are willing to forego a profit to take a flyer on some unknown, promising author? I have no experience in the publishing industry, but I am willing to wager huge quantities of money against that premise. Take a nice anonymous survey of authors — including aspiring or failed authors — who’ve worked with large publishers and let’s see what they think of the publishers’ author-friendliness.

Amazon is terrible for local bookstores, sure. But compared to what? How about you Google for [bookstore market share 1998]? Up comes a [newspaper: New York Times] article from that year titled “Independent Bookstores Struggle Against the Tide”. Quoth that article:

> In Tarrytown, the American Booksellers Association, a trade association, reported that while the independents held a market share of 31 percent in 1991, that number had dropped precipitously to under 19 percent five years later.

So let’s not romanticize the world that Amazon inherited. It was dominated by Borders and Barnes & Noble. At one point there was Waldenbooks, too.

It’s hard to find a sentence in Packer’s piece that doesn’t contain a tendentious interpretation of data that we all already experience. To pick just one:

> The digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while readers are being conditioned to think that books are worth as little as a sandwich. Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value, Johnson said. Its a widget.

Did Amazon create this attitude? Who you gonna believe: George Packer, or your own lying eyes? Here’s what my impression tells me: back in the day, I used to buy music CDs, each of which I treasured and obsessed over. I’d buy an album or two, then spend the next few weeks digesting it lovingly. I’d read all the liner notes; I’d listen to it until I’d memorized every lyric and every last bridge. Then MP3s happened. Now I don’t see any liner notes; I don’t see cover art. For a time I used Napster, which allowed me to get unlimited access to free music. Each individual track, then, was valueless — literally costless. Nowadays I use Amazon MP3s, where most tracks cost $0.99. I also use Rdio, which allows me to stream most any song for free. I’ve used Songza and Pandora for similar purposes. In fact the default now seems to be that music is free (ad-supported). I don’t know, but I assume none of these services pays artists particularly well.

So music, in any case, has long since moved from a model where each work was an individual perfect snowflake to a model wherein it’s all basically wallpaper: you can get all the music you want at any time of day or night, and each individual track is a fungible commodity.

As for print media: you could argue that Amazon turned any individual bit of writing into a commodity, but that’s obvious nonsense. The presence of blogs had much more to do with that than did Amazon. The fact that I can get my hands on any newspaper from anywhere in the world had much more to do with that than did Amazon. My Instapaper queue is enormous, meaning that I have mountains of fungible text awaiting me. Amazon did not invent the commoditization of everything electronic; the Internet did.

Listen, I’m not 100% happy about this. I wish this blog post you’re reading were the most brilliant thing you’ll read all week. I wish you carried it rolled up under your arm; that you highlighted interesting passages with a pen; that you photocopied it at work and shared it with all your officemates. But that’s not how the world works anymore. Someone writes an article in a newspaper or magazine, and within hours thousands of blogs have digested that article for you. Now you can choose among thousands of blogs, each of which approaches that newspaper article from thousands of perspectives. I’m sure I could find a libertarian gun nut’s take on George Packer’s piece if I looked long enough in benighted corners of the Internet. But the point is that it’s all a commodity now. George Packer’s apparent dream, wherein each book is treated as a perfect, crystalline work of art, is many years out of date.

I think it’s even out of date for beautiful books published by reputable publishers. Years ago I read Yochai Benkler‘s [book: The Wealth of Networks], which is really a lovely book published by one of the best university presses. A university press! Shouldn’t they be the last bastions of hope for authors who aren’t chasing a profit? University presses are associated with non-profit institutions whose goal is to contribute to the sum of human knowledge. Yet even Benkler’s book, which is sort of a landmark in the field, was horribly edited. When I asked around about this, the word I got back is that authors are now expected to do their own copyediting, and are expected to submit “camera-ready” manuscripts. So much for publisher support.

At the risk of waving my hands too broadly at “society”, I am willing to blame capitalism just as much as I’m willing to blame Amazon or the Internet. Eventually everything becomes a commodity. Eventually everything gets driven down to marginal cost. If Amazon didn’t do it, someone else would.

I don’t mean to absolve Amazon. In fact I mean to praise them, which Packer is somehow unwilling to do. Everyone loves Amazon, right? They’re good for customers. Here’s Packer:

> Those were sweet words for a company that declares itself to be Earths most customer-centric company. Even its bitterest critics reluctantly admit to using Amazon, unable to resist its unparalleled selection, price, and convenience. When Bezos talks about serving the customer, its as if he were articulating his purpose in life. The customer is almost theological, James Marcus said. Any sacrifice is suitable for the customer.

That’s basically the extent of Packer’s praise for Amazon, which is incredibly odd. This is a company whose success is changing one industry after another, and Packer’s piece somehow attributes all of that success to malign influence — such as the infamous engineering attitude. How about this: it’s succeeding because it does right by its customers? Packer is just unwilling to admit that, because it would undermine the entire rest of the article — an article whose premise is that Amazon’s band of barbarians is toppling a once-civilized industry. This premise gets no support from Packer’s article. And somehow Packer never really addresses a question that ought to be fundamental: how could something be good for readers and not good for books, or good for authors, or good for publishers? I’m open to the possibility that there’s a conflict there, but really Packer ought to be asking: does Amazon make people read more, or less? Offhand, I assume that it makes them read more, because books are now cheaper. When people read more, that’s good for authors and publishers. That seems to be the fundamental calculus here, and Packer never once addresses it squarely.

I hate to say it, but Packer’s piece is garbage. I hope you read it in costless form on the Internet. When you do so, I expect that Packer will shed a single proud tear for the commoditization of his heretofore priceless work.

__P.S.__: The costlessness of the Internet means that my own blog post here is just a disposable commodity. Either I learn to deal with that, or I don’t. The dialectic doesn’t care especially much what I think about it.

Dani Rodrik, “Economics: Science, Craft, or Snake Oil?”

February 2, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

This is a great piece, by the author of the exceptional [book: Globalization Paradox] (which I read years ago and never reviewed; shame on me). One of the basic themes underlying that book — and, I gather, underlying Rodrik’s [book: One Economics, Many Recipes] — is that reality is complicated, and that economics can give you diverse conclusions depending upon your assumptions. Different assumptions are appropriate for different contexts. Free trade doesn’t always, for instance, make the world a better place in the short run; there are winners and losers, and it’s not clear that the gains to the winners outweigh the losses to the losers (particularly if we attach ethical weight to a more-equal distribution of income). Only if you introduce the assumption that the winners can compensate the losers does this conclusion start to make sense.

There’s nothing wrong with assumptions; as the great John Tukey said, “Without assumptions there can be no conclusions.” If you’re going to argue that mathematics or science or economics has a poor track record in decision-making, the natural reply is, “Compared to what?” Compared to your gut, it’s not at all obvious that economics has done poorly.

Where the discipline does sin, according to Rodrik, is in telling a different story to the outside world than it does to its students. Graduate economics seminars, says Rodrik, very carefully tease out all the assumptions that make the conclusions true; what shows up in the newspapers does not (“free trade good; free markets good; industrial planning bad”).

Naturally, though, if you’re going to use economics for real-world decision-making, you need some way of testing which assumptions apply in a particular case. You need data. But doubly-blinded controlled experiments in economics are few and far between, if not outright impossible. So the discipline will always suffer from an abundance of models and a dearth of practical advice on how to use them.

Here I’m reminded of the very excellent “Deconstructing the argument for free trade”, particularly this bit:

> President Truman [allegedly] got so tired of hearing economists tell him “on the one hand…” that he wished for a one-armed economist. But frequently the best advice we can give is a menu of effects that flow from different choices. Trying to come up with a valid measure of the *net* effects is above our pay grade.

It’s a plea that economists show some humility. But since that seems to be in short supply, perhaps we need a belt-and-suspenders approach: the public, and policymakers, need to understand the limits of the discipline that they rely on.

(Rodrik link at the top via Cosma Shalizi’s Pinboard.)

Someone drove the trains to Auschwitz

January 29, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

Simply beautiful and haunting post by Corey Robin. It goes beyond the mere observation that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” It’s much more disturbing than that. The architecture of oppression depends upon many thousands of people doing their jobs *in the service of* that oppression.

To the question in there — would we fight like Pete Seeger if placed in a similar situation — the answer is probably no. I’m not answering for you; I’m answering only for myself. I’ve asked this question of myself a lot. Would I be the sort who sat at lunch counters with my black friends, drawing the jeers of segregationists? Unlikely. Threatened with the loss of my career, would I do as Seeger did and refuse to turn in my friends? I hope so, but it’s hard to map myself back into that era as anything outside the median.

And map it forward to today. What are the great issues of the day that I’m not only passively assenting to (e.g., the NSA wiretapping) but actively supporting? As I get more deeply into the trappings of bourgeois life — the wife, the kids, the home, the college educations to save for — what are the odds that I’ll resist? They seem to get slimmer by the year.

No hopeful moral here.

Richard F. Hamilton, The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community

January 25, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

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.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

January 18, 2014April 5, 2017/stevereads/Leave a comment

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.

William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution

January 14, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

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, [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).”

Shipments of babies to Paris, sure, sure … wait, what?

January 12, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

The quote in here, from [book: The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography] is, um, striking. Certainly makes me want to read the book, if nothing else as a novel angle on the French Revolution reading I’m doing.

(Via my friend Chris Young’s excellent roundup of the books he read in 2013.)

French Revolution reading plan

January 5, 2014/stevereads/Leave a comment

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 [book: The Victorians] (a gift to me, on the occasion of my 30th birthday, by the sadly departed Dan Weinreb), or Gellner’s astonishing [book: 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:

* [book: The Oxford History of the French Revolution] by William Doyle. It backs up a few steps and should, if I chose wisely, give me Just The Facts, Ma’am. I’m in the middle of it now. It’s very good so far. I’m up to Jacques Necker.
* [book: Twelve Who Ruled], recommended effusively by Lynn Hunt:

Palmers [book: 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.

* [book: France, 1789-1815: Revolution and Counterrevolution], recommended in the bibliography at the end of Doyle’s book.
* Alexis de Tocqueville, [book: The Old Regime and the French Revolution].
* Edmund Burke, [book: Reflections on the Revolution in France].

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.

Steve Reads

Category: Books