April 2013
3 posts
Note to All Writers
Note to all writers/academics/journalists: Next time you set out to write about violence, terror, genocide, or some other bit of social nastiness, please check out Yehuda Bauer’s essay “Is the Holocaust explicable?” in Rethinking the Holocaust first. It provides some useful rules of the road, and will you save you—and us—from a lot of embarrassing and over-heated...
Why Liberals Shouldn't Be Celebrating Tax Day
Or at least one of the several reasons they shouldn’t be supporting Tax Day. As I argued a few years back in the London Review of Books:
Liberals often have a difficult time making sense of these [anti-tax] movements – don’t taxes support good things? – because they don’t see how little the American state directly provides to its citizens, relative to their economic circumstances. Since...
Nietzsche and the Marginals, Take 2
Menger, Principles of Economics:
Utility is the capacity of a thing to serve for the satisfaction of human needs…Our needs, at any rate in part, at least as concerns their origins, depend upon our wills or on our habits. (119)
Nietzsche, The Gay Science:
Need.—Need is considered the cause why something came to be; but in truth it is often merely an effect of what has come to be. (§205, p....
March 2013
4 posts
Perry Anderson Learns Polemic the Hard Way
Reviewing his bitter and famous exchange with E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson writes:
What had astonished me were the corners he cut in representing the arguments he wanted to refute, which I couldn’t match with anything he stood for as a historian. This was a generic mistake on my part. I didn’t understand the rules of polemic. This is a literary form whose history has yet to be...
Edmund Burke on Austerity
From Letter to a Noble Lord (pp. 485-486):
I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, the worst economy in the world. In saving money, I soon can count up all the good I do; but when, by a cold penury, I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all...
One good liberal deserves another...
Liberal imperialism in the 19th century:
For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them…Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things...
Race Matters
Last fall, Gary Orfield and his colleagues at UCLA documented how school segregation has been increasing dramatically among blacks and Latinos. Just the other day, Jamelle Bouie reported that the wealth gap between blacks and whites is one of the largest we’ve ever seen. And now comes Thomas Edsall to tell us that racism — understood as individual prejudice — is on the decline....
February 2013
1 post
Hayek on Spielberg: the real unacknowledged...
Friedrich von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty:
However important the independent owner of property may be for the economic order of a free society, his importance is perhaps even greater in the fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs. (p. 193)
MSN Entertainment:
Steven Spielberg is sending free copies of his historical drama “Lincoln” to schools across the...
January 2013
7 posts
Nietzsche's Esotericism
Nietzsche, Nachlass:
Our true essence must remain concealed, just like the Jesuits who exercised dictatorship in conditions of general anarchy. (Cited in Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics, 5)
1 tag
The Entrepreneur as Medieval Lord
Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development:
There is the dream and the will to found a private kingdom, usually, though not necessarily, also a dynasty. The modern world really does not know any such position, but what may be attained by industrial and commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man. (93)
1 tag
The Ding an sich of Economics
Stanley Jevons on the Ding an sich that is the human heart: “Far be it from me to say that we ever shall have the means of measuring directly the feelings of the human heart. A unit of pleasure or of pain is difficult even to conceive….We can no more know or measure gravity in its own nature than we can measure a feeling.” No surprise then that, for Jevons, “every mind is...
Everything you need to know about Christopher...
Richard Seymour, author of the new book Unhitched, writing in the Guardian:
“To be able,” wrote the late Christopher Hitchens, “to bray that ‘as a liberal, I say bomb the shit out of them,’ is to have achieved that eye-catching, versatile marketability that is so beloved of editors and talk-show hosts. As a life-long socialist, I say don’t let’s bomb the...
2 tags
Economics is easy, so why so many bad economists?
“The study of economics does not seem to require any specialised gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy and pure science? Yet good, or even competent, economists are the rarest of birds. An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the...
1 tag
I don't want the state to pardon Aaron Swartz
I completely understand why some would want the state to pardon Aaron Swartz. But something about that move — and the wording of this petition — doesn’t sit right. It grants the state too much: not just the power to pardon Swartz but, effectively, the power to pardon itself. As my friend Michael Pollak pointed out to me, “Under our laws, Swartz was still innocent. Therein...
2 tags
When Salman Met Saul
So this exchange really did happen, once upon a time (i.e., 1986).
Salman Rushdie:
There are very few works by contemporary American writers that treat the subject which, for the rest of us, is the paramount subject about America: how America behaves in the rest of the world. I would like to ask both the Americans and the non-Americans why it is that American writers have, so to speak,...
December 2012
7 posts
5 tags
When Steve Jobs Met Nietzsche von Hayek
Alex Gourevitch dug this one up for my Nietzsche von Hayek files. It’s from Apple’s “Think Different”/”Crazy Ones” ad campaign:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You...
3 tags
Nietzsche and Neoliberalism: When commercial...
At the heart of my next book project is the argument that neoliberalism is the reinvention of aristocratic politics for a capitalist age, that the political theory of the free market is an effort to create what Nietzsche called “great politics” in the realm of the economy.
Nietzsche, of course, had nothing but contempt for capitalism (and economics more generally) — in part...
A Boy Can Dream
I have a dream that one day this internet will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all trolls are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on some forgotten website the trollish sons of trolls and the trollish sons of other trolls will be able to sit down together at a table of trollhood. I have a dream that one day even that...
1 tag
My Political Credo
I’ve never been much of an Emerson fan — on the two occasions that I taught him, we didn’t really click — but this line from his essay “History” comes pretty close to perfectly expressing my approach to politics:
All public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized.
2 tags
Nietzsche in the New York Times
Despite the sad news it delivers, an obituary in the New York Times can often be an occasion for hilarity. To wit:
Prof. Nietzsche was one of the most prominent of modern German philosophers, and he is considered the apostle of extreme modern rationalism and one of the founders of the socialistic school. (New York Times, 8/26/1900, p. 7)
H/t Brian Leiter
1 tag
Overheard on 12th Street
Woman talking into her phone:
So I was telling her about Lincoln, but I didn’t want to give it away and say that he got shot.
Looking for literary texts as counterpoint to...
When I teach modern political theory, as I will be this spring, I like to pair a theoretical text with a literary text. So we read Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth with Marx’s Capital, Vol 1. Or Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Or Machiavelli’s The Prince with Brecht’s Galileo. I even once taught Washington...
November 2012
21 posts
4 tags
Pity the country that needs heroes
In my 18 months on the internet, the three posts I’ve written that have generated the most intense and widespread outrage went after: Cory Booker, Christopher Hitchens, and Lincoln/Spielberg.
3 tags
Frederick Douglass: To Whom Do We Owe Our Freedom?
On Facebook, Ian Zuckerman brought to my attention this great speech of Frederick Douglass on Haiti.
Speaking for the Negro, I can say, we owe much to Walker for his appeal; to John Brown [applause] for the blow struck at Harper’s Ferry, to Lundy and Garrison for their advocacy [applause], We owe much especially to Thomas Clarkson, [applause], to William Wilberforce, to Thomas Fowell Buxton, and...
2 tags
Bukharin and the Austrians
A friend on Facebook alerted me to this lengthy critique of the Austrian School by Nikolai Bukharin. I found the opening to the Russian edition especially charming:
This book was completed in the fall of 1914. The Introduction was written in August and September of that year.
I had long been occupied with the plan of formulating a systematic criticism of the theoretical economy of the new...
3 tags
Libertarians in Alabama
Derrick Belcher, a libertarian in Alabama, is so furious that the government shut down his topless car wash business that he’s organized a petition for Alabama to secede from the union. There’s just one catch: the government that shut him down is the state of Alabama.
5 tags
Arendt on Fascism in Israel
If you’re trying to make sense of the comments of Gilad Sharon, son of Ariel Sharon, you might consider this:
In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel’s Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York Times, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was ‘no ordinary political party’, she wrote. It was ‘closely akin in its...
3 tags
Arendt on the Arab Question
Hannah Arendt, “To Save the Jewish Homeland,” 1948:
The only permanent reality in the whole constellation was the presence of Arabs in Palestine, a reality no decision could alter — except perhaps the decision of a totalitarian state, implemented by its particular brand of ruthless force.
For more on Arendt and Israel/Palestine, read this.
1 tag
A cliché wrapped in a cliché inside a cliché
Dear Christopher Buckley:
It doesn’t make it any less of a cliché to insert “as they say” somewhere inside the phrase “the rest is history.” At this point, that is the cliché.
Corey Robin
6 tags
Moshe Dayan Explains It All for You
Laleh Khalili brought this quote from Moshe Dayan to my attention tonight. He’s talking about conflict in the Golan Heights:
I know how at least 80 percent of the clashes there started. In my opinion, more than 80 percent, but let’s talk about 80 percent. It went this way: We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized...
6 tags
Reading about Gaza, I'm reminded of Brecht
Reading about the events in Gaza tonight, with Israel preparing for its second invasion in four years (the last time it killed 1400 Palestinians) and Barak and Netanyahu blustering away, I’m reminded of Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Germany” from 1933, which Hannah Arendt used as the epigraph for Eichmann in Jerusalem.
O Germany —
Hearing the speeches that ring from your...
5 tags
What do Oskar Schindler and Abe Lincoln have in...
When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German. When he makes a movie about abolition, he focuses on a white man. Say what you will, he’s consistent.
Scalia and Court Conservatives: History is Bunk
In 1992, in the school desegregation case Freeman v. Pitts, Justice Scalia wrote:
At some time, we must acknowledge that it has become absurd to assume, without any further proof, that violations of the Constitution dating from the days when Lyndon Johnson was President, or earlier, continue to have an appreciable effect upon current operation of schools. We are close to that time.
According...
1 tag
Nietzsche on the danger of voting rights
From Human, All Too Human (section 450):
…one is now supposed to learn…that government is nothing but an organ of the people and not a provident, venerable “above” in relation to a diffident “below.” Before one accepts this hitherto unhistorical and arbitrary, if nonetheless more logical assertion of the concept government, one might be advised to consider the...
2 tags
Nancy Pelosi has a black, a woman, two Jews and a...
I very much appreciate the substance of what Nancy Pelosi describes in a letter she sent out to congressional Democrats today:
Next week we will be welcoming a very large Democratic freshman class. The Democratic Caucus will bring to the 113th Congress the first caucus where the majority is women and minorities….When Congress begins next year we expect to have 61 women, 43 African...
George Allen, one of the most loathsome...
…in the country, will not be joining the Senate, one of the most loathsome institutions in the country.
They Don't Get Out Much at the New York Times
From the New York Times:
Among the most disturbing images to emerge from the aftermath of the storm was that of a pile of cars floating upended in the waters of a parking lot near Wall Street.
Um, no, not really.
4 tags
Richard Burton and Alexis de Tocqueville on...
Chris Williams, editor of The Richard Burton Diaries, on Richard Burton (at 4:28):
He was uncomfortable with the status of acting, the idea that he was simply speaking somebody else’s words. He had this tremendous interest in writing and scholarship. I think he wanted to be an author of some kind. So just being a voice wasn’t enough for Richard.
Alexis de Tocqueville to Paul Clamorgan (February...
2 tags
One of the reasons the NYC Marathon got...
…is that its organizers feared that an enraged citizenry would commit acts of violence against the runners.
This is from an email that the New York Road Runners sent out today:
The decision was made after it became increasingly apparent that the people of our city and the surrounding tri-state area were still struggling to recover from the damage wrought by the recent extreme weather...
1 tag
Family Feud in the Workplace
Sean Shannon, a reader of my blog and a former student of mine at the CUNY Graduate Center, writes to me:
While visiting my elderly neighbor last night, we watched an episode of Family Feud. There was a question that I thought interesting, and answers that were even more surprising. I can’t recall the question precisely, but it was something like: “What do people do when they feel they are not...
2 tags
Vienna, Gas, and the Jews
Walter Benjamin to Margarette Steffin (June 1939):
Karl Kraus died too soon after all. Listen to this: the Vienna gas board has stopped supplying gas to Jews. A consequence of the gas consumption of the Jewish population was that the gas company lost money, since it was precisely the biggest users who did not pay their bills. The Jews preferred to use the gas to commit suicide.
H/t a reader of...
3 tags
A Modest Proposal
Apparently there has been some looting of abandoned buildings in the wake of Sandy. Democratic City Councilwoman Christine Quinn, who is also running for mayor, wants to go all Rambo on the looters.
They really shouldn’t prey on their neighbors in these worst of times and anyone who is caught looting during this storm should have the book thrown at them in a way that is extreme,” Ms. Quinn...
October 2012
23 posts
2 tags
Auschwitz, oh, dear no! That person was never in...
Mary McCarthy to Hannah Arendt (December 12, 1970):
Five days, nearly, in London, very social. I saw a lot of fashion-mad people, including the current Women’s Lib idol, an absurd Australian giantess [Germaine Greer] who made remarks like “We must make them understand that fucking is a political act.” And here’s a marvelous one, quoted from Sonia [Orwell] by Stephen...
1 tag
Nietzsche on the Labor Question
From Twilight of the Idols (“Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” §40):
The stupidity — at bottom, the degeneration of instinct, which is today the cause of all stupidities — is that there is a labor question at all. Certain things one does not question: that is the first imperative of instinct. I simply cannot see what one proposes to do with the European worker now that one has made a...
3 tags
Nietzsche and the Marginals
Nietzsche:
Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time, as a present—and it was we who gave and bestowed it. (The Gay Science, §260)
Jevons:
A student of Economy has no hopes of ever being clear and correct in his ideas of the science if he thinks of value as at all a thing or...
4 tags
Even More Nietzsche von Hayek
Nietzsche:
A higher culture can come into existence only where there are two different castes in society: that of the workers and that of the idle, of those capable of true leisure; or, expressed more vigorously: the caste compelled to work and the caste that works if it wants to. (Human, All Too Human, §439)
Hayek:
…only from an advanced position does the next range of desires and...
School Test Prep: It's Better Than Genocide! →
Ms. Cheng, a director at a shoe importing company, said guiding her daughter through this process — which cost her about $2,000 this year alone — paled in comparison to what she had experienced earlier in her life. Her father and four brothers died of starvation during Cambodia’s civil war. And…
I could have been James Dean!
Only one cup of coffee and I’ve already been subjected to this.
The summer I turned 14, I morphed from a teenage Republican into a pot-smoking subscriber of The New Republic, and from a desultory reader of the junior high school syllabus into a devourer of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, starting with “Cat’s Cradle.” I was gobsmacked by his alloy of science fiction, philosophical wisecracking and...
3 tags
Who Won the French Revolution?
From today’s headlines:
Six out of ten French people believe the influence of Islam in France is “too big” and 43 percent see the religion as a “threat” to national identity.
From yesterday’s reaction:
The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen,...
