Category: Book Review

Review of "Goethe, Kant and Hegel: Discovering the Mind Volume 1"

I decided to purchased Goethe, Kant, and Hegel: Discovering the Mind. Volume One by Walter Kaufman to see if the book could work as a text for an Introduction to German Philosophy course for which I’m currently preparing notes. In this first of a three part history of the major intellectual vein leading to the creation of the discipline known as psychology, Kaufmann subjects the Goethe, Kant and Hegel to an assessment as to their contributions to the understanding of the mind both by analyzing their propounded ideas as well as their lives. In this latter task, he embodies the Nietzschean form of philosophy that has not been widely adopted by professors of philosophy but which he sees as being an insightful means of intellectual exegesis.

The profound but unacknowledged impact of Goethe’s thought on German philosophy is the first issue which Kauffman seeks to illustrate. He does this not only by quoting important thinkers praising Goethe’s genius, but also by showing the popular reaction to his writing, the development of his ideas by others and how his life was in accordance with them. As a gentleman poet/philosopher, Goethe does not fit the mold of the professors that follow him but instead follows his joys and finds outlet for his thought in such a way that it has a profound effect on all subsequent literature and even parts of the scientific community. Though his contributions he helped define and defend a non-mathematical model of science that was based on qualitative rather than quantitative measurements. This is, of course, the manner in which psychoanalysis operates, by prioritizing narrative accountability and discussion over testing via numbers. Kaufmann shows that Goethe provided a model of autonomy that rejected the rule of concepts but was instead run by experience and development. While many of these may be commonplace today, Kauffman is clear to show that at the time of their dissemination they were clearly revolutionary approaches – especially in the context of the Newtonian revolution in epistemology.

From here to Kant a number of lesser luminaries are mentioned and their general lack of new or innovative research into the mind are glossed over. Once Kant is arrived at, he is subjected to a devastating but deserving critique. His lack of rigor, ahistoricity, structural and epistemological absolutism, poor writing style masked in absurdly long sentences, the prioritization of concepts over experience and generally poor subject of human autonomy and the mind is thoroughly upbraided. It is by combining the analytics of his major and minor works with a biographical sketch of his life that Kauffman finds the source of these errors, for Kant is shown to have embodied many of the contradictory or ridiculous ideas. While ridiculing Kant casuistry, he shows how powerful a model he is for what NOT to think, what NOT to do. Indeed, it is his divorce of the heart, mind, body and natural inclinations from duty we can see the philosophic foundation for alienation later explored by Hegel, Marx, Freud and others.

Goethe the Great and Kant the Confounding are, according to Kauffman, synthesized by Hegel. While a more thorough account of Kauffman’s position towards this can be found in his book Hegel: A Reinterpretation, he provides a concise account of the success and failing in what he conceives to be Hegel’s project. While finding Hegel’s guilty of accepting of some of Kant’s flaws, such as his poor organization of material, his prolix form of address and the creation of a “comprehensive system,” he also sees more to be admired in him than to be disregarded. Thus while the attempt at a scientific series of psychological/epistemological stages in Phenomenology of Spirit is not up to Kauffman’s standards of rigor, he does say that it does provide an inspiring method of autonomy informed by profound self-knowledge and states that even Hegel, for all his attempts at showing absolute necessity, “…realized that all he could hope to show was various developments were not totally capricious, that there were reasons for them, and that one could construe them as organic”. Additionally insightful is Kauffman’s tripartite conceptualization of Hegel’s Phenomenology as science, poetry and encyclopedia via philological research. One can thus take a multitude of perspectives, as Hegel did in his research, in order to gain insight into oneself, one’s culture, nation and history. Indeed, to a marked degree much more so than even Goethe, Hegel is shown to incorporate close historical readings and illustrate it’s primary role in human development.

While an excellent text, the book is at times redundant. Additionally, Kauffman does not proffer a positive conception of the psyche amidst the critical expositions. This should not, however, be judged a fault as this is one part of three volumes and it is by finishing the rest of them, and thus familiarizing oneself with the other greater and lesser luminaries of German thought that one can garnish better insight into the human mind and subsequent developments in psychology and therapy practices.

As a final point of consideration it is worth mentioning how Kauffman closes this book with an insightful thought: “Those who would discover the mind cannot afford to ignore poetry and art”. As new research into the brains biological responses to reading literature shows, this is not just some refrain of an academic seeking to justify their position in the face of neo-liberal cuts to arts education, but a verifiable fact. The brain, conceived of solely as an organ grows, develops and becomes more agile while reading. But as Kauffman illustrates, it is not just an exercise for the brain but also one for the self – for by familiarizing oneself with the life and thought of others, which are not two different aspects but sides of a coin, we are able to learn more about ourselves.

Review of “A Place of Greater Safety”

Hilary Mantel’s meticulously researched and beautifully written historical novel A Place of Greater Safety is set in the epoch-making French Revolution and centers on Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton and Maximillien Robespierre. There are guest starring roles by Marat and Lucile Duplessis and despite it’s impressive length, is never overwrought or dull. The human and political elements blend almost seamlessly in such a way that neither is privileged: it is neither a novel of ideas nor a romantic novel. It is simply a very enjoyable and intellectually edifying novel.

One of the unexpected aspects of the novel is the way in which Mantel uses the tropes of romantic fiction and soap operas to deepen conflict and drive characters. Based on her own historical research, the sexual tensions depicted are real and give color to the cheeks of the characters and illustrate that they are not uni-dimensional abstractions of ideals but desiring bodies. And as soon as mobs are authorized to act as a supplement to police power and the Guillotine makes it appearance, it becomes clear that these are bodies which not only desire political power but to live. When the politics one promotes can suddenly be cause for execution, the stakes of the game are raised and this can lead to complex and emotionally charged scenes. In this particular type of scene as Camille, consistently shown to be the least in control of his emotions, consistently pulls the reader in to empathize with him. As he tried to save his former lovers and adversaries that he respects for their personal qualities from the at time capricious whim of revolutionary energies let loose the repulsion at the Reign of Terror takes on a more personal tone.

One of the notable aspects of this novelization of history is Mantel’s masterful depiction of various vantage points amongst ideologically disparate characters. Through their commentary we can see with a degree of irony the Duke of Orleans attempting to undermine his dissolute brother’s kingship so he could usurp it by throwing money at radical agitators. In this process he goes nearly broke and in effect funds the political machine that would later take his head. Considering the magnitude of events, it is not just the irony of situations that Mantel uncovers, but questions of basic political economy in period of great social unrest as they try to form into a new status quo. For instance, Mantel shows amongst the flow of events that one of the problems of adopting an ethically based absolute meritocracy in the opening phase of a revolutionary struggle is to repulse men of skill and attract men of belief. It is too simplistic to cast it as the pragmatism of Danton vs the idealism of Robespierre and Marat as the historical context determines possibilities. And in this Mantel is masterful in showing that were it not for Danton’s quasi-criminal nepotism portions of the Jacobin clubs would have disintegrated into oppositional movements of greater size or intensity than they were to later develop. What this would have meant for the period following the storming of the Bastille and the foundation of the National Assembly and later the Convention, through the unfolding of new events related to national security, the costs of food and the introduction of new characters that were not “the old Cordeliers” is not speculated on. However the play of forces on the table does make it seem unlikely that the movement towards Constitutionalism would have maintained cohesion. Without being too heavy handed, Mantel also shows how the revolution of social classes is also a symbolic one affecting language in a way that is quite powerful and dangerous.

As a final note, as someone’s who’s already read Citizen’s Robespierre’s speeches and writing, the book gave me a fresh interest in reading the journalism of Camille Desmoulins. The Lanterne Attorney is praised and feared by all of the characters in the novel and is probably one of the most relatable characters amidst the pantheon of great men that were pulled together in this exceptional novel.

Review of "Cuba – A New History"

I decided to purchase Cuba: A New History as I enjoy reading history books of places that I plan on visiting. While my fiance and I didn’t end up getting to enjoy the Cuban beaches, visit historically important sites, see the manner in which Cuban’s reproduce under the shadow of economic blockades of their country by their neighbor to the North and the revolutionary archives as our honeymoon plans were foiled by the theft of our uninsured car, I decided to read it at the time I’d planned rather than place another book in it’s place.

Gott’s history of the island begins with the New World encounter. The trade winds that blow east across a vast sea uninterrupted by land masses reaches their limits at the start of the Carribean Islands. Cuba is both the largest island and Havana the port which has the most favorable winds. The arrival of Spanish conquerors introduces history proper to the island, as now there are written records of interactions amongst disparate peoples – such as the Arawaks, who were decimated by disease and battle and lived only in small hamlets far away from places involved in tart. Up until the 17th century, however, the island as a whole was not viewed as a location to be occupied in toto – it was merely a port stopping point for ships on their way to South America to deposit slave and collect goods and silver. This Cuba was a place where buccaneers would chase the wild pigs that roamed the iron for food, corsairs would predate on royal ships and conflict between regents would find their space for disagreement in the

The strong emphasis on racial fears is a recurring theme throughout Gott’s history. While it wasn’t until the 1791 revolution in Haiti gave evidence to their fears of black dictatorship and reprisal killings, the colonialists were well aware that their only real hope for reinforcements from the majority Africans was thousands of miles away. To counteract this situation, the rich formed militias to help quell any outbreaks of black violence towards white owners, attempted to place limits on the importation of slaves, encouraged more Spaniards to settle the island, set up contract labor systems with Chinese laborers and violently restricted attempts of blacks to achieve political parity with whites. This is largely the limit to the history of the island until Simon Bolivar wrests dominion from the Spanish Empire in place of home rule. Fears, outbreaks of conflict by the aforementioned groups followed by attempts to wrest authority from the whites via civil war. However once Cuba was no longer just a stopping point on the way to mines, greater interest in it’s natural offerings came to the forefront. While sugar had previously been grown and processed on the island before, scientific advances in it’s production and manufacturing was to transform it into a key component of the Cuban economy. The problem with making sugar the primary revenue source for the economy is fluctuations of prices on the international market and the social conflict created by them in the face of capitalist social relations.

As the conflicts escalate, General Weyler is brought back from his campaign in the Philippines and applies several similar tactics. Concentration camps are formed to separate the cities and towns from the outlying jungle areas and those found outside of them are shot indiscriminately. Indeed Weyler is like the a black cloud of Death as many in his command die here due to tropical diseases and infections, non-combatants are killed indiscriminately as they make their way through these zones, and those in the camps starve due to their inability to farm. For more information on the relationship between Cuba and the Philippines, I’d heartily recommend Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination as despite it’s focus on Jose Rizal, author of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, it goes into detail on the Spanish responses during this period of anti-colonial movements. While Weyler is in the short term successful in momentarily quelling the domestic rebellion, it soon returns but before he can deal with it he is called back to Spain.

Shortly after this what was to be a war of independence instead turns into an American intervention. An explosion occurs on the Maine and the blame fallaciously falls onto the Spanish. The U.S. quickly routes their navy and allows the Spanish to take their troops home. As a result of this, the right of the U.S. to militarily intervene should they dislike anything that the country does is doing written into the new “independence” constitution. The Platt Amendement of 1903, as this right was called, essentially prevented the nationalization of U.S. investment of capital in the foam of railroads, new sugar processing plants, and the buy-ups of vast swathes of land.

Gott points out that this is a key problem for later home-rule movements and later creates the situation wherein the elected government falls out of favor with the populace due to the limits placed upon it’s sphere of action, faces a populist political group that seeks to take control, then leaves the hall of power to say there is a civil war going on and then invite the United States in to take control. In a way this is nothing but a mere continuation of the fights that had happened before – with the Marines even making use of the same tactics used by Weyler every few years to diffuse domestic unrest.

As can be imagined malfeasance was the order the of day, corruption endemic up and down the system, and unscrupulous politicians sought advancement by acting on behalf of those that would pay them. Here we see that it was Cuba’s internal history that came to validate the nationalists such as Jose Marti and later Castro. The Cuban’s and the large exile communities in New York CIty and Florida were well aware of the effect that this dominion by moneyed interests had on the island and sought to prevent it from continuing. Their aspirations took the place of literary and military campaigns as well as attempts to influence the American ambassador to Cuba, seen as one of the most influential person in Cuba, towards supporting specific parties or policies. The prominence of the Mafia was just one of the symptoms of this decadent period that has stayed in the American imagination. However this wasn’t to last. Fidel Castro came on the scene and soon it swept away.

Gott provides great insight and numbers important details in the lead up to and major events in the Cuban Revolution. The theoretical battles between peasant, student, worker and employer factions show that the tensions repressed by Batista were still near the surface and other groups besides Castro tried to use varying combinations to also engage in guerilla battles. Castro, however, won out with his superior tenacity, tactics, and ability to give promises to constants.The vantage point of the history, once from the standpoint of the slaves, workers, freed slaves, and white upper class changes once Fidel Castro emerges on the scene. The thrust is that about Fidel, Raul, Che, and the the revolutionary government first hobbled together and then emerging on the world stage coming into it’s own. While one could claim that the many changes Cubans went through on a daily basis are overlooked, lightly touched upon or otherwise minimized, this is not entirely true. Gott is clear in showing the positives and negatives that the revolution brought to the different classes then still on the island. Given Gott’s specialization on Latin American revolutionary movements, the history of anti-colonial insurgencies inspired by and assisted by Cuba is highly insightful.

As someone who’s spent most of their life up in the greater Miami area, I know how sensitive the Cuban exile community can be on issues related to Castro so it ghouls come as no surprise that some of the major concerns of the exile Cuban community, a not-so-thinly coated way of talking about the need for the United States to re-assert it’s dominion over the island, are addressed. Gott does not shy away from the political repression, judicial killings or the large number of people that have fled the island. He does, however contextualize it in such a way that Castro is not some capricious tyrant but someone who is trying to make sure that the gains his political machine has won doesn’t disintegrate from foreign control again. In order to maintain this we see Castro vacillating between nationalist and socialist rhetoric and policies as is fitting the occasion. Considering the history of the country has been one of foreign control via the manipulation of a section of domestics this is completely understandably. As is his populist appeal there. He largely rose to power and distinguished himself as a moral authority against the imperialistic ambitions of the United States. Gott closes the book by showing how for those that think that once Castro is gone there will be a sea-change in Cuba are wrong as for several years Fidel has moved into the background to let competent administrators take over his place.

Review of "Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition"

In Howard Botwinick’s Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition, the author seeks to provide an outline of the factors going into wage labor that Marx meant to include in Das Kapital but never completed. This book is important as it is not simply a restatement of imperfect competition theories, but in it’s comparative analysis of other explanations of wage pricing. As Botwinick states in the opening, the ways in which patterns of wage disparity manifest themselves is important as an explanatory function for the ways that similar jobs in different companies get different wages as well as the persistent of wage inequality due to race and gender and for relating the potentials of national capitals within an international paradigm.

Botwinick first surveys how orthodox, Labor market segmentationists (LMS), radical and even neo-Marxian economists all use neo-classical presuppositions, such as static general equilibrium frameworks, to explanation wage rates. The negative effects of using such concept that don’t actually occur within the material interactions of capitalist firms in competition on a local and world stage has myriad effects which Botwinick then outlines.

The orthodox economists get trenchant criticism for their explanatory conceptions of human-capital, marginalist, and institutionalist theories. Botwinick deracinates these and other theories of determining wages for their ability to still be considered social science despite the constant transformation. While they may not be precise or work, they have certainly provided many an academic with the opportunity to write a paper to include a new factor in determining wages.

For the radical economists and LMS, this means that though they seek to insert the criteria of class struggle within their explanatory framework of wage pricing, their models are essentially Ptolemizations of the neo-liberal models. Dual labor markets explanations present a myriad of empirical problems, which is seen as the cause for the growing tendency away from theoretical analysis and the movement into case studies – for as the typically used Juglar cycle is extended, the monopoly disappears.

The categories of segmentation used by LMS, periphery and core, are so slippery as to be useless and that many of the so called monopoly effects are simply the result of a period wherein one capital is able to be the regulating factor of the market and Botwinick’s counter-examples of the construction and automotive industry show that it is not the result of human capital qua itself that necessitates higher wages, but by the ability for workers to organize themselves and mobilize against their employers. Additionally, they disavow how it is that labor market segmentation is primarily worker-directed in order to maintain wages rather than a plot by owners to divide and conquer workers.

Addressing the neo-Marxists, he states that the conflation of neo-classical economics concepts of capitalist competition, which is to say one of total fluidity, with the actual conditions embedded in the roughness of material life is a total misreading of Marx. Large capital investments are not barriers, but simply conditions of entry and exit into a specific industry that capitalists must take into account. Botwinick also shows that the regulated pricing adjustment as practiced by capitalists are an attempt to ride the waves of fat and lean years inherent within capitalism. As it relates to wages, however, Botwinick’s exegesis of Marx shows that it is this very varying degree of fixed capital investment across industries creates not only substantial difference between profit rates for companies but potentialities for workers to exploit and gain higher wage.
Such class conflict is always within the limits of the game. The floating, latent, stagnant sectors of the working class as well as the paupers that make up the reserve army of labor is always there, as is the very real likelihood of capitalist divestment and bankruptcy due to ongoing capitalist competition. Given the dialectics of Marx, it should thus come as no surprise that just as mechanization and deskilling counter shirking and soldiering, the reliance upon capital-intensive machinery means that striking workers are able to inflict potentially dangerous costs on owners. Despite this caveat, however, Botwinick doesn’t rely upon a market share model of industry concentration to determine wage variability, but instead uses efficiency and the cost effectiveness of firms.

In chapters six and seven, Botwinick outlines multivariable calculus formations to outline the aspects entering into pricing of products as well as wages per worker that includes the level of fixed cost investment, depreciation and relation to other capitals. His structural analysis is dynamic, not static, and thus provides the link between inter-industry profit rates and the implications for empirical research into regulating and non-regulating capitals, such as the greater importance of plant size than market concentration in determining wages. The focus here on spatial limitations illustrates how some firms are able to obtain preferable market positions due to a unique set of circumstances, and their greater relevance within political economy in general.

These trenchant criticisms and exposition of a viable and preferable alternative to the current neo-classical conceptions of competition are not without end other than to change the manner which economists understand their subject. As Botwinick states throughout, it is not enough to simply to expand the limited scope and length of time that the current conceptions of “monopoly capitalist” relies upon, but to provide a basis for analyzing the limits of workplace conflict for increased wages. From this, Botwinick provides an outline for the American labor force to organize and regain some ground from the business interests that have dominated American politics for over forty years by, among other things, refusing the resource management techniques, fighting battles for international, industry-wide wage increases so that costs can be distributed collectively. While not calling the period of the CIO halcyon explicitly, he does state that this modes of workers organizing does provide many instructive lessons for the rank-and-fail to counter with the prevailing mode of business unionism.

It is interesting to note in closing this review that one of the aspects that would increase the likelihood of the international labor movement increasing their wages would be access to these figures that determine the profitability of the company. I would indeed say, that if Botwinick were writing this book today he would include in his closing that if a website and organization existed similar to Wikileaks but instead only publishing the numbers used by businesses then they would know their enemy in a much more profound way and thus increase their likelihood of achieving their goals.

Plugs for former Profs!

Maia Ramnath, my former professor, NYU thesis advisor and author of Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire has recently had her second book Decolonizing Anarchism: An Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (Anarchist Interventions) published by AK Press. I wish I could say more, but I won’t be reviewing books until I’m back in the United States.

Another former professor of mine that has his book going through the academic reading circuit to generate publication buzz for it right now is Slavoj Žižek’s
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. A friend of mine that has already read it and is also a Hegelian scholar has reviewed it positively. Though it is not on sale right now, you can pre-order from Amazon for a significant discount.

Review of "The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896"

The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 is a comprehensive history of the New York bourgeoisie, without a doubt most powerful and influential class in the 19th century United States. His work is not simply a regional history because the people are quite literally shaping the infrastructure and institutions of America, but also because Beckert consistently moves his level of historical abstraction from local developments in New York to the national implications and consequences of their actions. Combining the social, political, economic and intellectual history of this class, he provides many compelling arguments that give insights in to the reasons for their development. One of the starting points for his analysis is kinship-networks, the prevalent form of business organization at the time. As family business was usually something either born or married into, it becomes evident just how cautious this group of people is in maintaining it’s power and privilege. One’s mistake at the office could quite literally have the effect of turning the family into workers rather than employers or traders.

Beckert’s historiography is such that much of the information as to how the bourgeoisie came to set themselves apart from the working class comes from their own business literature, cultural publications, letters, diaries, property records, club membership rosters and congressional testimony. Beckert focuses on institutional formation, which included acculturation through clubs, churches, high society functions, marriage, militia and government service as well as the mores related presentation of the self and home, travel, raising children and women’s role as maintainer of respectability and kinship networks. As Beckert summarizes, it is the combination of this “complex web of behavior, tastes and taboos (which) provided them with the symbolic capital that proved to be a major asset in navigating the world” (40). However The Monied Metropolis also clearly shows that it is not merely the possession of these cultured qualities that makes one a part of the upper crust, as many of those in the newly formed professions had similar aspirations.

During the period of a financial crisis, much like today, Beckert shows how the bourgeoisie mobilized for class retrenchment via greater government control. Showing similar insight that Poulantazus would write about hundred years later, these New Yorkers feared that there were great dangers to be had from public works. Employment programs, welfare “limited their ability to cut wages and indirectly supported the power of unions” (214). By embracing and propagandizing a culture of private charity they were thus able to keep a large army of the unemployed as a disciplinary measure against workers seeking redress of economic or workplace grievances. Charity became a sort of terrestrial and celestial insurance by making sure that those receiving such pittances were actually “deserving” rather than shirkers, drinkers or idle, and that those giving out a portion of their bumper profits were seen as saintly. While those receiving handouts hardly conceived the rich as benevolent saints the construction of the latter shows how later liberal institutions created to monitor the activities of the unemployed came about. It is during the period of retrenchment we also see the various means that the wealthy sought to subvert democracy. Not merely by influencing local politicians but by changing state legislature so that appointment would be the means of determining significant political positions. Such changes were considered to be of the utmost importance specifically after the Tammany machine finally broke down.

Beckert provides a wealth of details to the various conflicting and at times overlapping ideologies of governance held by the New York bourgeoisie. Such rallying ideas for political mobilization are consistently shown in relationship to southern influence and developments. This meticulous approach is instructive as it illustrates the divides within the New York bourgeoisie itself, whether merchant or manufacturer. This becomes especially important during the debates leading up to and during the Civil War. Wile the former seeks to maintain the harmony always desired by the trader, the latter recognized that until the South provides raw goods to the North rather than being part of the transatlantic trade with the British it won’t be able to fully come into it’s own. Beckert puts aside contingent and determined economic factors of economic development, this not being a history of the North/South relationship, while rich detail about the political activism and ideological constructions of manufacturers and merchants are provided. Exegesis on the “tax-payer” ideology is particularly interesting as it shows how after the civil war the former southern plantation owners started using adopting the terminology of this northern ideology to deal with the conditions of Reconstruction. This allowed the southerners landholders to continue an essentially racist series of social and political policies by masking the historical conditions via coded language. As Beckert clearly shows, this was received with a wink and a nod by the northern elites who also found universal franchise to be an unfortunate barrier to their continued capital accumulation.

Beckert is also keen on showing how it was that the New Yorkers were able to build an ideology that showed them, correctly, as the new economic and cultural hegemon of the world. In this he builds up similar arguments as those put forward by T. Jackson’s Lears No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, yet this is not a restatement of Lear’s positions, but one that is more specifically concerning the New York bourgeoisie. Those that had descended from old stock American families started creating imagined communities, in groups such as the Song and the Daughters of the American Revolution, where their shared heritage became cultural capital and evidence as to their dominance in the direction of American life.

Heritage provided by European aristocracy also became of ideological interest to the bourgeoisie. While first seen as a holdover from the feudal era and a sign of European backwardness, as immigrants stocks arriving to America began changing, along with the primacy of means of production, social Darwinist theories came to be ever more popular in explaining the ascendency of the rich and the degeneracy of the poor. Pseudo-scientific theories were formulated in order to show how the new, less skilled, workers were genetically inferior. At the same time, sons and daughters of the New York elites increasingly showed status by marrying European aristocracy in order to obtain titles, regardless of how poor their partners were.

By the end of this book, Beckert showed that through all of the aforementioned practices and others elided from this review that by the dawn of the 20th century, the New York bourgeoisie had made themselves the most powerful group in the United States. Foreshadowed within this period are the inchoate tendencies that would make themselves felt again as the lower classes continued to clamor for more wages, as war would break out and risk investments in Europe, as a million of other crises large and small required assistance or guidance of some kind. Beckert leaves us with the clear impression that the New York bourgeoisie is the guiding light for the world bourgeoisie and that their input, experience and influence will eventually lead to the type of internationalist elite which The Atlantic write about here.

Review of "The Invention of Paris"

Women here look at themselves more than elsewhere, and from this comes the distinctive beauty of the Parisienne.
– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

I picked up a copy of Eric Hazan’s new book The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps to read before going to Paris hoping that it would be akin to Robert Hughes’ Barcelona. While both provides a wealth of details on the evolution of a city from medieval splendor to modern grandeur, the tone and tenor of the two books are vastly different. Where Hughes gives his attention to the architectural details that make Barcelona such a draw for those studying the applied arts as well as the history behind it, Hazans’ historiography focuses on the class conflict that played such a large role in the development of the city and provides little detail to the large changes of the city.

The first part of the book is itself separated into two sections and provides what might at best be called a micro-history of Paris by neighborhood from the 15th century to the mid 1900’s. Hazan illustrates that many ways the means of transportation available to goods production, land bequeathed to religious orders of variable popularity, health concerns, and the tax walls protecting the city from those that would prowl and predate on those just outside (and inside) the city walls. As a microhistory, the amount of details is amazing, if at times overwhelming.

The erection of a new wall around Paris for easier taxation and the changes that went on within it provides the reason for Hazan to change his discussion from quarters to fauborgs. Tax collectors have never been loved and to the rebellious Parisians this is no exception. The continual push of the intellectuals from the center to the periphery is detailed as is the contrast between various sections of the cities. As the rich would entrench themselves in a given position, they would find themselves afraid to go into certain sections for fear of populations that was known to all that they were exploiting.

One of the endearing parts of The Invention of Paris is it’s focus on specific regions and his explanations as to why it was that certain types of people were attracted there. For instance, salon culture has always attracted me, and the descriptions of Marais during the baroque period, which would have seen Thomas Hobbes, Blaise Pascal, Balzac, Descartes, Moliere and Racine weaving around the streets and entering into ornate drawing rooms to discuss their thoughts late into the night. The proximity to vast, old libraries and a population density of wealthy patrons willing to give some of their money in order to fund or just assist some of the greatest thinkers made Paris the intellectual capital that it was renowned as being. Whereas English is now generally the lingua franca within a meeting of the educated, French was the language of the court as well as anyone who wanted to address the audience of the literate across Europe.

One of the books weaknesses is the manner in which Hazan will jump back and forth throughout different epochs, sometimes by hundreds of years, in a single sections. While each particular quarter or fauborg is detailed in such a way as to show the influence of Royalist or capital imperatives on it, the historiography here lacks a cohesive narrative to draw all of them together and can seem overwhelming. The information provided, thus while interesting, seems to lack a pertinence other than a desire to prevent a particular historical event from being forgotten. Thus while we learn that recurring outbreaks of violence lead to Bellville as this was one of the easiest areas to defend once barricades had been erected.

One of the endearing qualities of the book is the wealth of literature that Hazan quotes illustrating the development of the city over hundreds of years. From journals of Honore de Balzac and Victor Hugo, letters by Daudet and Diderot as well as those closer to modern times like Guy Debord. In this regard the book reads like a love story with the city both from the point of view of Hazan as well as those that he quotes.

The second half of the book, the sections entitled Red Paris, Flaneurs and The Visual Image. The first of these three sections takes the histories of the neighborhoods and starts to show how various sections responded during period of social unrest. And where there are no longer seemingly random stories of transformations of architecture, movements of certain trades and markets and name checking of eminent personages and their relation to Paris, Hazan shines. After having provided all of these extensive details on the various neighborhoods of Paris, their political activism is not just described about but narrated in a series of tense scenes related to the various riots, rebellions, and revolutions of Paris.

“Even if this was not always where things started, even if the first shots were fired on the Pont d’Austerlitz or Boulevard des Capucines, the main fighting always took place in this labyrinth (the streets around Pont Notre-Dame) This constant is not just explained by symbolism, even if it was the capture of the Hotel de Ville that enabled an uprising to call itself a revolution. It also had strategic reasons, derived from the interlacing and narrowness of the streets” (294).

It is this sort of information, which comes after having read histories and reports on the unrest, that makes the at times very slow reading of the rest worth it. While I did not have a map of Paris available as I read it, I was able to use Google Maps to get a somewhat better understanding of the city’s landscape.
The first of the later two sections, Flâneurs gives a historical recounting of the milieu that gave birth to the types of social philosophy produced by Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. With a specific purpose in mind, outlining the manner in which the need to be seen in French society interacted with the idleness of many a person, though never a true idleness as it was always a resting point before highly productive work, created a notion of spectatorship that is no longer as common as it was once. The desire was both to see a scene that was “mysterious and complex enchantment” that would kindle the imagination through a shocking and unexpected encounter and not be visible as someone witnessing it, as then one’s inclusion in the events would alter things. There is an element wherein the highly cultured would be able to face the dark miseries of life, with some but not great risk. These encounters with the marginalized, as Hazan shows by interspersing quotes from various flâneurs, leads one to a passionate identification with the underclass and can thus account for the leftist tendencies in French literature.

In the closing section, The Visual Image, Hazan gives much attention to Manet and the manner in which the painting scene of Paris once dominated that of the world. Between the brusque manner that states with matter-of-factness that it was the combination of a certain number of ephemeral circumstances that caused this density of highly creative and innovative artists to emerge and migrate, to Paris, there are hints of elegiac sentiments stemming from the manner in which photography soon replaced painting as the means of showing “real life”. In this time the painters turned idyllic and started depicting ruins. The section is short, only 29 pages, and covers a lot of time and topics – Manet, Prout, Dadaism, Surrealism, Man Ray all are mixed together in a flurry of thoughts tangentially connected. And though this is unlikely to be deemed as anything more than a broad background for these highly influential people, there loose connections are exactly what Hazan has been bringing to the forefront throughout the work: Paris is protean and beautiful for it.

Review of "Nature's Metropolis – Chicago and the Great West"

The history of capitalism is the history of the relation between town and country, and Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West by William Cronon shows the epic scale of this relationship in Chicago’s inception and growth into the second largest city in America. Using a Hegelian-Marxist conceptual framework and a wealth of financial reports, invoices, federal bankruptcy data, census data, newspaper subscription records, and court rulings, Cronon expounds on how technological development related to production, transportation, housing, marketing and distribution mediated the economic relations between town and country.

Cronon opens by illustrating how Chicago grew to enormous proportions due to its relationship to a series of frontier and natural environments and how massive public projects were able to remove the natural physical limitations to trade. The mesh of physical contingencies that Cronon describes in the development of Chicago’s industry highlights the social and economic logic that is eventually sublated by subsequent development.

Cronon then surveys different historians’ approaches to understanding the development of the 19th century American West. He turns against Turner’s frontier thesis, and shows how agricultural development in the less developed region led to commercial expansion in the city. This critical point is then tied to an exegesis of Von Thunen’s Isolated State. This state is conceived of as such: The central zone is the city and is able to obtain the highest rents as it is the most population dense. Outside of this are five zones that, due to their capital investment and transportation costs to the city determines their proximal relation to it. First there is the zone of intensive agriculture (dairy and market gardens), following that is extensive agriculture (unrotated wheat) or intensive forestry, then open range livestock raising, a zone for trapping, hunting and trade with the hinterlands and finally the “wilderness”.

After explicating the weaknesses of this ahistorical concept, Cronon moves into a Marxian geography wherein capital enters and exits regions of increased profitability and is constantly changing these zone and the relationships of those in them. In his chapters regarding the conflict between small lumber stores and direct sellers as well as between local butchers and the Chicago meat processing plants we see this most clearly. However it would be a mistake to conceive of Cronon’s work as a social or labor history of Chicago, while these human concerns are intimately connected to his narrative, he is primarily concerned with explicating commodity market relationships, developments and their effects on the physical composition of Chicago. Though this may seem to be a disavowal of the very human element that created the wealth of the city, it functions more to delineate the competitive limits for both labor and capital based upon technological and regional development and the sundry effects this had on human relationships involved in the struggle for control of such processes. Examples of this include but are not limited to the standardization of packaging to handle greater volumes of wheat than any previously amassed, their grading of grain and lumber based upon variable qualities to simplify pricing, the purchasing power given to the grain barons, the creation of the first futures markets, attempts at regulation, etc.

In addition to the commodity history of grain, Cronon also focuses on meat, lumber, railways and capital investments. Each historically situates the conceptual/physical transformations brought about by centralization process as well as how many of these very aspects which gave Chicago a competitive advantage over nearby cities and helped it to rise also lead to its decline. One example of this is the large number of trains that turned Chicago into an entrepot. As the city grew, housing and commercial real estate development along with safety concerns sapped the train’s efficiency, thus forcing shippers to circumvent the city altogether and capital intense industries, such as Hormel, to decentralize. This dialectical perspective is evident throughout.

In the closing section Cronon outlines Chicago’s moral economy as conceptualized at the time, thus highlighting the oft-cited divide between town and country. The White City becomes a point for discussion on capitalist relationships in general and how symbiotic but unequal relationships were conceptualized and navigated. As generally ebulliant I am about this intricate work, there are also some glaring omissions that must be calculated within the historiography of Chicago’s commodity markets. The proximity of iron ore and coal is are two important aspects overlooked, as is the massive number of immigrants constantly entering into the city and putting constant downward pressure on wages. Cronon cannot be overly criticized for this, but at least some discussion of regulating industries and capital competition as it relates to the changes so artfully described would add yet another layer to the developments Cronon described.

Review of "Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922"

Brian Lloyd’s book Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922 gives an intellectual history of the early socialist thought in America. He claims that too much of the historical writings on this period has taken for granted the Marxist nature of American Socialists by simply categorizing the two major tendencies into Reform and Revolutionary Socialism (ex: Ira Kipnis), and then begins with careful consideration of the thoughts developed within socialist journals such as the Masses, the New Republic as well as the “socialist” books published at the time.

From here the book begins with an exposition of pragmatism as conceived by William James and Dewey. Lloyd shows the differences between these two thinkers that have often been conflated into a singular “pragmatist school,” largely due to the work of the former to create a unique “American” philosophy, and how it is vastly different from the Marxist holism. These thinkers, defined as they are by empiricist epistemologies, focus on biological and cultural dispositions, functionalist psychologizing, positivism and, in the case of James, dualism. If this seems like a strange opening for a Marxist intellectual history of early American socialist parties, it is done so in order to show the heterodox and unstable nature of socialist ideology at the time.
These two liberal are shown to have greatly influence the intellectuals writing for the socialist press and Lloyd further demonstrates the authority upon which Spencerian notions of social/cultural development, Veblenian economic stages, Nietzschean and Bergsonian concepts of the Will/interest and Darwinian determinism affected the “scientific” theories emerged in Progressive and socialistic discourses. In addition to these divergences form Marxist thought, the various socialist parties would at times rely upon small-producer ideologies – as evidenced in the Granger movement and the farmers faction of the Socialist Party – in order to act as an organizing principle.

Several intellectuals prominent within the socialist discourses of the time are then brought under scrutiny to show how the intellectual framework they used was more inspired by pragmatist notions than Marxist ones. The explanatory concepts used by of Eastman, Fraina, Hillquist, Boudin, Seligman and others are shown to be amalgams of naturalistic science and bourgeiouse thought. Several of these supposed socialists actively seek to discredit Marx, either because he is “foreign” and thus unfamiliar with the U.S.’s unique conditions, or as he has been discredited by Bernsteinian notions of evolutionary socialism, or simply because he wrote in a time so far removed that his concepts no longer apply to the non-competitive capitalism of the time. There were even those that claimed that Marx was really a pragmatist and a positivist, and would cloak their language with the terminology of Marx in a ceremonial fashion but really then would combine empirical data and the highly subjectivist new psychology within a framework of economic determinism that has naught to do with Marx.
It is from this exegesis that Lloyd pulls out how it should have been no surprise how all of the aforementioned socialist intellectuals were pulled into the nationalistic and xenophobic discourses justifying repressive social measures under the auspices of liberal values and crypto-imperial aspirations at the beginning of World War I. By exhaustingly limning the conceptual limits of hayseed empiricism, practical idealism, inchoate liberalism, “great men” theories, economic monism, etc. that characterized American “Marxism” and the Second International, their policies of exceptionalism become more understandable. As can readily be understood from the above, not only is their understanding of the path towards socialism completely divergent from the epistemological-ontological philosophy of Marx and instead steeped in exceptionalism, but the ramifications of such a position are then shown after the October Revolution. Many of the above thinkers go from Socialists to Anti-Communists, some of who became employed within various levels of government as political advisors to Woodrow Wilson.

The last 50 pages of the book outlines in broad detail the Marxist-Leninst position on a Socialist movement and provides a philosophical counterfactual to the projects of the various socialist groups. Lloyd is careful to state that he does not claim that were these American “revolutionary” organizations to adopt a dialectical and historically materialist ideology they would have been successful. He does, however, describe a clear contrast to the various pseudo-Marxisms and their myriad blind-spots. While this is done throughout the book as well, here we see a systematic presentation of the poverty of American Marxist thought.

Review of "Diplomacy"

One cannot possibly come to terms with an understanding of the State if one doesn’t factor in the many bureaucrats with varying degrees of intelligence and skill that are tasked with incarnating it to other nations. Whether it is to provide warnings should certain conduct continue, apologies or explanations for a certain occurrence, actionable information to assist an ally or any of a hundred other possibilities – the role of the diplomat to collective security in peace and war is the utmost importance. In this regard, and for many other reasons, Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy is a key reading for those concerned with the factors and forces that have composed the current system of international relations and continues to do so.

Kissinger’s opening outlines a metaphysical divergence between two approaches to international relations embodied in two different presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Denoting them respectively as a realist and an idealist, Kissinger limns the valences of each position and leads this discussion of different philosophical approaches to international relations into a broad reaching history of the European continent and the role that diplomacy and war had in forming the nation states of modern Europe.

In the following sections one reads not only the tactics and plans of great statesman such as Metternich, Gladstone, Disraeli, Palmerston, Richelieu, and Bismark but also the ones who played into the hands of their opponents and hobbled themselves as a result and/or were simply inept, such as Napoleon III. This period covers from the 18th century onwards and gives insight into the various war, agreements, alliances, histories and desires of the European nations. These are not just an account of what happens, but also paeans to those practitioners of Realpolitik that Kissinger respects with expressions of commiseration for some given the situation that they have inherited or must now face given the growing role of private citizens in government. Such elite disdain for those which seek some control in government is first couched in German nationalistic reactions and later in the conception of the anti-Vietnam War movement in America as a fifth column for Ho Chi-Minh.

One of the recurring themes of these praises couched in policy analysis is that the weight of uncontrollable circumstances, oftentimes in the form diplomacy not actualized with the proper considerations of audience and history, causes the collapse of the temporarily brokered peace and leads to war. In the chapter entitled “A Political Doomsday Machine,” Kissinger describes the string of bad policy decisions made on behalf of the Prussian Kaiser that caused the First World War to break out with most of the countries against them. Their emotionalism, inability to define long-range projections, bellicose paternalism towards their ostensible ally Great Britain and dogged determination to prove their superior capacity even at the cost of making repeated mistakes.

This tendency for conflict whose ends is spoils of land and waterways, natural resources and productive population is something that we see not only in the diplomatic history Kissinger outlines, but as a metaphysical composition of states themselves. In this it is interesting the manner in which Kissinger focuses on the theater of Europe and elides much of the United States own interventions from the 19th century onwards in order to frame his adopted country as a self-less, disinterested isolationist.

Kissinger excels in formulating his exegesis on the needs of various states as essentially geo-political with ideology and religion as mere masks to this. Britain wants to prevent the emergence of a great European power that could threaten to invade it so will forgive all previous misdeeds done against it in order to ally with the enemy of their enemy. Russia seeks the route to Constantinople and the Straits so it could control the Eastern Mediterranean. France wants to prevent the unification of the Germans so that a united front of once small kingdoms against it is impossible. This constant movement from different levels of abstraction, state to person to industry, shows just how much the Hegelian mode of historiography and dialectic comprehension has influenced Kissinger.

Interspersed throughout the books are pithy statements that give insight into statecraft such as: “A leader who confines his role to his people’s experience dooms himself to stagnation; a leader who outstrips his people’s experience runs the risk of not being understood” (43). In this we see that Kissinger, a noted Harvard academic, writes not just as a historian, but as a formative part of history. This is one of the aspects which makes Diplomacy such a wonderful book is not only for all of the above reasons but as Kissinger was, and at the time of my writing this still is, a major figure amongst the circle of actors directing American foreign policy. This is the reason for so much ire directed at him by those with some kind of moralizing lens. As such, it is no mistake to say that midway through the book, around the period that Kissinger himself is writing about his experiences in conducting statecraft, that these writings can be seen as important to the writings of Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War, Xenephon’s Persian Expedition or even Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul .

In the period immediately preceding his ascent, with the collapse of European hegemony in the third world and the rise of the bi-polar system, Kissinger lays out the arguments of the others playing important roles in the formation of international policy. He states the policies of Winston Churchill, Walter Lippman, and Henry Wallace as regards the threat of possible confrontation with Soviet Russia and shows the underlying presuppositions in the policy of each. While most view Kissinger as a hawk, in the exegesis of his own positions it becomes clear that he was not so and always sought to avoid direct confrontation. One of the noteworthy aspects of these sections detailing U.S.-Soviet relations is the manner in which Kissinger states that despite their tendency towards soaring rhetoric of impending war, the Soviets were afraid of potential combat with America troops in the period prior to their obtaining nuclear weaponry and even after they had achieved parity for plans were either for Mutually Assured Destruction or a conventional war they were unlikely to win.

After limning how the rationale for the Marshall Plan was a form of Soviet containment and giving extensive details about the origins and reasons for continuance of various conflicts in Asia, Kissinger devotes a the last part of the book to recounting his time in the Nixon administration and detailing the quagmire known as Vietnam. He doesn’t shy away from addressing the various criticisms leveled at him in the period during and following the war, and his explanations why it was that tactical considerations trumped humanitarian ones seem valid due to the books theme showing that raison d’etat is the guiding principle of international relations and will likely continue to be so as those that act otherwise tend to become IR losers. As such, the influence of game theory on Kissinger’s approach to politics comes to the foreground as well as his tendency towards using the “realist” approach by justifying it in terms of “idealist” politics. Such an approach to policy making, never needed to be used by his aristocratic idols, stems from the populist character of modern politics. This presents an alternative from the Roosevelt-Wilson split in orientation outlined in the beginning and is a situation that Kissinger displays a soft contempt for given his belief that only specialists should control policy.