wiser today

Melvin Konner

2011-10-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

The Tangled Wing

The twenty-first-century actresses and models we idolize would be a poor bet to bring a healthy infant to term, much less to lactate. But the women whose images grace our great museums had just the ripeness needed. Among our ancestors, the woman who matched this ideal would have enough energy in the bank to make childbearing safe and healthy without slowing down a very active life. The men attracted to her were no fools. What appealed to them—unconsciously, since they didn't do the calculation—was reproductive readiness. Why moderns like women who look like girls remains a mystery and a tribute to the role of culture and learning in setting sexual responses. Women now signal high status by looking as close to the edge of starvation as they can—pubescent girls for the first half of their lives, social X-rays for the second—they are that sure of their future wealth and comfort.

Most of our ancestors, unfortunately, could not keep enough weight on to attain the Titian ideal. Even the !Kung are no exception to the rule about shortages. In the 1960s and 1970s economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins made a habit of referring to them as 'the original affluent society'—a strange way to describe a group of people with a 50 percent childhood mortality rate, resulting in a life expectancy at birth of thirty years. To be fair, Sahlins was referring to their apparent dietary sufficiency, their seemingly adequate leisure time, and above all their sense of satisfaction with their lives. But all three claims are controversial.

Excellent studies by Richard Lee showed that the !Kung spent just a few hours a day, a few days a week, in the food quest; that they had many leisure activities; that their diet was well balanced; that they did not exhaust their environment's food supply; that their caloric intake was just above the minimum needed for their size and weight; and that they did not aspire to the more well-to-do herding and agricultural life of their Bantu neighbors. Subsequent work, however, called some of these findings into question. Spending just a few hours a day and a few days a week in the food quest is impressive, but many more hours are spent making tools and weapons, curing skins, preparing and cooking food, making clothing, and planning future hunting-and-gathering expeditions—none of which was included in the initial research on !Kung work. If what lawyers and judges do is work, then when the !Kung sit up all night at a meeting debating a hotly contested divorce, they are also working. If what psychotherapists and ministers do is work, then a !Kung man or woman who spends hours in an enervating trance trying to cure people is working as well. Furthermore, the !Kung are often ill, with physical complaints apparent to anyone who visits them. They suffer endemic diseases including malaria, gut infections, parasites, and tuberculosis, among others. Most women spend the years from nineteen to forty-five either pregnant or nursing, a further major drain. Considering these facts about physical condition, we must also ask whether some of what looked like leisure to earlier investigators was perhaps just not feeling well. When people are feeling poorly they may not work, but that doesn't qualify as leisure.

As for available food left unused, that claim also requires scrutiny. Palatability and ease of access enhance eating, especially in the obese but also in normal people. Mongougo nuts are tasty and nutritious—they are the !Kung staff of life—but even a !Kung can eat only so many of them. If a woman who has eaten little else for a week straight declines an opportunity to take yet another ten-mile trek to the farther mongongo groves in the heat, carrying a child, and even chooses to skip a meal that day instead, this is not necessarily evidence that she is affluent. Perhaps she has merely made a cost-benefit analysis that allows the nuts to rot on the ground. Shortages of food were probably seasonal, and Edwin Wilinsen, who studied !Kung diet in the 1970s and 1980s, concluded that annual shortages result in significant weight loss (five to ten pounds) just as in Gambian farmers. In the end, both Lee and Wilinsen have a piece of the truth: Lee helped correct the widespread impression that hunting-and-gathering life was an unremitting, desperate search for food, but Wilinsen showed that it is not ideal.

Nancy Howell, a demographer at the University of Toronto, analyzed the !Kung population and found that food shortages help to explain its very slow growth. Her model of infertility draws on that of Rose Frisch. According to this widely accepted theory, fertile ovarian cycles are unlikely below a certain minimum level of body fat. Although the !Kung picture is not this simple, caloric insufficiency probably plays some role in lowering their fertility, by helping to lengthen birth spacing to four years. And then there are the mortality figures. How Sahlins could call such people affluent seems puzzling, but the argument goes something like this: the !Kung have lived in these same circumstances for thousands of years. Their continued existence in their present ecological situation would be impossible without high mortality, and they are used to it.

I do not buy this argument, and neither do the !Kung. Marjorie Shostak's book Nisa documented the life of a !Kung woman from her own narrative at age fifty-five, supplemented by Shostak's annotations. It was perhaps the most intimate life narrative ever collected from a 'primitive' person. Together with the follow-up study, Return to Nisa, which adds another fifteen years to the story, the account achieves unprecedented insight into the !Kung view of their own lives. Clearly they were not satisfied with their lot. They arc neither at peace with nor inured to the many losses those bleak mortality curves deliver, and they are quite envious of people who arc better off. Still, they are tough, good-humored, resilient, self-possessed, and generous. They are not self-pitying and they do not allow their poverty or the conditions of stress they endure to destroy their joy in life. The !Kung, with far greater challenges, generally whine much less than the average upper-middle-class American does in a mild recession or even during a gasoline price bump. To provide some idea of the absolute differences in these circumstances, there is little doubt that perhaps not the poorest 5 percent of Americans but the next poorest 5 percent would seem to the !Kung to possess fabulous wealth, comfort, and safety. Imagine sleeping in a bed! Imagine eating fruit that has more flesh than pit! Imagine a 95 percent chance that your child will live!

For the first few months after returning from my two years with the !Kung, I used to hear a phrase in my mind, in the !Kung language, one that would often have been on the lips of a !Kung, if one had been with me: 'Rich people, everywhere rich people.' I remember being in Harvard Square—one of the busiest corners in the world—on an ordinary autumn day, watching someone get out of an ordinary car in ordinary clothing. I stared and said it aloud: 'Rich people, everywhere rich people.' For years every time I scraped a plate into the sink—from the most modest of meals, and meals that by American standards were quite thoroughly eaten—I would hear one of my !Kung friends asking me, 'Are you a person who destroys food?' It was hard to throw out orange peels; !Kung women saved them to make perfume.

Norman Stone

2011-09-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

Europe Transformed

In the Habsburg Monarchy, bureaucracy was deliberately used as a device for pre-empting minority nationalism. If sufficient Slovenes, Czechs or Poles were given State jobs, with a pension attached, they would have no incentive to pursue secessionist causes. Roughly a third of all students in Austrian universities therefore took law degrees and headed for jobs in the bureaucracy, for which a training in law (especially 'administrative law' or Verwaltungsrecht) was an essential preliminary. In other countries, the imperialist coalitions around 1900 had absorbed dissident young men in a drive for empire. The Habsburgs could not do this, for they were too weak. Instead, in the era of Ernst Korber (which ended in 1904) they spent government money building up government concerns, such as canals and railway lines. It all made for more bureaucracy and more law degrees.

In the more backward countries, such growing bureaucracy could be dangerous. It amounted to a social reiolution of a sort. The old 'notables'—landowners, for the greater part—began to lose their control of the countryside in the 1890s. The days when caciquismo ruled Spain, when a family of bosses (caciques) like the Pidals in the Asturias could run a locality, securing tax concessions, exemptions from conscription, post-office jobs and even 'fixed' trials for their clients, all in return for votes, were going: not least because by 1900 even larger estates were suffering from the rise in costs, and everywhere, without exception, were registering a perceptible fall in surface area. In Ireland, Spain, Sicily or Russia, whether the government attempted land reform or not, the great estates were in decline. In these parts, there was usually not much industry or commerce to revive the economy; more and more, government jobs were the only way ahead. In Italy, it was said, 'in the south, the only industry is power.' A government job, the prefect, the various hired thugs of the mafia or, in Naples, the camorra, were parasitical. In Russia, the police department was often part of the underworld. Anti-Semitism was tolerated and sometimes organized by the police, and it flared up in a context of declining great estates, in the western Ukraine or Bessarabia, the capital of which, Kishinyov, produced a notorious pogrom in 1903. In the province of Tver, a governor, Aklestyshev, actually did appoint men with criminal records to deal with the local
representative council. The Irish Home Rulers became, in their enemies' eyes, a huge 'machine,' especially when English forms of local government were extended to Ireland in 1898. The city administration of Naples was dismissed fourteen times by government decree because of its corruption. There was a startling illustration of the problem in 1908, when the Sicilian city of Messina was wrecked by an earthquake and a tidal wave. From all over Italy and subsequently from all over Europe, money and volunteers arrived to restore the city and its stricken inhabitants. But the tons of goods and thousands of lire passed without difficulty into the hands of local 'bosses' and
were sold off elsewhere.

In the west, the new bureaucracy also gained power, although that power could plausibly be represented as progressive. Senior civil servants could in effect dictate government policies, as was done by Morant at education, Llewellyn Smith or Askwith in matters of industry, or, in France, Arthur Fontaine at labour or Monod at
education. In Great Britain, until shortly before this era, feudal institutions had survived: parish vestries, grand juries and quarter-sessions had been uneasily adapted to modern needs. The administrative reform, when it came, was too hasty and ill-thought-out, especially in its financing—the rating system, which was both oppressive and ineffectual. British towns did become healthier in this period, but the process really depended on their capacity to attract loans, which the city of Liverpool had pioneered in 1880, at a time of low interest-rates. In general, the expansion of bureaucracy in Great Britain compared badly with continental experience, since there was virtually no corpus of law to control the bureaucrats. In France (and, by extension, most other countries influenced by Napoleon) there was a droit administratif, over which the Cour des comptes presided. In England, the bureaucrats made it up as they went along, and could have gone much further than they did, only, in this era, they were held up by the extraordinary (in continental eyes) respect for property that English Common Law preserved.

Andrew Knoll

2011-09-05T20:15:00.000-07:00

Life On A Young Planet

Wandering through an alpine forest or snorkeling above a coral reef, we observe an ecology shaped by plants (or seaweeds) and animals, with large vertebrates at the top of the food chain and other creatures below. Ecosystems also contain many organisms that we can't see, but concern for their contributions is generally fleeting—surely bacteria and other microorganisms, tiny and simple, eke out their living in a world of our making?

As large animals, we can be forgiven for holding a worldview that celebrates ourselves, but, in truth, this outlook is dead wrong. We have evolved to fit into a bacterial world, and not the reverse. Why this should be is, in part, a question of history, but it is also an issue of diversity and ecosystem function. Animals may be evolution's icing, but bacteria are the cake.

Plants, animals, fungi, algae, and protozoa are eukaryotic organisms, genealogically linked by a pattern of cell organization in which genetic material occurs within a membrane-bounded structure called the nucleus. Bacteria and other prokaryotes are different—their cells lack nuclei. In terms of biological importance, eukaryotes would seem to have a decisive edge; eukaryotic organisms display a variety of form that ranges from scorpions, elephants, and toadstools to dandelions, kelps, and amoebas. In contrast, prokaryotes are mostly minute spheres, rods, or corkscrews. Some bacteria form simple filaments of cells joined end to end, but very few are able to build more complicated multicellular structures.

Peter Richerson

2011-08-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

Robert Boyd

Not By Genes Alone

Considerable evidence suggests that the ability to acquire novel behaviors by observation is essential for cumulative cultural change. Students of animal social learning distinguish observational learning or true imitation (hereafter, plain imitation) from other kinds of social transmission. Imitation occurs when animals learn a novel behavior by observing the behavior of more-experienced animals. Simpler kinds of social transmission are much more common. For example, local enhancement occurs when the activity of older animals in a particular location increases the chance that younger animals will visit that spot and then learn the older animal's behavior on their own. Thus, young chimpanzees that frequently accompany their mothers to termite mounds are more likely to acquire termiting skills than individuals whose mothers never termite. A similar mechanism, stimulus enhancement, occurs when a social cue makes a given stimulus salient to the animal. For example, smelling food particles on nest mates makes Norway rats more likely to sample these foods when foraging. Young individuals do not acquire the information necessary to perform the behavior by observing older individuals in either of these cases. Instead, the activity of others causes them to be more likely to acquire this information through their own interaction with the environment.

Local and stimulus enhancement and imitation both can lead to persistent behavioral differences among populations, but only imitation gives rise to the cumulative cultural evolution of complex behaviors and artifacts. To see why, consider the cultural transmission of stone tool use. Suppose that an early hominid learned, on its own, to strike rocks to make useful flake tools. Her companions, who spent time near her, would be exposed to the same kinds of conditions, and some of them might learn to make flakes, too, entirely on their own. This behavior could be preserved by local enhancement, because groups in which tools were used would spend more time in proximity to the appropriate stones. However, that would be as far as toolmaking would go. Even if an especially talented individual found a way to improve the flakes, say by blunting the back to protect the hand, this innovation would not spread to other members of the group because each individual has to learn the behavior independently, and individual learning is time consuming and chancy. Local and stimulus enhancement are limited by the learning capabilities of individuals, and by the fact that each new learner must start from scratch with only the barest clues from other animals to go by. Imitation allows each new innovation to be added to an individual's behavioral repertoire, because the information about how to perform the behavior is acquired by observing the behavior of others. To the extent that observers can rapidly and accurately use the behavior of models as a starting point, imitation leads to the cumulative evolution of behaviors that no single individual could invent on its own.

Several lines of evidence suggest that imitation is usually,not responsible for protocultural traditions in other animals. First, as we have already said, many socially learned behaviors, like potato washing in Japanese macaques, are relatively simple and could be learned independently by individuals in each generation. Second, new behaviors like potato washing often take a long time to spread through the group, a pace more consistent with the idea that each individual had to learn the behavior on its own, aided only by weak clues of stimulus or local enhancement. Finally, sophisticated laboratory experiments capable of distinguishing imitation from other forms of social transmission like local enhancement have usually failed to demonstrate observational learning, except for the specialized song-learning system of some birds.

Adaptation by cumulative cultural evolution is not a byproduct of intelligence and social life. We say 'monkey see, monkey do,' and use ape as a verb, but in fact monkeys and even apes do not seem to be especially clever imitators compared to humans. The best evidence comes from experiments in which the imitative capacities of children and apes have been compared. Primatologists Andrew Whiten and Deborah Custance designed an artificial 'fruit,' a rugged, transparent plastic box that held treats inside. Experimental participants could open the box by manipulating a latch consisting of either bolts or a pin-and-handle arrangement. The participants were eight chimpanzees three to eight years of age and three groups of children with mean ages of 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 years. They watched a familiar human demonstrate a specific technique for opening the fruit, and then were allowed to attempt,open it themselves. The experimenters recorded whether the participants used the same technique that they had been shown. By most measures, chimpanzee imitative performances exceeded chance. However, 2.5-year-old children did even better, and older children were dramatically more proficient imitators than the chimpanzees.

Psychologist Michael Tomasello and his coworkers conducted similar experiments in which chimpanzees and children were shown how to use rakelike toots to obtain food that was out of reach. The chimps who watched expert demonstrators were more successful than untrained chimps in using the tool to obtain the food reward, but they did hot imitate the precise method that their demonstrators had used. Children, on the other hand, followed the method they had been shown: Tomasello describes the ape technique as emulation rather than imitation; apes learn that a tool can be used to cause some desired effect by watching a demonstrator, but they don't pay close attention to the details of how the tool is used. Children imitate so faithfully that they persist in using an inefficient technique, one that the chimpanzees usually abandon in favor of the more-efficient alternative. Children aren't smarter than chimpanzees in general, just much more imitative. Taken together, these experiments suggest that social learning in apes and humans is not the same. Children imitate very faithfully, while apes emulate or at least imitate less faithfully.

Although the evidence on hand suggests that most cultural traditions in other animals are not the product of imitation, some caution is in order. Negative results are always difficult to interpret; experiments can fail for many reasons. A recent clear demonstration of imitation by marmosets suggests that better experiments might detect imitation in a wider range of species. Experimental data from bottle-nosed dolphins suggests that they are excellent vocal and motor imitators, consistent with the field evidence. Thus, we don't claim that imitation is unique to humans. However, the current evidence suggests that (1) cumulative cultural evolution is rare, and perhaps absent, in other species; and (2) even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, rely on different modes of social learning than humans.

So far, we know of no convincing evidence that any other species has a cultural item as complex as a stone-tipped spear. Rudimentary forms of observational learning are certainly present in chimpanzees, orangutans, whales, 'crows, various songbirds, and parrots, but as Darwin put it, a 'great gap' exists between humans and other animals. No other species seems to depend on culture to anywhere near the degree that humans do, and none seem adept at piling innovation atop innovation to create culturally evolved adaptations of extreme perfection. In fact, there is no evidence that humans made tools as complex as a stone-tipped spear until about four hundred thousand years ago.

Daniel Chirot

2011-08-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

How Societies Change

Competition between feudal lords and centralizing kings persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and though some kings, notably in France and England, managed to create more centralized administrations, they were never able to bring their nobles under complete control. In other parts of Europe, particularly in Germany and Italy, regional lords and trading cities broke the power of centralized monarchs and further fragmented the political structure. Everywhere, the Church was yet another political actor, siding sometimes with kings, sometimes with lords, sometimes with increasingly independent towns prospering from the revival of trade after the tenth century.

One of the main consequences of this fragmentation was that merchant cities in Europe were able to bargain for considerable freedom and self-government. In contrast, in the Middle East they were subjected to control by mercenary military force, and in China they could never escape control by the empire.

Merchants and town artisans everywhere in the world have a peculiar outlook on life. Unlike warrior nobles, whose chief goal is to be brave and honorable, or peasants, who fall back on resignation and magic to help them out of difficult situations, those whose life consists of commerce are careful calculators who come to believe that it is possible to understand the environment as one understands doing one's job: by measuring what resources and investments one makes and by carefully maximizing profits. The lives of merchants and urban artisans are dominated by ledgers and accounts, not by the search for honor and the glory of battle, nor by attempts to magically manipulate an uncontrollable natural environment. Rationality, that is, an attitude that it is possible to calculate and purposively manipulate the environment, is more likely to be developed in an urban than in a rural setting because urban life is less subject to the vagaries of nature. It is more likely to grow among peaceful merchants than among warriors, who must depend far more on luck to survive and whose lives are more dependent on developing physical than intellectual skills.

The political stalemate in western Europe between kings, lords, and the church allowed a more rational urban culture to thrive and establish itself. At the same time, the discordance between the reality of a divided Europe and the perception that there should be more harmony led intellectuals to reexamlne Christian beliefs. The mixture of a growing, rational urban culture and the attempt to harmonize religious teachings with reality produced a rationalizing religious outlook. Its basic assumption was that the universe must make more sense than it seemed to, and that if one searched hard enough, it should become possible to find the calculable laws according to which everything worked.

This deep belief that the laws of God must manifest themselves as a set of regular, calculable relationships and that these were subject to rational understanding was not unique to western Europe. Urban dwellers and troubled philosophers had thought along these lines in all civilizations. But it was only in western Europe that there were enough individuals thinking this way, and for a long enough period of time, for this new way of viewing the world to gain a firm foothold. For this to happen, it was important that no unified imperial structure bring Europe together.

In agrarian societies rationalizing thinkers are inherently dangerous. They question the legitimacy of hereditary monarchs because they examine the political system from the point of view of practicality and efficiency. Their intellectualism demeans warriors and the ethic of noble honor, which is based on action rather than thought. They bring into doubt the great religions of resignation, which are supposed to keep the peasantry satisfied with their miserable lot, because they suggest that improvement is possible and that human beings have the capacity to make their own decisions. They cast doubt on established religious thinking by subjecting theology to its own rationality, that is, to testing and questioning in order to find the truth, as opposed to simply receiving it as it has been handed down over the ages. In all agrarian societies the really daring rationalist thinkers have been accused of being heretics and of being a menace to the established order in society. They might be protected by an occasionally enlightened prince, but they were more likely to wind up being imprisoned or killed by irate authorities.

Part of the European advantage was that such thought was somewhat protected by the diversity of political power and by the towns' interests in maintaining their freedom. Only in an independent urban environment were there many who might agree with dangerously rational thinkers. Only where it was possible for a thinker to flee to a safe haven could the continuing development of rational thought take place. Thus both political division and powerful towns were necessary.

Through a set of coincidences, western Europe, like ancient Greece before it, and for many of the same reasons, developed a greater tradition of free thought and rationality than other agrarian civilizations. And at the same time, it was thriving because of its growing agriculture and commerce. Had western Europe been a united imperial state like China there would not have been such an impetus to engage in religious self-exammation. Had there not been such a political stalemate that allowed towns independence and pitted church, kings, and nobles against each other, there would not have been as much space for the development of rational thought.

Robert Lopez

2011-08-10T19:35:00.000-07:00

The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages

Many craftsmen were slaves; many merchants lacked citizen rights; and in many of the innumerable Roman 'cities' agriculturists and officials were not only more influential and wealthy but also more numerous than the trading class. The Commercial Revolution did to the medieval city what the Industrial Revolution was to do to the entire European scene. It gradually shook the numeric, economic and political predominance of landowners and officials and made the market, instead of the public place or the cathedral squares, the main focus of urban life.

The term 'market' (from the Latin mercatum) may mean both a gathering of merchants and their gathering place. In the latter sense, the Romans used more commonly the term forum, and they ordinarily called a merchant negotiator, that is, business man. During the later Middle Ages 'market' and 'merchant' (mercator) gradually crowded out the older words, probably because in the barbarian period the withering of urban life had made permanent market places and resident business men superfluous in all but a few towns. There was not enough to do for traders to get together every day at the same place or wait for customers in a shop. The collapse of continuous trade, however, stressed the significance of periodical gatherings, and these would grow in numbers, size, and complexity wherever and whenever economic activities picked up. They ranged; from weekly or monthly encounters, where townspeople and country people of the immediate surroundings exchanged handfuls of local goods in the course of a few hours, to annual affairs, usually lasting several days, where customers from a larger area bought provisions for the whole year, sold any surplus they produced, and got hold of a few outlandish objects. At their lowest level, daily markets opened no more than a loophole in a wall of self-sufficiency: many transactions were carried out directly between the producer and the consumer, sometimes, by barter, and nobody had to spend the night away from home. Annual markets, usually called fairs after the feria (feast or holiday) to which they were linked, called for more complex arrangements. Any empty space might do for professional merchants to set up their stalls and pitch their tents (tienda still designates the shop in modern Spanish), but they would not come from afar unless they had some assurance of free and easy access, some advantages and conveniences during their stay, and, of course, a reasonable chance for profit.

Urban growth did not destroy the temporary markets, which had been ordinarily confined outside the walls or segregated in the yards of churches and castles, but eventually transferred the bulk of trade to what we might call the shopping and business sections of the town. Stately halls for sectional or specialized trade, covered plazas and arcaded alleys, long rows of craftsmen's houses with a shop open on the street came alive in a picturesque disorder of which we can still get an idea when we visit the suks and bazaars of certain Muslim towns, from Marrakesh to Istanbul, where industrial pollution has not yet replaced preindustrial dirt. The more important transactions of wholesale or luxury trade were carried out more discreetly in the office of a notary or a guild, the inner rooms of a merchant's mansion, the private quarters of a sea captain or the premises of a company of merchant bankers. Obviously not all towns attained the same size and complexity, but many of them fitted the statement of Chretien of Troyes, the famous French writer of the late twelfth century: 'One might well believe that in a city a fair is being held every day.' More proudly, a Florentine chronicler of the early fourteenth century pointed out that his city had no use for special markets or fairs: you could buy and sell any amount of anything at any time. He exaggerated but slightly: Florence at her medieval peak, with a busy population of better than 100,000 inhabitants, a mint output of 500,000 gold florins a year, a wool production of 80,000 pieces of cloth, a meat consumption of 4,000 oxen, 80,000 lambs and 30,000 pigs, a wine consumption of 25 million quarts, a fertile district ruled by her independent commune, and the largest business companies in the Christian world, hardly needed the stimulus of periodical marts.

In all but a very few urban centers, however, markets and fairs continued to play an important role. Some economic activities are essentially seasonal: the gathering of certain crops, the opening of snow and icebound routes, the sailing dates for large convoys of ships, the traditional time for shearing sheep, preparing cheese, or delivering cloth to the wholesaler determined spurts that could best be channeled into a fair. Travel took a long time, and a merchant would be encouraged to take a specific trip if he knew that he would reach an extraordinarily large number of his colleagues and an unusual variety of goods. Moreover, markets and fairs tied their fortune to special facilities and privileges not normally available on the spot. Not many towns outside northern and central Italy enjoyed full independence and still fewer controlled the country around them; ordinary trade, therefore, had to cope with all kinds of obstacles in the unfriendly context of a feudal government and an agrarian society. No doubt the interests of lords and farmers were not in everything different from those of towns and traders, nor was unrestricted commercial liberty the ideal of most towns. A compromise was always possible, but it would be more easily attained for the limited duration of a fair than for the entire year. Lords and towns alike would then be willing to interrupt any war, lower any toll and tax, waive the customary restrictions on the residence and activities of aliens, grant speedy and informal justice according to international commercial law, strike abundant coinage of good and uniform quality, recognize and enforce written or verbal obligations, renounce such obnoxious customs as aubaine (confiscation of the property of deceased aliens), ius naufragii (seizure of the goods, and sometimes of the survivors, of wrecked ships), and reprisal (forfeiture of the wares of all fellow citizens of a defaulting merchant). Even the greediest prince and the most protectionistic town usually realized that at least temporary concessions were needed to get a market going, and that a going market would bring money and supplies outlasting the suspension of normal burdens.

Still if the absolute volume of transactions in markets and fairs kept increasing as the Commercial Revolution progressed, their share of total trade inevitably diminished. Seasonal factors cannot be entirely eliminated, but a steadier demand will elicit a more evenly distributed offer; sailors and muleteers will prolong their operations under all but the most forbidding weather; and craftsmen will use stocks of raw material to spread their work throughout the year. By the late thirteenth century a Pisan manual of business, foresees only one slack month out of twelve, and the detailed notarial records of Genoa show no serious variation at any time of the year. Less successful cities on peripheral shores or in the countrified center of Europe are more sensitive to seasonal fluctuations, but a city that for a long series of years has attracted peasants to her weekly market and merchants to her annual fair will normally become a permanent nerve center of trade.

William Ian Miller

2011-08-05T19:23:00.000-07:00

Faking It

Once people suspect hypocrisy, many start to mistrust all appearances of virtue as so much glory seeking and shamming. Montaigne goes so far as to claim that virtuous deeds done openly are ever more compromised the grander they are: 'The more glittering the deed the more I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness.' Because virtue looks good, it looks bad. What are the virtuous to do? Pretend to vice? In fact this antihypocrisy strategy is often tried—recall that Jesus counsels it with regard to fasting: pretend that you are not fasting when you are (Matt. 6.16-18)—and it immediately gives rise to its own styles of hypocrisy, vanity, and playing at virtue. In one of Mark Twain's burlesques of Heaven we find Sir Richard Duffer, a butcher from Hoboken who died with a carefully cultivated reputation for meanness; he was awarded a baronetcy in Heaven for having secretly furnished the homes of 'honest square people out of work' with meat. Take the more famous cases of St. Thomas a Becket and St. Thomas More, who secretly wore itchy hairshirts underneath their sumptuous robes to punish themselves for the vanity of their rich clothing and high office. Better to appear completely given over to unapologetic luxury than to appear virtuously dressed in unostentatious habit and be suspected of ostentatious piety. Yet it is hard not to suspect Becket and More of smirking to themselves, vain of their hairshirt secret, or congratulating themselves on the brilliance of a move that turns their showy sumptuousness into fake showy sumptuousness, all to get around the stricture against trumpeting one's virtue.

Similarly, it is hard not to imagine the simpler Richard Duffer undertaking considerable extra labor to keep his generosity secret. We can see him delighting in his reputation for meanness, precisely because it is false, taking no small pleasure in a smug contempt for those fools who fall for his perfectly engineered deception, who are so wrong in their opinion of him. The townspeople's false blame purifies his virtue and shoots him straight to Heaven, at least according to this theory of obsessive hypocrisy avoidance.

There are certain false fronts that are not part of the niceties of politeness and decorum but instead turn the people who are their objects into fools: this is the sin of Frank Churchill in Emma, who by keeping his engagement to Jane Fairfax secret is assumed by others, namely Emma, to be available for flirtation. The unknowing are thus entrapped into humiliating themselves by fancying they are being attended to by Frank in ways they are not. When the sham is revealed people resent it, and with good reason. It is not likely that the denizens of Hoboken who disliked the falsely mean butcher will feel much more charitable toward him once his secret is revealed. No one likes being made a fool of, even (or especially?) in the interests of someone else's trip to Heaven. It is not as if Duffer's strategy doesn't impose costs on the unwitting others; they have had the vice of censoriousnes thrust upon them against their will.

With Becket and More, two very sophisticated actors, the suspicion of hypocritical antihypocrisy is stronger. They are not being vain of their virtue in the vulgar sense of parading holiness about literally trumpeting it, but instead are being vain of their virtue to their internal audience, for the benefits accruing to their self-esteem. Their secret self-mortification, however, eventually gets noticed. That is why I can write about it. When Becket died it was apparent when they stripped him, and we know of More's too. They, I suppose, knew we would know, for by playing to their internal audience they were also, just maybe, playing to a future earthly audience in addition to the one in Heaven.

Wearing a hairshirt, even in secret, is ostentatious in a way that other, less lurid kinds of devotion are not, especially back then, when the competition in matters of holiness was a political as well as social and religious issue. Even if the motives for wearing hairshirt for mortifiers of the flesh such as Becket and More were untainted by competitiveness or glorying, they would know that others might suspect that their motives were tinged with saintly ambition. They surely struggled with incessant temptation and could not always keep the pride of finery and high office at bay. The hairshirt is a testimony to that. But did they not also indulge in some self-satisfaction in knowing they were enduring itching silently, ever so patiently, while suffering the additional punishment of being blamed for their pride of office?

Unless, that is, hairshirts had already become a fad and you could not trust that the people you encountered were not also wearing one. Various ways of mortifying the flesh followed the rules of fashion ability; in the early centuries of Christianity, stylites—pole sitters—were in vogue; in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries pus drinking had its day. One can imagine a group of wags, all with hairshirts under their brocaded doublets, querying in their cups: tell me Philip, where do you go for your hairshirts? Do you order the lice separately?

Gordon Tullock

2011-07-14T05:18:00.000-07:00

Toward a Theory of the Rent-Seeking Society

The provincial governor who promulgates a new regulation with the intent of increasing the number of fees he gets for permitting people to avoid it not only increases his own income and the potential income of the specialists in rent avoidance, but he also imposes a real burden on society, for the regulation, in at least some areas, will be enforced. Further, he may, as a result of concentrating on this kind of activity, have this time distracted from such necessary functions of government as maintaining public order. He may not be supervising his junior officials, with the result that the kind of multiple exaction I have described above occurs. Altogether, one would expect poverty from this system, and, if we turn to the parts of the world where it is dominant, that is what we see.

If we examine the United States and most modern European countries, we find relatively little direct bribing of government officials. Note that I say relatively little, not zero, and I should also add that in my opinion the amount is increasing; unless changes are made, it will become quite a large amount in a generation or so. Still, in a direct sense the phenomenon of rent seeking does not exist.

In an indirect sense, rent seeking does exist to some extent, and the bureaucrats tend to be paid a good deal more than is actually necessary for the performance of their services, although the very highest officials are normally paid less than would be needed in order to attract people capable of managing these immense organizations. This conflict between fairly high pay for the lower officials and fairly low pay for the higher officials may be one of the reasons why in most Western countries the lower-level bureaucracy tends to be relatively uncontrolled from the top. The salaries offered to the upper administrators simply cannot attract people who have the personal ability necessary to control such a large apparatus.

The bureaucrats and other government officials, however, if they do not do very much in the way of soliciting bribes, do in fact issue a very large number of regulations and laws that directly affect many private businessmen. Further, the actual administration of these laws is invariably subject to a good deal of discretion. I should say in passing that the highest level of discretion of this sort is in fact exercised not by what we think of as bureaucrats, but by an older bureaucracy, that is, the courts. The judges are far more likely to make decisions on their own without being deeply bound by the law than are the regular bureaucrats. This is concealed from view to some extent by the fact that the judge's decision is defined as the law, and we do not generally notice how little it is controlled by the law that existed before he pronounced it.

This matter aside, what we observe is the development of very large-scale rent-avoidance activities. The DuPont Corporation for many generations was headed by chemical engineers. In the early days, these engineers were members of the DuPont family, but after two generations in which the president was a young man who had married the daughter of the previous president, rather than a direct DuPont, it slipped into the control of people who are not members of the family. It is notable that the current president, Irving S. Shapiro, is not a chemical engineer but an attorney who is a specialist on public relations and government influence. I do not wish to criticize DuPont for this decision, which I think under the circumstances was very sensible, and I certainly do not wish to criticize Shapiro, who I think is an extremely competent, intelligent, and well-motivated man. However, I do criticize the social order that made it necessary for this company to switch to a manipulator for its chief executive. Surely our medicines and plastics will be poorer in the future than they would be had the company retained its concentration on essentially technological matters.

Pascal Boyer

2011-07-10T18:26:00.000-07:00

Religion Explained

Supernatural agents can be very different. Religion is about the existence and causal powers of nonobservable entities and agencies. These may be one unique God or many different gods or spirits or ancestors, or a combination of these different kinds. Some people have one 'supreme' god, but this does not always mean that he or she is terribly important. In many places in Africa there are two supreme gods. One is a very abstract supreme deity and the other is more down-to-earth, as it were, since he created all things cultural: tools and domesticated animals, villages and society. But neither of them is really involved in people's everyday affairs, where ancestors, spirits and witches are much more important.

Some gods die. It may seem obvious that gods are always thought to be eternal. We might even think that this must be part of the definition of 'god.' However, many Buddhists think that gods, just like humans, are caught in a never-ending cycle of births and reincarnations. So gods will die like all other creatures. This, however, takes a long time and that is why humans since times immemorial pray to the same gods. If anything, gods are disadvantaged in comparison with humans. Unlike gods, we could, at least in principle, escape from the cycle of life and suffering. Gods must first be reincarnated as humans to do that.

Many spirits are really stupid. To a Christian it seems quite obvious that you cannot fool God, but in many places, fooling superhuman agents is possible and in fact even necessary. In Siberia, for instance, people are careful to use metaphorical language when talking about important matters. This is because nasty spirits often eavesdrop on humans and try to foil their plans. Now spirits, despite their superhuman powers, just cannot understand metaphors. They are powerful but stupid. In many places in Africa it is quite polite when visiting friends or relatives to express one's sympathy with them for having such 'ugly' or 'unpleasant' children. The idea is that witches, always on the lookout for nice children to 'eat,' will be fooled by this naive stratagem. It is also common in such places to give children names that suggest disgrace or misfortune, for the same reason. In Haiti one of the worries of people who have just lost a relative is that the corpse might be stolen by a witch. To avoid this, people sometimes buried their dead with a length of thread and an eyeless needle. The idea was that witches would find the needle and try to thread it, which would keep them busy for centuries so that they would forget all about the corpse. People can think that supernatural agents have extraordinary powers and yet are rather easily fooled.

Salvation is not always a central preoccupation. To people familiar with Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, it seems clear that the main point of religion is the salvation or deliverance of the soul. Different religions are thought to offer different perspectives on why souls need to be saved and different routes to salvation. Now, in many parts of the world, religion does not really promise that the soul will be saved or liberated and in fact does not have much to say about its destiny. In such places, people just do not assume that moral reckoning determines the fate of the soul. Dead people become ghosts or ancestors. This is general and does not involve a special moral judgement.

Official religion is not the whole of religion. Wherever we go, we will find that religious concepts are much more numerous and diverse than 'official' religion would admit. In many places in Europe people suspect that there are witches around trying to attack them. In official Islam there is no God but God; but many Muslims are terrified of jinn and afreet, spirits, ghosts and witches. In the United States religion is officially a matter of denomination: Christians of various shades, Jews, Hindus, etc. But many people are seriously engaged in interaction with aliens or ghosts. This is also among the religious concepts to consider and explain.

You can have religion without having 'a' religion. For Christians, Jews or Muslims it is quite clear that one belongs to a religion and that there is a choice, as it were, between alternative views on the creation of the universe, the destiny of the soul and the kind of morality one should adhere to. This results from a very special kind of situation, where people live in large states with competing Churches and doctrines. Many people throughout history and many people these days live in rather different circumstances, where their religious activity is the only one that is conceivable. Also, many religious notions are tied to specific places and persons. People for instance pray to their ancestors and offer sacrifices to the forest to catch lots of game. It would not make sense to them to pray to other people's ancestors or to be grateful for food that you will not receive. The idea of a universal religion that anyone could adopt—or that everyone should adopt—is not a universal idea.

You can also have religion without having 'religion.' We have a word for religion. This is a convenient label that we use to put together all the ideas, actions, rules and objects that have to do with the existence and properties of superhuman agents such as God. Not everyone has this explicit concept or the idea that religious stuff is different from the profane or everyday domain. In general, you will find that people begin to have an explicit concept of 'religion' when they live in places with several 'religions'; but that is a special kind of place, as I said above. That people do not have a special term for religion does not mean they actually have no religion. In many places people have no word for 'syntax' but their language has a syntax all the same. You do not need the special term in order to have the thing.

You can have religion without 'faith.' Many people in the world would find it strange if you told them that they 'believe in' witches and ghosts or that they have "faith" in their ancestors. Indeed, it would be very difficult in most languages to translate these sentences. It takes us Westerners some effort to realize that this notion of "believing in something" is peculiar. Imagine a Martian telling you how interesting it is that you "believe" in mountains and rivers and cars and telephones. You would think the alien has got it wrong. We don't 'believe in' these things, we just notice and accept that they are around. Many people in the world would say the same about witches and ghosts. They are around like trees and animals—though they are far more difficult to understand and control—so it does not require a particular commitment or faith to notice their existence and act accordingly. In the course of my anthropological fieldwork in Africa, I lived and worked with Fang people, who say that nasty spirits roam the bush and the villages, attack people, make them fall ill and ruin their crops. My Fang acquaintances also knew that I was not too worried about this and that most Europeans were remarkably indifferent to the powers of spirits and witches. This, for me, could be expressed as the difference between believing in spirits and not believing. But that was not the way people saw it over there. For them, the spirits were indeed around but white people were immune to their influence, perhaps because God cast them from a different mold or because Western people could avail themselves of efficient anti-witchcraft medicine. So what we often call faith others may well call knowledge.

Joel Mokyr

2011-07-07T05:13:00.000-07:00

The Lever of Riches

Although technological progress is by definition a net improvement to the economy, it is almost always the case that there are some groups whose welfare is reduced because of it, or who at least believe so ex ante. Technological change shocks the labor market, alters the physical environment, makes existing human and physical capital obsolete, and unambiguously reduces the producer's surplus of the innovator's competitors. In a repeated game, the gainers might have tried to compensate the losers. By its very nature, however, technological change is a nonrepeated game, since an invention is only invented once. Once an invention is made, an inventor often needs protection from those who stand to benefit from the suppression of the invention. The dilemma is sharpened by the fact that the benefits are usually heavily diffused, while the costs are concentrated. Thus the losers will find it easier to organize, and are quite likely to try to squelch technological progress altogether. Resistance to technological change occurred in many periods and places but seems to have been largely neglected by most historians, though Morison (1966, p. 10) views it as 'the single greatest matter of importance and interest in this whole process [of invention].'

Some examples: as early as 1397, tailors in Cologne were forbidden to use machines that pressed pinheads. In 1561, the city council of Nuremberg, undoubtedly influenced by the guild of red-metal turners, launched an attack on a local coppersmith by the name of Hans Spaichi who had invented an improved slide rest lathe. The council first rewarded Spaichi for his invention, then began to harass him and made him promise not to sell his lathe outside his own craft, then offered to buy it from him if he suppressed it, and finally threatened to imprison anyone who sold the lathe (Klemm, 1964, p.153). The ribbon loom was invented in Danzig in 1579, but its inventor was reportedly secretly drowned by orders of the city council. Twenty-five years later the ribbon loom was reinvented in the Netherlands—though resistance there, too, was stiff—and thus became known as the Dutch loom. A century and a half later, John Kay, the inventor of the flying shuttle, was harassed by weavers. He eventually settled in France, where he refused to show his shuttle to weavers out of fear. But the prolonged opposition of vested interests against the flying shuttle in Britain was ineffectual. Resistance to new technology was traditionally strongest in the textile trade, but appeared in less expected places as well. In 1299, an edict was issued in Florence forbidding bankers to use Arabic numerals (Stern, 1937, p. 48). In the fifteenth century, the scribes guild of Paris succeeded in delaying the introduction of printing into Paris by 20 years. In the sixteenth century, the great printers revolt in France was triggered by labor-saving innovations in the presses.

These negative reactions to technological progress can only be understood as an attempt by those with an investment in certain techniques to prevent the decline in the value of their skills. Economies in which the institutional setup protects the inventor from such threats, or in which distributional coalitions, which protect the selfish interests of small groups at the expense of the large majority, are comparatively weak will have a far better chance for technological success. Inventors or manufacturers who perceive that innovating is a thankless and possibly dangerous activity will lose interest, and technological change will peter out.

Brian Bond

2011-06-28T02:27:00.000-07:00

The Unquiet Western Front

In book after book (and in numerous articles) Terraine reiterated his main points. The First World War was not unique and sui generis, as Paul Fussell and others have asserted or assumed: it should be viewed rather in the wider context of industrial mass warfare, including the American Civil War and the Second World War. But material conditions in the First World War ruled out brilliant generalship or any quick route to victory for two main reasons: commanders were deprived of the direct voice control of their predecessors and of the wireless communications of their successors; and poor tactical means of mobility entailed that the defensive would hold an advantage over the offensive. Next, he pointed out that from mid-1916 until the end of the war Britain, uniquely in its history, bore the main burden of the war on the crucial front and against a very powerful enemy. Attrition warfare and heavy casualties were unavoidable: British generals were no worse, indeed perhaps better, than those of the other belligerents. Finally, the war had to be won on land, above all on the Western Front, and was won by the Allies, with Haig and his armies playing the leading role.

Terraine had his limitations and blind spots, and it would not be surprising if at times he was driven into dogmatic or more extreme positions in fending off his critics. As Taylor’s review of Haig indicated, in championing the generals (or 'Brasshats') he is markedly unsympathetic to the 'Frockcoats,' notably Lloyd George. As regards sources, he tended to stick with the ofﬁcial histories, biographies and other published works which were available in the 1920s, and did not much avail himself of the archival collections which were opened from the end of the decade. Perhaps most seriously, there is a pronounced note of determinism in his approach which is most obviously evident in the subtitle of his book on Passchendaele: 'A Study in Inevitability.' As one thoughtful critic has pointed out, by stressing the great extent to which external factors (weaponry, transport, communications) constricted innovation in tactics and strategy, Terraine makes it very difﬁcult for himself to allow for innovations and improvements. Furthermore, his thesis, 'despite its deep understanding of modern industrial warfare, leads the reader away from a perfectly natural British desire to criticise the conduct of the war that cost so many lives, to the rather Panglossian conclusion that the Great War was, in fact the best of all possible wars.'

Be that as it may, thanks to Terraine and other historians we can now understand, if we wish to, that commanders had very limited room to manoeuvre—in every sense. Moreover, despite all the errors and shortcomings, it is possible to reach the conclusion that Britain’s war effort, on both the home and military 'fronts,' was very impressive indeed.

These views are still controversial and had certainly not gained wide acceptance by the end of the 1960s; indeed, they remained unpopular if not incomprehensible. As Alex Danchev suggested in concluding his scintillating analysis of 'bunking' and debunking in the 1960s, the overall effect of the upsurge of renewed interest in the Great War was to revive and perpetuate the impression made on the public by the anti-war memoirs of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Vidia Naipaul

2011-06-24T05:12:00.000-07:00

Among the Believers

One of the English-language magazines I bought was published from the holy city of Qom. It was The Message of Peace, and, as its title warned, it was full of rage.

It raged about the Shah; about the 'devils' of the West and the evils of its technology; it even raged about poor old Mr Desai, the Indian prime minister, who banned alcohol (good, from the Muslim point of view) but drank urine (from the Muslim point of view, deplorable). But it wasn't for its rages that I bought the magazine, or for the speeches of Khomeini, or for the biographies of the Shia Imams. I bought the Message of Peace for an article on Islamic urban planning.

Could there be such a thing? Apparently; and more, it was badly needed. Islam was a complete way of life; it didn't separate the worldly from the spiritual. Hence it was necessary, in addition to avoiding materialist industrial excess, to plan for 'a theocentric society.' In this society women also had to be sheltered. Problems! But the very existence of these problems proved the need for sensible Islamic planning. And a solution was possible.

Build, at the corners of an imagined square, four residential areas. Give each a mosque, a clinic and a nursery: that is where the women will busy themselves. The men will go to work. They will go to work in the centre of the square. At the very heart of this working area there will be a mosque large enough to hold all the male population. With the mosque there will be an alms-giving centre, since the giving of alms is as important in Islam as prayer, or fasting, or the pilgrimage to Mecca.

In a circle around the mosque there will be a bazaar; around the bazaar will be a circle of offices; and at the perimeter of this office circle there will be hospitals, maternity homes and schools, so that men on their way to work can take their children to school, and on other occasions can rush to hospitals or maternity homes.

For recreation, women can meet and chat. Men can ride horses or take up flying. 'The idea is not to encourage such games which distract the religious consciousness of the community.'

There are certain other Islamic requirements. Water from recycled sewage is not to be used, except for irrigation. 'The concept of cleanliness, and water as the medium of bodily cleanliness, is strong in Islam. The purifying agent for water is water itself and the chemical and biological processes are not acceptable from the religious point of view.'

The houses in the residential areas are to be so aligned that the prayer call from the mosque can reach them without the use of an amplifier.' There is a final detail. 'The toilet fixtures like water closets shall be so arranged as to make the user not to face the City of Mecca either from his front or back side.'

Jacob Talmon

2011-06-15T02:13:00.000-07:00

Romanticism and Revolt

Fichte's flaming addresses to the German nation contain a violent condemnation of the characterlessness and cowardly selfishness displayed by the Germans under the blows administered by Napoleon, and a stirring call for a return to the true, authentic German self. On closer scrutiny this turns out to be an apotheosis of deep human spirituality and strength of character, as opposed to a political listlessness and aimless drift. Fichte does not refer to any glorious martial traditions or to deeds of conquest in the German past. In fact, he says in so many words that the Germans, being a mature nation of spiritual depth, would not stoop so low as to compete with other nations—the British, the French, the Spaniards—in the subjugation of other races, in the exploitation of primitive tribes or in the scramble for wealth and power. Their destiny was to serve as an example of devotion to values that are the pride of the human race, to create and uphold them with a fierce, self-denying tenacity.

By being truly German Fichte also meant being authentically creative—that is, in obedience to a primary irresistible impulse, and not by way of deliberate contrivance. The Germans were the creative, the original race among the European nations, the Urvolk, because they were the only great nation in Europe to have kept their original language. The British, French, Italians and Spaniards had taken over a language from another people and turned it into a kind of jargon; as imitators they lacked immediacy and originality, and could at best produce variations on the original creative achievements of others. In this rhapsody on the Urvolk and Ursprache Fichte took leave of his earlier rationalist and mechanistic modes of thought. The Ursprache was something unique that was mysteriously there, a datum of nature. This contains the pregnant suggestion that spiritual content is predetermined by some natural, ineluctable forces.

The peacemakers at Vienna, as we have seen, had no use for any Volkstum ideology. The governments of the different German states invoked local, not national, traditions to buttress the principle of dynastic legitimacy, and the German Bund created in 1815 was to be a league of German states, and not the political-juridical framework of a united German nation.

Such a setback to the hopes of national unity at the hands of the guardians of the monarchical order was calculated to revive liberal and even radical opposition. The issue of revolution became central. As in the case of Italy, abstract logic pointed to a republic. There was ultimately no middle position between dynastic legitimacy and popular sovereignty. Once legitimacy was denied on constitutional grounds, the right of separate states to exist at all would inevitably be rejected on national grounds. If there was a single German nation with a right to determine its fate, and if no king had a divine right to dispose of the destinies of his subjects, the constitutional liberal became a nationalist, and the nationalist was driven to become a democratic republican.

William Rubinstein

2011-06-08T21:59:00.000-07:00

Genocide

About 15,000 Polish officers and prisoners of war were murdered on Stalin's orders in the notorious massacre at Katyn in April 1940. Many other Poles were certainly killed by the Soviet forces when they reoccupied the country in 1944-5, with more than 50,000 Poles arrested in the Lublin area alone in 1944-5. If these figures are reasonably accurate, it would appear that at least 700,000-800,000 Poles were killed by Stalin during the Second World War.

The Nazi reign of terror, unleashed on western Poland in September 1939 and on eastern Poland in June 1941, was even more brutal and murderous, as befitted their belief in Polish subhumanity. Apart from the total and automatic extermination of all Polish Jews and many Gypsies, the Nazis at least threatened the lives of all gentile Poles and destroyed much of its infrastructure. Most significantly, the Nazis engaged in Poland on ethnic cleansing on a grand scale and, it seems, fully intended to expel tens of millions of ethnic Poles from Poland to Siberia to make way for German colonists. Soon after conquering Poland, the Nazis actually expelled 630,000 Poles from the areas of western Poland they annexed, another 265,000 from Germany itself (a total of 923,000 persons) to the General Government. About 200,000 'Aryan'-looking Polish children were kidnapped and brought to Germany by Himmler's orders. As well, during the war about 2.3 million Poles were deported to Germany to do forced labour. The Nazis systematically murdered the Polish elite, killing 45 per cent of physicians, 57 per cent of lawyers, 40 per cent of professors and 18 per cent of the clergy. Probably over 200,000 gentile Poles (and perhaps far more) were killed in extermination and concentration camps, including 74,000 at Auschwitz, where they constituted the second largest group of murder victims. About 100,000 Poles died in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. The overall number of gentile Polish dead at the hands of the Nazis has generally been estimated at about 2 million,

This figure (like so many others) seems high, although anything in the way of a better estimate app€ears extr€emely difficult to achieve with the sources available to us. There is, for instance, no evidence that more than, at most, several hundred thousand gentile Poles died in the extermination camps, and nor is there any evidence of the general mass murder of gentile Poles equivalent to the killing of the Jews by the Einsatzgruppen, although very large numbers of ethnic Poles were certainly murdered by the Germans, often for no reason. It seems reasonable to assume that perhaps 500,000-700,000 gentile Polish civilians were deliberately killed by the Nazis during the war, with, say, 300,000 dying while doing slave labour in Germany; thus, upwards of 1 million gentile Poles perished at the hands of the Nazis, to which must be added up to several hundred thousand more at the hands of the Soviets. These figures do not begin to cover the scale of damage done to Poland during the Second World War. About 84 per cent of the buildings in Warsaw were destroyed, and the city was, at the end of the war, almost literally uninhabited. By any standards, and even if the number of victims is scaled down from considerably higher figures, this was an appalling slaughter. With the possible exception of the western Soviet Union, Poland plainly suffered more than any other nation during the Second World War.

But perhaps another group, yet to be considered, suffered even more, Soviet prisoners of war, who fell into the hands of the Germans. It seems likely that more Soviet prisoners of war died in Nazi captivity than any other group except for the Jews. It appears that no less than 5,160,000 Soviet soldiers were captured by the Germans, of whom 3,222,000 died while prisoners of war. If accurate, or even approximately accurate, this figure is higher than the total number of Jews who died in extermination camps such as Auschwitz. There is some evidence, however, that the death toll is an underestimate, since other authoritative German files reveal the number of captured Soviet troops to have been 5,754,000, suggesting that 3,816,000 Soviet troops died while prisoners of war. While there may be some exaggeration in these figures, especially from inflation in the number of Soviet soldiers allegedly captured in reportage to their superiors, in general (and unlike other groups in this chapter) these figures are probably accurate enough. The German army captured vastly more Soviet soldiers soon after invading the Soviet Union than it had expected—probably 3.4 million in 1941 and 1.4 million in 1942—and had no facilities for dealing with them, Hitler specifically ruled out any humane treatment of Soviet prisoners, except for Volksdeutsch (Germans living elsewhere, in this case in the Soviet Union) and other 'Aryans.'

David Potter

2011-05-25T02:22:00.000-07:00

People of Plenty

Probably nothing has contributed more to the weakness of the conservative position in the United States than the fact that this principle, which the great conservative leaders like Edmund Burke and Benjamin Disraeli have recognized as the foundation stone of conservatism, has been so sharply rejected by American conservatives that it fell by default to the opposition. Ultimately, Franklin Roosevelt did more to give men a sense of status than all the Republican Presidents since Lincoln.

The heavy emphasis which America has placed upon mobility of course necessitated this rejection of status, for the two are basically contradictory. Whereas the principle of status affirms that a minor position may be worthy, the principle of mobility, as Americans have construed it, regards such a station both as the penalty for and the proof of personal failure. This view is often pushed to a point where even the least invidious form of subordination comes to be resented as carrying a stigma, and certain kinds of work which are socially necessary are almost never performed except grudgingly. The individual, driven by the belief that he should never rest content in his existing station and knowing that society demands advancement by him as proof of his merit, often feels stress and insecurity and is left with no sense of belonging either in the station to which he advances or in the one from which he set out.

After nearly two hundred years, these difficulties now begin to be recognized, and there is a dawning realization that both our insistence upon mobility and our denial of status have been carried to excess. The fierceness of the mobility race generates tensions too severe for some people to bear, and fear of failure in this race generates a sense of insecurity which is highly injurious. Denial of status deprives the individual of one of his deepest psychological needs. Few societies have ever attempted to dispense with it, and most of them have acted to assure the individual of a certain niche in society, even if they were not prepared to offer a minimum wage or a more abundant life. Even where status appears to have been ejected, it sometimes comes in again by the back door: for instance, Americans who repudiated status in terms of an existing social order very often embraced mobility as leading to secure and desirable status in the social order of the future. In a country which possessed so little but could legitimately anticipate so much, it became genuine realism for the pioneer to identify himself with the prosperous future community which he was building rather than the squalid temporary settlement in which he lived. The imperceptible way in which the drive of mobility merges with the anticipation of status is suggested by the appeal used by a life insurance company which sells policies to provide for the future education of children and advertises with the picture of a small boy, over the caption, 'He is going to college already.'

It follows, then, that even where status has been publicly renounced, individuals continue to manifest, in a variety of ways, a deep psychological craving for the certitudes which it offers.

Laurence Rees

2011-05-24T05:07:00.000-07:00

Auschwitz

It was in November 1941 that construction began on a small camp about 500 meters from the railway station in the isolated town of Belzec in the far southeast of occupied Poland. In the minds of the members of the SS, this was to be a local solution to a local problem—the need to kill 'un-productive' Jews living in the surrounding area. Just as the Chelmno gas van center was established primarily to kill Jews from the Lodz ghetto, so Belzec was built to kill 'unwanted' Jews from the Lublin area.

In December 1941, SS Haupsturmfuhrer (captain) Christian Wirth arrived at Belzec to take up the post of commandant. Originally trained as a carpenter, the fifty-six year old had fought in World War I and was awarded medals for bravery, had joined the Nazi party, and then, during the 1930s, worked for the Gestapo in Stuttgart. In 1939, Wirth became involved in the euthanasia actions against the mentally ill and helped organize their murder by use of bottled carbon monoxide. By 1941, he was working in the Lublin area, conducting more euthanasia killings. Known by the nickname 'savage Christian,' Wirth was a sadist. He was once observed whipping a Jewish woman and chasing her into the gas chamber, and he personally murdered Jews with his own hands. Red faced and sweating, he screamed obscenities while encouraging his men to commit bestial acts.

At Belzec, this loathsome man was able to cram all his previous killing experience into one physical space. He decided to use carbon monoxide gas as the means of murder, not supplied from canisters as in the gas chambers of the euthanasia program but from a normal combustion engine, just as Widmann had used a few months before in the Soviet Union. The three small gas chambers themselves were incorporated into a brick building that was disguised to resemble a shower room, with the carbon monoxide gas delivered through fake shower heads.

So far, with the use of carbon monoxide from a car engine and the pretend showers, Wirth was adapting previous killing techniques. But now, in supervising the layout of the camp, he entered entirely new territory and broke completely with established concentration camp design. First, he realized that because the vast majority of arrivals would be alive only for a matter of hours, the large complex of buildings that characterized Auschwitz or Dachau could be dispensed with. The death camp—unlike the concentration camp—needed relatively few facilities of any kind and could be contained in a small space. Thus Belzec measured less than 300 meters square.

Visitors to the sites of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka (of whom there are far, far fewer than travel to Auschwitz) are shocked by how tiny these killing camps were. A total of about 1.7 million people were murdered in these three camps—600,000 more than the murder toll of Auschwitz—and yet all three could fit into the area of Auschwitz—Birkenau with room to spare. In a murder process that is an affront to human dignity at almost every level, one of the greatest affronts—and this may seem illogical unless you have actually been there—is that so many people were killed in such a small area. Somehow the mind associates an epic tragedy with an epic space—another reason, perhaps, that Auschwitz is so much better known today than these three death camps. The massive scale of Birkenau gives the mind space to try and conceive of the enormity of the crime—something that is utterly denied to visitors at a place like Belzec. How can the brain conceive of 600,000 people, the estimated death toll here, being murdered in an area less than 300 meters square?

Roger Lowenstein

2011-05-02T19:55:00.000-07:00

While America Aged

Beginning in 2001, when he became chairman of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, Peter S. Kalikow worried constantly about the agency's pensions. The MTA oversaw New York's subway system, along with bus service and various commuter-rail lines. From 2000 to 2005 the pension bill for the city subway and bus systems soared tenfold. And the agency was projecting an alarming continued escalation.

This crisis was partly due to demographic trends, which made the pension math unworkable as workers lived longer. In the subways a typical employee in an earlier generation worked for 40 years and then lived off his pension for, say, another 10 years. Now employees retired after 25 years, after which they were likely to collect a pension for an equivalent quarter-century or even longer. It was as if two conductors were aboard each train—one of them doing the steering and the other lazing in his rocker—and both at taxpayer expense.

To Kalikow this seemed inherently unsound. He worried that the MTA was repeating the mistakes of General Motors. A serious car buff, Kalikow had admired GM as an undergraduate and followed its fortunes ever since. He found it astonishing that a company once emblematic of success—a company that had been profitable even during the Depression—was now on the verge of collapse. Kalikow once told an aide, 'The greatest company in America is going broke over pensions. We have to do something before it catches up to us here.'

By the time Kalikow took office, though, the problem had caught up to the public sector—and not just in New York. It's no accident that many states and municipalities are in bad shape, because negotiations in the public sector are inherently tilted in the direction of higher benefits. Public unions can organize politically and influence elections—which is to say that, unlike GM employees, they can vote their bosses out of office. Politicians thus face huge temptations to increase benefits, even though this is costly in the long run.

Public-sector pensions also enjoy an enhanced legal status that makes them ultimately far more costly. A private company at least has the option of 'freezing' its plan. When that happens, employees keep the benefits already accrued, but from the time of the freeze onward, they do not accrue more credits. To employers this can be a very significant saving. In contrast, a public agency can never stop the meter—not even with a union's permission. And governments do not even have the option of escaping pensions via bankruptcy.

Though GM's benefit structure had been ruinous to its shareholders, it had not hurt the public at large. Public pensions are different. The MTA pensions, for example, are financed by taxes and fares; they are paid for by the public, especially the riding public. And riders and taxpayers, more than the employees, were Peter Kalikow's chief constituency—or so he maintained. Why should the public pay for employee pensions? Most of the people riding the trains could not hope to retire after 25 years, nor did they earn as much as the average transit worker, who made $58,000 a year in 2005.

As it was, the public was already footing the bill. Squeezed by rising costs, Kalikow had been forced to defer subway expansion projects; he was trimming service, eliminating bus routes, closing token booths and reducing late-night operations. The fare had been bumped, from $1.50 to $2. The MTA's capital needs were massive, and Kalikow was in a perpetual battle for state and federal subsidies.

The pension obligation was simply staggering. Transit contributed $381 million, or 14 percent of the payroll, to the city pension funds. By 2009 the bill was expected to nearly double, to $620 million—more than four times the total of a decade earlier. Health care cost the authority an additional $410 million, and it, too, was rising at double-digit rates. And transit workers contributed only 2 percent of their salaries for pensions and nothing for health care. Meanwhile, they as well as spouses and dependents got full medical coverage including vision and dental—for life—with free generic drugs and a minimal $15 copay on doctor visits.

David Osterfeld

2011-04-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

Prosperity Versus Planning

First, an MNC may attempt to pressure the host government to get special privileges, such as tax exemptions and subsidies, or licensing restrictions and tariffs, thereby protecting it from competition. It may do this through either lobbying, bribery, or veiled threats to locate elsewhere. That should hardly be surprising. Contrary to the usual chamber of commerce rhetoric regarding the glories of free enterprise, businesses are not particularly fond of competition. Far from favoring open entry, businesses have often been at the forefront of attempts to get the government to 'rationalize' the economy through the imposition of regulations restricting entry and thus competition. That does not change merely because a firm crosses a political boundary.

But there is no reason that such questionable practices have to originate with the MNC. It would be surprising if there were not at least some highly placed host-country government officials who had used their positions to obtain special advantages for themselves, that is, to extort MNCs for their own benefit.

There is a variety of questionable payments. One can distinguish between two types of payments originating from the MNC intended to influence public officials in the host country: 'grease' and bribery. Grease is so named because its purpose is to 'lubricate' or facilitate certain government activities. Grease payments normally go to low-level government employees and are typically small bribes—gratuities—intended to get the government employees either to perform their duties or at least to perform them expeditiously. Those duties include such things as providing work permits, visas, licenses, customs clearances, police protection, hotel accommodations, appointments with public officials, and a host of other services. But grease may also be used to get local officials to look the other way, to shirk their duties, to ignore certain regulations, thereby enabling the MNC to conduct certain types of business operations or at least to conduct them at a lower cost. Examples include payments by the MNC to allow it to evade customs duties or to circumvent various tariff restrictions on imports. Thomas Gladwin and Ingo Walter reported that while grease accounts for about 95 percent of all questionable payments made by the MNCs, the dollar amount is probably less than 25 percent of the total.

Bribery is the payment of large sums of money, or its equivalent, to high-ranking government officials. The purpose is to obtain benefits that lower level officials are not in a position to grant. These include such things as the acquisition of contracts, tax concessions, import as well as export exemptions, and changes in the laws and policies of the host country. While cash payments are the most common form of payment, other forms are not unheard of. They might include a gift of a Mercedes-Benz, jobs for the official's relatives or friends, or free vacations on the Riviera, to name but a few.

Finally, there is blackmail or extortion, where the questionable practice originates at the receiving end. Blackmail would include such things as threats to renege on existing or potential contracts, to nationalize or expropriate the company, or even to harm or kill MNC officials if the demands are not met.

Since both bribery and extortion are illegal, it is probably impossible to determine just how common such practices are. However, the available information suggests that those activities are fairly common.

Richard Wrangham

2011-04-03T19:42:00.000-07:00

Catching Fire

A common requirement among Native American hunters was for boys making their first kill to carry their prize back to camp and stand by while others cooked and ate it. The practice symbolized the subordination of men to the demands of the group. More often, he divided his food himself. The community might allow him to make personal choices about who to give meat to, but not necessarily. In the western desert of Australia, every large hunted animal had to be prepared in a rigidly defined fashion when it was brought to camp. The hunter's own share of a kangaroo was the neck, head, and backbone, while his parents-in-law received a hind leg, and old men ate the tail and innards. The contrast with women's ownership of their foods is striking. Although women forage in small groups and might help one another find good trees or digging areas, their foods belong to them. The sex difference suggests that the cultural rules that specify how women's and men's foods are to be shared are adapted to the society's need to regulate competition specifically over food. The rules were not merely the result of a general moral attitude.

A woman's right to ownership protects her from supplicants of both sexes. In Australia's western desert, a hungry aborigine woman can sit amicably by a cook's fire, but she will not receive any food unless she can justify it by invoking a specific kinship role. It is even more difficult for a man. A bachelor or married man who approaches someone else's wife in search of food would be in flagrant breach of convention and an immediate cause of gossip, just as a woman would be if she gave him any food. The norm is so strong that a wife's presence at a meal can protect even a husband from being approached. Among Mbuti Pygmies, if a family is eating together by their hearth, they will be undisturbed. But when a man is eating alone, he is likely to attract his friends, who will expect to share his food.

Under this system, an unmarried woman who offers food to a man is effectively flirting, if not offering betrothal. Male anthropologists have to be aware of this to avoid embarrassment in such societies. Cofeeding is often the only marriage ceremony, such that if an unmarried pair are seen eating together, they are henceforward regarded as married. In New Guinea, Bonerif hunter-gatherers rely on the sago palm tree for their staple food year-round. If a woman prepares her own sago meal and gives it to a man, she is considered wed to him. The interaction is public, so others take the opportunity to tease the new couple with jokes equating food and sex, such as, 'If you get a lot of sago you are going to be a happy man.' The association is so ingrained that a man's penis is symbolized by the sago fork with which he eats his meal. If a man takes his sago fork out of his hair and shows it to a woman, they both know he is inviting her for sex. In that society, for a woman to even look at a man's feeding implement is to break the rule against her constrained food-sharing.

Because interactions occur in public, a husband's presence is not necessary to maintain customary principles. The husband's role is important not so much for his physical presence, but because he represents a reliable conduit to the support of the community. If a wife reported to her husband that another man had inappropriately asked her for food, the accused would be obliged to defend himself to both the husband and the community at large.

This may explain one of the reasons why marriage is important to a woman in these societies. Among the Bonerif, as among many hunter-gatherers, sexual intercourse is not tightly restricted to marriage. Wives are free to have sexual relations with several men at the same time, and may do so even when their husbands protest. Furthermore, they get little food from their husbands. But marriage means that her children will be accepted, according to anthropologist Gottfried Oosterwal. In addition, marriage gives a woman access to the only ultimate authority, which is the set of communal decisions reached by men in the men's house. These decisions represent the 'crystallized view of everyone about everything' and are accepted as the right view by the whole community. Having a husband means that when social conflict arises, a good wife has an advocate who is a member of the ultimate source of social control.

A link to the communal authority is critical, because the ability of victims to deter a bully or a persistent pest depends on their being a legitimate member of the community. Hunter-gatherers deal with braggarts, thieves, and violators of other social norms in a consistent way, according to anthropologist Christopher Boehm. They use communal sanctions. Whispers, rumors, and gossip evolve into public criticism or ridicule directed at the accused. If the offender continues to incur public anger, he or she will be severely punished or even killed. The killing is done by one or a few men but will be approved by all the elders. Capital punishment provides the sanction that most completely enforces hunter-gatherer adherence to social norms, and it is in men's hands. Thus by virtue of being married (or, if unmarried, by virtue of being a daughter), a woman is socially protected from losing any of her food. Having a husband or father who is a legitimate member of the group, she is effectively protected by him.

Robert Conquest

2011-04-02T23:40:00.000-07:00

The Harvest of Sorrow

The Russian intelligentsia had taken two contrary views of the peasantry. On the one hand they were the People incarnate, the soul of the country, suffering, patient, the hope of the future. on the other, they appeared as the 'dark people,' backward, mulish, deaf to argument, an oafish impediment to all progress.

There were elements of truth in both views, and some of the country's clearest minds saw this. Pushkin praised the peasants' many good qualities, such as industry and tolerance. The memoirist Nikitenko called the peasant 'almost a perfect savage' and a drunkard and a thief into the bargain, but added that he was nevertheless 'incomparably superior to the so-called educated and intellectual. The muzhik is sincere. He does not try to seem what he is not.' Herzen held, if rather sanguinely, that inter-muzhik agreements needed no documents, and were rarely broken; in the peasant's relationship to the authorities, on the other hand, his weapon was deceit and subterfuge, the only means available to him—and he continued to use it in Communist times, as can be seen in the work of all schools of Soviet writers from Sholokhov to Solzhenitsyn.

But for the Utopian intellectual it was one or the other, devil or angel. The young radicals of the 1870s, to the number of several thousaand, 'Went to the people'—stayed for months in the villages and tried to enlist the peasants in a socialist and revolutionary programme. This was a complete failure, producing negative effects on both sides. Turgenev's 'Bazarov' gives some of the feeling: 'I felt such hatred for this poorest pe€asant, this Philip or Sidor, for whom I'm to be ready to jump out of my skin, and who won't even thank me for it'—and even Bazarov did not suspect that in the eyes of the peasants he was 'something in the nature of a buffooning clown.'

It would not be true to say that all the intelligentsia suffered this revulsion, and early in the next century the Socialist Revolutionary party took up the peasant cause in a more sophisticated manner. But meanwhile Marxism had won over a large section of the radicals, and they were given ideological reason for dismissing the peasantry as the hope of Russia. This change of view was, of course, little more than a transfer of hopes and illusions from an imaginary peasant to an almost equally imaginary proletarian.

But as regards the 'backward' peasantry, one now finds expressions of hatred and contempt among the Marxist, and especially among the Bolshevik, intellectuals going far beyond Marxist theoretical disdain; and one can hardly dismiss this in accounting for the events which followed the October Revolution.

The townsman, particularly the Marxist townsman, was not even consistent in his view of what was wrong with the peasantry, varying between 'apathetic' and 'stupidly greedy and competitive.' Maxim Gorki, giving a view shared by many, felt that 'the fundamental obstacle in the way of Russian progress towards Westernization and culture' lay in the 'deadweight of illiterate village life which stifles the town'; and he denounced 'the animal-like individualism of the peasantry, and the peasants' almost total lack of social consciousness.' He also expressed the hope that 'the uncivilized, stupid, turgid people in the Russian villages will die out, all those almost terrifying people I spoke of above, and a new race of literate, rational, energetic people will take their place.'

The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, saw them as 'barbarian tillers of the soil, cruel and merciless, beasts of burden whose life provided no opportunity for the luxury of thought.' Marx had spoken of 'the idiocy of rural life,' a remark much quoted by Lenin. (In its original context it was in praise of capitalism for freeing much of the population from this 'idiocy'). Lenin himself referred to 'rural seclusion, unsociability and savagery'; in general he believed the peasant 'far from being an instinctive or traditional collectivist, is in fact fiercely and meanly
individualistic.' While, of a younger Bolshevik, Khrushchev tells us that 'for Stalin, peasants were scum.'

Avner Offer

2011-03-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

The First World War

If the gamble turned out badly, the losses could be as massive as they actually turned out to be. This is where we take leave of conventional rationality. Rationality (e.g. in economics) has room for risktaking, but hardly for risks on such a scale. Even Russian roulette is safer than deliberately entering a war with powers of equal or superior resources to one's own. A one-half probability of failure (surely it was no lower than that) is not a risk upon which any rational person would choose to wager such colossal stakes. Yet the leaders of Germany placed the fate of their political system and the property, livelihoods and lives of millions of their countrymen on a bet of this magnitude. Not only that, they continued to do so repeatedly during the war: in starting the battle of Verdun in 1916, the unrestricted submarine campaign of 1917 and the spring offensives of 1918. How can such action be explained?

Certainly not in economic terms: they chose to fly in the face of economics, and economics, in the widest sense, brought them down—as the blockade strategists in Britain had predicted. General Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War provides an insight into the military mind on the eve of the war. He affected to despise economic motives and, in passing, the United States of America and its 'plutocratic' values. The leaders of the American peace movement, he wrote,

appear to believe that public opinion must represent the view which the American plutocrats think most profitable to themselves. They have no notion that the widening development of mankind has quite other concerns than material prosperity, commerce and money-making.

A few pages later the General gives vent to the mystical and fatalistic dimension. Action is not to be judged by its consequences, but by the intentions that drive it.

For the moral justification of the political decision we must not look to its possible consequences, but to its aim and its motives, to the conditions assumed by the agent, and to the trustworthiness, honour, and sincerity of the considerations which led to action.

In another passage he wrote, 'Even defeat may bear a rich harvest.'

It is impossible to conclude this section without some speculation on the cast of mind that made this possible. The most striking feature about it is a fundamental incompetence: an unworthiness to manage the affairs of a great nation. This incompetence radiated from the very top downwards, and should provide a warning about the fitness of any group of persons, however capable, for handling the means of mass destruction. On 30 March 1911 Bethmann Hollweg spoke in the Reichstag, explaining his restraint in Morocco in terms of Bismarck's sagacious admonition, that,

Even victorious wars can only be justified when they are forced upon a nation, and we cannot see the cards held by Providence so closely as to anticipate the historical development by personal calculation.

Bernhardi quotes these words, but follows them with another epigram from Bismarck: 'Men Make History.' It was not calculation that finally drove the German leaders, but a reckless, fatalistic abandon.

Michael Connor

2011-03-05T03:23:00.000-08:00

The Invention of Terra Nullius

Surely Henry Reynolds knew terra nullius was never used in the eighteenth century? After all, he couldn't find an example for his books. He needed to tell his readers this. Throughout his book his usage and argumentation made terra nullius out to be the contemporary judicial means used to dispossess Aborigines of their land. The historians who used his books, the Aboriginal activists who quoted him, the students who learnt their history from him, all believed terra nullius was the authentic voice of the eighteenth century evicting Aborigines.

Before his confused/confusing definitions Reynolds asked 'what this obscure Latin concept actually means and if it was legitimately applied to Australia in the late eighteenth century.' The answer he gave, throughout his book, was 'no,' and as to what it actually meant his opinions were divided. Having authorised two meanings for terra nullius, he went on to offer others.

Several times in The Law of the Land, Reynolds presents literal meanings of terra nullius, and manages to disagree with himself each time. In one place he introduces the plural and claims the literal meaning is 'a land without owners.' In another he changes course and says the literal meaning is 'largely uninhabited.' Elsewhere he refers to tena nullius as 'uninhabited lands.' Ironically, one of the references he gave for his definition of terra nullius pointed out that uninhabited does not necessarily mean without sovereignty.

Accept Reynolds's view that the magic phrase was not 'legitimately applied to Australia in the late eighteenth century,' and the question arises of why we have muddied our history, law courts, and public discussions by using it? The British government took possession of the sovereignty and ownership of all the land. There are English words which may be used to clearly examine the ensuing stages of Aboriginal dispossession. Although terra nullius was a useful tool for modern politics, and its sudden withdrawal would release some hot air from the history writing of a generation of academics, we could really learn to live without it.

Terra nullius, with its meaning tightly controlled, could have been presented as a possible theory from late nineteenth and early twentieth century theorists to discuss British colonial settlement of Australia. It could have battled it out with other possible theories. We accepted it completely. We drove off the specific meaning of the term in favour of 'literal meanings.' Its general acceptance slanted historical discussion, and slowed a scholarly return to the archives for a necessary reappraisal of settlement. When scholars and students entered the archives looking for examples of terra nullius that is all they found: examples which seemed to fit the theory. They needed to look further afield for bits that didn't fit the mental template. And even as everyone fitted it into their books, articles, and conversations, there was no guarantee that there was even a shared understanding of what it meant.

The politics of modern land rights politics have thrown big questions at our small beginnings. How did this land become British? How were the Aboriginals dispossessed? Was it all really accomplished in a matter of moments as Phillip read his commission? For an historian, the answers raise questions of evidence. What sort of data is needed? Are all the answers to be found in inter-bureaucrat correspondence? Should any weight be given to the views of anonymous writers in colonial newspapers? How important are the adversarial arguments of lawyers, the opinions of judges, or the views of Colonial Official legal experts who had never seen the colony and perhaps knew little of its brief history? Did philosophy, Roman law, or books of law theory written years before the founding of New South Wales explain antipodean actions? How important, if at all, was a theory unheard of until over one hundred years after the colony was founded and not applied to our history for almost another hundred years?

Reynolds was rather strict with Mabo's Justice Daryl Dawson saying that, amongst other things, he had

failed to use many of the most obvious sources and did not pursue the issues in question with the rigour which might have been expected. The historical record is critical to his argument but it was not examined with sufiicient care.

Justice Dawson consulted the commissions of the early governors. Reynolds didn't. In The Law of the Land, these basic documents, the sources of British claims to sovereignty and crown ownership of the land, are missing. They are not hard to find. They begin on page one of volume one of the
Historical Records of Australia.

David Landes

2011-03-04T17:39:00.000-08:00

The Unbound Prometheus

In England, sumptuary laws were dead letters by the end of the sixteenth century; they were repealed by James I in 1604. Over the next two centuries, the trend toward homogeneity of expenditure—the effacement of vertical regional differences as well as horizontal social distinctions—continued. Contemporaries complained of the luxury of the lower classes, who dressed so as to be indistinguishable from their betters. This was an exaggeration; social lament as a literary genre is invariably hyperbolic. Besides, much of the elegance of the populace was meretricious, the result of an active trade in second-hand clothes. Even so, the very demand for cast-offs was evidence of the absence or decay of customary distinctions: the poor man could and did wear the same kind of coat as the rich. Similarly, contemporaries complained of the farmer's imitation of city ways, his abandonment of the rustic simplicity of yore. Again an exaggeration—yet the truth was that in no economy was the countryside so closely integrated into the commercial circuit; nowhere were the local pockets of self-sufficiency so broken down.

All of this was part of a general process of urbanization, itself a reflection of advanced commercialization and industrialization. London alone was a monster: Defoe estimated in 1725 that it contained a million and a half inhabitants, almost a quarter of the people in the kingdom. This figure is testimony, not to Defoe's accuracy, but to the impression the 'great wen' made on contemporaries; yet even conservative estimates put the population of the metropolitan area at about half that number. In the provinces, the cities and towns developed steadily after the Civil War; among the most rapidly expanding were unincorporated 'villages' like Manchester, which had perhaps 12,500 inhabitants in 1717 and 20,000 by 1758. An estimate of 15 per cent of the population in cities of 5000 and over by mid-century and 25 per cent by 1800 is probably close to the truth. By contrast, the French figure on the eve of the Revolution was something over 10 per cent; and Germany was even more rural.

But it was not only that England had more people living in cities than any other European country except perhaps Holland; it was the character of British urban life that made the pattern of settlement particularly significant. On the Continent, many of the cities were essentially administrative, judicial, ecclesiastical in function. Their populations consisted essentially of bureaucrats, professionals, soldiers, and the shopkeepers, artisans, and domestics to serve them. The city was not so much a node of economic activity, trading manufactures and mercantile services for the products of the countryside, as a political and cultural centre drawing tax revenues and rents from the rural population in return for government and by traditional right. Madrid is the classic example of this kind of agglomeration; but Paris was much like this, and perhaps a majority of the larger French provincial cities—including places like Arras, Douai, Caen, Versailles, Nancy, Tours, Poitiers, Aix, and Toulouse—were little else. In Germany, of course, the very fragmentation of political power was an incitement to the multiplication of semi-rural capitals, each with its court, bureaucracy, and garrison.

By contrast, the relatively smaller size of Britain's political apparatus and its concentration in London left the older provincial centres to somnolence and decay. Nothing is more striking about the map of Britain in the eighteenth century than the modernity of the urban pattern. The medieval county seats—Lancaster, York, Chester, Stafford—were overshadowed by younger places like Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham, and there was already a substantial shift of population in favour of the North and Midlands. Much of the increase, moreover, did not take place within the cities proper, but took the form of a thickening of the countryside. Numerous overgrown industrial villages sprang up—concentrations of hundreds of spinners and weavers in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, similar in many ways to the earlier rural agglomerations of East Anglia.

The pattern throughout was one of close contact and frequent exchange between city and land. Trade and shops went to the customers: the late A. P. Wadsworth noted the numerous advertisements of cottages-to-let for tradesmen in the villages around Manchester, reflecting on both sides the keen response to economic opportunity. In spite of the sparseness of the data, it seems clear that British commerce of the eighteenth century was, by comparison with that of the Continent, impressively energetic, pushful, and open to innovation. Part of the explanation is institutional: British shopkeepers were relatively free of customary or legal restrictions on the objects or character of their activity. They could sell what and where they would; and could and did compete freely on the basis of price, advertising, and credit. If most shopkeepers continued to haggle, many followed the lead of the Quakers in selling at fixed, marked prices. In so far as such methods prevailed, they conduced to a more efficient allocation of economic resources and lower costs of distribution.

In sum, the home market for manufactures was growing, thanks to improving communication, increase in population, high and rising average income, a buying pattern favourable to solid, standardized, moderately priced products, and unhampered commercial enterprise. How much it grew, however, one cannot say precisely; we have no statistics on domestic consumption.

Barry Rubin

2011-03-02T05:04:00.000-08:00

The Tragedy of the Middle East

After all, if foreigners were not to blame for the overwhelming problems facing the nation, the next likely culprit had to be the government itself. This is a common technique in politics, during all eras and everywhere in the world, but it has been used with particular effectiveness in the Middle East.

Syria's use of the Arab-Israeli dispute to justify and maintain its military presence and control of Lebanon as a satellite is a superb example of such an argument's indispensable usefulness. When Gibran Tueni, editor of the Lebanese newspaper al-Nahar, published an open letter to Syrian President Bashar al-Asad in 2000 asking him to withdraw Syria's army from Lebanon, Lebanon's President Emile Lahoud, always submissive to Syria, could squelch the rather mild request by responding, 'This broken record is played with pro-Israeli motivations every time there are developments that may favor Lebanese and Syrian interests.' Tueni answered sadly but uselessly, 'It is a pity that someone who calls for the minimum standards of sovereignty and independence for his country is accused of treason.' Yet that complaint could be extended to the way any call for reform has been treated in the Arab world.

Any proposal for reform could be squelched by labeling it an alien Western notion, as if every import were a Trojan horse sent to weaken Arab resolve or Iranian morality and thereby make them easy prey to conquest.

Since the Arabs were said to be imperiled by merciless and evil enemies—Western imperialism, Zionism, traitors at home—who were responsible for everything wrong, they must fight on and on, never losing but never winning. They could not devote more efforts to construction, for they must man the battlements. They cannot challenge their own governments, because the endless war requires national unity. And what could be better portrayed as an example of imperialist and racist thinking than the simple observation that Arab governments and societies might actually have some real responsibility for their own fate? This has been a profoundly crippling tendency. If the proper question to be asked is, 'Who did this to us?' the response must be to unravel a conspiracy, and the issue will be how to fight better. But if the question is, 'What did we do wrong?' then the next step must be to figure out how to fix the problem by changing one's own thinking, methods, and institutions. Moreover, to argue that solutions were possible only when the 'enemies' were defeated—which was never going to happen—meant the endless postponement of the steps needed to find real solutions. This was the catch-22 of Arab politics: Nothing can be done until Palestine is liberated or U.S. influence expelled, or until unity comes for all Arabs or Muslims, and since these things have not happened, then the desperately needed steps to solve the Arabs' problems must wait.

Lance Banning

2011-03-01T04:41:00.000-08:00

The Sacred Fire of Liberty

In a remarkable reversal of its previous position—'shameful,' Madison described it—the Presbytery dropped its customary opposition to religious taxes, providing that the act was fair to all denominations. With this important portion of the clergy 'as ready to set up an establishment which is to take them in as they were to pull down that which shut them out,' with the overwhelming weight of an increasing number of petitions favoring a bill, and with the pro-assessment forces willing to revise the marriage law and the incorporation bill to satisfy the main objections of dissenters, the prospect for successful legislation was growing day by day.

While the assessment bill was on the table, the House directed its attention to the new incorporation act, which carried on December 22 by a vote of 47 to 38. Although he still considered it 'exceptionable' in several respects, Madison abandoned his objections and voted with the majority. Some such act was clearly necessary to permit the church to hold and manage property, he wrote, and this one seemed as harmless as the circumstances would permit. Moreover, its defeat, he reasoned, might have doubled its supporters' 'eagerness' for the 'much greater evil' of the general assessment, to which the House immediately proceeded.

To Madison's dismay, support for the assessment showed few signs of cooling. The bill completed its preliminary readings by a vote of 44 to 42, and there was nothing left to do except to argue that a measure so important should be printed for the public's consideration before its final passage. In support of this appeal for a delay, Madison prepared one of the most elaborate speeches of his career. Sometime during the debates, in fact, he drafted outlines for at least two major speeches.

If he followed the surviving outlines, the shorter speech observed that the assessment bill required the courts to determine what was 'Christian.' How, he asked, were they to do so? Which Bible would they use, 'Hebrew, Septuagint, or Vulgate?' Which translation? How were judges to decide which books were canonical and which apocryphal when Catholics, Lutherans, and other Protestants disagreed? How should the courts interpret scripture? 'What clue' could guide them through the 'labyrinth' of Christian doctrine?

The longer speech placed state support in broader context. The tendency of the assessment bill, it opened, was to establish Christianity as a state religion, although religion was 'not within [the] purview of civil authority.' The fundamental issue, Madison insisted, was not whether religion was necessary, but whether an establishment was necessary for religion. Human beings were naturally religious, he maintained, but history showed that state establishments 'corrupted' the religious impulse. Contemporary Pennsylvania, other middle states, and early Christianity all showed that religion could thrive without state support, which would discourage immigration and might even lead Virginia's own dissenters to seek a freer climate. Patrick Henry, it was true, had warned that immorality had led to the collapse of several mighty states. But most such states had had established churches, Madison observed. So did most of the New England states, which were as troubled as Virginia. Rising immorality was not a product of the absence of a state-supported church; it was a consequence of wartime dislocations and 'bad laws.' The proper cures, accordingly, were peace, a better administration of justice, education, the personal example of leaders, laws that would 'cherish virtue,' and an end to the hope for a general assessment instead of voluntary support for religious bodies. The assessment bill, he finished, would 'dishonor Christianity.' The 'progress of religious liberty' was inconsistent with the resurrection of a state religion.

Madison was seldom a 'forensic' member of a legislative body (in his own disdainful phrase), but he could be uncommonly effective when he was. He was undoubtedly an able parliamentary tactician. On Christmas Eve, eight other delegates who had supported the incorporation act changed sides and voted with him to postpone the final reading of the assessment bill until November, 1785. The vote was 45 to 38, almost exactly a reversal of the numbers that had carried the Episcopal incorporation.

Madison's appeals and legislative strategy were not, of course, the only influence on this outcome. By itself, moreover, the postponement of the final reading of the bill did not assure defeat of the assessment. Yet Madison had plainly served as legislative leader of his side, and his defense of freedom left a memorable impression on his colleagues. Two of them, the brothers George and Wilson Cary Nicholas, immediately appealed for his continued leadership in a campaign to muster public opposition. They urged him to prepare a form for a petition, which could be circulated in the counties in the months before the next assembly as an instrument for shaping and expressing popular opinion. The product, his anonymous 'Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments,' became a cornerstone in the American tradition of religious freedom. It also proved perhaps its author's clearest and most eloquent enunciation of a set of fundamental principles that guided him throughout his public life.

Simon Sebag Montefiore

2011-02-25T18:26:00.000-08:00

Young Stalin

Many tycoons and middle-class professionals were sympathetic contributors to the Bolsheviks. Berta Nussimbaum, wife of an oil baron and mother of the writer Essad Bey, was a Bolshevik sympathizer. 'My mother,' Essad Bey says, 'financed Stalin's illicit communist press with her diamonds.' It remains astonishing how the Rothschilds and other oil barons, among the richest tycoons in Europe, funded the Bolsheviks who would ultimately destroy their interests. Alliluyev remembered these Rothschild contributions.

The Rothschild managing directing David Landau, regularly contributed to Bolshevik funds, as recorded by the Okhrana—whose agents noted how when Stalin was running the Baku Party, a Bolshevik clerk in one of the oil companies 'was not active in operations but concentrated on collecting donations and got money from Landau of the Rothschilds.' It is likely that Landau met Stalin personally. Another Rothschild executive, Dr Felix Somary a banker with the Austrian branch of the family and later a distinguished academic, claims he was sent to Baku to settle a strike. He paid Stalin the money. The strike ended.

Stalin regularly met another top businessman, Alexander Mancho, managing director of the Shibaev and Bibi-Eibat oil companies. 'We often got money from Mancho for our organization,' recalls Ivan Vatsek, one of Stalin's henchmen. 'In such cases, Comrade Stalin came to me. Comrade Stalin also knew him well.' Mancho was either a committed sympathizer, or Stalin was blackmailing him, because the businessman coughed up cash on request at even the shortest notice.

Stalin was also running protection-rackets and kidnappings. Many tycoons paid if they did not wish their oilfields to catch fire or 'accidents' to befall their families. It is hard to differentiate donations from protection-money, because the felonies Stalin now unleashed on them included 'robberies, assaults, extortion of rich families, and kidnapping their children on the streets of Baku in broad daylight and then demanding ransom in the name of some "revolutionary committee,"' states Sagirashvili, who knew him in Baku. The 'kidnapping of children was a routine matter at the time,' recalls Essad Bey, who as a boy never went out without a phalanx of three kochi bodyguards and a 'fourth servant, mounted and armed, who rode behind me.'

Baku folklore claims that Stalin's most profitable kidnapping was that of Musa Nageyev, the tenth richest oil baron, a notoriously stingy ex-peasant who so admired the Palazzo Cantarini in Venice that he built his own (bigger) copy—the majestic Venetian-Gothic Ismailiye Palace (now the Academy of Sciences). Nageyev was actually kidnapped twice, but his own accounts of these traumas were confused and murky. Neither case was ever solved, but Bolshevik involvement was suspected. Years later, Nageyev's granddaughter, Jilar-Khanum, claimed that Stalin jokingly sent the oil baron thanks for his generous contributions to the Bolsheviks.

It was said that the millionaires like Nageyev were keen to pay up after a 'ten-minute conversation' with Stalin. This was probably thanks to his system of printing special forms that read:

The Bolshevik Committee
proposes that your firm
should pay — roubles.

The form was delivered to oil companies and the cash was collected by Soso's Technical Assistant—'a very tall man who was known as 'Stalin's bodyguard,' visibly packing a pistol. Nobody refused to pay.'

The Bolshevik boss befriended organized crime in Baku, their operations and those of the Mauserists often overlapping. One gang controlled access to some wasteland in the Black City section. Stalin 'made an agreement with the gang only to let through Bolsheviks, not Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks had special passwords.' In Russia's wildest city, both sides used violence: the oil tycoons employed Chechen ruffians as oilfield guards. One of the richest oil barons, Murtuza Mukhtarov, who resided in Baku's biggest palace based on a French Gothic chateau, ordered his kochis to kill the young Stalin. Soso was badly beaten up by Chechens, probably on Mukhtarov's orders.

Stalin's secrecy was so absolute that the Mauserist Bokov said, 'It was sometimes so conspiratorial that we didn't even know where he was for six months! He had no permanent address and we only knew him as 'Koba.' If he had an appointment he never turned up on time; he turned up either a day early or a day later. He never changed his clothes, so he looked like an unemployed person.' Soso's comrades noticed that he was different from the usual passionate Caucasian. 'Sentiment was foreign to him,' says one. 'No matter how much he loved a fellow, he'd never forgive him even the tiniest spoiling of a Party matter—he'd skin him alive.'

So again he succeeded in raising money and guns, but with him there was always a human cost. The traditional Bolsheviks like Alexinsky and Zemliachka were 'very indignant at these expropriations' and killings. 'Stalin blamed one member for provocation. There was no definite evidence, but that person was forced out of the city, "judged," condemned to death and shot.'

Stalin prided himself on being what he called a praktik, a practical hardman, an expert on what he called 'black work,' rather than a chatty intelligent, but his gift was for being both. Lenin soon heard a storm of complaints about Stalin's banditry but by now, writes Vulikh, Stalin 'was the true boss in the Caucasus' with 'a lot of supporters devoted to him who respected him as the second person in the Party after Lenin. Among the intelligentsia, he was less loved, but everybody recognized that he was the most energetic and indispensable person.'

Soso had an 'electrical effect' on his followers, of whom he took good care. He had a talent for political friendship that played a major role in his rise to power. His roommate from Stockholm, Voroshilov, the eager, fair-haired and dandyish lathe-turner. joined him in Baku but fell ill. 'He visited me every evening,' said Voroshilov. 'We joked a lot. He asked if I liked poetry and recited a whole Nekrasov poem by heart. Then we sang together. He really had a good voice and fine ear.' 'Poetry and music', Stalin told Voroshilov, 'elevate the spirit!' When Alliluyev was arrested again, he worried about his family, so once released he came to consult Soso, who insisted he had to leave, giving him cash to move to Moscow. 'Take the money, you've children, you must look after them.'

Ronald Coase

2011-02-14T03:11:00.000-08:00

Essays on Economics and Economists

For that extensive division of labour required to maintain a civilized standard of living, we need to have the co-operation of great multitudes, scattered all over the world. There is no way in which this co-operation could be secured through the exercise of benevolence. Benevolence, or love, may be the dominant or, at any rate, an important factor within the family or in our relations with colleagues or friends, but as Smith indicates, it operates weakly or not at all when we deal with strangers. Benevolence is highly personal and most of those who benefit from the economic activities in which we engage are unknown to us. Even if they were, they would not necessarily in our eyes be lovable. For strangers to have to rely on our benevolence for what they received from us would mean, in most cases, that they would not be supplied: 'Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain to expect it from their benevolence only.'

Looked at in this way, Adam Smith's argument for the use of the market for the organisation of economic activity is much stronger than it is usually thought to be. The market is not simply an ingenious mechanism, fueled by self-interest, for securing the co-operation of individuals in the production of goods and services. In most circumstances it is the only way in which this could be done. Nor does government regulation or operation represent a satisfactory way out. A politician, when motivated by benevolence, will tend to favour his family, his friends, members of his party, inhabitants of his region or country (and this whether or not he is democratically elected). Such benevolence will not necessarily redound to the general good. And when politicians are motivated by self-interest unalloyed by benevolence, it is easy to see that the results may be even less satisfactory.

The great advantage of the market is that it is able to use the strength of self-interest to offset the weakness and partiality of benevolence, so that those who are unknown, unattractive, or unimportant will have their wants served.

Niall Ferguson

2011-02-10T23:18:00.000-08:00

The Ascent of Money

Germany's position in the summer of 1921 could have felt optimistic, and such foreign capital as did flow into the country after the war was speculative or 'hot' money, which soon departed when the going got tough.

Yet it would be wrong to see the hyperinflation of 1923 as a simple consequence of the Versailles Treaty. That was how the Germans liked to see it, of course. Their claim throughout the post-war period was that the reparations burden created an unsustainable current account deficit; that there was no alternative but to print yet more paper marks in order to finance it; that the inflation was a direct consequence of the resulting depreciation of the mark. All of this was to overlook the domestic political roots of the monetary crisis. The Weimar tax system was feeble, not least because the new regime lacked legitimacy among higher income groups who declined to pay the taxes imposed on them. At the same time, public money was spent recklessly, particularly on generous wage settlements for public sector unions. The combination of insufficient taxation and excessive spending created enormous deficits in 1919 and 1920 (in excess of 10 per cent of net national product), before the victors had even presented their reparations bill. The deficit in 1923, when Germany had suspended reparations payments, was even larger. Moreover, those in charge of Weimar economic policy in the early 1920s felt they had little incentive to stabilize German fiscal and monetary policy, even when an opportunity presented itself in the middle of 1920. A common calculation among Germany's financial elites was that runaway currency depreciation would force the Allied powers into revising the reparations settlement, since the effect would be to cheapen German exports relative to American, British and French manufactures. It was true, as far as it went, that the downward slide of the mark boosted German exports. What the Germans overlooked was that the inflation-induced boom of 1920-22, at a time when the US and UK economies were in the depths of a post-war recession, caused an even bigger surge in imports, thus negating the economic pressure they had hoped to exert. At the heart of the German hyperinflation was a miscalculation. When the French cottoned on to the insincerity of official German pledges to fulfil their reparations commitments, they drew the conclusion that reparations would have to be collected by force and invaded the industrial Ruhr region. The Germans reacted by proclaiming a general strike ('passive resistance'), which they financed with yet more paper money. The hyperinflationary endgame had now arrived.

Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, as Milton Friedman said. But hyperinflation is always and everywhere a political phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a fundamental malfunction of a country's political economy. There surely were less catastrophic ways to settle the conflicting claims of domestic and foreign creditors on the diminished national income of postwar Germany. But a combination of internal gridlock and external defiance—rooted in the refusal of many Germans to accept that their empire had been fairly beaten—led to the worst of all possible outcomes: a complete collapse of the currency and of the economy itself.

Judith Shklar

2011-02-02T05:01:00.000-08:00

Ordinary Vices

Fear is not just a vice, or a deformity of our character. It is the underlying psychological and moral medium that makes vice all but unavoidable. It is far more than just being afraid. One can be afraid of fear, because fear is the ultimately evil moral condition. It is so for the individual and for society, and that is what Montesquieu meant by despotism, the principle of which is fear.

Fearing fear may well drive us into our libraries or other places of withdrawal. Montesquieu had to recommend the vices that tend to bring us into public life and make us into free citizens. What else was there to arm us against despotism? Of rulers, therefore, no more is demanded than justice—no other virtues at all. That does, however, mean that they are required to live up to a higher standard of probity than are private persons. We are, of course, encouraged to cultivate the intellectual and social virtues, but only our legal obligations can be enforced. That is, in fact, the outlook of most Americans. We impose far higher standards of honesty and discipline upon public servants than upon people engaged in business or employed in any way in the private sector. That is a total reversal of the beliefs of Machiavelli and his disciples, who have always agreed that goodness is a private luxury that rulers cannot afford. Like them. Max Weber in this century has argued that there are two ethics, one obedient to the Sermon on the Mount, intent upon a pure conscience, and the other concerned only with outcomes and in pursuit of some political 'cause.' This stark choice between a public and a private ethos may seem especially real when one thinks about war and peace and similar life and death or public safety issues. In fact, the division of public and private imperatives is not so clear. Most politics are not a question of stark choices at all; they involve bargains, incremental decisions, adaptations, rituals, display, argument, persuasion, and the like. Decisions are rarely made by isolated and heroic individuals sacrificing their conscience and their honor. The Machiavellian ethical pathos and drama of choice are hardly ever relevant. A liberal government is expected to be more just and honest than its average citizens, and its agents are not charged with tasks that require them to be more vicious than, or even particularly different from, private citizens.

It is not possible to think of vices as simply either private or public. There are vices that are purely private, or that for the sake of political freedom are fenced off from even the scrutiny of public agents. But there are others that are both private and public. There are some that we tolerate only in public officials as agents of coercion. That means that the simple choice that Weber inherited from Machiavelli between a mere two roles, immoral politics and moral privacy, does not make much sense in a liberal democratic state. It is a leftover from the highly personal state of the early modern period, in which Weber often still seemed to live. His typical statesman is a heroic figure who must make enormous moral sacrifices for the sake of his country or ideology. His ethical conflicts are those of the aristocratic neoclassical drama of Corneille more than those that confront politicians in contemporary representative democracies. His were the politics of the great gesture, and they still appeal to those engaged intellectuals who like to think of 'dirty hands' as a peculiarly shaking, personal, and spectacular crisis. This is a fantasy quite appropriate to the imaginary world, in which these people see themselves in full technicolor. Stark choices and great decisions are actually very rare in politics. The sorts of choices that occur in public regularly are no different from those that have to be made by every single person who is responsible for other people and not just to them. No mother of a family can cultivate her conscience only; and if she does not calculate the consequences of her actions in a cool matter-of-fact way, her children will suffer the effects. What we look for both in public officials and in our friends is character. Not a set of discrete, heroic, ethically significant decisions, but the imperceptible choices of dispositions that are manifest in the course of a lifetime.

And character is an indissoluble amalgam of motives and calculations. No one specializes in that. Betrayal, especially, is built into relations of trust at every level of society—at home, in the office, and at war. As social actors, we all have unclean hands some of the time. It is not a glamourous melodramatic issue for conspicuous agents only. In matters of probity, far from permitting officials a great moral latitude, we are very strict about keeping their private hand out of the public till. The whole force of Weber's heroic drama is drawn from the obvious fact that there are special tasks that only public agents perform. Throughout history, war and punishment have been the primary functions of government. No liberal ever forgets that governments are coercive. Certainly, neither Kant nor Montesquieu nor Locke ignored this most undeniable of all facts. Weber chose to put it in a nutshell by defining the state as the holder of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It is not an adequate definition, but it does encourage demands for limited government and for justice as the sole public virtue, and underlines the political significance of putting cruelty first. All this and more is obviously an effort to reduce the threats that governmental force poses to liberty.

It is a mark of the ethical radicalism of Montesquieu and The Federalist that neither worried in the least about the consciences of rulers. They assumed that this was a moral relic that would cease to mean anything once absolute rulers and their confessors were replaced by an institutional 'system' that demanded only justice from public officials. That, in effect, was too limited a vision of leadership. Whether it be a psychological necessity or only the effect of electoral politics, personal leadership appears to be inescapable, and this is especially so in circumstances of danger, in what are perceived as 'crises' in international relations, intense domestic conflicts, or extreme economic disorders. Liberal democracies therefore continue to face the old threats of personalized politics, and they cannot ignore the character of conspicuous public figures. There has, after all, been only one incomparable George Washington. Not all the vices of public agents are therefore equally irrelevant, and that is why Montaigne's profound meditations upon cruelty and misanthropy, and his unconditional rejection of Machiavelli, even at the cost of unresolvable doubt, uncertainty, and conflict, seemed to me to be so enduringly relevant to the actualities of public force and coercion.

Doug Irwin

2011-01-24T04:59:00.000-08:00

Free Trade Under Fire

Trade improves economic performance not only by allocating a country's resources to their most efficient use, but by making those resources more productive in what they are doing. This is the second of John Stuart Mill's three gains from trade, the one he called 'indirect effects.' These indirect effects include 'the tendency of every extension of the market to improve the processes of production. A country which produces for a larger market than its own can introduce a more extended division of labour, can make greater use of machinery, and is more likely to make inventions and improvements in the processes of production.'

In other words, trade promotes productivity growth. The higher is an economy's productivity level, the higher is that country's standard of living. International trade contributes to productivity growth in at least two ways: it serves as a conduit for the transfer of foreign technologies that enhance productivity, and it increases competition in a way that stimulates industries to become more efficient and improve their productivity, often by forcing less productive firms out of business and allowing more productive firms to expand. After neglecting them for many decades, economists are finally beginning to study these productivity gains from trade more systematically.

The first channel, trade as a conduit for the transfer of foreign technologies, operates in several ways. One is through the importation of capital goods. Imported capital goods that embody technological advances can greatly enhance an economy's productivity. For example, the South Carolina textile magnate Roger Milliken (an active financier of anti-free-trade political groups) has bought textile machinery from Switzerland and Germany because domestically produced equipment is more costly and less sophisticated. This imported machinery has enabled his firms to increase productivity significantly. Between a quarter and half of growth in U.S. total factor productivity may be attributed to new technology embodied in capital equipment. To the extent that trade barriers raise the price of imported capital goods, countries are hindering their ability to benefit from technologies that could raise productivity. In fact, one study finds that about a quarter of the differences in productivity across countries can be attributed to differences in the price of capital equipment.

Advances in productivity are usually the result of investment in research and development, and the importation of foreign ideas can be a spur to productivity. Sometimes foreign research can be imported directly. For example, China has long been struggling against a devastating disease known as rice blast, which in the past destroyed millions of tons of rice a year, costing farmers billions of dollars. Recently, under the direction of an international team of scientists, farmers in China's Yunnan province started planting a mixture of two different types of rice in the same paddy. By this simple technique of biodiversity, farmers nearly eliminated rice blast and doubled their yield. Foreign R&D enabled the Chinese farmers to increase yields of a staple commodity and to abandon the chemical fungicides they had previously used to fight the disease.

At other times, the benefits of foreign R&D are secured by importing goods that embody it. Countries more open to trade gain more from foreign R&D expenditures because trade in goods serves as a conduit for the spillovers of productive knowledge generated by that R&D. Several Studies have found that a country's total factor productivity depends not only on its own R&D, but also on how much R&D is conducted in the countries that it trades with. Imports of specialized intermediate goods that embody new technologies, as well as reverse-engineering of such goods, are sources of R&D spillovers. Thus, developing countries, which do not conduct much R&D themselves, can benefit from R&D done elsewhere because trade makes the acquisition of new technology less costly. These examples illustrate Mill's observation that 'whatever causes a greater quantity of anything to be produced in the same place, tends to the general increase of the productive powers of the world.'

The second channel by which trade contributes to productivity is by forcing domestic industries to become more efficient. We have already seen that trade increases competition in the domestic market, diminishing the market power of any firm and forcing them to behave more competitively. Competition also stimulates firms to improve their efficiency; otherwise they risk going out of business. Over the past decade, study after study has documented this phenomenon. After the Cote d'Ivoire reformed its trade policies in 1985, overall productivity growth tripled, growing four times more rapidly in industries that became less sheltered from foreign competition; Industry productivity in Mexico increased significantly after its trade liberalization in 1985, especially in traded-goods sectors. Detailed studies of India's trade liberalization in 1991 and Korea's in the 1980s reached essentially the same conclusion: trade not only disciplines domestic firms and forces them to behave more like a competitive industry, but helps increase their productivity.

Vaclav Havel

2011-01-12T03:09:00.000-08:00

Open Letters

Could you imagine something that would more effectively fire a just mind—preoccupying it, then occupying it, and ultimately rendering it intellectually harmless—than the possibility of 'a struggle against war'? Is there a more clever means of deceiving men than with the illusion that they can prevent war if they interfere with the deployment of weapons (which will be deployed in any case)? It is hard to imagine an easier way to a totalitarianism of the human spirit. The more obvious it becomes that the weapons will indeed be deployed, the more rapidly does the mind of a person who has totally identified with the goal of preventing such deployment become radicalized, fanaticized and, in the end, alienated from itself. So a man sent off on his way by the noblest of intentions finds himself, at the journey's end, precisely where anonymous power needs to see him: in the rut of totalitarian thought, where he is not his own and where he surrenders his own reason and conscience for the sake of another 'uninhabitable fiction'! As long as that goal is served, it is not important whether we call that fiction 'human well-being,' 'socialism,' or 'peace.'

Certainly, from the standpoint of the defense and the interests of the Western world, it is not very good when someone says 'Better Red than dead.' But from the viewpoint of the global, impersonal power, which transcends power blocs and, in its omnipresence, represents a truly diabolical temptation, there could be nothing better. That slogan is an infallible sign that the speaker has given up his humanity. For he has given up the ability personally to guarantee something that transcends him and so to sacrifice, in extremis, even life itself to that which makes life meaningful. Patocka once wrote that a life not willing to sacrifice itself to what makes it meaningful is not worth living. It is just in the world of such lives and of such a 'peace'—that is, under the 'rule of everydayness'—that wars happen most easily. In such a world, there is no moral barrier against them, no barrier guaranteed by the courage of supreme sacrifice. The door stands wide open for the irrational 'securing of our interests.' The absence of heroes who know what they are dying for is the first step on the way to the mounds of corpses of those who are slaughtered like cattle. The slogan 'Better Red than dead' does not irritate me as an expression of surrender to the Soviet Union, but it terrifies me as an expression of the renunciation by Western people of any claim to a meaningful life and of their acceptance of impersonal power as such. For what the slogan really says is that nothing is worth giving one's life for. However, without the horizon of the highest sacrifice, all sacrifice becomes senseless. Then nothing is worth anything. Nothing means anything. The result is a philosophy of sheer negation of our humanity. In the case of Soviet totalitarianism, such a philosophy does no more than offer a little political assistance. With respect to Western totalitarianism, it is what constitutes it, directly and primordially.

In short, I cannot overcome the impression that Western culture is threatened far more by itself than by SS-20 rockets. When a French leftist student told me with a sincere glow in his eyes that the Gulag was a tax paid for the ideals of socialism and that Solzhenitsyn is just a personally embittered man, he cast me into a deep gloom. Is Europe really incapable of learning from its own history? Can't that dear lad ever understand that even the most promising project of 'general well-being' convicts itself of inhumanity the moment it demands a single involuntary death—that is, one which is not a conscious sacrifice of a life to its meaning? Is he really incapable of comprehending that until he finds himself incarcerated in some Soviet-style jail near Toulouse? Did the newspeak of our world so penetrate natural human speech that two people can no longer communicate even such a basic experience?

Roger Sandall

2010-12-10T05:03:00.000-08:00

The Culture Cult

Open society or closed culture? Individuality or collectivism? Universalism or ethnic particularity? Cosmopolitanism or nationalism? Economic liberalism or socialism? Atomism or organicism? Knowledge as independently-arrived-at truth, to be experimentally confirmed or falsified, or knowledge as communally authorized belief forever beyond appraisal as true or false? Freely adaptable modern mobility, interest in change and ability to handle it, openness to science and innovation—or roots fixed forever in unrelinquishable blood-soaked tribal soil? In Austria, with the transformation of Herder's cultural nationalism into nationalism per se, writes Ernest Gellner, 'The opposition between individualism and communalism between the appeal of Gesellschaft (society) and of Gemeinschaft (community), a tension which pervades and torments most societies disrupted by modernization, became closely linked to the hurly burly of daily political life and pervaded the sensibility of everyone.' In the terms employed in this book, for Gesellschaft read modern universal civilization and market economies; for Gemeinschaft read the emotional complexes and intimidating coercive ties associated with the waning communal world.

The decline of the communal is saturated in pathos. As Gellner writes, 'community is sung and praised by those who have lost it.' On this view its bards and celebrants nostalgically call to mind an ideal that has gone, an innocence which is destroyed, and an idyll which may in fact never have been. When it is alive, community is imperceptible, is hardly noticed, and provides a taken-for-granted matrix for events: 'It is lived, it is danced, it is performed in ritual and celebrated in legend, but it is hardly articulated in theory.' When it is about to die the communal culture which has been unconsciously accepted as an all-embracing umwelt now becomes consciously dwelt on, theorized, idealized, mythicized, and may, in some cases, proceed swiftly from the pathos of decline to the bathos of Disneyfication. But as Gellner says, the central argument concerning cultural identity, vitality, and authenticity, everywhere makes similar claims: 'Roots are everything. Rootlessness is not just wicked but deeply pathological and pathogenic.' Rootless cosmopolitanism is evil.

Along the path Gellner delineates lies the ominous marriage of cultural nationalism and political madness which, alas, anthropological enthusiasm for the glories of human collectives has never been willing to confront: 'The relatively gentle Herderian insistence on the life-enhancing quality of a local communal culture was in due course strengthened by a less benign element: Darwin mediated by Nietzsche. The vitality-conferring roots were to be not merely territorial-cultural, but also genetic. The legitimating community was not merely language-transmitting but also a gene-transmitting one....The line of development towards extreme and racist nationalism was clear and plausible.'

Trevor Wilson

2010-12-04T01:59:00.000-08:00

The Myriad Faces of War

Up to January 1917 the naval and military forces of Britain had generally been taking the war to the enemy. On the water the Royal Navy had instituted a blockade of Germany and had forced the High Seas Fleet to keep off the high seas. On land Britain had launched offensives against the Germans in Flanders and France and against the Turks at Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia.

Germany, by contrast, had so far made no direct attempt to knock Britain out of the war. Twice around Ypres during the first year of the struggle German forces had dealt savagely with the relatively small British army. And at sea in 1915 the limited number of U-boats had sunk a considerable body of British merchant ships. But these blows were not of the same order as those Germany had launched against France in the opening weeks of the war and again at Verdun in 1916—blows intended to eliminate the French from the ranks of the combatants.

In January 1917 this situation changed. The rulers of Germany determined that Britain should now become the adversary destined for swift elimination. This would not be done on land, given Britain's continued strength in manpower and in industrial resources. Instead advantage would be taken of Britain's acute vulnerability to naval blockade. Germany's enlarged submarine force would be employed to sink a large proportion of the merchant shipping approaching and leaving Britain's shores. This would have a double effect. Neutral vessels would soon refuse to run the U-boat gauntlet and so would cease trading with Britain altogether. And British shipping would become so depleted that it could no longer adequately supply the nation's civilian population, war machine, and expeditions abroad. The calculation was that the destruction of 600,000 tons of British shipping a month, combined with the total withdrawal of neutral shipping, would force Britain to sue for peace within six months. The German plan depended on the adoption of unlimited submarine warfare. That is, every merchant ship of Allied or neutral origin, within a large area of sea, would be considered fair game. And no regard was to be had for the safety of their passengers and crews. Attacks would be carried out without warning and, where appropriate, from beneath the sea.

Developments in the submarine war had, in any case, been pointing the Germans in this direction. The new U-boats that Germany was building had a considerably increased torpedo capacity, thus facilitating many more submerged attacks. And Britain's growing practice of arming its merchant ships, along with its use of Q-ships, was rendering submarine attacks on the surface both more perilous and less rewarding. As long as the U-boat could strike from beneath the sea, the weapons of merchantmen and Q-ships held no dangers.

Technical evolution, then, was directing German thinking towards the unrestricted use of the U-boat. What the country's rulers contributed was the calculation that the consequent sinking of neutral vessels would not be an unfortunate corollary. Rather, it would be the most lucrative part of the whole campaign. For whereas attacks on British shipping would deprive Britain only of that proportion of its merchant fleet that actually went to the bottom, the campaign against neutrals would accomplish far more. It would drive all neutral shipping from Britain's shores.

Germany's leaders, of course, were not under the illusion that in adopting this course they had nothing to lose. The United States would certainly become belligerent. President Wilson might be prepared to retreat from his stand on the Lusitania and kindred incidents, whereby he had refused to tolerate the sinking even of Allied passenger ships if American lives were thereby endangered. But he would never back down so far as to tolerate the course that was now being contemplated: the indiscriminate sinking of American-owned and -manned merchant ships. Nevertheless, the Kaiser's advisers calculated that this would not matter greatly. In their view, American industry and raw materials were already at the disposal of the Allies. So the only further contribution the United States could make was in manpower. But the USA had for the moment no army deserving consideration. Hence its attention would signify only if the war went on long enough for the Americans to raise and train an army that they could then transport to Europe. If all went according to German plans, this would never happen. The U-boat campaign would ensure that the war ended much earlier. And anyway, by the time the USA possessed a considerable army, the shipping required to carry it to the battlefield would have ceased to exist.

William Easterly

2010-12-02T03:04:00.000-08:00

The Elusive Quest for Growth

High inflation crazily inverted the lecture your grandfather gave you on how compound interest could multiply savings. In your grandfather's lecture, saving your pennies makes you rich if you wait long enough. In the inverse version, high inflation reduces riches to pennies if you wait too long.

Argentina sets the record for highest and longest inflation, with an annual average inflation of 127 percent per year from 1960 to 1994. Thus, Argentines had the most potential in the world for money meltdown. If an Argentine with the equivalent of $1 billion in savings had kept all of his money in Argentine currency since 1960, the real value of his financial holdings in 1994 would amount to a thirteenth of a penny. A candy bar that cost 1 Argentine peso in 1960 cost 1.3 trillion pesos in 1994. To avoid having to use trillions in prices for candy bars, Argentina had done numerous monetary reforms where it asked the public to exchange 1 zillion 'old pesos' for 1 'new peso.' Then prices were thereafter quoted in 'new pesos.'

It's not a big mystery why inflation creates bad incentives for growth. Because of the money meltdown, people try to avoid holding money during high inflation. Inflation is effectively a tax on holding money. But this avoidance of money comes at a price, because money is a very efficient mechanism for economic transactions. We can think of money as being one of the inputs into efficient production. Inflation is then like a tax on production.

Moreover, inflation diverts resources away from producing things to producing financial services. A study has found that financial systems, measured by the share of financial services in GDP, get bloated during high inflation, and so productive sectors get short shrift. This makes sense: individuals devote a lot of resources to protecting their wealth during high inflation, resources that get taken away from productive uses. People respond to the incentives to divert resources toward protecting their wealth and away from creating new wealth. Trying to have normal growth during high inflation is like trying to win an Olympic sprint hopping on one leg.

Cesar Grana

2010-11-24T03:12:00.000-08:00

Bohemian Versus Bourgeois

Romantic literature glorified strong passions, unique emotions, and special deeds. It despised normalcy, foresight, concern with customary affairs, and attention to feasible goals—everything of which the middle class was a daily example. Marx praised the bourgeoisie for its power to objectify the world. Literary men decried it for the same reason, seeing in this power a chill, analytical obsessiveness which would destroy the integrity of human experience, not only intellectually but psychologically. Romantic philosophers warned against the spirit of measurement because of what it did to human knowledge, splitting it into isolated parts.

The aesthetic rebels pointed to what it did to the human personality by draining it of stature and vitality for the sake of quantitative gain. The bourgeoisie represented ambition without passion, possessiveness without depth of desire, power without grandeur, everything that was spiritually paltry and anti-vital, everything that was inadequate and pettily self-protective, in a psychological and even a biological way. Greed was bourgeois, but so were carpet slippers and head colds.

From different moral and intellectual beginnings the two streams of anti-bourgeois agitation naturally came to different views of social action. The political writers—Marxists, Proudhonians, Saint-Simonians, Fourierists—concerned themselves with a social response to bourgeois rule which was conceived as a power counterthrust to power. These men applauded the material benefits made possible by bourgeois economic enterprise, but demanded an end to the new forms of injustice inaugurated by it. The literary rebels, on the other hand, were interested in the rights of the few. Their claims were made in the name of obeisance to taste, beauty, and the sovereignty of special intelligence and creative power. They did not, as we shall see, criticize the bourgeoisie so much for its heartlessness as for its vulgarity and the insignificance of its life aims. From such a 'spiritual' point of view it often appeared to literary men that the only important difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was the capacity of the first to exploit the second. Aside from this the two seemed one in their common devotion to material gratifications. In other words, the literary rebels were individualistic without being democratic, just as they tended to be esoteric and pessimistic; socialists and reformists, of course, tended to be progressive, scientific, and optimistic. Seeing themselves as a small, embattled company of select spirits in the midst of a massive onslaught of materialistic grasping, the literary men became self-conscious, easily threatened, and almost unappeasable in their intellectual fastidiousness. But it would be wrong to say that they had no view of the social order or the proper society. They did. It was that of a hierarchical world resting on the discipline established by reverence to intelligence and to the spiritual poise and aesthetic and moral superiority of a new aristocracy—themselves.

Mark Mazower

2010-11-20T01:58:00.000-08:00

Dark Continent

The death camps formed part of a larger 'concentration camp universe' in which the SS ruled over hundreds of thousands of inmates in a vast network of camps stretching right across Europe. The boundaries of this 'universe' stretched as far north as Norway, as far south as Crete. By the end of the war, some 1.6 million people had been incarcerated, of whom over one million had died (in addition to those deliberately targeted for extermination). In Europe as a whole there were more than 10,000 camps, including—in addition to the eight extermination camps and the twenty-two main concentration camps with their 1,200 offshoots—over four hundred ghetto camps, some twenty-nine psychiatric homes and thirty children's homes where patients were murdered, twenty-six camps in the occupied eastern territories where mass murder was institutionalized, as well as numerous others housing POWs, civilian workers, juveniles or 'Germarnizable' east Europeans. Some thirty-three nationalities were to be found among the inmates at Dachau, over fourteen in Ravensbruck. The conditions of work were so oppressive that even many so-called labour camps were regarded by the inmates as centres of extermination. Describing the granite quarry at Gross-Rosen, near Breslau, a French doctor who arrived there from Auschwitz noted: 'Nowhere did I see individual murders carried out with such dexterity as at Grossrosen; murder was practised without qualms, by the kapos, by the camp police, by the SS and their dogs. With consummate skill they could kill a man with two or three blows.'

The inmates of these camps provided the basis for the main economic activity of the SS, which by 1944 extended from mining to heavy industry, from land reclamation to scientific 'research.' Four hundred and eighty thousand of the 600,000 prisoners in the camps in late 1944 were termed fit for work. Their tasks included sorting the possessions of dead prisoners for distribution to the Waffen-SS or other departments, building, quarrying and mining, as well as manufacturing in the Buna works and other industrial operations. Like the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the wartime Reich became a slave labour economy.

In February 1944 armaments czar Speer enlisted Himmler's help in 'deploying concentration camp inmates in functions that I regard as especially urgent.' This request inaugurated a rapid expansion of slave labour in munitions, in aircraft construction and particularly in building the underground missile works at 'Dora' and Peenemunde. Death rates here were horrendous: 2,882 of 17,000 workers died on the 'Dora' project within a few months: Speer regarded the project as a 'sensational success.' Overall, some 140,000 prisoners were used by Speer while 230,000 were utilized as slave labour by industrial firms in the private sector. By this point the armaments crisis had reached such a point, that for the first time anti-Semitic ideology was overridden and Hungarian Jews were moved from Auschwitz as additional labourers.

Barbarossa also extended the range of SS responsibilities in other directions. Terror replaced the rule of law in the East, and Himmler was authorized to deal with civilians directly without reference to the courts. The Waffen-SS became Himmler's army, growing from around 75,000 men in 1939-40 to nearly 500,000 by late 1944, part-threat part-partner to the Wehrmacht and as such a key instrument for Hitler in his gradual Nazification of the Army. The SS was given responsibility for policing the occupied territories in the East, while SS-Gruppenfuhrer Bach-Zelewski was placed in charge of coordinating anti-partisan operations.

Needless to say, such operations resulted in enormous destruction and loss of life. The basic strategy was 'to answer terror with terror.' Reprisal ratios were set for attacks on German life or property. As a result thousands of villages were burned down and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in the course of 'cleansing operations.' Their impact upon partisan activity was almost certainly counter-productive, driving young men into clandestine activity. Efforts at a more sophisticated counter-insurgency strategy would have to wait several decades: after 1945 European colonial powers, and the Americans, studied and learned much from the failures of Nazi retaliatory anti-guerrilla policies.

While the partisans never really posed a significant military threat to German rule, they did obstruct the process of Germanization. Here, too, Barbarossa made Nazi thinking more extreme and more ambitious. Following the conquest of the Ukraine and Belorussia, SS town planners lost no time in drawing up proposals for new small German towns dotted across the Ukraine. 'General Plan East' envisaged a massive settlement programme stretching from Lithuania to the Crimea over twenty-five years. At Auschwitz, inmates dug fish ponds and built barns for model farms where Nazi colonists could be trained before heading east.

In the real world, however, certain difficulties with the entire Germanization idea were becoming apparent. One was corruption, for among the Germans from the Old Reich was a high proportion of 'gold-diggers' (or 'golden pheasants,' as they were known) and carpet-baggers, attracted by the prospects of quick riches and easy plunder. By contrast, few farmers wanted to make the move. Settlers felt exposed in rural areas where their life and property were endangered by the embittered local population.

Ironically—given the regime's obsession with 'living-space'—there did not seem to be enough settlers for the enormous amount of territory which Himmler dreamed of colonizing. 'Well, Kamerad, how are you getting on?' asked the local peasant leader in a Nazi paper of the time. 'Too much land,' is the response, as the unwilling farmer looks helplessly into the distance.' 'The proportions between space and people have been reversed,' commented another critic in 1942. 'The problem of how to feed a great people in a narrow space has changed into that of the best way of exploiting the conquered spaces with the limited numbers of people available.'

As the regime cast around for volunteers, the screening of potential colonists threw up some knotty problems for the racial theorists: some party hardliners were willing to take any suitable-looking candidates, even if their ties with Germany were tenuous; others insisted that knowledge of language and culture was more important than physical attributes. Some even speculated that if the SS brought home too many racially superior specimens from Russia, the inhabitants of the Reich might develop an inferiority complex and start a race war! On the other hand, of the 35,000 unwilling Slovenes, who were forcibly brought to Germany, only some 16,000 were finally reckoned suitable for Germanization; as most were the relatives of Slovene partisans, it is surprising that the number was so high. The rest, together with others from Luxembourg and Alsace, had to be kept in detention camps for the duration of the war.

The limits imposed by wartime reality on Himmler's demographic engineering were sharply revealed in the case of Zamosc, a town south of Lublin where a special effort was made to create a planned settlement of Volksdeutscbe. In this, the only case where the SS brought its colonization schemes anywhere near completion, over 10,000 Poles were removed from their homes to make way for German settlers. Half the Poles fled into the forests, where they joined the Underground and raided farms and villages; the rest were screened for racial purity and deported. Twenty-five thousand Germans were brought into an area still inhabited by 26,000 Ukrainians and 170,000 Poles. They were, a propagandist boasted, 'the first German cell of the modern eastern colonization, reawakened by this search to a pulsating German colonial life.' But by early 1944, the local authorities were already trying to persuade Himmler to abandon the colony and evacuate the settlers westwards: assaults on their farms were a regular occurrence and their menfolk were sleeping in fields to avoid being killed by the Underground.

Yet Himmler and Hitler stuck doggedly to their vision of a German empire in the East and left the evacuation of their hardy colonists as late as possible. This lack of contingency planning for withdrawal was but one aspect of the basic unreality in their plans. Their racist colonialism was doomed to failure; it was an imitation of Habsburg frontier policy without Habsburg political flexibility. They had created such hatred among the local population that in the absence of 'an overpowering police machine' the numbers of colonists required to hold vast areas of the former Soviet Union for Germany were beyond the grasp of Berlin. Hider's long-term policy had been to see '100 million Germans settled in these territories.' But such numbers simply did not exist. The Nazis wanted to turn Germans into peasants, but most Germans refused. Whether, as Himmler believed, the returning war heroes from the front would have welcomed a farm-stead in Poland or the Ukraine as their reward must be open to doubt.

As the Red Army advanced, the resettlement scheme disintegrated of its own accord. Between August 1943 and July 1944, some 350,000 Crimean Germans were evacuated to western Poland; others followed from the Ukraine and Belorussia. The German scorched-earth policy meant that it became impossible for many colonists to remain even had they wanted to. By early 1945, hundreds of thousands of German refugees were trekking westwards towards the Reich in a vast spontaneous exodus.

At the same time an even grimmer series of forced marches betrayed the dark side of the racial dream. In the last phase of the Final Solution, the extermination camps and concentration camps were closed down and, in some cases, destroyed, and the surviving inmates were driven through the snow on long marches in the general direction of the Reich. Of the 714,211 prisoners still in the camps in January 1941 around 250,000 died on these death marches.

A variety of motives lay behind the marches—including the SS's reluctance to allow prisoners to fall into Allied hands as well as the desire to exploit them as slave labourers. But in some cases, journeys on foot or by train were so aimless that it seems the intention was simply to 'continue the mass murder in the concentration camps by other means.' Marchers were starved, beaten and shot, particularly when they became too exhausted to keep up with tbe others. In addition to the brutality of the guards, the victims often had to contend with the active hostility of the civilian German population they passed through. Instances of help are also recorded. 'In Christianstadt German women tried to give us bread, but the women guards wouldn't
permit it,' recorded one former prisoner. 'One German woman with a human heart cried: "Ihr Elende, Ihr Ungluckliche." The brutal woman guard yelled: "What are you doing pitying Jews?"' It is worth noting that there are no known instances of German bystanders losing their lives for expressing sympathy in the hearing of SS guards. Even so, disapproval and indifference outweighed pity: by early 1945, with the end in sight, many German civilians saw themselves as the prime victims of the war and remained blind to the misfortune of the marchers passing through their midst.

In this terminal phase of Hitler's empire, the barriers which had previously existed between the ordered world of the Volksgemeinschaft and the underworld of the camps now dissolved. The inmates emerged 'like Martians' into the outside world. Their guards were no longer solely SS men, sworn to secrecy; they included retreating soldiers, civilians, Party officials and Hitler Youth members. Random shootings and massacres took place no longer within the camp perimeter, but by roadsides, in woods and on the outskirts of towns and villages in Germany and Austria.

The ultimate technical problem arising from mass murder practised on this scale was how to dispose of the dead. In the extermination camps, corpses were burned on enormous pyres or in ovens. The random, ubiquitous killing of the final months could not be so easily tidied up. As the Germans retreated from the Lublin region, they made hasty and unsuccessful efforts to hide the traces of genocide. Klukowski noted with horror 'the odor of decomposing bodies from the Jewish cemetery' where mass graves had been dug.

Steven Pinker

2010-10-12T05:09:00.000-07:00

The Blank Slate

The genes have metaphorical motives—making copies of themselves—and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain—heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level).

I suspect there is another reason why the explanations are so easily confused. We all know that people sometimes have ulterior motives. They may be publicly generous but privately greedy, publicly pious but privately cynical, publicly platonic but privately lusting. Freud accustomed us to the idea that ulterior motives are pervasive in behavior, exerting their effects from an inaccessible stratum of the mind. Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error. Brooklyn is not expanding.

Even people who can keep genes and people apart in their minds might find themselves depressed. Psychology has taught us that aspects of our experience may be figments, artifacts of how information is processed in the brain. The difference in kind between our experience of red and our experience of green does not mirror any difference in kind in lightwaves in the world—the wavelengths of light, which give rise to our perception of hue, form a smooth continuum. Red and green, perceived as qualitatively different properties, are constructs of the chemistry and circuitry of our nervous system. They could be absent in an organism with different photopigments or wiring; indeed, people with the most common form of colorblindness are just such organisms. And the emotional coloring of an object is as much a figment as its physical coloring. The sweetness of milk, the scariness of heights, and the vileness of carrion are fancies of a nervous system that evolved to react to those objects in adaptive ways.

The sciences of human nature seem to imply that the same is true of right and wrong, merit and worthlessness, beauty and ugliness, holiness and baseness. They are neural constructs, movies we project onto the interior of our skulls, ways to tickle the pleasure centers of the brain, with no more reality than the difference between red and green. When Marley's ghost asked Scrooge why he doubted his senses, he said, 'Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!' Science seems to be saying that the same is true of everything we value.

But just because our brains are prepared to think in certain ways, it does not follow that the objects of those thoughts are fictitious. Many of our faculties evolved to mesh with real entities in the world. Our perception of depth is the product of complicated circuitry in the brain, circuitry that is absent from other species. But that does not mean that there aren't real trees and cliffs out there, or that the world is as flat as a pancake. And so it may be with more abstract entities. Humans, like many animals, appear to have an innate sense of number, which can be explained by the advantages of reasoning about numerosity during our evolutionary history. (For example, if three bears go into a cave and two come out, is it safe to enter?) But the mere fact that a number faculty evolved does not mean that numbers are hallucinations. According to the Platonist conception of number favored by many mathematicians and philosophers, entities such as numbers and shapes have an existence independent of minds. The number three is not invented out of whole cloth; it has real properties that can be discovered and explored. No rational creature equipped with circuitry to understand the concept 'two' and the concept of addition could discover that two plus one equals anything other than three. That is why we expect similar bodies of mathematical results to emerge from different cultures or even different planets. If so, the number sense evolved to grasp abstract truths in the world that exist independently of the minds that grasp them.

Perhaps the same argument can be made for morality. According to the theory of moral realism, right and wrong exist, and have an inherent logic that licenses some moral arguments and not others. The world presents us with non-zero-sum games in which it is better for both parties to act unselfishly than for both to act selfishly (better not to shove and not to be shoved than to shove and be shoved). Given the goal of being better off, certain conditions follow necessarily. No creature equipped with circuitry to understand that it is immoral for you to hurt me could discover anything but that it is immoral for me to hurt you. As with numbers and the number sense, we would expect moral systems to evolve toward similar conclusions in different cultures or even different planets. And in fact the Golden Rule has been rediscovered many times: by the authors of Leviticus and the Mahabharata; by Hillel, Jesus, and Confucius; by the Stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire; by social contract theorists such as Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke; and by moral philosophers such as Kant in his categorical imperative. Our moral sense may have evolved to mesh with an intrinsic logic of ethics rather than concocting it in our heads out of nothing.

But even if the Platonic existence of moral logic is too rich for your blood, you can still see morality as something more than a social convention or religious dogma. Whatever its ontological status may be, a moral sense is part of the standard equipment of the human mind. It's the only mind we've got, and we have no choice but to take its intuitions seriously. If we are so constituted that we cannot help but think in moral terms (at least some of the time and toward some people), then morality is as real for us as if it were decreed by the Almighty or written into the cosmos. And so it is with other human values like love, truth, and beauty. Could we ever know whether they are really 'out there' or whether we just think they are out there because the human brain makes it impossible not to think they are out there? And how bad would it be if they were inherent to the human way of thinking? Perhaps we should reflect on our condition as Kant did in his Critique of Practical Reason: 'Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect, on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.'

Francois Furet

2010-10-04T03:03:00.000-07:00

The Passing of an Illusion

Today, it is hard to imagine the hatred aroused by parliamentary deputies at the time. The deputy was hated as the essence of all the lies of bourgeois politics. He symbolized oligarchy posing as democracy, domination posing as law, corruption lurking beneath the affirmation of republican virtue. The deputy was seen as exactly the opposite of what he pretended to be, of what he ought to be: in theory, the representative of the people; in reality, the man through whom money—that universal master of the bourgeois—takes possession of the will of the people. He was plutocracy disguised as politics. With this image, which in the nineteenth century was shared by everyone from the extreme Right to the extreme Left, the critique of the idea of the 'representation' of the people inseparable from modern democracy reached its peak. After World War I, it was reinforced by the psychology of the soldiers who had emerged from that terrible ordeal, a war that had been voted for but not undergone by members of parliament. Even when it took the form of a constituent assembly, ennobled by the French precedent, an elected assembly elicited little indulgence from Lenin in January of 1918. The dictatorship of the proletariat, inscribed in historical necessity and incarnated by the Bolshevik Party, could dispense with the vicissitudes of a vote and the incertitudes of a parliament; Mussolini, decked out in the values of war and fortified by the violence exercised by his partisans in Italy, had merely to bend the deputies to his will.

What was lost in both cases, along with the political abstraction of representation and juridically abstract law, was the idea of the constitutional state. The substitution of a party or its leader for the vote of the citizens or their elected representatives did away with democratic legitimacy and legality. On the one hand, the seat of power was henceforth occupied permanently in the name of its essential identity with a class chosen by history or with a national community superior to all others—an identity of an ontological order, bearing no relation to the empirical contingency of a vote and making nonsense out of political competition arbitrated by an election. On the other hand, the party or person, or both, now in power were no longer encumbered by laws, for which they tended to substitute or superimpose their own will. For them, history was merely the bearer of a law constituting the relationship between the state and its citizens—a dynamic of the forces between classes and between peoples. Revolution was the most constant and natural embodiment of that dynamic.

Disdain for the law as a nominal disguise for bourgeois domination, apology for force as the midwife of history—these themes existed well before the beginning of the twentieth century in Western political thought and were particularly virulent in the decades preceding the Great War, both on the right and on the left. On this subject, Georges Sorel remains one of the most interesting authors of the period, both for the tenacity with which he detested and denounced the pusillanimity of bourgeois parliamentarianism and for the hopes he invested in violence, that great, hidden truth of the modern world. Though an interesting writer, he was never quite to be trusted, for he navigated between revolutionary syndicalism and Action francaise, was anti-Semitic, and admired both Lenin and Mussolini—which is precisely why we should be curious about his writings. His work is of interest not only on account of its prescient aspect but because it allows us, for once, to measure the distance between theory and practice, and even between intellectuals and real history.

In Sorel's thought, violence is inseparable from creation. Infused by a great idea—the general strike—its role was to tear away the web of lies that covered society and to restore moral dignity to individuals and meaning to their collective existences. As in Nietzsche's thought, it facilitated a reunion of humanity with its own grandeur, beyond the reach of the universal pettiness of democratic times. The bourgeoisie lived in hypocrisy; class struggle brought virtue back onto the public scene to the benefit of the proletariat. It lent violence an ethical goal and turned the revolutionary activist into a hero. The reason the proponents of the general strike admired Lenin and Mussolini was that they saw them as two prodigies of volition who had taken charge of their peoples in order to realize the new humanity. Poor Georges Sorel! Intellectually a son of Proudhon, an individualist and an anarchist, he was filled with admiration for the founders of regimes in comparison to which the despised bourgeois state looked like a libertarian Utopia! He saw only the aspects of those regimes that fit with his own passions and ideas. Lenin was the successor to the great czars, as revolutionary as Peter the Great and as Russian as Nicholas I. Mussolini belonged to the betrayed tradition of the republican Risorgimento. By marrying national renaissance with the socialist idea returned to its revolutionary vocation, these two 'leaders of peoples' forcibly destroyed the bourgeoisie order in the name of a higher concept of the community.

In fact, neither the Red Terror that Lenin exercised in order to retain power, nor the Fascist Terror used by Mussolini in order to gain power, had much to do with the philosophical idea of violence developed by Sorel. Lenin's and Mussolini's Terrors were born of an event—the war—not of an idea. Rather than products of an unprecedented conviction, they were part of a general revival of revolutionary means of domination through fear.

The war generalized the dual habit of violence and passivity. It gave European nations the worst kind of political education just as it was mobilizing populations into the military, down to the last citizen. The Russian Revolution, even the February one, was no exception to the rule. On the contrary, it combined military defeat, governmental incompetence, and revolutionary ineptitude and was incapable of establishing a constitutional order. It was the first event to show that the postwar period was still at the mercy of the passions and expedients of the war. In October, Lenin seized power not because of his philosophical ideas but in spite of them. It was circumstance that opened the way to his inflexible will, in what was a most improbable context for a Marxist. Mussolini did not triumph in 1922 because he held fast to a doctrine but because his adversaries were weak, timid, or both. The postwar political world as prefigured by these two men—each of whom claimed to be its exclusive guide—was not, no matter what they said, one of Sorelian violence. It was a world of political gangsterism that happened to be supported by favorable conditions.

Domestic political battles had lost the body of rules that had been etched into and had become part of the workings of European mores and institutions during the nineteenth century. Emancipated from civilization's constraints, the passionate wellsprings that animated those rules grew more powerful and universal than ever. Hatred of money, egalitarian resentment, and national humiliation resonated all the more as the leaders, not to be outdone, fanned the flames. While remaining opportunistic tacticians, the leaders both shared and, at the same time, manipulated the passions liberated by the war. As European politics took a turn for the doctrinal—Bolshevism and Fascism were doctrines, after all—it also became increasingly elementary: first, it transformed ideas into beliefs; and, second, any means were considered acceptable, starting with the elevation of deception and assassination to the status of civic virtues. You could kill your fellow citizens like enemies in a war. They need only belong to the wrong class or to an opposing party. The denunciation of legality as a 'formal' lie led to the 'real' exercise of arbitrary power and of terror. Whoever was in power had the right to designate the adversaries he needed to exterminate.

Thus, in both Russian Bolshevism and Italian Fascism we find a two-tiered political system in which a philosophy of history coexisted with a political method, the former made up of noble intentions and ideas, the latter of expedience. The former was the poetry, the latter the prose. Fascism lost its poetry with World War II, whereas Bolshevism used it as an opportunity to conceal its prose. In attempting to understand Europe during this period, no historian can sidestep the fact that Mussolinian Fascism was a doctrine and a hope for millions of people. It lacked a great intellectual forebear, but it sought to get rid of the bourgeoisie in the name of the new humanity and, moreover, managed to co-opt a large part of the intellectual avant-garde—the futurists, those nostalgic for the enthusiasm of the Risorgimento, Marinetti, Ungaretti, Gentile, and even Croce if only briefly.

Tyler Cowen

2010-09-28T03:00:00.000-07:00

Creative Destruction

Although Gandhi complained that British imports were damaging the Indian textile industry, Indian producers had practiced a comparable form of cultural imperialism for centuries. The Indians flooded southeast Asia with their high-quality textile products, starting as early as the first century A.D. and continuing through the present day. India was dominant in the African trade as well, especially after the slave routes opened up. The development of Indian handwoven textiles relied on 'exploiting' these external markets.

Indian penetration of other Asian markets was so strong that some of them erected import barriers against the Indian products. Thailand, for instance, enforced import restrictions and sumptuary laws to the detriment of the Indian trade. The British had once sought protection against Indian cloth as well. In the eighteenth century, Indian cloth was greatly popular in Britain. Hand-painted cotton chintz was very popular in European markets, especially in England, and revolutionized European textile styles. An English ban on chintz failed to keep the product out, just as a 'buy domestic cloth' movement, an English precursor of Gandhi's Swadeshi movement, failed. The textiles were so highly demanded that they entered England through the Netherlands. These forms of cultural imperialism, as practiced by Indians, supported the industries that Gandhi later claimed were victimized by British cultural imperialism.

The very notion of Gandhi's Swadeshi movement was based on foreign influences. The Swadeshi writers had been strongly influenced by John Ruskin, William Morris, and the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement of Great Britain. These individuals decried the effects of commerce on art and called for a return to the indigenous production of national handicrafts. Yet the Arts and Crafts movement borrowed from foreign influences heavily. William Morris, who produced some of the finest carpets in British history, looked to Persian weaving for inspiration about design.

Adrian Goldsworthy

2010-08-20T03:53:00.000-07:00

The Fall of the West

Britain broke up into many separate communities. It was not simply a reversion to the old tribes pre-dating Roman rule. Too much time had passed for these to have great meaning and, instead, the administrative states created by the Romans had more significance. Even so, the powers that would emerge did not follow these boundaries very precisely. Instead, new states or kingdoms were created. Most, if not all, were ruled by kings—or tyrants, as Gildas and other sources tend to dub them. They may not have been the only authorities, and some civic leaders seem to have continued to exist, but such warlords were undoubtedly stronger than any other powers to emerge. Central imperial power had gone and in its place anyone capable of controlling enough force, influence and wealth was able to carve out a kingdom.

A source written in Gaul in the middle of the fifth century talks of Britain being 'devastated by a Saxon invasion in 410. There is no archaeological evidence for this attack, but then the same is true of most barbarian raids on Britain and other parts of the empire. Certainly, settlement by Saxons or other north German peoples in early fifth-century Britain seems to have been limited to a few small communities in the south-east. These may as easily have been mercenaries brought in by British leaders—or before that by the imperial authorities—as settlers who seized territory by force. The example of Alaric's Goths shows that the same group could easily appear in both guises over the course of just a few years. The attacks in 410 were most likely heavy raids and need not have involved huge numbers of warriors or any attempt at permanent occupation. Some might prefer to date the attacks earlier and associate them with the ones that are supposed to have provoked the rebellion against Constantine. Alternatively, Saxon attacks may have become heavier to exploit the weakness in Britain following the expulsion of the imperial authorities.

Saxon raids posed a problem, especially to those communities in vulnerable areas. The same was true of plundering bands of Picts, Scots and Irish. All were likely to have been quite small-scale, especially when the attackers came by sea. Roman rule in Britain was not ended by outside attacks, nor were the British powers that emerged rapidly overrun by these foreign enemies. There is some sign of the Britons organising to combat their foes, especially on Hadrian's Wall where several forts were reoccupied in the fifth century. Sometimes the evidence of activity is slight, but at Birdoswald a large timber hall was built on the foundations of the Roman granary. Someone also repaired the defences at Housesteads, although in earth rather than stone. At the very least this suggests local war leaders with warbands were based in partially restored former army bases. One scholar would even see this as the sign that a leader emerged able to revive something of the old military command of the Dux Britanniarium, albeit doubtless on a more modest scale.

Britain's kings and warlords most likely fought each other as often as foreign enemies—the Romans had no monopoly on civil war—and the fragmentation of the provinces into many small kingdoms does not suggest harmony. Like the emperors, it would be surprising if they did nor employ barbarians as allies or mercenaries to fight against their neighbours and rivals. For at least a few decades it was British leaders who remained in control throughout the old Roman diocese. No light was switched off, immediately extinguishing all aspects of culture and life from the Roman period. Most cities and towns continued to be occupied, as did many villas. Some substantial buildings were built within the old walls of towns, even if they were invariably of timber construction. Systems to supply water remained in use for most of the fifth century in at least one case being repaired. Some baths continued to function, but in general these were one of the first things to decay and be abandoned both in cities and at villas. Very soon no one had the skill or wealth to maintain such sophisticated pieces of engineering, let alone build new ones. There were also more mundane changes. It quickly became rare to use pottery that was not made locally, and before long the potters ceased producing wheel-turned pottery.

Some things survived, but that is not to say that the changes were not major and fairly rapid—certainly within a generation—even if they were not instant. Life in Britain became less sophisticated, with few signs of prosperity comparable to the Roman period. The wealthiest were cushioned to some extent, and it was easier for them to leave and settle in Brittany, but their comforts were fewer both there and in Britain itself. Western Britain, notably Wales, Cornwall and Cumbria, had been amongst the least developed parts of the Roman province. Paradoxically this may have changed in the century or so after Roman rule, with these areas becoming a little more 'Roman' and almost certainly more thoroughly Christian. There is no good evidence for a substantial pagan community in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries before the creation of the Saxon kingdoms.

Britain was not cut off from all contact with the Roman empires after 410. Trade declined massively, and it was no longer part of the imperial bureaucratic and fiscal systems, but as far as both Romans and Britons were concerned it remained part of the Roman world. The church played a key role in maintaining this connection. Bishop Germanus of Auxerre in Gaul was later canonised and his biographer recorded two visits to Britain, the first in 429 and the second sometime in the next fifteen years. Travel to Britain was evidently still possible and not excessively dangerous. Nevertheless, it is hard to judge how much the biographer really knew of life on the island. Germanus seems to have visited St Albans (Verulamium) and went to the shrine of its famous martyr. In one city he healed the blind daughter of a local dignitary, called a tribune, but whether this was the corre€ct tide is questionable. He also rallied the locals to defeat a band of Saxons and Picts—in itself a fairly unlikely combination—teaching his men to raise a shout of 'Alleluia!' This is said
to have been enough to rout the enemy.

Yet the main reason for both visits was to combat heretical Christians rather than foreign plunderers. Germanus held debates with priests adhering to a doctrine named Pelagianism after its founder. Pelagius was originally from Britain, although his preaching mainly attracted attention after he moved to Italy in 380. His particular brand of asceticism was moderate by the standard of the day, but his emphasis on the ability of individuals to become virtuous through effort and make themselves acceptable to God was far more controversial. Over time he attracted many prominent critics, including St Augustine, who accused him of effectively denying that salvation depended on grace alone. Pelagius was finally condemned as a heretic in 418. Germanus' biographer claims that the bishop easily confounded the British Pelagians in debate. He also characterises them as boastful and ostentatiously dressed, but this may just be conventional criticism. It is hard to say whether it can be used to show that there were substantial numbers of wealthy aristocrats and
priests in the British towns.

David Gilmour

2010-08-17T04:25:00.000-07:00

The Ruling Caste

Following the Guntur famine of 1833, Arthur Cotton irrigated the arid tracts of the Godavari delta and spent thirty-four years building dams and canals in the Madras presidency. After a lesser crisis in 1868, the 108-mile-long Agra Canal was dug to provide famine relief in the North-Western Provinces. But it was the tragedy of 1876-8 that led to the establishment of a general Famine Commission under Richard Strachey and the consequent adoption of a Famine Code. The Code, based on Strachey's very thorough report, made recommendations for preventing future crises and gave guidance for action in the event of a monsoon failure and a rise in grain prices. Further irrigation works and closer access to railways were designated for areas prone to drought; District Officers were given instructions about the distribution of food and the organization of relief works; tax remissions were authorized and loans were to be made available to farmers trying to recover from the drought. The Code, together with a substantial sum the Government set aside annually as Famine Insurance, persuaded many people that the problem had been solved. Such complacency was erased by the famine of 1896-7 in which the Viceroy, Elgin, displayed a lack of awareness reminiscent of Lytton, and by a still greater one in 1899-1900 that even the energetic Curzon struggled to contain. At least the Government was now more generous with aid: by the spring of 1900, 5 million people were receiving relief at the cost of £8,500,000, a gigantic effort reflected in a decline in the mortality rate to only just above the average. Three years later James Sifton, a griffin who rose to a governorship in the 1930s, described the state of tension that a famine threat instilled in Civilians during Curzon's rule.

We are beginning to look anxiously for rain now. Only about 1/2 inch has fallen since I came out, and if the storms don't begin in about a week, we shall be scouring the district looking for any traces of scarcity. The one thing that a lieutenant-governor can be 'broken' over is a badly-managed famine. So he has everything cut and dried for an emergency. Every year a detailed plan for possible relief works in every district is made out by the engineer. The surveyor marks out the total area and maximum of population liable to famine. And the magistrate keeps his eye on the price of food and sends a fortnightly return on the subject. And if there is only a suggestion that the cattle or the children in any part of the district are looking thin, the magistrate flies off and usually takes the Commissioner too.

Whatever shortcomings the Government may have had, famine duty brought out the best in the ICS. Shaken by the Orissa calamity, the then Viceroy, Lawrence, had announced that the District Officers' duty was to attempt to preserve every life in their districts. And all reports indicate that they did so tirelessly and uncomplainingly. One Civilian, the Collector of Firhoot, stayed at his post while his wife was dying of breast cancer; another returned to Nasik eight months before the end of his furlough znd arrived just in time to bury his predecessor, who had died of bubonic plague. Hermann Kisch discovered that, of all the Bengal Civilians seconded to Madras to fight the 1876 famtne, he was the only one whose health did not break down. The ICS was not the only service that suffered casualties in the fight. A memorial at Jubbulpore in the Central Provinces commemorates the five Civilians, two subalterns, one police officer and one engineer who died in the struggle to save lives in the 1896-7 famine. A decade later eight Government officials died in a famine in the former North-Western Provinces.

Kisch also had to deal with the Bihar famine of t874, six months after arriving in India for the first time. He had no idea 'how to dig a good tank [reservoir], or build a grain store, or to store grain so as to avoid injury from damp or heat.' He learned quickly. Within a month of his posting to Tirhut, the griffin had built fifteen Government grarn stores and opened twenty-two relief works; he was employing 15,000 people daily and feeding 3,000 more for free.

The principal problem for officials was the physical one of getting food to the afflicted areas. Railways by themselves were not the solution. 'Wagonloads of grain might be left rotting at a depot because there was inadequate transport to take the food to the villages. In districts where people were starving, the bullocks were unlikely to be sufficiently fit to pull heavy carts. Even if they were, they would have to be fed from their loads because famine areas obviously possessed no fodder. And even if these difficulties were overcome, there was always the danger that the carts would be looted by hungry robbers as they lumbered towards their destination. Those places where grain did not arrive often saw an increase in petty crime. When John Beames was sent to Ambala, he found the large hall crammed with people who had openly committed theft so that they would be sent to prison and get fed.

A Civilian's problems did not end even after the provision of food and relief work. Kisch had to deal with Brahmins who would not eat boiled rice and who would rather die than dig, tank with common coolies. They would pray, they told him, but not work. Other sufferers were reluctant to accept charity because they believed it entailed conversion to Christianity. Northbrook, who successfully managed the famine of 1874, found an even more bizarre example of resistance. The people of one district, he informed Queen Victoria, prostrated themselves before a Civilian and, 'although evidently in distress, prayed not to be relieved, protesting that they were not starving and needed no help.' They had heard, apparently, that the Government favoured emigration to Burma and, 'believing the Burmese to be cannibals with enormous mouths,' they thought the administration 'had a plan to fatten up the people first & then ship them off to Burma for consumption.'

One of the finest famine administrators was the abrasive MacDonnell, an Irishman without charm or humour but with much drive and pugnacity. Detested and admired in similar measure by his subordinates, he was regarded by Curzon as the ablest of the senior Civilians. MacDonnell established his reputation by his famine work and a report on relief operations in the 1870s; he consolidated it as Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces during the famines of the 1890s. He gave District Officers discretion to spend money in emergencies without waiting for permission and told their supervising Commissioner to impress on them 'their personal responsibility in regard to starvation deaths. The system is ready and they have the funds. They cannot be held free of blame if starvation deaths occur.' Known for his sympathy for tenants' rights as well as for his ability to cope with emergencies, MacDonnell was acclaimed even by the generally hostile nationalist press.

Both Elgin and Curzon realized that the key ingredient of MacDonnell's success was co-operation not coercion. As Curzon explained to the Secretary of State, he 'invariably sends for the local leaders, gets them on his side, makes them put their names to a document embodying his policy, and thus at the same time carries through what he wants and remains free from attack.' This method was especially successful in Cawnpore in l900 when riots broke out after five people suffering from bubonic plague were removed to a plague camp outside the town. Troops were called out after the camp was burned down and several policemen had been killed, but MacDonnell quickly arrived and ordered them back to barracks. He then sat down with local leaders and discussed the plague regulations before issuing modifications and posting them around the town. Cawnpore soon returned to normal, and only the ringleaders of the riot were punished.

Cholera was an old and usually lethal scourge. Bubonic plague—the Black Death of the Middle Ages—was newer to India and thus even more terrifying. It arrived in Bombay in 1896, soon hit Poona and two years later spread to the north. Since no one then knew how it had arrived (in fact by rats in ships coming from Hong Kong) or how it could be treated, panic spread even more quickly than the disease itself. Except in Bombay, where the Army took charge, District Officers were put at the head of emergency committees consisting of doctors, sanitary commissioners and inspectors of hospitals.' They and their assistants descended on towns and villages, sending the infected population to emergency camps, pouring white-wash over the house walls and perchloride of mercury on to people's possessions. In his second year in the ICS Montagu Butler found himself in charge of emptying ten plague-stricken villages and providing huts, wells, shops, food and rudimentary hospitals for their inhabitants.

Civilians dealing with plague and cholera behaved even more courageously than they did on famine duty, living among the victims, burying the corpses after the sweepers had fled, and sometimes catching and dying of the disease themselves. But in their anxiety they were inclined to be a little overzealous, and their heavy-handed measures caused resentment and led to rioting. Indians were outraged by personal inspections by doctors, by British troops searching their houses for suspected plague cases, and by restrictions on how and where their dead should be buried. When an Assistant Collector in Surat ordered that a maximum of fifteen mourners should take a corpse to a distant mosque, he was defied by 3,000 Muslims who insisted on accompanying the body to its last resting place.

British officials justified extreme measures on the grounds that 'native agencies' were so incompetent that they were doing nothing to prevent the plague from spreading. An officer of the Army Medical Service advised W.C. Rand, the Assistant Collector of Poona, to use only British troops to conduct house-to-house searches for hidden plague corpses. He did so, restricting Indians to the role of interpreters to explain to the population what the Army was doing. Shortly afterwards Rand and a colleague were assassinated by Hindu revivalists who claimed that the anti-plague precautions outraged the religious susceptibilities of the people.

Such feelings were widespread. When the Collector of a district in Bihar proposed at a public meeting that urban committees should be formed to supervise sanitary measures, a Hindu speaker condemned the proposal as useless because God had sent plague among them as a consequence of their sins: all that was required for the disease to disappear was that Hindus, Muslims and Christians should respectively obey the teachings of the Shastras, the Koran and the Bible. In Bihar and the east of the country, where the plague was weaker but the outrage was almost as strong as in Bombay, officials were ordered to show restraint: if the Bihari people believed the Government was trying to kill them with disinfectants, then they must not be compelled to use them; if they thought that pouring Condy's fluid down wells did not purify the water but turned it into poisoned blood, then the fluid must not be poured.

Martin Wolf

2010-07-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

Why Globalization Works

If we regard choices as valuable in their own right, then there are few choices more important to people than those to travel and, if necessary, to escape from oppressive, exploitative or predatory regimes. This is self-evidently true in big ways. It is also true in smaller ones. In the 1960s, it was forbidden for British citizens to take more than tiny amounts out of the country. This was worse than humiliating and unpleasant. The policy was designed to allow the government to avoid the exchange rate effects of a policy of inflation designed to maintain full employment in the presence of trade union pressures. This was a predatory policy. It ended up by wiping out the savings of a sizeable portion of the British middle classes. If money could have been taken out of the country, these dangerous and ultimately unsustainable policies would have been halted far sooner. This is the sense in which, as discussed in the previous chapter, the possibility of capital mobility desirably constrains the state. That is one reason for welcoming capital account liberalization, notwithstanding all the difficulties.

Now consider a second reason for convertibility. It is clear that a well-run and regulated financial system is a tremendous economic asset. Its functions are central to the good performance of the economy and to the ability of the population to live their lives in a tolerable manner. The purpose of the financial system is to mobilize savings, allocate capital, monitor management and transform risk. This is not just for the elite. Think, for example, of poor farmers. Consider the benefit they can obtain from the ability to put money by safely, to obtain adequate insurance of their harvests, to sell their crops in advance in liquid and competitive markets, or to buy useful assets before they have saved up the money they need. By performing these functions, the financial system can transform the effectiveness of the economy. A great deal of empirical work, much of it summarized in a comprehensive evaluation published by the World Bank in 2001, has demonstrated that the size of the financial sector alone, regardless of its sophistication, has a strong causal effect on economic performance. As the study notes, 'there is now a solid body of research strongly suggesting that improvements in financial arrangements precede and contribute to economic performance.' In terms of its impact on growth, the most important effect seems to be on productivity, not on the accumulation of capital.

Yet how are developing countries with what are, in general, tiny financial markets to obtain the first-class financial sectors that they need? Among the developing countries, only China and Brazil have financial sectors with assets that amount to even 1 per cent of the global total. In about a third of all countries the total assets of the banking system are less than $1 billion, smaller than those of an insignificant local bank in the US. Another third have assets of less than $10 billion. Yet, in 2000, the world's fiftieth largest bank, KeyCorp of the US, had assets of $83 billion. It is impossible for such tiny markets to support competition among self-standing national players with realistic aspirations to world-class performance. Unless one believes the world's poor deserve only low-quality financial services, the answer has to include substantial inward foreign direct investment in the sector. Outsiders bring five benefits. The first is superior know-how and efficiency. The second is the ability to exploit the economies of scale generated in world markets. The third is the ability to piggy-back on the skills and experience of the home-country regulator of the new entrant into the financial market. The fourth is a desirable disruption of domestic insider connections that allow the monopolization of the financial system by groups of powerful people, at the expense of the taxpayer and small customers, as both providers and would-be users of funds. Last, countries with a higher proportion of foreign-owned banks and a smaller proportion of state-owned banks are also less prone to financial crises, perhaps because the foreign banks are better regulated, better managed or merely more immune to pressures for imprudent lending.

Moreover, many of the fears about the presence of foreign banks have proved misplaced. There is no hard evidence, notes the World Bank, that the local presence of foreign banks has destabilized the flow of credit or restricted access to small firms. Instead, the entry of these banks has been associated with significant improvements in the quality of regulation and disclosure. The very threat of entry has often been enough to galvanize the domestic banks into overhauling their cost structure and the range and quality of their services, with the result that foreign entry has often proved not to be as profitable for the entrants as they may have anticipated.

Joyce Appleby

2010-06-24T02:51:00.000-07:00

Capitalism and a New Social Order

Thomas Paine, who traveled from revolution to revolution with a valise filled with designs for an improved iron bridge, was the prototype for a score of others. Joel Barlow wrote poetry, philosophical tracts, and pamphlets on internal improvements while he went about Europe hawking land in America's West. Jefferson and Madison once proposed buying a male merino sheep for every county in Virginia. Robert Fulton patented a machine for sawing marble, one for spinning flax, and another for twisting hemp into rope. He also developed the submarine, a steam engine, and a torpedo boat for which he is remembered. Less well known are his political publications, among them an essay 'to the Friends of Mankind' which begins by announcing that the interests of men and nature in all countries is universally the same: to wit, 'to live in peace and Cultivate the material enjoyments of life.' Nothing is truly political and honorable, he went on to explain, but a studious cultivation of the mental and corporeal powers and 'a free circulation of the whole produce of Genious and labour.' Among other things that fall to the duty of a good Republican, Fulton concluded, was to teach youth just ideas of individual and natural rights and not to teach them that 'particular men are their Superiors' or that it is good 'to resign their rights on earth in order to gain possession of heaven.'

Because so much has been made of the Puritan work ethic in America, it is worth pointing out that the Republicans did not extol those pristine virtues of thrift and frugality. What opened before their eyes was the prospect of the widespread enjoyment of comforts. Indeed, the word comfort sprang into use in these years. Luxuries conjured up an aristocratic economy of elite consumption and plebian toil while necessities brought to mind the penury of age-old limits. Comforts, on the other hand, could be generally aimed at and enjoyed without harm to others. In 1785, when Jefferson and Adams were both in Europe negotiating commercial treaties for the United States, Jefferson actually corrected Adams' draft treaty with Spain, by substituting 'comforts' for 'necessaries.' Workers should have such an equivalent for their labor 'as to enable them to live with comfort,' Republican George Logan wrote. An anonymous Republican hailed the United States as 'this land of comfort, where, blessed with health, and being industrious, no one needs despair of a comfortable livelihood at least.' The Democratic Society of Philadelphia called for the promotion of necessary manufacturers as long as they were 'consistent with an economy of full employment and comfortable support for all American citizens.' Nor were Republican editors, even those in rural communities, reluctant to dazzle their readers with images of ever-increasing wealth. 'Industry,' one wrote, 'secures the enjoyment of health, strength, and happiness. Under its influence, nature new decks herself in the gayest attire...cities rise, forests are transformed into fleets. Men visit their fellow men, and the necessities of one clime are supplied by the superfluities of another. Increasing luxury gives spring to invention.' 'Agriculture where territory is not wanting is the hand-maid of opulence,' wrote another. Thus did the age of limits yield in the imagination to a vision of prosperity, and it did so long before the steam engine and the dynamo disclosed their wonderful powers.

From the Republican New York Journal came the endorsement of agriculture as the parent of commerce: 'Both together form the great sources from which the wants of individuals are supplied.' Despite these panegyrics to industry, it was moderate toil the Republicans aimed for in apparent conformity to American work habits. According to the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, who traveled extensively through the Northern countryside in 1795 and 1796, nonchalance was the most characteristic American trait. Not even on the frontier, he said, did farmers work more than four days a week. 'Necesary unremitting labour is a form of despotism,' according to Cooper. Speaking to one another as fellow human beings, the Republicans abandoned that didacticism that figured so prominently in Federalist social commentary. The hope of a widely diffused prosperity also colored Republican writings on competition. 'A liberal mind cannot for a moment harbour the idea that every new artisan is a base plotter of the destruction of his competitor,' the Republican editors of The Farmers Register charged, going on to justify their starting a second country newspaper on the grounds that 'it is only by competition that a town or city can flourish. The united efforts of rival artisans give energy to trade; the public becomes better served and places gradually rise in importance with the celebrity of their manufacturers,' a position they concluded, so self-evident that it needed no illustration.

At the most general level, the Republicans' expectation of a sustained prosperity based upon an ever-expanding global exchange of goods undercut the Federalist rationale for energetic government. It was no longer needed to protect the weak from the strong, the hungry from the hoarders, the survival of the whole from the selfish acts of the few. An increased level of productivity had solved that ancient problem. Nor in Republican thinking was government heeded to direct economic activities to secure a larger share of a finite pie in an age of commercial expansion. This was what the English example offered and the Republicans feared. As one newspaper writer noted, Great Britain had enjoyed a long period of economic growth, but 'the body of the British nation live in a state of abject dependence upon the potent few. The hard earned wages are wrung from the hands of the laboring part of the community' to support the government and pay the interest on a national debt that only grows larger. Here is a critique of the British funded debt that owes nothing to the classical republican obsession with political corruption. The Republicans interpreted the mercantilist goals of national wealth and power as parts of another scheme of the few to wrest natural and equal rights from the many. A similar reinterpretation of the threat of luxuries also came from Republican pens.

Moralists had long inveighed against luxuries, seeing in them but the tip of the iceberg of self-indulgence. An old staple in the Sunday fare of sermons, such indictments of luxury were frequently but thinly veiled attacks on social mobility. Sharing the upper-class attitudes of their substantial parishioners, many American ministers viewed the popular consumption of such things as imported fabrics as leading to a dangerous blurring of class lines. Jeffersonians also attacked luxuries, but from a very different perspective. Madison developed their line of attack in a series of articles for the National Gazette. Silverplated candlesticks and printed velvets, as Cooper had said, required forced markets, that is to say, artificial tastes. According to Madison, the making of luxuries skewed manufacturing toward the pocketbooks of the wealthy few, leaving the economy's productive base vulnerable to changes in fashion while at the same time creating the hordes of dependent factory operatives who turned out the lace ruffles and silver knee buckles for the rich. Far better the Republican argument went, to promote the production of grains and raw materials, which served the interests of ordinary people around the world and depended upon no government favors for its promotion, no body of experts for its dextrous management.

Kenneth Waltz

2010-05-24T02:36:00.000-07:00

Man, the State, and War

In cooperative action, even where all agree on the goal and have an equal interest in the project, one cannot rely on others. Spinoza linked conflict causally to man's imperfect reason. Montesquieu and Rousseau counter Spinoza's analysis with the proposition that the sources of conflict are not so much in the minds of men as they are in the nature of social activity. The difficulty is to some extent verbal. Rousseau grants that if we knew how to receive the true justice that comes from God, 'we should need neither government nor laws.' This corresponds to Spinoza's proposition that 'men in so far as they live in obedience to reason, necessarily live always in harmony one with another.' The idea is a truism. If men were perfect, their perfection would be reflected in all of their calculations and actions. Each could rely on the behavior of others and all decisions would be made on principles that would preserve a true harmony of interests. Spinoza emphasizes not the difficulties inherent in mediating conflicting interests but the defectiveness of man's reason that prevents their consistently making decisions that would be in the interest of each and for the good of all. Rousseau faces the same problem. He imagines how men must have behaved as they began to depend on one another to meet their daily needs. As long as each provided for his own wants, there could be no conflict; whenever the combination of natural obstacles and growth in population made cooperation necessary, conflict arose. Thus in the stag-hunt example the tension between one man's immediate interest and the general interest of the group is resolved by the unilateral action of the one man. To the extent that he was motivated by a feeling of hunger, his act is one of passion. Reason would have told him that his long-run interest depends on establishing, through experience, the conviction that cooperative action will benefit all of the participants. But reason also tells him that if he forgoes the hare, the man next to him might leave his post to chase it, leaving the first man with nothing but food for thought on the folly of being loyal.

The problem is now posed in more significant terms. If harmony is to exist in anarchy, not only must I be perfectly rational but I must be able to assume that everyone else is too. Otherwise there is no basis for rational calculation. To allow in my calculation for the irrational acts of others can lead to no determinate solutions, but to attempt to act on a rational calculation without making such an allowance may lead to my own undoing. The latter argument is reflected in Rousseau's comments on the proposition that 'a people of true Christians would form the most perfect society imaginable.' In the first place he points out that such a society 'would not be a society of men.' Moreover, he says, 'For the state to be peaceable and for harmony to be maintained, all the citizens without exception would have to be [equally] good Christians; if by ill hap there should be a single self-seeker or hypocrite...he would certainly get the better of his pious compatriots.'

If we define cooperative action as rational and any deviation from it irrational, we must agree with Spinoza that conflict results from the irrationality of men. But if we examine the requirements of rational action, we find that even in an example as simple as the stag hunt we have to assume that the reason of each leads to an identical definition of interest, that each will draw the same conclusion as to the methods appropriate to meet the original situation, that all will agree instantly on the action required by any chance incidents that raise the question of altering the original plan, and that each can rely completely on the steadfastness of purpose of all the others. Perfectly rational action requires not only the perception that our welfare is tied up with the welfare of others but also a perfect appraisal of details so that we can answer the question: Just how in each situation is it tied up with everyone else's? Rousseau agrees with Spinoza in refusing to label the act of the rabbit-snatcher either good or bad; unlike Spinoza, he also refuses to label it either rational or irrational. He has noticed that the difficulty is not only in the actors but also in the situations they face. While by no means ignoring the part that avarice and ambition play in the birth and growth of conflict, Rousseau's analysis makes clear the extent to which conflict appears inevitably in the social affairs of men.

In short, the proposition that irrationality is the cause of all the world's troubles, in the sense that a world of perfectly rational men would know no disagreements and no conflicts, is, as Rousseau implies, as true as it is irrelevant. Since the world cannot be defined in terms of perfection, the very real problem of how to achieve an approximation to harmony in cooperative and competitive activity is always with us and, lacking the possibility of perfection, it is a problem that cannot be solved simply by changing men.

Ernst Mayr

2010-04-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

What Evolution Is

When sorting out the collections he had made on the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin encountered the same question again and again: Are some slightly different specimens merely variants within a population or are they different species? Indeed, in the 1840s when he wrote his monographs on the classification of the barnacles, Darwin came to the conclusion that no two specimens in a collection from a single population were exactly identical. They all were as uniquely different from each other as are human individuals. And the animal and plant breeders, with whom Darwin was associated since his Cambridge student days, told him the same. They always knew which individuals in their herds they should select as the breeding stock for the next generation. Individuality made this possible.

Since the terms 'transmutationism' and 'transformationism' are not suitable for this new theory, Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection is best referred to as the theory of variational evolution. According to this theory, an enormous amount of genetic variation is produced in every generation, but only a few individuals of the vast number of offspring will survive to produce the next generation. The theory postulates that those individuals with the highest probability of surviving and reproducing successfully are the ones best adapted, owing to their possession of a particular combination of attributes. Since these attributes are largely determined by genes, the genotypes of these individuals will be favored during the process of selection. As a consequence of the continuous survival of individuals (phenotypes) with genotypes best able to cope with the changes of the environment, there will be a continuing change in the genetic composition of every population. This unequal survival of individuals is due in part to competition among the new recombinant genotypes within the population, and in part to chance processes affecting the frequency of genes. The resulting change of a population is called evolution. Since all changes take place in populations of genetically unique individuals, evolution is by necessity a gradual and continuous process.

Philip Bobbitt

2010-03-24T02:49:00.000-07:00

The Shield of Achilles

It is difficult to forget the scene of the small Ethiopian emperor appealing in vain to the great powers for aid. But it seems to be equally difficult to remember the Italian aggression against defenseless Libyan tribes that occurred several years earlier. Then Italian planes strafed and waged, systematically if incompetently, a modern war of ethnic annihilation; this was when the first concentration camps were set up by a European power in the twentieth century. Libya was, however, unlike Ethiopia, governed by Italy and thus these acts of aggression were veiled by the cloak of sovereignty. This failure to act by the society of nation-states was not simply a lapse of will, and so it is seldom associated with the League's other public failures. Rather such a failure was built into the idea of a world community composed of sovereign nation-states. The League was irrelevant to allegedly domestic disputes. Perhaps we should be grateful that Hitler invaded Poland, for otherwise we might have been treated to the spectacle of the society of states standing by while the Holocaust efficiently proceeded as an 'internal matter.'

Indeed the U.N. Charter under Article 2 (7) specifically precludes the organization from intervening 'in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.' Similarly, the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention into the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty provides that '[n]o State has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly for any reason whatever in the internal or external affairs of any other State.'

The U.N., a second generation of the League, has given us a second generation of such failures, that is, a new wave of crimes shielded by sovereignty. Perhaps the most notorious is that of the Cambodian class crimes. The Khmer Rouge were the sovereign authority for purposes of international law; indeed the United States (and many states) voted to preserve their U.N. seat even when the Khmer Rouge abandoned Phnom Penh. Atrocities conducted within a state's borders are impervious to an international law built out of absolute sovereignty. Human catastrophes like the war in Mali simply never rise to the consciousness of the U.N., a majority of whose members could be counted on to keep it—as they long kept the Somali civil war—off the international agenda. The same model of international law that has shaped the League of Nations and the United Nations has also created a certain sort of legal status for the State that actually enfeebles those international institutions with respect to a critical class of conflicts.

Nor can we say that these institutions have even succeeded in preventing or at least managing war, the goal for which their bargain with the State was struck regarding sovereignty. The story of the League's failure to prevent war, including World War II, is too familiar to recount. The U.N. was designed with precisely this failure in mind, and was given constitutional authority to arm itself and to wage war against aggressors who threatened the peace. It is instructive, however, to look closely at how the U.N. has actually managed to succeed when it has acted to wage war. It may surprise some to learn that its successes have come only because the ideal of a world covenant enforced by a world military force has quickly, if quietly, abandoned.

Articles 42 and 43 of the U.N. Charter authorize the Security Council to use armed forces to maintain international peace and security. Article 43 provides for military agreements by which it was thought a U.N. force would be constituted from personnel contributed by the member states.

This has never materialized. The temporary absence of the Soviet delegate in June 1950 permitted the Security Council to recommend that members repel the North Korean attack on South Korea and to authorize the U.S.-designated commander to use the U.N. flag. All U.S. forces, however, were under U.S. command and, save in name only, there was no significant U.N. force on the peninsula. Absent the kinds of agreements envisaged under Article 43, the Security Council has no authority to command member states to commit their armed forces to a U.N. military enforcement action.

The consequence of this arrangement is that armed forces remain entirely the creatures of states. The recent coalition force arrayed against Iraq provides an example. With more justice, it might be said that this was a NATO force, with contributions from the Gulf region, rather than a U.N. force. There is nothing wrong with this; indeed I have suggested there is much right with such ad hoc coalitional forces. But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that they function as a U.N. enforcement arm.

Whatever intentions the drafters in San Francisco may have had for a U.N. defense force, this force has never come into being. And it is notable that in the Fourth Yugoslav War, over Kosovo, the U.N. was bypassed entirely.

Ernest Gellner

2010-03-07T04:53:00.000-08:00

Nationalism

Agrarian societies are based on food production and storage, and a relatively stable technology. This virtually is the definition of agrarian society. Within it, apart from the distinction already introduced, between state-endowed and stateless societies, there is also the important distinction between illiterate and script-using societies. The latter, as you might say, are capable of storing not only provisions, but also ideas. Or rather, they are equipped with a specially powerful technique for the storage of ideas. Even without writing, societies can 'freeze' ideas, or at least phrases, by ritual incantations which preserve patterns and make them normative.

The technological stability or stagnation of agrarian society has certain overwhelmingly important implications. It means that no radical improvement in output is conceivable: the only increase possible is one based on increasing the use of one of the available factors of production—land and labour—and this inevitably comes up against the Law of Diminishing Returns. In simpler terms, agrarian society has a kind of limit of possible output put upon it, determined by the (ex hypothesi) fixed technology, and the finite local resources amenable to that technology. In simple terms: there is a ceiling on possible production, though not on population growth. These societies are Malthusian. Crucial consequence: the struggle for resources or produce in such a society, between its constituent members or sub-groups, is, inevitably, a zero-sum game. No one can gain without someone else incurring a corresponding loss.

Agrarian societies are inherently Malthusian. The requirements of labour and defence power make them value offspring or, at any rate, male offspring; the stability of technology imposes a limit on production. These two factors jointly have the implication which made Malthus famous: the exponential growth of population, jointly with the non-exponential growth (if any) of output, means that the society as a whole is never too far removed from the point when it becomes incapable of feeding all its members, and periodically, as a result of harvest failure or social disruption, it faces famine.

Famine does not strike at random. In agrarian societies, men starve according to rank. Agrarian society is a food-producing and storing system; the silos or stores are guarded, and the contents are distributed only in accordance with the enforced entitlements of the members. In north Africa, the local name for the state is or was Makhzen, a word with the same root as store, magazine. The term is highly suggestive: government is by control of the store; government is the control of the store.

In this situation, the correct strategy for any individual or group within society is to be intensely concerned with its own position or rank, within the social order, and not with the enhancement of output. It is your social standing, your station and its entitlements, which will determine your fate. Extra output is only likely to attract pillage or taxation. It is pointless. Occasionally, extra output may be hidden and used to enhance its owners' security and prospects. But that is rare. More often, the path leads from power to wealth, rather than from wealth to power. In medieval Spain, a saying affirmed that warfare was a quicker as well as a more honourable route to riches than trade. This point can, all in all, be generalised for most agrarian societies.

This profound and important truth is reflected in the characteristic value system of agrarian societies. Generally speaking, they despise work and value honour. What is honour? A touchy sensitivity about one's own status, blended with a cult of aggressiveness and skill in coercion and intimidation. These tend to be the dominant values of the ruling strata of agrarian societies. Generally they constitute a 'nobility,' and the term, very characteristically, wobbles between referring to membership of a status group, and possession and display of values summed up as 'honour.' Frequently, these as it were 'red' values are combined, in various ways, with the 'black' values of a clerisy. The coercion which dominates agrarian society requires cohesion, which in turn depends on principles of legitimacy for its operation—you need to know whom to gang up with. Coercion operates best if the gangs of coercers are well denned and cohesive, and if their internal authority structure is clear. The ritual and doctrinal maintenance of these principles of legitimacy of membership and leadership also require specialists—namely, priests or clerics of one kind or another—and in this manner, the Black tend to share power and authority with the Red in the agrarian world. The social philosophy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment consisted, basically, of a repudiation of this world: notoriously, its ambition was to see the last king throttled with the entrails of the last priest. The Enlightenment correctly characterised the basic features of the world it was rejecting; it was mistaken in thinking that world, and the oppression and superstition it lived by, to be simply the fruit of human stupidity, of lack of 'Enlightenment'. The strangling of monarchs with the guts of clerics, attractive though the picture may be, would not on its own terminate the agrarian world and its system of values and illusions. That system is rooted in the logic of the agrarian world, and not in human stupidity, or at least not in stupidity alone.

The basic circle in which agrarian society is locked, is complete, and it is difficult to see how one could break out of it (in fact, this has happened, though no one is quite sure of how it was done). The agrarian situation dictates certain values which inhibit innovation and productive growth; this entails a zero-sum situation which dictates certain values; that in turn...There is no exit from this circle. (Or, if you like, there is one, but it has only happened once, miraculously.)

What concerns us here are the implications of this for the relationship of organisation and culture. Agrarian society tends to be organised hierarchically, with each stratum, and its members, jealously guarding its standing and its privileges, and eager to differentiate itself from lower strata which would, given the chance, usurp some of its perks. The lowest of the large strata in this society, namely the rustic agricultural producers, is also segregated into local village communities. Mobility between these is restricted, mainly because the agricultural producers are generally tied to the land, formally or informally. It helps to impose discipline and ensure that the available surplus is handed over: it would not help the social order if peasants could wander in pursuit of more benign overlords. In western Europe, the diminution of the rigours of serfdom is attributed to the shortage of labour following the Black Death, which apparently encouraged gentry to behave more leniently to underlings, so as to encourage them to stay.

Agrarian society is generally inegalitarian in its values. It even exaggerates its own inequality and hides such mobility as occurs, just as our society tends to do the exact opposite. A rough law seems to apply to social development: the more complex and 'developed,' the more inegalitarian (cf. Lenski 1966: 43). So it goes on, until the coming of modernity, which, for reasons to be discussed, reverses the trend and also, for related reasons, engenders nationalism.

Agrarian society encourages cultural differentiation within itself. Such differentiation greatly helps it in its daily functioning. Agrarian society depends on the maintenance of a complex system of ranks, and it is important that these be both visible and felt, that they be both externalised and internalised. If they are clearly seen in all external aspects of conduct, in dress, commensality, accent, body posture, limits of permissible consumption and so forth, this eliminates ambiguity and thus diminishes friction. If a man's station and its rights and duties become part of his soul, his pride, this, once again, helps maintain social discipline. That great classic of the social theory of agrarian society, Plato's Republic, in fact defines morality in these very terms: morality consists of each element in the hierarchical social structure performing its assigned task, and no other.

This leads us to the main generalisation concerning the role of culture in agrarian society: its main function is to reinforce, underwrite, and render visible and authoritative, the hierarchical status system of that social order. (The lateral differences between members of the food-producing stratum have a slightly different role in helping to tie its members to their community.) Note that, if this is the primary role of culture in such a society, it cannot at the same time perform a quite different role: namely, to mark the boundaries of the polity.

This is the basic reason why nationalism—the view that the legitimate political unit is made up of anonymous members of the same culture—cannot easily operate in agrarian society. It is deeply antithetical to its main organising principle, status expressed through culture. It is not mobile and anonymous, but holds its members in their 'places,' and the places are highlighted by cultural nuance. Similarly of culture does not constitute a political bond within it: quite often, differences of culture express social complementarity and interdependence. In such circumstances, cultural differences often do create or strengthen political solidarity. The characteristic political unit of the agrarian age is generally either much smaller than the limits of a culture—city-states, village communities, tribal segments—or very much larger: culturally eclectic empires which have no reason whatsoever to limit their expansion when they encounter linguistic or cultural boundaries (of which they may be wholly ignorant, and to which they are indifferent). The most characteristic political unit of the agrarian age tended to make joint use of both these principles: a trans-ethnic empire would be superimposed on sub-ethnic communities, which it used as its local agent, tax-collector and deputy.

The characteristic forms of violence and aggression were intra- rather than inter-cultural. Feuds occur between clans of the same wider culture, aristocrats in principle fight or duel only with others of the same rank. When violent conflict passes beyond the local group, it is generally indifferent to culture and language, even if no longer contained within their limits. Lines of conflict within peasant populations tend to concern local resources, and consequently, the opponents are frequently of the same culture. There is something odd about the idea that people geographically distant, and with no real shared or opposed interests, should align themselves simply in virtue of shared or distinct accent: that is a modern idea, which is generally absent in the agrarian world.

Michela Wrong

2010-02-24T02:33:00.000-08:00

In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

Inflation, which had reached double-digit figures sufficient in themselves to bring down an accountable Western government suddenly rocketed in 1991 to a mind-boggling 4,130 per cent. The next year it fell slightly to 2,990 per cent. But the next year it was back up to 4,650 per cent and in 1994 came the worst of the worst: inflation ballooned to 9,800 per cent.

For Zaireans paid in local currency, the effect of what was effectively an unofficial tax on every financial transaction was disastrous. In the time it took to drink a coffee, the rate could have changed a couple of times. Dither too long over the bill and it might have to be altered. Return from a long trip and the store of zaires that had bought a family a meal before you left now scarcely afforded a bar of soap.

In supermarkets, no one bothered ticketing goods individually any more, so quickly did the prices change. Instead they were classed in categories with a single index, easily updated, giving that day's price for each category of goods. Each individual note was now worth so little, the banking industry effectively ground to a halt, unable to muster the liquidity needed for major transactions. Sometimes, behind the tellers, you would see hillocks constructed of soiled, strangely aromatic zaire notes, stacked against the wall in brick-like blocks: destined for some small business struggling to pull together the salary for its workforce, perhaps, or to buy a photocopier. There was rarely enough cash for anything more ambitious. Checking the amount could take hours, despite the fact that to simplify counting, notes were split into convenient 'paquets' of twenty-five. You trusted your black market moneychanger, in fact you trusted every Zairean you dealt with, not to subvert the entire system by sneaking a couple of notes out of each paquet. Ironically, a crisis created by such top-level dishonesty bred its own moral norms amongst its victims, adhered to with a greater degree of conscientiousness than the rules of a conventional financial system.

Indeed, it gave birth to an imaginative mutual aid system amongst those still tenacious enough to want to operate in a society where the banks had become irrelevant. Coffee exporters and arms traders, aid organisations and diamond smugglers found themselves strange bedfellows as they established an informal money-trading network. A single phone call would enable a factory boss to locate the zaires needed to pay his work-force, or a Lebanese dealer to find the dollars he needed to buy his diamonds. It was do-it-yourself banking and it worked. 'I find it quite inspirational,' a British businessman once confessed. 'Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of currency will be traded over the phone, the transaction takes seconds to go through, rather than the weeks involved if it were being conducted through banks, everything is done verbally and no one ever welshes on a deal, because they know if they did the whole apparatus would collapse around their ears and everyone would lose out.'

But even if the process was taking place in graceful slow motion, the system was indeed imploding under the weight of its own eccentricities. Each time a new denomination was issued in a forlorn attempt to keep up with inflation, politicians would wait with bated breath to see if the population would accept it as legal tender or refuse it as inflationary. That was the step that helped push the soldiers to riot in 1993, when they found their wages being refused in shops. One of the last bills issued under Mobutu—the 500,000-zaire note cheekily dubbed the 'prostate' in honour of his afflicted organ—was rejected en masse in Kinshasa, providing a few mouvanciers with a wonderful opportunity to exploit. Appropriating notes rendered worthless in Kinshasa, they chartered planes and flew stacks of prostates down south to Lubumbashi, where they dumped them wholesale onto a more amenable black market.

In Kasai, of course, the new zaires had never been accepted at all, presenting a lucrative opening for officials who hoarded 'ancien zaires' instead of burning them as directed, then off-loaded them in the Kasaian trading centres of Mbuji Mayi and Kananga. In the far east, new zaires were accepted but traded at a different rate against the dollar from Kinshasa, another opportunity for those lucky enough to travel to make a profit on the spread. One country, at least four separate currency zones: Zaire was beginning to crack at the seams.

John Bury

2010-02-10T22:29:00.000-08:00

History of the Later Roman Empire

The strong fortress of Asemus on the Danube, in Lower Moesia, won high praise for its valiant resistance to Hunnic squadrons, which separating from the main body had invaded Lower Moesia. They besieged Asemus, and the garrison so effectually harassed them by sallies that they were forced to retreat. A successful defence was not enough for the men of Asemus. Their scouts discovered the times when plundering bands were returning to the camp with spoils, and these moments were seized by the garrison, who unexpectedly assailed these small bodies of Huns and rescued many Roman prisoners.

The Imperial troops, which had been operating against the Persians and the Vandals, must have been available for operations against the Huns in A.D. 442 or 443, but it is not recorded that Aspar or Areobindus took the field when they returned from Persia and Sicily. We hear that a battle was fought in the Thracian Chersonese and that Attila was victorious, and after this a peace was negotiated by Anatolius (A.D. 443). The terms were humiliating for the Emperor. Henceforward the annual Hun-tribute of 700 lbs. of gold was to be trebled, and an additional payment of 6000 lbs. was to be made at once. All Hun deserters were to be surrendered to Attila, while Roman deserters were to be handed over to the Emperor for a payment of ten solidi a head.

Hitherto the realm of the Huns had been divided between the two brothers, Bleda and Attila. Of Bleda's government and deeds we hear nothing. We may conjecture that he ruled in the east, from the Lower Danube to the Volga, and Attila in the west. Soon after the Peace of Anatolius, Attila found means to put Bleda to death and unite all the Huns and vassal peoples under his own sway. For the next nine years (A.D. 444-453) he was the most powerful man in Europe.

The Illyrian and Thracian provinces enjoyed a respite from invasion for three years. But in A.D. 447 the Huns appeared again south of the Danube. The provinces of Lower Moesia and Scythia, which had suffered less in the previous incursions, were now devastated. Marcianopolis was taken, and the Roman general Arnegisclus fell in a battle on the banks of the river Utus (Wid). At the same time, another host of the enemy descended the valley of the Vardar and advanced, it is said, to Thermopylae. Others approached Constantinople, and many of its inhabitants fled from it in terror. So we are told by a contemporary, who says that more than a hundred towns were taken, and that the monks and nuns in the monasteries near the capital were slain, if they had not already fled.

Attila was now in a position to enlarge his demands. A new peace was concluded (A.D. 448) by which a district, along the right bank of the Danube, extending from Singidunum eastward to Novae, and of a breadth of five days' journey, should be left waste and uninhabited, as a march region between the two realms, and Naissus, which was now desolate, should mark the frontier.' But Attila continued to vex the government at Constantinople with embassies, complaints, and demands, and as the drain on the treasury was becoming enormous, the eunuch Chrysaphius conceived the base idea of bribing an envoy of Attila to murder his master. Edecon, the principal minister of Attila, accepted the money and returned to his master's residence, which was somewhere between the rivers Theiss and Korss, in company of a Roman embassy at the head of which was Maximin. But the plot was revealed to Attila. He respected the person of the ambassador, but he sent to Constantinople Orestes (a Roman provincial of Pannonia who served him as secretary) with the bag which had held the bribe tied round his neck, and ordered him to ask Chrysaphius in the Emperor's presence whether he recognised it. The punishment of the eunuch was to be demanded. The Emperor then sent two men of patrician rank, Anatolius (Master of Soldiers in praesenti) and Nomus (formerly Master of Offices), to pacify the anger of the Hun. Attila treated them haughtily at first, but then showed surprising magnanimity and no longer insisted on the punishment of Chrysaphius. He promised to observe the treaty and not to cross the Danube (A.D. 449-450).

Until the end of the reign of Theodosius the oppressive Hunmoney was paid to Attila, but, as we saw, Marcian refused to pay it any longer. It seemed that the Illyrian provinces would again be trampled under the horse-hoofs of the Hun cavalry, though little spoil can have been left to take. But Attila turned his eyes westward, where there was hope of richer plunder, and the realm of Valentinian, not that of Marcian, was now to be exposed to the fury of the destroyer.

Burton Folsom

2010-01-18T22:32:00.000-08:00

New Deal or Raw Deal

In the Panic of 1893, U.S. unemployment briefly hit what was then the all-time high of 18.4 percent, but the panic was over in a little more than five years. In the mini-recession of 1921, unemployment reached 11.7 percent, but hard times lasted less than two years. In both of these economic downturns, Presidents Cleveland and Harding cut federal expenses and, in the case of Harding cut the income tax rate as well. Soon investments in business became attractive again, capital slowly flowed back into the American economy, and it bounced back. In recessions before 1893 and 1921, presidents followed roughly the same plan and the crises were short-lived.

In 1929, however, after the stock market crash, President Hoover did the opposite of Cleveland and Harding. Hoover increased federal spending-through the Federal Farm Board, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and public works. Then in 1932 he agreed to sharply increase both income and excise taxes to help pay for his costly programs. With the top income tax rate hiked to 63 percent, and with almost all Americans paying some excise taxes for the first time in U.S. history, private investment did not bounce back and unemployment reached 25 percent. Thus Roosevelt had an especially difficult task when he entered the White House. Some of his emergency measures—the banking holiday and taking the United States off the gold standard (to stop the outflow of gold)—may have been in order. His New Deal, however, is another story because there he applied ideas from underconsumption theory.

What if, instead of expanding Hoover's programs and starting many new ones of his own, Roosevelt had kept his campaign promises to cut spending, reduce taxes, and lower the Smoot-Hawley tariff immediately? In the Democrat Party platform, and in speech after speech during the campaign, Roosevelt promised these three things.

On taxes, for example, Roosevelt seemed to understand that lower taxes would attract business investments. On the campaign trail, he said, 'Taxes are paid in the sweat of every man who labors because they are a burden on production and are paid through production. If those taxes are excessive, they are reflected in idle factories, in tax-sold farms, and in hordes of hungry people, tramping the streets and seeking jobs in vain.' In Sioux City, Iowa, Roosevelt announced that if elected president, 'I propose to use this position of high responsibility to discuss up and down the country, in all seasons and at all times, the duty of reducing taxes, of increasing the efficiency of Government, of cutting out the underbrush around our governmental structure, of getting the most public service for every dollar paid in taxation. That I pledge you, and nothing I have said in the campaign transcends in importance this covenant with the taxpayers of the United States.'

In describing his 'covenant' with the taxpayers, Roosevelt often became specific. He pledged to 'reduce the cost of current Federal Government operations by 25 percent.' The Democrat Party platform also promised Americans 'a saving of not less than 25 percent in the cost of the federal government,' and Roosevelt viewed that platform as a binding document. In Pittsburgh, Roosevelt announced, 'Before any man enters my Cabinet he must give me a two-fold pledge:

1. Absolute loyalty to the Democratic platform and especially to its economy plank.

2. Complete cooperation with me, looking to economy and reorganization in his Department.'

He further said he would 'eliminate from Federal budget-making during this emergency all new items except such as relate to direct relief of unemployment.'

These pledges, this 'covenant with the taxpayers,' freed Roosevelt to attack the 'reckless and extravagant' spending of the Hoover administration. 'It is committed to the idea that we ought to center control of everything in Washington as rapidly as possible—Federal control.' If, as president, Roosevelt had used his influence to cut spending and then cut the tax rate on top incomes from 63 percent back to about 25 percent, that would probably have encouraged investors to seek returns on new capital ventures. When Harding and Coolidge introduced such tax cuts during the 1920s, that helped the American economy go from 11.7 percent unemployment in 1921 to an average of 3.3 percent unemployment from 1923 to 1929. If Roosevelt had slashed tax rates, many Americans could also have given more to private charities; states and cities would have had more room to ask wealthy citizens for contributions to assist the hungry people in their cities. Governor Joseph Ely of Massachusetts, as we have seen, fully embraced that line of reasoning. In fact, Roosevelt himself seemed to be making these connections during the campaign.

The tariff needs discussion as well. In Seattle, Sioux City, and elsewhere, Roosevelt blasted the 'outrageous rates' of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. He showed a keen understanding of the dynamics and unintended consequences of Hoover's signing the highest tariff in U.S. history. 'Now, the ink on the Hawley-Smoot-Grundy tariff bill was hardly dry before foreign nations commenced their program of retaliation,' Roosevelt observed. And the Hoover administration 'had reason to know that would happen. It was warned. While the bill was before Congress, our State Department received 160 protests from 33 other nations, many of whom after the passage of the bill erected their own tariff walls to the detriment or destruction of much of our export trade.' What's more, Roosevelt observed that American manufacturers responded to foreign retaliation against American-made products by relocating their American businesses—and jobs—to friendlier foreign countries. Americans had established '258 separate factories' in other parts of the world from 1930 to 1932 to escape retaliation. Lost American factories and diminished American business was not the only harm.

Farmers were most hurt by the Smoot-Hawley tariff because so much of American agriculture was exported. Forty nations, Roosevelt noted, had set up high tariffs against U.S. imports.

Eric Jones

2010-01-04T04:56:00.000-08:00

The Record of Global Economic Development

In the United States over 98 per cent of people have electricity, telephone, and a flush toilet. Over 70 per cent own a car, VCR, microwave, air conditioner, cable TV, washer and dryer. The incidence of disease, the quality of the air and the productivity of American agriculture have all improved. These achievements would be less impressive if they were confined to the rich countries, but in reality gains were made almost everywhere during the last 40 years of the twentieth century. In low-income countries, life expectancy at birth, which is probably the most telling statistic of all, reached 56 in 1992 from only 42 in 1960. Enrolments in primary schools rose and literacy improved (even female literacy). Installed telephone lines and the number of calls, including international calls, are expanding almost too fast to keep track. The economic basis of these changes in the Third World has been a huge rise in exports and a shift in the type of products made and exported. Low-yielding primary commodities, which constituted 90 per cent of all Third World exports in 1960, had fallen to the 20 per cent to 60 per cent range by 1994. The share of manufactured exports, which are better earners, has increased. In short there has been a manufacturing revolution, with all this implies for the spread of skills.

Economic growth is good for the poor. In the fastest growing countries poverty has fallen the furthest and pollution been reduced the most, while literacy and life expectancy have risen the highest. There has of course been stress from structural change as economic activities have relocated themselves. Some people adapt to change, others would like to halt or reverse the process, partly because they overreact to short-run or regional impacts and do not care to consider the whole picture. It is difficult to stand aside from the vast churning of change while one is living through it and hard to perceive the underlying processes clearly. The imagination may easily fail and the malevolent will ride in to exacerbate the confusion. Yet the statistics, properly presented, leave no doubt that the gain has been very widespread indeed. The political and institutional conditions giving rise to this outcome are, in essence, those that have produced similarly benign results in the past; it is the modern consequences that have outclassed all historical precedent.

Protestors of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization persuasion have, overall, no rational leg to stand on. We can only suppose that their bitterness derives from something other than the facts–from an exaggerated rise in expectations combined with personal ambition on the part of their leadership. Stridency may be heightened by the frustration aroused not only by the failure of many of their predictions but from a static level of support in terms of gifts of money and volunteers' time. This stasis has intensified competition among the various campaigning groups. Their desire to stop the economic clock is deeply reactionary, though naturally they assert at the tops of their voices that they are the radical and progressive ones. This is like the note in the curate's sermon: 'weak point–shout.'

In a situation where fewer and fewer people express an active interest in foreign affairs, unrepresentative small groups may get their way if they are vocal enough. Politicians respond to electoral threats and squeaky wheels, not to the unthreatening silent majority and certainly not to academic researchers. This is 'Skaggs' Law.' The anti-globalization protestors may not in the end succeed in bringing down the house about our ears but they give comfort to nationalists who find economic integration disconcerting. As a result, deluded or timid governments and firms may hesitate to open their economies or face up to competition from other businesses precisely when it would pay to speed up change and reform. Many governments are happy to be given an excuse to avoid the conflicts that the opening of trade initially tends to create. Some firms and industries are always happy to lobby for special protection against foreign competitors.

Richard Vinen

2010-01-03T03:35:00.000-08:00

The Unfree French

Prisoners were punished for 'relations amicales.' Men were sentenced for offences that involved kissing, exchanging gifts or going for walks with German women: one got four months for 'having exchanged tendresses with a girl.' An officer was sentenced to two years for having drunk tea with two German women. Another prisoner fell in love with a married woman, whom he met whilst taking a course in German literature. He gave her child chocolate and biscuits. He asked her for a photograph of her child and also stole a photograph of the woman herself. He wrote several letters to her but tore them up. Finally, he sent her a letter in which he declared his true feelings. For this offence, he was sentenced to a year in a civilian prison. The fact that he had referred to her as 'dearest' Ursula was held against him.

Prosecutions of French prisoners of war give odd little glimpses of their relations with the German population. A prisoner returning from a fishing expedition met a German woman and exchanged one of his fish for some fruit. He also embraced her. At his trial, he insisted that the embrace was just a 'joke.' He was sentenced to five months for the embrace and six weeks for illegal fishing. Another prisoner had spent the night in a German woman's house. The court seemed to accept that he had slept on the sofa, that he had helped the woman with various chores and that the prisoner was a friend of the woman's husband. In spite of all this, he was sentenced to six months. A German woman invited two French prisoners into her house for coffee and cakes. When a patrol knocked on her door, the prisoners hid under her bed. They were found and both sentenced to six months; the woman was sentenced to four months.

French prisoners were frightened of the reprisals that might follow an affair with a German. Joseph Raoux, who had had a brief fling with his employer's wife, faked conjunctivitis, even though he knew that this would mean transfer from a farm to the less congenial atmosphere of a factory. Rene Dufour's friend Camille, who feared 'that I will be caught with my boss's wife,' was one of a number of prisoners who tried to escape in order to get away from the consequences of an affair with a German woman.

In spite of all this, numerous prisoners allude to the fact that Frenchmen did sleep with German women. Indeed, the existence of such relations seems to have been taken almost for granted. Maurice Duverne wrote: 'On small farms (the husband often drafted), the prisoner of war was not badly off with regard to work, food, etc. Hum, I will say no more.' When Duverne subsequently moved to an office job, one of his French colleagues had an affair with a German girl, who wore black when he was killed in an accident. Jean Brustier recalls teaching German to a peasant from the Aveyron who wished to be able to talk to his lover.

Even back in France, people knew that prisoners of war were sleeping with German women. One prisoner wrote to his wife: 'I do not stint myself, if you want a photo I can even send you one. Yes, I have everything I need with a daughter of two, I will say no more.' The woman wrote to the French authorities seeking to establish whether her husband really did have a daughter in Germany—and the French authorities warned him to be more discreet if he did not want his wife to report him to his camp commandant.

Some Frenchwomen asked to have their husbands moved to different work Kommandos in order to break up affairs. One of the few direct references to the war in the novels of Georges Simenon concerns a prisoner who has fathered two children whilst in Germany. A few prisoners seem to have seen the seduction of German women (or at least talking about the seduction of German women) as a means of continuing the war against German men. One prisoner called his employer a whore and claimed to have slept with her. She first admitted the affair and then insisted that she had rebuffed his advances. At his trial, the prisoner admitted that he had been drunk and had recently received an anonymous letter alleging that his wife was frequenting German soldiers in Paris. More commonly, prisoners recalled German women with amusement, mild embarrassment or wistful nostalgia. What is notably absent from any prisoner account is any sense that sex with German women might be seen as unpatriotic. No Frenchman had his head shaved for sleeping with a German woman.

Some sexual encounters between French prisoners and German women involved brief tussles in cowsheds or haystacks. Some relations, however, lasted a long time and involved real emotional commitment (a fact that German courts regarded as making the offences more serious). One girl of twenty-three hid an escaped prisoner in her bedroom for fifty-one weeks without even her own father knowing about his presence.

Drew McCoy

2009-12-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

The Elusive Republic

The classical republican heritage embraced by the Revolutionaries stressed the close relationship between public virtue—the austere and unselfish devotion to the common good that was on the lips of every patriot in 1776—and private virtue, which was exemplified by the character traits of frugality, temperance, and rigorous self-control. As John Adams explained a few months before the Declaration of Independence, 'Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without Private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.' It was for this reason that so many republicans greatly feared both commerce and indulgence in wealth as dangerous threats to the success of the Revolution. In one sense, the Revolution can properly be viewed as a reactionary effort, as one historian has put it, 'to bring under control the selfish and individualistic impulses of an emergent capitalistic society that could not be justified'—or at least that could not be justified by traditional moral standards. In the flush years of 1775 and 1776, when thousands were swept up in the spirit of a 'rage militaire,' many of the Revolutionaries were inspired to hope that the American people might indeed conform to the classical notion of virtue and thus become the special kind of simple, austere, egalitarian, civic-minded people that intellectuals had dreamed about for centuries. To these enthusiasts, the ancient republic of Sparta was an appropriate model for a new America, a rude but virtuous society of independent citizen-warriors who demonstrated an unselfish devotion to the collective good because they were shielded from the corrupting intrusion of commerce and luxury. This vision of America, in Samuel Adams's revealing words, as a 'Christian Sparta,' permeated the apocalyptic rhetoric that gave public expression to the spirit of the Revolution.

But there was also an uneasy suspicion (and sometimes recognition) among the Revolutionaries that even predominantly agricultural America was already a relatively advanced commercial society, that Americans were to a great extent an ambitious commercial people with refined tastes and manners, and that under such conditions inflated expectations of classical public virtue might be unrealistic. Steeped in the patterns of classical literature and inspired by a real revolutionary fervor, educated and articulate Americans almost unthinkingly invoked the Spartan formula as an abstract ideal. When they confronted the sobering realities of eighteenth-century America, however, they invariably had nervous doubts about its republican potential.

John Adams probably best exemplifies this uneasy skepticism about the potential for classical virtue in America. By early 1776, Adams was thoroughly committed to both independence and republicanism. After admitting that 'Virtue and Simplicity of Manners are indispensably necessary in a Republic among all orders and Degrees of Men,' he added, however, that 'there is so much Rascality, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition such a rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degree of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.' The 'Spirit of Commerce' was rampant in America, especially in Adams's own New England: since 'even the Farmers and Tradesmen' were 'addicted to Commerce,' he seriously doubted if a positive passion for the public good could ever be superior to the indulgence of private and egoistic passions, especially the pursuit of wealth. During the debates over non-importation in 1775, he was appropriately concerned with the question of just how long, realistically, his countrymen would tolerate a suppression of their foreign commerce:

How long will or can our People bear this? I say they can bear it forever. If Parliament should build a Wall of Brass, at low Water Mark, We might live and be happy; We must change our Habits, our Prejudices our Palates, our Taste in Dress, Furniture, Equipage, Architecture, etc., but We can live and be happy. But the question is whether our People have Virtue enough to be mere Husbandmen, Mechanicks, and Soldiers? That they have not Virtue enough to bear it always I take for granted. How long then will their Virtue last? till next Spring?

Later, during the war, when his countrymen persistently demonstrated a want of classical forbearance, Adams similarly doubted if they would agree to the remedy of a public enforcement of republican austerity. 'There is such a charm to the human heart in elegance,' he sighed; 'it is so flattering to our self-love to be distinguished from the world in general by extraordinary degrees of splendor in dress, in furniture, equipage, buildings, etc.' The psychological roots of the infatuation with luxury that eighteenth-century writers had examined at such length seemed to infect the souls of all men, even those of an agricultural people who aspired to emulate the ancient Spartans. Adams had ambivalent, at times contradictory, feelings about the character of the American people. In the final analysis, though, he saw clearly that they were not Spartans in any classical sense, and that American society was not as 'young' and primitive as traditional republicanism demanded it to be. If America was to be a republic, it appeared that commerce and its consequences would have to be integrated into a more relevant and realistic conception of republicanism.

Although the Spartan brand of virtue often seemed merely impractical in a relatively advanced commercial society, it could also, if viewed from another perspective, be regarded as wrong in principle and thus unrepublican as well. In a speech 'On the Fall of Empires,' delivered to the Continental Congress in May 1775, William Moore Smith noted that, ironically, the famed Lycurgus, ruler of ancient Sparta, had destroyed liberty in his attempt to prevent the accumulation of wealth and luxury that he thought would subvert it. This tragedy brought to light a vexing dilemma, particularly relevant to the American situation. The crucial point, Smith asserted, was that true liberty was impossible without a security of property in its broadest sense. Smith's listeners hardly had to be reminded of this point, since the crux of the colonial dispute with England was an assertion of precisely this right to dispose freely of the fruits of one's industry. Even Samuel Adams, a leading promoter of the Spartan vision, had stated the matter quite clearly in 1768, speaking for the Massachusetts House of Representatives: 'It is acknowledged to be an unalterable law in nature, that a man should have the free use and disposal of the fruit of his honest industry, subject to no controul.' Where property was thus secure in a republic, however, honest labor inevitably produced an accumulation of wealth, which too often brought with it the debilitating luxury and other evils destructive of virtue and liberty.

Preventing the completion of this vicious cycle by arbitrarily denying men the right to their property was patently unjust, so Smith looked for another way to resolve the dilemma. Wealth should not be excluded, but if the use of it was judiciously regulated perhaps it was not necessarily incompatible with republicanism after all. Speaking of Mandeville's well-known defense of commerce and luxury. Smith admitted that it could never justify vicious luxury or an insipid indulgence in sensual pleasure.

John Carey

2009-12-03T21:26:00.000-08:00

Original Copy

The question it poses is: are working-class children better off than they were two or three generations ago? Any sane and sensitive obseryer, with even a vague knowledge of the bad old days, would, you'd suppose, return a confident yes. But not Mr Seabrook. There have, he concedes, been material gains, but these have been offset by spiritual losses. Today's working-class child, showered with possessions from the cradle up, has been cheated, Mr Seabrook argues, of the sense of purpose which the valiant fight against poverty once ensured. The warmth and companionship of working-class life have gone too, and the young wander, like shrunken and bewildered addicts, in the lotus-land of limitless consumerism.

How well this accords with the strapping youngsters you see around is a matter for personal judgement. But what's surprising (and, in its way, honourable) is that having fixed on his thesis Mr Seabrook should include so much evidence that undermines it. For when he questions elderly ex-workers about the conditions of yesteryear, the horror stories that spill out soon put the little worries of consumerism into perspective. Most of his oral historians belong to an era—recent, but already unthinkable to us—when youth and death were gruesomely twinned. They remember TB, meningitis, diphtheria, and the hot, slow deathbeds of siblings. Children who survived faced a working day that could stretch, for a thirteen-year-old, from eight in the morning to eleven at night. 'Many a time I've left the house at seven, faint with hunger,' a woman, now eighty-five, attests. 'I've burnt crumbs of toast, and then poured boiling water on it to make out it was tea.'

These rigours did not, it seems, ensure spiritual health. Home life was brutal. According to Mr Seabrook's informants, parents regularly set about their children, and each other, with a varied armoury including whips, razor strops and stair rods. Women were ceiemonially humbled to puff the male ego. A son recalls how his father, if he didn't like his dinner, would throw the plate at the wall. He also persistently blew his-nose on to the grate. The wife never protested, but meekly fetched newspaper and cleaned up. It seems to occur to Mr Seabrook as he records these memories, that they are not as inviting as he intended. He declares that the injustice and lack of love they reveal were not representative of working-class life in the period. But how can he know? To establish that you'd need an extensive survey, and much of the evidence is already in the grave.

As for today's children, they are, on the whole, surprisingly absent from his book, given that its subject is childhood. He chats with a Hell's Angel (one of a splinter group called the Filthy Few), and joins four teenage glue-sniffing truants in a derefict house. About school, where most children spbnd most of their waking life, he says virtually nothing. Instead he touches contemptuously on the modern iuvenile's appetite for Coke, crisps and electronic toys, and on the ludicrous pop 'culture' by which adolescents have allowed themselves to be bamboozled. Such frivolities are admittedly aggravating to the middle-aged. But to imagine they can vie with the real social evils like hunger and disease which still kill seventeen million children a year in the Third world (many of whom would, no doubt, be only too glad of a little consumerism) is to be guilty of the same affluent soft-headedness that Mr Seabrook despises in the young.

He can sustain his case only by political rhetoric which disintegrates immediately on contact with common sense. Thus he maintains that modern parents, by indulging their children in material things, have 'thrown them to the market-place' and 'might as well have thrown them to the wolves.' But surely even Mr Seabrook could distinguish a live child, however degraded by digital watches and potato crisps, from a dead one? And surely even he would prefer the former? Or perhaps not. He doesn't seem to like children much, and his constant insistence that they should have a 'purpose' is obtusely utilitarian. You'd have to be rather strange to ask, when confronted with a child, what the purpose of it was.

On the other hand Mr Seabrook is plainly in love with his own childhood, and recalls it poignantly. It was working-class, and he tells us about the thick green soap, full of grit, with which the kitchen was scrubbed, the foamy arcs it made on the floor, and other details, magical to a child. It's a charming picture, though you can't help wondering about the woman who actually did the scrubbing. Was it such fun for her? She seems to have become a decorative appendage in Mr Seabrook's nostalgia. one part of him, you feel, would like the old working class preserved in a sort of sociological zoo, housing endangered species the clog-shod labourer swinging over ringing cobbles; the mum with her soapsuds and copper stick; the children playing on whistles resourcefully shaped from natural ash wood.

It was capitalism, Mr Seabrook gloweringly insists, that swept these lovable proletarians away, along with the green soap, and replaced them with their effete modern counterparts. He seems to envisage it as a deliberate plot. capitalism decided to give working class children easy and immediate gratification (toys, TV, crisps) so as to sabotage their human potential and stop them developing any critical intelligence, since that might threaten the capitalist system. As a version of history this seems too simple to be interesting—on a par with creeds that ascribe the world's ills to intemational lewry or rays from outer space. But Mr Seabrook's need to find a scapegoat in capitalism plainly relates to his own sense of guilt. His strange and querulous book is, among other things, a personal confession.

He tells us how he broke away from his working-class roots, went to Cambridge and indulged, with his clever friends, in 'cruel and shameless exultation' at the 'awfulness' of his parents. Now he feels sorry. Understandably: but it is not a rare case, nor exclusively working-class. Gifted children of ungifted parents must either outgrow them or remain stunted. There's no middle way. As Drfohnson remarked: 'Nature sets her gifts on the right hand and on the left: as we approach one we recede from another.' It's not capitalism's fault.

Elie Kedourie

2009-11-21T23:57:00.001-08:00

Nationalism

The candidates in theology, as has been seen, claimed for the state more than any absolutists had ever claimed. But was it really in the power of the state to grant them their wish, to banish the alienation, to still the discord between the inner and the outer man, and institute that harmonious life which, they believed, had once obtained in ancient Greece or medieval Christendom? For this is what they really wanted; it is to such a conclusion that their criticism of the lifeless enginery of enlightened Absolutism ultimately led. The evil could not be remedied, Adam Muller declared, 'so long as state and citizen serve two masters...so long as hearts are internally rent by a double desire, the one to live as a citizen in a state...the other, to extract himself from the whole civil order, to cut himself off from that same state along with his domestic and private life and with his most sacred feelings, indeed even with religion'. A state, says Schelling, 'constituted with a view to an external end, perhaps only in order to ensure mutual assurance of rights' is one based on compulsion and need; whereas in the true state 'science, religion and art become one, in living fashion, interpenetrating and becoming objective in their unity.' And in his celebrated Addresses to the German Nation (1807-8) Fichte scornfully rejected a state which merely maintained 'internal peace and a condition of affairs in which everyone may by diligence earn his daily bread and satisfy the needs of his material existence so long as God permits him to live.' 'All this,' Fichte goes on to say, 'is only a means, a condition, and a framework for what love of fatherland really wants to bring about, namely, that the eternal and the divine may blossom in the world and never cease to become more and more pure, perfect and excellent.' This then is the full extent of the claim: that the state should be the creator of man's freedom not in an external and material sense, but in an internal and spiritual sense.

The phraseology of this theory of the state tends to disguise the element of violence that accompanies all government. Individuals, the theory says, merge their will in the will of the state, and in this merging they find freedom. They not only obey, but give their active assent to the laws and actions of the state. Force in such a case is irrelevant. But this is the case of the perfect state. If, however, such a phraseology were applied to the less perfect state, the effect would be to hide under soft euphemisms the hard issues of power which, by its very nature, is exercised by some over others. This phraseology would describe political matters in terms of development, fulfilment, self-determination, self-realization, and they would then be indistinguishable from aesthetic or religious questions where power is not in question. But if, as in actual states, government implies the existence of the hangman and the soldier, then to clothe issues of power in religious or aesthetic terminology can lead to a misleading and dangerous confusion. Reason of state begins to partake of sovereign Reason, and necessity of state to seem a necessity for eternal salvation.

This confusion between public and private, this intermixture between the spiritual and the temporal, has passed into current political rhetoric; and rulers have tried to persuade the ruled that relations between citizens are the same as those between lovers, husbands and wives, or parents and children, and that the bond uniting the individual to the state is religious, similar to that which unites the believer and his God, the prophet and his followers, or the mystic and his disciples.

Cynthia Farrar

2009-11-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

The Origins of Democratic Thinking

As the structure of the argument in Plato's Republic makes clear, Plato's theory is radically revisionary—it proposes an unconventional picture of what it is to flourish as a human being—yet it remains tied to the question of what men need and want. The challenge posed in the Republic, which the elaborate account of the just city seeks to answer, is whether justice is essential to human well-being. In Book One, the sophist Thrasymachus declares that justice is what is in the interest of another, not oneself, and that it is foolish for anyone, and particularly for any powerful person, to act justly. In Book Two, Glaucon and Adeimantus offer a 'contractarian' analysis of the foundation and motivation for justice, which presents what man has good reason to do as a function of his circumstances: all men are, as it happens, relatively equal, so they have an interest in agreeing to refrain from harming one another. Such an account cannot explain why even the most invulnerable of men, Gyges, possessor of a ring that makes him invisible, should be just. The Republic provides a revisionary account of both justice and well-being which reveals that even for Gyges, justice is not folly. The bonds of justice had to close firmly around each man, regardless of his powers or ambitions.

Plato argues that justice is constitutive of the good for man, for all men. It is a condition of society and of the individual. Justice consists in each man getting his due, not qua human being but qua member of a harmonious social order with particular qualities to contribute to that order; and it consists in each part of man (appetite, spirit, reason) getting its due on the same principle. The rule of reason over appetite is the essence of order in the cosmos, the polis and the individual, and each level of the hierarchy buttresses the others. Justice is a condition of the soul that prevents the indulgence of the individual's desire for more (pleonexia) which is for Plato (as for Aristotle) the source of unjust behavior toward other members of society. The unity of the society and the universal and compelling grip of the claims of justice depend upon a hierarchy not, as in traditional aristocratic societies, of persons, but of person-parts: intellect and appetite. The individual's ethical status, and his freedom and well-being, is not for Plato dependent on his own possession of wisdom. Rather, the talents of men capable of abstract reasoning, deployed in mobilizing cosmic principles for the good of the entire polis, ensure the universal subjection of passion to reason, of the contingent to the absolute, and thereby secure the well-being of all. Plato, anxious to construct (or discover) a metaphysical basis for the good of all men in society, utterly abolished integrity and autonomy, dissolving the boundaries of the self.

Plato's radical reconstrual of the self whose freedom and good the ideal city is designed to secure undermines the very foundations of democracy, politics and indeed of worldly agency. Plato, like Kant, disempowers men in the process of 'liberating' them. Men who must rely on their own humble wits are, according to Plato, enslaved. Man has to flee this world, make his way up out of the cave or be ruled by someone who has done so, in order to escape being mired in the flux of his own bodily desires, material causality and the contingencies of circumstance. For Plato, genuine freedom depended on attaining this higher ground. Prudence, the informed assessment of circumstance, is rejected as subject to contingency: it is inadequate to the task of identifying and adhering to the good for man, because it is too implicated in the mutability of events and desires. Plato thus rejects the whole notion of autonomous participation in the creation of order and unity under the tutelage of reason which, in the theories of Protagoras, Thucydides and Democritus, reflected the experience of a democracy guided by an elite in the interests of the whole. The individual soul's capacity to mediate the equilibrium between inner and outer, and between passion and judgment, the leader's capacity to persuade the citizens to pursue a vision of the common interests, the competence of men in society to determine what their interests are, the cosmic order created through the interaction of matter—all, conceived as visions of ordered freedom, as the antithesis of slavery, are for Plato equally slavish.

The Platonic redescription of freedom flies in the face of conventional belief. Both democratic man and the tyrant, each in his own way apparently the epitome of freedom, are in fact slaves. They are enslaved by appetite. And men controlled by others, slaves in the ordinary understanding of that term, are truly free. In order that appetitive man 'may be ruled by a principle similar to that which rules the best man, we say he must be a slave to the best man, who has a divine ruler in himself' (Rep. 5900). To be free is not to rule oneself but to be ruled by reason from outside, to be a slave. The logos that had expressed the citizen's own purposes and freedom has been fully externalized. It still addresses man's interests, but these are no longer interests he can be brought to appreciate, nor can they be realized in society as it is, nor indeed can he participate in their realization. Plato has sapped the polis of its political structure by extending the claims of the polis to all inhabitants, whatever their status in the community, however disparate their resources and capacities and experience. The Platonic city does not rest on relative equality, nor does it aspire to instill competence and independence in its members; autonomy is not, in Plato's view, possible for the vast majority of individuals, and it is not necessary. In the process of, as he thought, liberating men who were enslaved internally, Plato dismissed not just democracy, but politics. For politics depends upon the capacity for autonomy. For this very reason, a world organized politically would necessarily, in Plato's view, be disordered and unstable.

Aristotle decried the excessive unity of Plato's republic. His theory sought to rehabilitate politics, the relationship between autonomous individuals and social order. As he says in the Politics: 'Even if we could suppose the citizen body to be virtuous, without each of them being so, yet the latter would be better.' In rejecting Plato's argument for communal ownership and relationships, Aristotle asserts that men will not care for the community as a whole unless they care for some portion of it which has to do with them personally. Thus Aristotle apparently rehabilitates man's capacity to assess and pursue his own interests in a society which is his own construction. Aristotle attempts to give worldly force to Platonic teleology by restoring to man his basic integrity. Aristotelian teleology is founded not on a transcendent form of the good but on a (biological and metaphysical) account of the ends proper to man as a certain kind of creature. This creature cannot be reduced (or elevated) to its incorporeal soul. Not (or not merely) the philosopher's understanding, but practical wisdom tied to habituation of the sentiments, to character, is essential to man's realization of his true nature.

Gordon Wood

2009-10-21T16:58:00.000-07:00

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Jefferson had come into the presidency in his 'revolution of 1800' determined to reverse the monarchizing tendencies of the Federalists; indeed, he later said his election 'was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.' Even the symbols and ceremonies of government were simplified or eliminated, and government as a social force became increasingly weaker. By the early nineteenth century, foreign immigrants immediately noticed that 'government' in America made 'no sensation.' 'It is round about you like the air,' said a startled William Sampson fresh from Ireland, 'and you cannot even feel it.' No people in the Western world ever dismantled its national government more completely than did the Americans of the early Republic. In time the delivery of the mail was the only way most citizens would know that such a government even existed.

Yet, of course, there were continued republican appeals to the natural sociability, the sympathy, and what Joel Barlow called 'the attracting force of universal love' that presumably existed in all people. In the three or four decades following the Revolution newly independent American men and women came together to form hundreds and thousands of new voluntary associations expressive of a wide array of benevolent goals—mechanics' societies, humane societies, societies for the prevention of pauperism, orphans' asylums, missionary societies, marine societies, tract societies, Bible societies, temperance associations, Sabbatarian groups, peace societies, societies for the suppression of vice and immorality, societies for the relief of poor widows, societies for the promotion of industry, indeed societies for just about anything and everything that was good and humanitarian. People cut loose from traditional social relationships, it was observed as early as 1789, were 'necessarily thrown at a considerable distance from each other, and into a very diffused state of society.' The various voluntary associations and institutions enabled them to come together in new ways and to combine their mites for charity most effectively. By the 1820s in Massachusetts alone these associations of like-minded men and women were forming at the rate of eighty-five a year.

There was nothing in the Western world quite like these hundreds of thousands of people assembling annually in their different voluntary associations and debating about everything. In other countries, said Charles Ingersoll, such 'various self-created associations' gave the authorities 'so much trouble and alarm' that they tried to prevent their formation. But because their own society was so dispersed and loose, Americans found these associations "not only harmless but beneficial.' So prevalent did these social organizations become that eventually some people like William Channing came to fear that the social principles of these organizations were threatening that 'individuality of character' that was so important to Americans and the real goal of all social action.

Yet Channing and others need not have worried. For many members soon redefined their relationship to these voluntary associations. Instead of giving their time and effort to the benevolent organizations, as in the past, many persons began giving money. The societies became less mutual associations and more fiduciary ones, and philanthropic- minded people could now belong to many voluntary societies at the same time. Money had a way of multiplying people's social relationships while at the same time attenuating them.

Many others came to believe that Christianity might be the best means of tying Americans together. All along, of course, varieties of Protestantism had been a major adhesive force for ordinary Americans, often the principal source of community and order in their lives. But the Revolution had disrupted American religion; it scattered congregations, destroyed church buildings, interrupted the training of ministers, and politicized people's thinking. The religious yearnings of common people, however, remained strong, stronger than any of the revolutionary leaders realized.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century powerful currents of popular religious feeling flowed beneath the genteel and secular surface of public life, awaiting only the developing democratic revolution to break through the rationalistic and skeptical crust of the Enlightenment and sweep over and transform the landscape of the country. The consequences were far-reaching, not just for the mass of ordinary people but for many of the enlightened revolutionary leaders themselves, who were frightened and bewildered by this democratic revolution.

Harold Perkin

2009-10-11T23:58:00.001-07:00

The Origins of Modern English Society

The pattern is set by a superior; and authority will at any time countenance absurdity. A hat, a coat, a shoe, deemed fit to be worn only by a great grandsire, is no sooner put on by a dictator of fashions, than it becomes graceful in the extreme, and is generally adopted from the first lord of the Treasury to the apprentice in Houndsditch.

Indeed, the fashion cycle aptly illustrates the exact degree of diifference between England and the rest of Europe. Since it can only nourish in a society with sufficient openness and emulation between its upper ranks, it was peculiar to European civilization. Beginning in the fifteenth century at the break-up of strict feudalism, with cycles of perhaps half a century, it gradually speeded up until in the eighteenth century it went round about once every decade. Within this European context the peculiarity of English society was that the fashion cycle by the eighteenth century reached so much further down the scale. Foreigners like P.J. Grosley and Per Kalm noticed that the very servants and labourers wore the paniers and sacks, the knee-breeches and occasionally even the peruques, of their betters, and their observations are amply confirmed by the paintings and prints of Hogarth, Stubbs, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and Gillray. Alone amongst European nations, including the Celtic fringe, England was without a 'national costume,' that euphemism for peasant dress. With the significant exception of the smock-frock, the working overall worn by the agricultural labourers in the more backward parts of southern England, where the gap between the 'labouring poor' and their 'betters' survived down to the late Victorian age, the common people, at work and especially at leisure, wore a conscious imitation of the dress of their immediate superiors.

Cotton was the leading industry of the Industrial Revolution because it admirably suited the demands of the emulative fashion cycle. So versatile and yet, potentially, so cheap a fabric, variable in colour, pattern and texture, yet washable and hard-wearing, could make endless reappearances in the salons of high fashion, and just as repeatedly spread down the social scale. Wool was less versatile, yet mass consumer demand played a significant part in the rise of the West Riding and the decline of the older areas: the decline of the West Country cloth industry has been attributed less to the competition of machine-production—which a number of West Country manufacturers adopted—than to the shift in taste from their solid, expensive cloths to the cheaper and lighter woollens and worsteds of the Yorkshire mills. In the pottery trade Josiah Wedgwood consciously used the 'lines, channels and connections' of his noble and royal clientele to spread the fashion for his wares to the rest of society: 'Few Ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common style till authorized by their betters—by Ladies of superior spirit who set the ton'; and he sought out Queen Charlotte's patronage not so much for his artistic productions as for his Queensware, the plain cream earthenware with which to woo the mass market. And even in agriculture and the brewing industry the technical revolutions were due not merely to the increase in population, but to the increasing preference of the 'lower orders' for the fresh meat and wheaten bread of their superiors, and the shift in taste from the lighter ales to the strong, dark, highly-brewed, mass-produced porter. Indeed, social emulation could even operate in bad times, in the refusal to lower standards under the harshest pressure: in the near-famines of the war years the agricultural labourers of the south refused to accept oats or potatoes in place of wheaten bread, and the poor law authorities had to concur.

Daniel Yergin

2009-09-24T02:46:00.000-07:00

Joseph Stanislaw

The Commanding Heights

The consequence of all this was an economic system that had three self-defeating characteristics. The first was the 'Permit Raj'—a complex, irrational, almost incomprehensible system of controls and licenses that held sway over every step in production, investment, and foreign trade. The control system had begun as an emergency improvisation during World War II, but after independence it became far more, with much greater ambitions. What was meant to be the embodiment of the all-knowing allocators and balancer of the economic national interest turned into an endlessly arbitrary bureaucracy. Everything needed approval and a stamp. If a businessman wanted to shift from making plastic shovels to plastic pails, he had to get approval. A company had to get approval before it could increase output. Indeed, any company worth over $20 million had to submit all major decisions, including the membership of its board of directors, for government assent. Even trivial decisions required stamps. All of this meant hanging around interminably in government offices and seeking to curry the favor of a myriad of officials. But if you had the licence and the stamp, there was a consolation—protection against competition from those who did not have the necessary approvals. The result was a host of interests that did not encourage economic growth—'the politicians who profit from the corruption, the bureaucrats who enjoy the power, the businesses and the workers who like the sheltered markets and squatters' rights.'

The second characteristic was a strong bias toward state ownership, reflecting what has been described as the Fabians' 'measured and slow-paced ascent up the Marxist mountain.' The public sector rose from 8 percent of GDP in 1960 to 26 percent by 1991. The central government owned about 240 enterprises, excluding traditional state industries like railways and utilities. Their importance can be seen in their scale. By the end of the 1980s, 70 percent of the jobs in the large 'organized' sector of the economy were in state-owned companies. Moreover, it was estimated that half of the 240 firms were in fact terminally bankrupt. Rather than letting 'sick' companies fail, the government took them over and ran them. Workers assumed that salaries were the guaranteed 'rewards' for being employed while overtime was their pay Even when their enterprises were closed down, they still expected to be paid the overtime. State-owned companies generally operated in totally sheltered markets, with no discipline from competition The result was a state-owned sector that had no incentive to be efficient, that did not respond to customers, and that racked up ever-growing losses.

The Hindustan Fertilizer Corporation made for a truly brilliant example. In 1991, at the time of the economic crisis, its twelve hundred employees were clocking in every day, as they had since the plant had officially opened a dozen years earlier. The only problem was that the plant had yet to produce any fertilizer for sale. It had been built between 1971 and 1979, using considerable public funds, with machinery from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and a half-dozen other countries. The equipment had looked like a great bargain to the civil servants who made the basic decisions, because it could be financed with export credits. Alas, the machinery did not fit together and the plant could not operate. Everyone just pretended that it was operating.

The third self-defeating characteristic was a rejection of international commerce. What has been described as 'export pessimism' settled over decision makers. India adopted the inward-looking drive for self-sufficiency that had been so fashionable in the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s. By rejecting foreign trade and foreign investment, it excluded itself from the world economy. India developed a very large cadre of highly talented scientists and engineers, but, as in the Soviet Union, there were major obstacles to deploying new technologies in the marketplace. The hostility toward foreign investment, the severe limits on international trade, and the constraints on competition all closed down the avenues by which innovation moves into nations. India fell behind technologically. Often, technology was frozen at the level at which it had been in the 1950s or 1960s.

David Stove

2009-09-10T23:20:00.000-07:00

The Plato Cult

Let the universe, down to its last electron, be of as high a grade of intelligence as you please. Suppose even (since there is no point in stinting ourselves here) that it is bung-full of love too. It is still perfectly clear that there is nothing at all idealist about this theory. If the world is that way, then that is the way the world is, and thought's only concern in the matter is to acknowledge that there is this much thought, love, and so on around. Our physics and biology would then be miles away from where they are now. But our philosophy would not be one inch nearer to being idealism.

The spirituality, or thought, or ideality, then, which idealism ascribes to the world, is not any sort of possible way the world might be, or any sort of contents it might have. No amount of intelligent electrons, affectionate air, etc., will ever suffice to make idealism true. To make idealism true, what is needed is that electrons, if they are intelligent, be identical with thoughts of intelligent electrons; and that electrons, if they are not intelligent, be identical with thoughts of non-intelligent electrons; and so on, for red billiard balls, and everything else.

Yet that is what can never be, and even the idealist knows it can never be. For you cannot believe that a red billiard ball is a thought of a red billiard ball, unless you understand it. To understand it, you have to know what is meant, respectively, by the phrases, 'a red billiard ball,' and 'a thought of a red billiard ball.'

But if you do know what those phrases mean, then you know that a thought of a red billiard ball cannot possibly be the same thing as a red billiard ball, just as a thought of a murder cannot possibly be the same thing as a murder. Only someone who knows that idealism is impossible, then, can believe it. The spirituality which idealism ascribes to the world is therefore not only a 'light that never was on land or sea,' and never could be: it is a light which the idealist himself, if he believes his philosophy, knows there never could be.

To say this is not to accuse idealists of hypocrisy. They are not hypocrites. They are merely divided in their minds, and overwhelmed by a wish. With half of his mind an idealist knows, quite as well as everyone else does, that a red billiard ball cannot be a thought of a red billiard ball. But he also must have the world congenial, saturated all through by thought, and nothing short of the identity of thing with thought will make that congeniality intimate enough.

But while idealism is not hypocritical, it is hard to beat for anthropocentricity. What are we best qualified for, what is the strongest part of our game? Why, thought, of course: both in general, as being members of the most intelligent species, and in particular as being philosophers. Well then, thought must perforce be the very constitution of reality. And if this is not possible, that does not make it any the less imperative.

The only way to be more anthropocentric than ordinary idealism would be if some heterodox sect of idealists were to identify reality, not with thought in general, but just with false or senseless thought. For surely that is the really strongest part of our game: that is where neither animals nor angels nor God can come near us, and where we philosophers leave even our fellow-men for dead. If a philosopher wants to make the universe maximally congenial, he should identify reality with error, contradiction, and absurdity. This would, after all, spread real ideality all round, and stamp our distinctive trademark indelibly on all reality in a way which mere true thought never could.

This doubly impossible kind of idealism, it is likely enough, actually was embraced by some philosophers in the third or fourth century AD: it certainly has a sort of neo-Platonist, or perhaps a Gnostic-Christian, ring to it. But even if no one ever has held it, it is nevertheless the very conclusion to which all idealism inevitably tends. This statement will probably seem outrageous or unserious, but I am convinced of its truth. The reason is that, just as ordinary religion is believed partly because it is known to be false, so idealism, whenever it has been believed, has been believed partly because it was known to be impossible: believed from an active preference for absurdity, and for more absurdity rather than less.

Almost any philosopher will sometimes take a certain pleasure in maintaining, for fun or in the hope of learning something, some logical impossibility which he does not at all believe, but cannot see his way to avoid. But this is taking an occasional, superficial, and innocent pleasure in impossibility. Idealist philosophers are very different: they take a pleasure in impossibility which is neither occasional, nor superficial, nor innocent.

In the case of the objective idealists, this fact is even obvious. Hegel and Bradley are always bringing bad news, of course, of the outbreak of 'contradictions' in even the most settled districts: but who cannot detect that they do so with satisfaction? They pretend to be only fire-spotters, but anyone can tell that they are actually firebugs. Some people's idea of paradise is to have flowers springing up around one's feet at every step: theirs is to have impossibilities doing the same.

The same thing is sufficiently obvious in Kant: recall this attitude to his famous four 'antinomies.' These things, precisely because they are supposed to impose impossibilities inescapably on us, are quite clearly very precious to him, like children to a doting parent; even though these ones are, to any non-parental eye, uncommonly feeble and ugly. But Kant would have killed to keep them, or at least would have had forty more if he could have come by them.

And even as to Berkeley, what do you think it was that made his philosophy so pleasing to his own mind, and so inexhaustibly attractive to other minds? Was it his celestial mechanics of spirits: the business about the infinite immaterial television-station and its flock of little television-receivers? Of course not: there is not even anything really idealist about that. If the world is 'will and idea' in that particular way, then that is the way the world is, and thought does not constitute it so. Whereas it is precisely that, of course—the most paradoxical, incredible, impossible thing of all—which is the priceless thing to Berkeley's mind: that perception or thought is the essence of physical things. Or in other words, that perceptions or thoughts of ours, to which according to Berkeley himself, nothing corresponds or could correspond, are the very constitution of physical reality.

What all idealism does, then, and the secret of its attraction, is this: it diffuses through all reality that falsity, or impossibility, or absurdity, which in fact distinguishes, and which we know distinguishes, human beings from all other things, and philosophers from all other human beings. It is by one touch of erring human nature that idealism makes the whole world kin. And this is why idealism inevitably gravitates towards its doubly impossible special case.

If this suggestion seems to you too fanciful, and the preference for impossibility which I impute to idealists too improbable to be true, then I think you must know little of the lengths that intelligence will go to, once deprived of popular religion, to hide from an indifferent universe. But I will also remind you that the nineteenth century was not only the century of objective idealism, but the century of romanticism. If I had said of certain poets of that time, that the only world that attracted them was not only not the actual world but not even a possible one, and that its impossibility was for them an essential part of its attraction, then I would have been thought to utter a commonplace of literary history, rather than a paradox. Yet is is only another case of this same preference for the known-to-be-impossible, that I ascribe to the philosophical contemporaries of those poets.

Zeev Sternhell

2009-08-20T17:26:00.000-07:00

Neither Right Nor Left

In a classic work of national socialism written at the end of 1912, Edouard Berth summed up the despair and feelings of revolt of the Sorelians. He condemned 'the ignoble positivism' in which 'the bourgeoisie seems to have succeeded in sweeping along both the aristocracy and the people.' 'Pessimism, utilitarianism and materialism,' he said, 'are eating away at all of us, nobles, bourgeois and proletarians.' These words of Berth, a revolutionary syndicalist who was associated at that time with the integral nationalists, read like a text of Gentile. Did not the Italian philosopher also see fascism principally as a revolt against positivism? Against that positivism that created the 'regime of money, the essentially leveling, materialistic and cosmopolitan regime' that delivers up France to 'the essence and quintessence of bourgeois materialism, the Jewish speculator and financier'? Thus, 'one saw socialism and syndicalism successively pass into the hands of the Jews and become defenders of that nauseating and pestilential ideology of which Malthusianism, anti-Catholicism and antinationalism are the whole substance,...and it would seem, in fact, that the people now aspire only to the state of well-being of the man who has retired and is completely uninterested in anything except his pension, and lives in terror of social or international unrest and asks for only one thing: peace-a stupid, vacuous peace made up of the most mediocre material satisfactions.' Berth railed against 'bourgeois decadence,' against 'the completely bourgeois pacifism' that infects 'the people coming to birth with the corruption of the bourgeoisie coming to an end.' Bourgeois decadence bequeaths to the people 'a hypertrophied state, the product of a beggarly and half-starved rural and urban democracy,' and it creates a 'universal stagnation' in which the proletariat borrows 'the worst ideas of the decadent bourgeoisie.'

To counteract the effects of decadence, then as in the past, Berth saw but one solution: war. 'War,' he said, 'is not always that "work of death" that a vain people of effeminate weaklings imagines. Behind every powerful industrial and commercial development there is an act of force, an act of war.' War assures the progress of civilization and at the same time raises the question of the state and the nation. Berth, who was Sorel's disciple, quotes Proudhon—'War is our history, our life, our entire soul'—and Arturo Labriola, who claimed that 'the sentiment of national independence, like the religious sentiment, leads to the most incredible manifestations of sacrifice.' Only violence can save the human race from 'becoming universally bourgeois,' 'from the platitude of an eternal peace.'

Six years before writing these words under the pseudonym of Jean Darville, Berth, returning to one of Sorel's main ideas, had said that he believed that the syndicalist movement and proletarian violence possessed 'the capacity of regenerating the degenerate bourgeoisie and restoring its power of resistance so that it could fulfill its historical mission to the end.' In revolutionary syndicalism he had seen a fusion of the very Nietzschean idea of responding with 'blows of the fist' to the selfinterested benevolence of the bourgeoisie and the 'Marxist precept' that if one wishes to resolve social antagonisms, they first have to be taken to an extreme. If Berth was influenced by Nietzsche, that was certainly not accidental. Nietzsche had a considerable influence on the 'new school,' as he had formerly had on Barres,' and it is therefore not at all surprising that their successors in the thirties should also be very preoccupied with him. Thierry Maulnier wrote a book about him, and during the same period Drieu La Rochelle acknowledged his intellectual debt to Nietzsche's pessimism and his pragmatic philosophy of irrationality and action.

However, Berth attempted a synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche, whereas Drieu rejoiced at the overthrow of Marxism by the Nietzschean spirit. Berth could not conceive that the purpose of proletarian violence was merely that of setting two antagonistic classes against each other, but thought it was, rather, primarily that of creating the conditions in which a class could be formed, for 'economic unity' (or 'unity of situation'), he said, may be the necessary condition for the forming of a class, but it is not a sufficient condition. To this economic unity should be added 'unity of will,' and 'unity of will' is created only through struggle. It is in struggle that the classes become conscious of themselves and of what Berth, apparently following Hegel's Philosophy of Right, called the collective self or complex personality.'

According to Berth, the concept most dangerous to the idea of a class was that of a party. The real difference, he believed, between a class and a party was not that a party was an ideological unit and a class an economic unit: a class, when it is fully developed, is also an ideological entity. The real difference, he said, is that a party is only a collection of individuals from various classes-something that does not allow class consciousness to awaken and to attain the full clarity of an idea. In a word, a party is an organ of democracy, and 'democracy does not know classes, it only knows individuals.' Consequently democracy is fatal for socialism and the proletariat.

Berth claimed that liberal democracy and bourgeois society led to social atomization: 'Society is brought to the point where it is only a market made up of free-trading atoms, in contact with which everything dissolves. There are now only individuals, dustlike particles of individuals, shut up within the narrow horizons of their consciousness and their money boxes.' Side by side with this disintegration "of the merchant, bourgeois, liberal and democratic world,' however, one has the proletariat 'restoring the scattered condition of things and minutes to the permanent unity of its will to power.' Entrenched within 'the strongholds of its syndicates,' the proletariat alone is capable 'of restoring to a dissolving world a meaning, a goal, a direction, an ideal.' For, finally (here Berth quotes Sorel), 'it is war...that engenders the sublime, and without the sublime there cannot be a lofty morality.' Consequently, setting off, like Sorel, on a crusade for the redemption of morality and civilization, Berth once again assailed the 'international plutocracy' that 'is pacifistic by instinct and interest," for this plutocracy fears 'a revival of heroic values [that] could only hurt its purely materialistic domination.' Berth quotes at length a text that Pareto had contributed to Sorel's journal L'Independance, in which the Italian sociologist accused this plutocracy of being 'cowardly, as the Jews and the usurers had been in the Middle Ages. Its weapon is gold, not the sword: it knows how to scheme; it does not know how to fight. Thrown out on one side, it comes back on the other, without ever facing the danger; its riches increase while its energy diminishes. Exhausted by economic materialism, it becomes increasingly impervious to an idealism of sentiments.'

After having found inspiration in Pareto, Labriola, and Corradini, Berth turned to Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Berth wanted to destroy 'the power of the average, or, that is to say, of democratic, bourgeois and liberal mediocrity (as Nietzsche said, the proper word to qualify whatever is mediocre is "liberal").' It follows, then, that 'the dual, parallel and synchronized national and syndicalist movement must bring about the complete ousting of the regime of gold and the triumph of heroic values over the ignoble bourgeois materialism in which Europe is presently stifling. In other words, this revolt of Force and Blood against Gold, whose first signs were detected by Pareto, and the signal for which was given by Sorel in Reflections on Violence and by Maurras in Si le coup de force est possible, must end with the total downfall of the plutocracy.' To save civilization, one therefore had 'to persuade one group that the syndical ideal does not necessarily mean national abdication, and the other group that the nationalist ideal does not necessarily imply a program of social pacification, for on the day when there will be a serious revival of warlike and revolutionary sentiments and a victorious upsurge of heroic, national and proletarian values-on that day, the reign of Gold will be overthrown, and we shall cease to be reduced to the ignominious role of satellites of the plutocracy.'

The intellectual evolution that we see here was not the result of chance, but followed naturally from the Sorelians' basic conception of the relationship between socialism and the proletariat. Ultimately, they looked on it not as a fixed relationship but as something circumstantial, arising out of a given historical situation. The relationship between socialism and the proletariat could even be regarded as accidental, and that explains the ease with which the proletariat could be integrated into the nation and lose its unique status as a revolutionary factor. It transpired that the revisionists, those 'revolutionary revisionists' of the pre-1914 period, like the 'neos' of the thirties, came to believe that this role could be played not only by the proletariat but also by the nation, and this was what connected the thinking of people like Sorel, Labriola, Berth, and Michels with that of the next generation's critics of Marxism and liberalism. Neither group really set as its goal the liberation of the proletariat and the liberation of the individual; both groups, rather, sought to save civilization through a negation of bourgeois and liberal values and a condemnation of the old Socratic tradition.

Richard Pipes

2009-08-11T01:01:00.000-07:00

Communism

In the 1960s the government of Chile was controlled by Christian Democrats, whose leader, Eduardo Frei, pursued fairly radical social and economic policies. In particular, Frei carried out an ambitious agrarian reform program that called for the expropriation, with compensation, of large estates. Frei also nationalized much of the mining industry. These measures had the effect of polarizing Chilean society between the right, which thought they went too far, and the left, which saw them as inadequate. The popularity of the Frei administration was further undermined by inflation, which on the eve of the 1970 presidential election rose to 35 percent.

In that election, the three leading candidates ran neck and neck. The largest number of votes (36.3 percent) was cast for Salvador Allende, a medical doctor of Marxist sympathies, who represented the Popular Unity Party, a bloc of socialists and Communists. The conservative runner-up received 34.9 percent of the vote. Because no candidate had won an absolute majority, the issue was referred to the Congress. During the two months that followed the election, Allende struck a deal with the Christian Democrats, who agreed to support his candidacy provided he subscribed to a set of conditions committing him to honor Chile's constitution. These included respect for law and political pluralism. Spelled out in the Statute of Constitutional Guarantees, passed by Congress, it enabled Allende to assume the presidency.

Allende's 'Chilean Road to Socialism' was thus from the beginning subject to restraints that impeded the radical designs of its socialist and Communist constituency. Despite his admiration for Fidel Castro, Allende was a romantic idealist rather than a fanatical revolutionary. But his doctrinaire backers, determined to introduce into Chile a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' on the Soviet model, kept pushing him to the left, and as his measures failed he became radicalized. Allende believed that he could achieve socialist objectives by legal means on the assumption that his reforms would in time gain him the support of the nation's majority. The Communists supported this strategy, convinced that in Chile their objectives could be attained peacefully. Unfortunately for them, this did not happen, in part because Allende's socialist legislation alienated much of the country, and in part because it reduced the country's economy to shambles.

After assuming the presidency, Allende entrusted the economic ministries in his 'United popular Government, to Communists, who proceeded to nationalize the remaining mining industries, banking, and much of manufacturing. Enacted by decree, these measures bypassed the legislature. The confiscation of the Anaconda and Kennecott copper mines caused foreign investments to dry up. The Soviet Union came to Allende's assistance, extending to him over half a billion dollars in loans. Other countries also offered aid but it was not enough to rescue Chile's battered finances. To pay for the various social measures, including hikes in wages, the government resorted to the printing presses, which produced an inflation that far surpassed anything seen under Frei: in the three years of Allende's presidency, the value of the currency in circulation increased by a factor of fifteen, and inflation exceeded 300 percent a year.

Concurrently with the nationalization of enterprises, the government proceeded to collective agriculture. To this end, it tolerated and even encouraged land seizures. The result was a dramatic drop in food production, with wheat crops declining by almost 50 percent. Acute shortages followed: when Allende's government fell, the country had flour reserves for only a few days.

Protests mounted. The most serious of these were organized by truckers—small private entrepreneurs—who objected to government plans to compete with them by means of a national transport company. On two occasions these strikes, which involved as many as 700,000 people, brought the country's transport and much of the economy to a standstill. In an orthodox Communist country, such demonstrations would have been declared counterrevolutionary plots instigated by the CIA and suppressed. But in Allende's Chile, although the government controlled the radio and much of the press, there remained considerable freedom of information, which could not be silenced without provoking a national revolt. Opposition parties functioned and criticized the government. And, above all, there was the Congress and the Supreme Court.

In August 1973 the Chamber of Deputies voted 81 to 45 that Allende had violated the constitution by usurping its legislative powers, ignoring the country's laws, and infringing on the freedom of speech. The Supreme Court, for its part, condemned Allende for subordinating the judiciary to his political needs. In view of the absence in the Chilean constitution of provisions for impeachment, the Chamber requested the armed forces to restore the laws of the land. Obeying this mandate, eighteen days later, Chile's military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, forcibly removed Allende from office. The new regime was a dictatorship that dealt quite brutally with the defeated socialists and Communists.

John Patrick Diggins

2009-07-30T23:15:00.003-07:00

The Lost Soul of American Politics

In all matters but this of Slavery the framers of the Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language. But the Constitution alludes to slavery three times without mentioning it once! The language used becomes ambiguous, roundabout, and mystical. They speak of the 'immigration of persons,' and mean the importation of slaves, but do not say so. In establishing a basis of representation they say 'all other persons,' when they mean to say slaves—why did they not use the shortest phrase? In providing for the return of fugitives they say 'persons held to service or labor.' If they had said slaves it would have been plainer, and less liable to misconstruction. Why didn't they do it?

Lincoln is not suggesting that the framers' intent in leaving slavery unspecified was deliberate verbal obscurantism or that it was a result of their limited range of political discourse and linguistic possibilities. For the failure to utter and write the term 'slavery' was not a speech or verbal act; it was, in Lincoln's mind, a political act that amounted to moral failure. Here again, as with the 'ideology' of the Revolution, the linguistic medium may conceal rather than reveal meaning. For the framers consigned slavery to silence because its meaning was so clear it haunted the conscience. The mind knows whereof it does not speak.

Language was as much a 'cloudy medium' to Lincoln as it was to Madison. Lincoln resisted the idea that what a word means depends on its use, and he too possessed a premodern awareness of the difficulties of meaning that result from distortions of language that render shifting words incapable of communicating essential ideas. 'The world,' wrote Lincoln in 1864,

has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are such in the want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases, with himself, and with the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names—liberty and tyranny.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even in the North, and all professing to love liberty.

Aware that the idea of liberty cannot be conveyed simply by the conventional vocabulary of liberty, Lincoln nonetheless did not sink into linguistic despair. Nor did he insist that we can only know the meaning of an idea if we know under what conditions it is true or false or under what linguistic usages it can be explained. Such an exercise would make the meaning of an idea simply a matter of circumstances. Lincoln believed, on the contrary, that certain ideas were absolute because they involved fundamental principles. To appreciate Lincoln's stance, let us examine briefly his ideas on the nature of free government, on the concept of the morally right, and on the principle of human equality.

The South's decision to secede in January 1861 confronted Lincoln with the perennial problem of the authority of a government and the freedom of the people who compose it. In two major addresses delivered in response to the crisis, the 'First Inaugural' and the 'First Message to Congress,' Lincoln directed his thoughts to the South's argument that the respective states reserved the sovereign right to nullify laws of the Federal government and, as a last resort, to secede from it. A government that provided the means of its own destruction, Lincoln reasoned, would violate the meaning of 'all governments' as having the duty of self-preservation. Even if the Federal Union be 'not a government proper, but an association of states in the nature of a contract merely,' the definition of contract presupposes that one member cannot violate it without the consent of all members. Convinced that the Union was older than the Constitution, which had indeed been established 'to form a more perfect union,' Lincoln held that the intent of the Constitution as an instrument of government was to make the Union perpetual as a means of perfecting it. 'I hold, that in contemplation of universal law, and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments.' In his address to Congress Lincoln claimed that the threat of disunion presented a problem of universal significance, indeed, a problem that had assumed in his mind the sublimity of political mysticism:

And this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes. It presents the question, whether discontented individuals, too few in number to control administration, according to organic law, in any case, can always, upon the pretense made in this case, or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily, without any pretense, break up their Government, and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth. It forces us to ask: 'Is there, in all republics, this inherent, and fatal weakness?' 'Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?'

Harvey Mansfield

2009-07-30T23:15:00.001-07:00

Manliness

Let us not overlook the politics of Roosevelt's manliness. He was a great one for the assertiveness of executive power. His notion of the president's duty was not bound to actions authorized in the actual words of the Constitution. In a notable exchange with his Republican rival William Howard Taft, who held that belief, Roosevelt declared that the president is 'the steward of the people, bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not to content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin.' The American founders made an executive power strong enough to stand up to popular opinion and to withstand the temptation to seek popularity, but progressives like Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson made the president into a 'leader'—that is, on occasion a follower—of public opinion. Roosevelt, for all his promotion of positive merit (in which he borrows words of the Bible), is still a steward—and how manly is that? Who is more manly: George Washington, a man of dignity not to be trifled with, or Teddy Roosevelt, steward of the people, who sees humiliating constraint in the Constitution but not in popular favor? Here we detect a soft core to TR's blustering, outer toughness.

The same can be said of Roosevelt's imperialism. TR was no 'chicken hawk,' no armchair, theoretical imperialist whose main concern is with the ist or ism at the end of the word, and whose only action is egging others on. Quite the contrary! Having got himself named assistant secretary of the navy by President William McKinley in 1897, he was in office when the U.S. battleship Maine was blown up in the harbor of Havana in February 1898. But of course he was not the secretary of the navy. So he waited ten days until his boss took the afternoon off for a massage; then, having been routinely designated acting secretary, TR sprang into action—summoning experts, sending instructions around the world for the navy to be ready for war, ordering supplies and ammunition, and requesting authorization from Congress for unlimited recruitment of seamen. In four hours he created momentum toward war that neither the president nor his hapless superior could stem. After war was declared on April 19, Roosevelt, his alacrity now red-hot zeal, was offered command of a cavalry troop to be formed of frontiersmen, dubbed by him 'Rough Riders.' He declined the command for lack of experience but took second-in-command as being an office he knew how to work from. In short order, Roosevelt formed the troop consisting of cowboys leavened with polo players, having them ready by the end of May. Thus he gained the double glory with the double virtue that Machiavelli says is due to the captain who trains his army before he conquers the enemy. Not content with this, he rushed into action contrary to the example of Machiavelli, himself always a behind-the-lines commander. At considerable personal risk, TR led his troops in the famous charge up San Juan Hill, and when he reached the top, shot and killed one of the enemy. After the action he was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, America's highest decoration for bravery in battle. When he did not receive the medal, he was not too proud to lobby for it, anxious as he was to prevent the War Department from doing an injustice.

In all this Roosevelt grasped his opportunities, or as we would say in his spirit, faced his responsibilities. Responsibilities as we use the word often attach to an office, and they might seem to be particular to it—whether president, assistant secretary, or a nonpolitical office, such as parent. But TR's willpower manliness looks at the office as an excuse for action rather than the source of a duty imposed on the officeholder. It was manly of TR to seek the office, which he did eagerly rather than dutifully. Yet we cannot overlook the fact that taking on a responsibility is—nonetheless for its enthusiasm—accepting a duty. And it is a duty to those less competent and willful than oneself, hence a compromise of one's own freedom and independence.

Hannah Arendt

2009-07-29T02:54:00.001-07:00

The Origins of Totalitarianism

First, in their claim to total explanation, ideologies have the tendency to explain not what is, but what becomes, what is born and passes away. They are in all cases concerned solely with the element of motion, that is, with history in the customary sense of the word. Ideologies are always oriented toward history, even when, as in the case of racism, they seemingly proceed from the premise of nature; here, nature serves merely to explain historical matters and reduce them to matters of nature. The claim to total explanation promises to explain all historical happenings, the total explanation of the past, the total knowledge of the present, and the reliable prediction of the future. Secondly, in this capacity ideological thinking becomes independent of all experience from which it cannot learn anything new even if it is a question of something that has just come to pass. Hence ideological thinking becomes emancipated from the reality that we perceive with our five senses, and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things, dominating them from this place of concealment and requiring a sixth sense that enables us to become aware of it. The sixth sense is provided by precisely the ideology, that particular ideological indoctrination which is taught by the educational institutions, established exclusively for this purpose, to train the 'political soldiers' in the Ordensburgen of the Nazis or the schools of the Comintern and the Cominform. The propaganda of the totalitarian movement also serves to emancipate thought from experience and reality; it always strives to inject a secret meaning into every public, tangible event and to suspect a secret intent behind every public political act. Once the movements have come to power, they proceed to change reality in accordance with their ideological claims. The concept of enmity is replaced by that of conspiracy, and this produces a mentality in which reality—real enmity or real friendship—is no longer experienced and understood in its own terms but is automatically assumed to signify something else.

Thirdly, since the ideologies have no power to transform reality, they achieve this emancipation of thought from experience through certain methods of demonstration. Ideological thinking orders facts into an absolutely logical procedure which starts from an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it; that is, it proceeds with a consistency that exists nowhere in the realm of reality. The deducing may proceed logically or dialectically; in either case it involves a consistent process of argumentation which, because it thinks in terms of a process, is supposed to be able to comprehend the movement of the suprahuman, natural or historical processes. Comprehension is achieved by the mind's imitating, either logically or dialectically, the laws of 'scientifically' established movements with which through the process of imitation it becomes integrated. Ideological argumentation, always a kind of logical deduction, corresponds to the two aforementioned elements of the ideologies—the element of movement and of emancipation from reality and experience—first, because its thought movement does not spring from experience but is self-generated, and, secondly, because it transforms the one and only point that is taken and accepted from experienced reality into an axiomatic premise, leaving from then on the subsequent argumentation process completely untouched from any further experience. Once it has established its premise, its point of departure, experiences no longer interfere with ideological thinking, nor can it be taught by reality.

The device both totalitarian rulers used to transform their respective ideologies into weapons with which each of their subjects could force himself into step with the terror movement was deceptively simple and inconspicuous: they took them dead seriously, took pride, the one in his supreme gift for 'ice cold reasoning' (Hitler) and the other in the 'mercilessness of his dialectics,' and proceeded to drive ideological implications into extremes of logical consistency which, to the onlooker, looked preposterously 'primitive' and absurd: a 'dying class' consisted of people condemned to death; races that are 'unfit to live' were to be exterminated. Whoever agreed that there are such things as 'dying classes' and did not draw the consequence of killing their members, or that the right to live had something to do with race and did not draw the consequence of killing 'unfit races,' was plainly either stupid or a coward. This stringent logicality as a guide to action permeates the whole structure of totalitarian movements and governments. It is exclusively the work of Hitler and Stalin who, although they did not add a single new thought to the ideas and propaganda slogans of their movements, for this reason alone must be considered ideologists of the greatest importance.

What distinguished these new totalitarian ideologists from their predecessors was that it was no longer primarily the 'idea' of the ideology—the struggle of classes and the exploitation of the workers or the struggle of races and the care for Germanic peoples—which appealed to them but the logical process which could Tbe developed from it. According to Stalin, neither the idea nor the oratory but 'the irresistible force of logic thoroughly overpowered [Lenin's] audience.' The power, which Marx thought was born when the idea seized the masses, was discovered to reside, not in the idea itself, but in its logical process which 'like a mighty tentacle seizes you on all sides as a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter defeat.' Only when the realization of the ideological aims, the classless society or the master race, was at stake, could this force show itself. In the process of realization, the original substance upon which the ideologies based themselves as long as they had to appeal to the masses—the exploitation of the workers or the national aspirations of Germany—is gradually lost, devoured as it were by the process itself: in perfect accordance with 'ice cold reasoning' and the 'irresistible force of logic,' the workers lost under Bolshevik rule even those rights they had been granted under Tsarist oppression and the German people suffered a kind of warfare which did not pay the slightest regard to the minimum requirements for survival of the German nation. It is in the nature of ideological politics—and is not simply a betrayal committed for the sake of self-interest or lust for power—that the real content of the ideology (the working class or the Germanic peoples), which originally had brought about the 'idea' (the struggle of classes as the law of history or the struggle of races as the law of nature), is devoured by the logic with which the 'idea' is carried out.

The preparation of victims and executioners which totalitarianism requires in place of Montesquieu's principle of action is not the ideology itself—racism or dialectical materialism—but its inherent logicality. The most persuasive argument in this respect, an argument of which Hitler like Stalin was very fond, is: You can't say A without saying B and C and so on, down to the end of the murderous alphabet. Here, the coercive force of logicality seems to have its source; it springs from our fear of contradicting ourselves. To the extent that the Bolshevik purge succeeds in making its victims confess to crimes they never committed, it relies chiefly on this basic fear and argues as follows: We are all agreed on the premise that history is a struggle of classes and on the role of the Party in its conduct. You know therefore that, historically speaking, the Party is always right (in the words of Trotsky: 'We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right.'). At this historical moment, that is in accordance with the law of history, certain crimes are due to be committed which the Party, knowing the law of history, must punish. For these crimes, the Party needs criminals; it may be that the party, though knowing the crimes, does not quite know the criminals; more important than to be sure about the criminals is to punish the crimes, because without such punishment, History will not be advanced but may even be hindered in its course. You, therefore, either have committed the crimes or have been called by the Party to play the role of the criminal—in either case, you have objectively become an enemy of the Party. If you don't confess, you cease to help History through the Party, and have become a real enemy.—The coercive force of the argument is: if you refuse, you contradict yourself and, through this contradiction, render your whole life meaningless; the A which you said dominates your whole life through the consequences of B and C which it logically engenders.

Totalitarian rulers rely on the compulsion with which we can compel ourselves, for the limited mobilization of people which even they still need; this inner compulsion is the tyranny of logicality against which nothing stands but the great capacity of men to start something new. The tyranny of logicality begins with the mind's submission to logic as a never-ending process, on which man relies in order to engender his thoughts. By this submission, he surrenders his inner freedom as he surrenders his freedom of movement when he bows down to an outward tyranny. Freedom as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men. Over the beginning, no logic, no cogent deduction can have any power, because its chain presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning. As terror is needed lest with the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilized lest anybody ever start thinking—which as the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of deduction. Totalitarian government can be safe only to the extent that it can mobilize man's own will power in order to force him into that gigantic movement of History or Nature which supposedly uses mankind as its material and knows neither birth nor death.

The compulsion of total terror on one side, which, with its iron band presses masses of isolated men together and supports them in a world which has become a wilderness for them, and the self-coercive force of logical deduction on the other, which prepares each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, correspond to each other and need each other in order to set the terror-ruled movement into motion and keep it moving. Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

George Stigler

2009-06-24T05:21:00.000-07:00

The Economist as Preacher and Other Essays

History is written by and for the educated classes. We know more about the thoughts and actions of an eighteenth-century lord than about 100,000 members of the classes which were at or near the bottom of the income and educational scales. No one can deduce, from documentary evidence, the attitudes of these lower classes toward economic philosophies, whereas the noble lord's words are enshrined in Hansard and several fat volumes of published correspondence. Hence we cannot determine from direct documentary sources what the attitudes toward laissez-faire of these lower classes have been.

Nevertheless, it is an hypothesis that is plausible to me and I hope tenable to you that these lower classes—who have increased immensely in wealth and formal education in the last several hundred years—have been strongly attracted to the economic regime of laissez-faire capitalism.

One highly persuasive evidence of this is the major spontaneous migrations of modern history: the armies of Europeans that came to the United States, until barriers were created at both ends; the millions of Chinese who have sought entrance to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other open Asian economies; the millions of Mexicans who these days defy American laws designed to keep them home. These have not been simply migrations from poorer to richer societies, although even that would carry its message, but primarily migrations of lower classes of the home populations. An open, decentralized economy is still the land of opportunity for the lower classes.

The stake of the lower classes in the system of competition is based upon the fact that a competitive productive system is remarkably indifferent to status. An employer finds two unskilled workers receiving $3.00 per hour an excellent substitute for a semiskilled worker receiving $8.00 per hour. A merchant finds ten one-dollar purchases by the poor more profitable than a seven-dollar purchase by a prosperous buyer. This merchant is much less interested in the color of a customer than in the color of his money.

If it is true that a large share of the population of modern societies (and many other societies as well) eagerly migrates to competitive economies when given the opportunity, why have these people supported the vast expansion of governmental controls over economic life in the many democratic societies in which they constitute an important part of the electorate?

I shall postulate now, and argue the case later, that the lower classes have not supported regulatory policies and socialism because they were duped or led by intellectuals with different goals. Instead, these classes have shared the general propensity to vote their own interests. Once the unskilled workers enter an open society, they will oppose further free immigration.

John Barrow

2009-06-14T03:30:00.001-07:00

The Artful Universe

The new 'Revolutionary Calendar' was introduced by official decree on 24 November 1793. Further decimalization was suggested in order to divide each day into ten decimal hours of 100 decimal minutes, each of 100 decimal seconds' duration. This reform was enunciated with the intention of superseding the astrological logic at the heart of the seven-day week. Moreover, it was stated that the new calendar should not resemble that used by the Roman Catholic or other apostolic churches. One of its aims seems to have been the abolition of the religious observance of Sunday. The ensuing conflict between the Catholic order of the Dominicans (named from the Latin dies dominica, or, 'the Lord's day'), and the 'Decadists,' was a result of this aim. Opposition to the observance of Sunday became draconian during the Reign of Terror, when the closing of businesses, the donning of special Sunday dress, and the opening of churches on the old seven-day Sunday cycle were all forbidden. In 1794, Robespierre attempted to institute a new state religion dedicated to the worship of the Supreme Being each decadi. His aim was to alter the centre of gravity of French life, and replace the influence of the Church by that of the State. However, after reaching its zenith in 1798, the whole enterprise gradually disintegrated, and it was virtually non-existent by the end of the eighteenth century. Its failure was officially recognized by Napoleon's official reinstatement of the seven-day week, together with Sunday as the day of rest, in September 1805. The Gregorian calendar, already in use in Britain and America, and still used universally today, was readopted.

The other notable attempt to reform the week was Stalin's institution of the 'uninterrupted production week' in the Soviet Union in 1929. Here, there was a twofold purpose. One was to avoid a fallow day once a week, when all machinery would lie idle and all production cease; the other was to disrupt the pattern of family and community life to an extent that traditional religious observance would be unsustainable. Stalin set about achieving these ends by introducing a five-day cycle with four days of work followed by one day of rest. The cycle was not the same for everybody. The rest days were staggered throughout the population, so that factories and farms were constantly in production, with 80 per cent of the population working, and 20 per cent resting, on any given day. At first, each of the days of the new production week was labelled by a number, but the numbers were soon replaced by colours. Individuals began labelling their friends, family members, and acquaintances by their 'colours.' Society fragmented into five chromatic subsocieties. The 'yellows,' who had their day off on the first day of the week could socialize only with other yellows. Families were fragmented because different rest-days were allocated to different members of the same family. Attempts at religious observance were thwarted by the lack of opportunity for whole families or communities to meet together on the same day.

Despite close attention by the authorities, the 'uninterrupted production week' eventually degenerated into uninterrupted weak production. Workers whose duties, friends, and responsibilities were compartmentalized into a single day began to value their work very little. The absence of key workers who were needed to maintain equipment played havoc with the goal of continuous production. By 1931, the internal tensions were becoming acute and Stalin suspended the reform, blaming the irresponsibility of the workers and promising the reintroduction of the production week after a process of re-examination and re-education. But it was never reintroduced, and the whole idea was killed by his decree two years later. However, as if to emphasize the conflict with religious tradition, it was not replaced by the traditional seven-day week. Instead, it gave way to a six-day week—albeit with a single universal day of rest. This scheme continued to meet with resistance that grew in strength the farther one strayed from the centre of government. Peasant communities followed their hallowed seven-day cycle wherever possible, regardless, and eventually the State gave up, reinstating the seven-day cycle with the traditional 'day of resurrection' as the day of rest on 26 June 1940.

These battles for the seven-day week and its day of religious observance are instructive. They reveal the power of cultural tradition to order our lives. History shows that the structuring of days in a weekly cycle enables religious faiths to establish their identity by the device of hallowing particular days, or introducing a particular practice on particular days (for example, the former Roman Catholic tradition of abstaining from meat on Fridays). One should remember that there is nothing astronomically necessary about the cycle of days being sevenfold. If one steps into cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas that were outside the sphere of influence of the early Jewish tradition and of Mesopotamian astrology, then one finds 'weeks' of other lengths. In Africa and Central America, the weekly cycle is often framed around agricultural communities and trade. The market day is the most important day, and the weekly cycle of life revolves around it. In some parts of Africa, the word for 'week' is that for a 'market.' Another interesting feature of the length of weekly cycles in some non-Western civilizations is their link to the base of the counting system used. Distinctive examples are to be found in Central and South America, where counting systems based upon 20 (the number of fingers on two hands plus the toes on two feet) rather than our own 'decimal' system based upon 10 (the number of fingers on two hands) were widespread. Both the Mayans and the Aztecs employed base-20 counting systems and 20-day time cycles to define their weeks; the Mayans chose to divide their year into eighteen 20-day weeks and five additional, special days.

Martin Mayer

2009-05-16T23:00:00.001-07:00

Madison Avenue, USA

Every year tens of thousands of women write their personal problems to friendly Betty Crocker, the leading General Mills brand name, and it cannot be argued that these women are motivated by any logical process (indeed, it is reasonable to assume that they are incapable of logical processes). Nevertheless, somewhere inside their skulls they know they have been told by an ad that Betty is an understanding person. Though the final effect occurs on a semiconscious level, it originates in a perfectly conscious suggestion.

To Norman B. Norman of Norman, Craig & Kummel such conscious suggestions are usually a waste of the advertiser's time and money; what is meaningful to Norman is the unconscious suggestion. 'Why does a man use a cologne? To be sexy, of course. Sportsman toiletries came to us, they were using fishing rods in their ads to show they appealed to the outdoor type. What good is that? That girl we gave them has been one of the highest rating ads since it first appeared. Take Veto deodorant. Of course it should stop perspiration, people expect a deodorant to stop perspiration, the way they expect bread to be fresh. Why advertise what everybody expects?' We gave them a slogan with empathy—'Because You Are the Very Air He Breathes.' That gets at the heart of the matter.'

A high-voltage salesman ('the perfect huckster,' says the head of an unfriendly rival agency), Norman is a very tall man with high cheekbones and deep-set brown eyes under thick brown hair. He speaks with a deep, loud voice which on dry days may be audible in the apse of St Patrick's Cathedral, across the street twenty-one stories down from his office window. A social psychologist by academic training, he entered advertising on the research end with the Milton Biow Company in 1934, and moved on to William Weintraub as an account executive. He was senior vice-president of the agency, responsible for the Revlon, Maidenform, and Ronson accounts, when he and Eugene Kummel and David Kaplan bought out Weintraub in the fall of 1954. One of their first steps was to lure Walter Craig, a broadcasting expert, away from his job as advertising manager of Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Serutan, Geritol), and into a titular position in the agency, which now bills about $30 million a year. Weintraub continues as chairman of the board although he is no longer a principal owner of the agency.

Shortly after Norman took over, the agency found the word for its approach to the problems of advertising: 'Empathy.' Norman hopes that his agency's ads will involve customers with the advertised products at the deepest levels of their being, by expressing the real reasons why people buy these products. Since his orientation is Freudian, and a large part of his agency's business has been in cosmetics and lingerie, these real reasons are often sexual, which means that the ads can do no more than suggest them—although the photographs for Veto deodorant, with the girl stretched on the leopard-skin rug and the man's shoulder intruding, are as close to the literal as the law allows. In one of the great new-business coups of 1957, Norman's partner Gene Kummel won the Pabst account ($7 million worth) with a 'motivationally researched' campaign ('Pabst Makes It Perfect'), stressing what the motivational researchers like to call the leisure-time significance of beer drinking.

The Maidenform Brassiere ads are, of course, the classic example of the philosophy. Late in 1956 the Leo Burnett agency threw a few thousand dollars into what it called 'wastebasket research' to find out which ads housewives liked, and the Maidenform ad ran third in a group of three fashion advertisements. '"It goes too far," the ladies kept saying,' Burnett's A.F.H. Armstrong reported to a 4As meeting. '"It combines dress and undress. She would be decenter if she were entirely in her underwear."' Kay Daly, a svelte, nervous, immaculately turned out blonde who is Norman's fashion director and one of the agency's two copy chiefs, was delighted with the results of the Burnett tests. 'Housewives,' she said, 'should think those ads are shocking. That's the point.'

Germaine Greer

2009-05-16T22:59:00.002-07:00

Shakespeare

The intimacy of his contact with them is established from his first appearance as a spectator at Claudius's elaborate performance as king in council, when before he speaks to any character on stage he speaks to the audience. In reply to his mother's questioning of his mourning behaviour, he makes a claim which the audience has no choice but to believe:

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show...(I. ii. 77-85)

Thus he places himself as it were between the audience and the histrionic behaviour of Elsinore; the audience recognize him and accept him as belonging to a different order of reality. He will show them falsehood in its endless disguises, but in doing so, because the mind herself cannot be trusted, he will be in danger of corruption and derangement.

After his first soliloquy, when Hamlet emerges as protagonist, the audience acquire a new surrogate onstage, as Horatio comes to tell Hamlet what the audience already know. The intimacy between audience and protagonist is strengthened by the protagonist's display of affection for this silent watcher, to whom as he lies dying Hamlet entrusts his hard-won truth:

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me.
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story. (V. ii. 349-54)

In the third scene of Hamlet, we are shown Elsinore at home; we hear Laertes traducing Hamlet, and Polonius intoning his conventional advice to a son with the principal emphasis upon cunning and manipulation, followed by his attempt to instil the same politic calculation in his daughter. Normally the convention requires us to believe what is said on stage about an absent character unless it is specifically denied, but Ophelia's dimness ('I do not know, my lord, what I should think') and Polonius's brutal cynicism incline us to withhold belief. When Hamlet at his next appearance condemns the general tendency to believe the worst of people, our doubts are justified. The audience, through Horatio, its surrogate, swears loyalty to Hamlet, undertaking to keep faith with him, no matter how strangely he should behave. Again, a Hamlet scene is followed by a scene without him, in which we discover for ourselves what lies behind Polonius's glib, high-sounding morality. We see him paying a spy to defame his own son, so vilely that the snooper himself protests. Ophelia, a spy herself, comes hotfoot to tell of Hamlet's first piece of odd behaviour. Polonius interprets it as love madness; the audience has no reason to respect his judgement. It seems more likely that Hamlet was searching in Ophelia's face for something that he did not find, something which is not to be found in Elsinore.

The disjunction between how the inhabitants of Elsinore see Hamlet and the way the audience experiences him is deliberately maintained, for the audience must learn to disbelieve Elsinore on its own account. They will respond positively to the appeal in Hamlet's love letter to doubt 'truth to be a liar' rather than doubt him. Gradually he is assuming the role of probe, searching the body of Elsinore for the source of its corruption. If we doubt his right to be 'scourge and minister' to Denmark's disease, the play collapses into chaos, but if we forget the danger of sliding into solipsism, which is always present when we trust to our own reason for a guide, we have not understood the nature of the case. The drama of Protestantism in its finest hour was the heroism of insisting upon the sovereignty of the individual conscience.

Hamlet's first diagnostic tool is a play: the neatness of the correspondence of play within play to the play itself is a typical example of the kind of ingenuity that delighted learned Elizabethans. The action that Hamlet mounts is extremely formal, with its elaborate dumb show, its Prologue, and its long speeches in rhyming couplets. What is contained within this stylized structure is the 'occulted truth' that is causing the disease of Denmark. All around Hamlet, Elsinore is presenting feigned actions of a more naturalistic variety, which convey nothing but lies. Ophelia pretends to read, to lure Hamlet into a play staged by Polonius for the hidden audience of Gertrude and Claudius. Gertrude summons him to her closet, to play a scene for Polonius. Each time the audience is privy to the set-up, and each time Hamlet guesses right.

The Elizabethan audience knew the conventions of revenge tragedy at least as well as we today grasp the complicated rules of spy fiction. Once Hamlet has raised the suspicion that he knows that Claudius is a murderer, he is in deadly danger, not only of being eliminated by the tyrant, but also of being damned himself. The scourge of God is afterward burned in the fire. In case we should forget this conundrum, the scene where Hamlet decides not to kill Claudius as he is praying helps us to remember it. By failing to kill Claudius, Hamlet comes off the revenge treadmill, and instantly becomes the hunted rather that the hunter. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern come yapping at his heels, he cries, 'Hide, fox, and all after.' The audience knows exactly what he means, but his stage hearers are nonplussed. Only Claudius himself, sharing the audience's knowledge, knows what Hamlet is up to. He evades confrontation, preferring to hide and spy as if he were the avenger and not Hamlet. We begin to see that if Hamlet is to redeem Denmark, he will have to die to do it.

Michael Miller

2009-05-16T22:59:00.001-07:00

The Bon Marche

Part opera, part theatre, part museum, Boucicaut's eclectic extravaganza did not disappoint those who came for a show. Merchandise heaped upon merchandise was a sight all its own. Bargain counters outside entryways produced a crush at the doors that attracted still larger crowds, thus creating for all the sensation of a happening without and within. Inside, the spectacle of flowing crowds intensified, orchestrated by barred passages, by cheap, tempting goods on the first floor that brought still another crush to the store's most observable arena, and by a false disorder that forced shoppers to travel the breadth of the House. The oft-frenzied actions of thousands of employees, the din of calls about the cashiers, and the comings and goings of garcons in bright livery were the tumultuous accompaniment of a sensational proceeding.

Everywhere merchandise formed a decorative motif conveying an exceptional quality to the goods themselves. Silks cascaded from the walls of the silk gallery, ribbons were strung above the hall of ribbons, umbrellas were draped full blown in a parade of hues and designs. Oriental rugs, rich and textural, hung from balconies for the spectators below. Particularly on great sales days, when crowds and passions were most intense, goods and decor blended one into another to dazzle the senses and to make of the store a great fair and fantasy land of colors, sensations, and dreams. White sales, especially, were famous affairs. On these occasions the entire store was adorned in white: white sheets, white towels, white curtains, white flowers, ad infinitum, all forming a single blanc motif that covered even stairways and balconies. Later, Christmas displays became equally spectacular. In 1893 there was a display of toys representing an ice-skating scene in the Bois de Boulogne. In 1909 plans included a North Pole scene in the rue de Bac section, a Joan of Arc display in the rue de Babylone area, and an airplane 'with turning propeller and luminous toys' above the rue de Sevres staircase.

So the store, monumental, theatrical, fantastical, became an attraction in its own right to entice the public to visit the displays and to make of their trip an extraordinary experience. As early as 1872 Boucicaut was billing the Bon Marche as 'one of the sights of Paris.' Soon after he offered daily tours of the House. Each day at three o'clock shoppers, or mere visitors, were invited to assemble in the reading room. From there a guide conducted them throughout the building, visiting behind-the-scenes activities and passing through the great galleries and their displays of merchandise.

It is in this role of impresario that we must also see Boucicaut's inauguration of House concerts within and without the store. The very inspiration was suggestive of the directions in which bourgeois society was moving—and being moved. The presentation of concerts as regularly scheduled public events was itself of recent date, developing rapidly along these lines only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. But their growing proliferation under middle-class sponsorship for predominantly middle-class audiences pointed to the extent to which an enterprising bourgeoisie, cognizant of a growing bourgeois demand, was coming to organize the nation's leisure and arts, as well as its industrial output, into marketable commodities. The scale remained limited, but the tendency was undeniable: middle-class culture, even in the narrowest definition of its artistic pursuits, was assuming a consumer mentality. Still, the step from promoting entertainment events as a consumer event in themselves to exploiting them for substantially wider commercial purposes was a considerable one, and it is here that Boucicaut's productions take on significance, standing as it were on the threshold of modern marketing techniques.

The implications of these concerts were staggering. Music and shows had a long history as come-ons, but never had the connections been quite so sweeping. Now anything partaking of middle-class identities and middle-class tastes, or even simply of public fads, could become a means to a totally unintended and disassociated end: the promotion of a consumer society. If music could be sold to the middle classes either because there was a market that wished it aesthetically or that wished it socially as a sign of refinement—one of those ways by which the upper levels of the bourgeoisie sought to distinguish themselves from the lower orders, thereby setting the tone by which the lower bourgeois strata would just as eagerly seek to assert their distinction and hence their claim to middle-class status—then it could also be sold to the middle classes as an inducement to consumption of a very different sort. And if formal choral societies had equally become a widespread phenomenon over the past forty years, to be found largely among artisans and clerks but encouraged by middle-class audiences who warmed to this exhibition of solidarity with their own image of themselves (a side that did not escape the Boucicauts), then these societies too could be turned to the mass marketer's account, selling far more than good cheer and bad music.

Thus Boucicaut began his series of concerts. The first performance within the store was held in 1873, and until the death of Madame Boucicaut there would generally be one or two such events a year, usually in November and January. Saturday evening summer concerts in the square outside the Bon Marche began in the same year. Until the First World War these took place weekly, from June to September, except when the House societies were performing outside of Paris, or during inventory or Assumption.

The productions were grand and well-planned affairs. For the summer concerts, open to the general public, the House printed about 1,600 programs in advance. These were distributed at the cashiers, at entry ways, or in the reading room. Winter concerts—far more lavish in their conception, attended by invitation only, and apparently something of a society event—played to as many as 7,000 persons (of whom several thousand were employees). Rehearsals, for which performers were released early from work, were scheduled several times a week. Later, in the 1880s, well-known singers, including several from the opera, were added to the program. On the nights of the concerts themselves, large numbers of counters were dismantled, seats and special decorations set in place. Expenses ran into the thousands of francs.

As another of Boucicaut's showcase orchestrations, Bon Marche concerts played a dual role. On one level, they were presentations to the public of a new kind of employee: disciplined, cultivated, gentlemanly. This was important, because retail clerks in the past had acquired a disreputable image. Referred to by the derogatory term of 'calicot,' a title that had stuck from an unflattering portrait in a play by Scribe, clerks were notorious for their disorderly behavior, their untrustworthiness, and their claims to a status they did not have. Such an image could be acceptable in a small shop where neither service, nor ambiance, nor even necessarily trust was critical to a sale. But in a retail world that now stressed shopping as a pleasure in itself, the image had to change, and to this end House concerts provided a promotional device that displayed for once not the salesgoods, but the sellers themselves.

But it was again the ability to make of the store something it was not that was most important here. As one reviewer remarked:

'When one leaves a concert given by the Bon Marche, it is truly difficult to gather together all of one's impressions, the program having undertaken all that is possible, and even the impossible.

'The lights, flowers, and splendors heaped beneath the eyes of the guests, the eminent artists one has applauded, all in the end shimmer, sound, and run together in the memory of someone the least distracted, and one remains dazzled, dazed for some time while trying to recover the necessary stability to arrive at some sort of judgment.

'Let us speak first of the hall. In less than an hour the store, glutted with merchandise, abandoned to a world of gnomes or genies, is rapidly transformed, as in a fairyland, into a bewitching palace, dazzling with its lights, filled with flowers and exotic bushes whose effect is splendid. Everywhere carpets and silk tapestries from the Orient are flung and hung in abundance, forming charming salons, hallways, and retreats, all embellished by the good taste of the tapestry-workers. Immense departments, earlier filled with customers, soon will serve as an altar to the cult of music...'

Tim Harford

2009-05-16T22:58:00.001-07:00

The Logic of Life

Speed daters are able to propose to anyone and everyone they meet, and do so electronically after the event, so the embarrassment of rejection is minimised. That should mean that, for most people, a proposal of a date is a simple, uncomplicated expression of approval, and that nobody would propose a date they didn't want accepted or hold back a proposal even though they wanted a date. Belot and Francesconi persuaded one of Britain's largest dating agencies to release information about the activities of 1,800 men and 1,800 women who, over the course of nearly two years, attended eighty-four speed dating events. The researchers were able to see who went to which event, and who proposed to whom.

It won't surprise many people to hear that while women proposed a match to about one in ten of the men they met, men were a bit less choosy and proposed a match to twice as many women, with about half the success rate. Nor will it shock anyone to hear that tall men, slim women, non-smokers and professionals received more offers. But what might raise the odd eyebrow is that it became clear from about two thousand separate speed dates (that's one hundred hours of stilted conversation) that people seemed systematically—and rationally—to change their standards depending on who showed up for the speed date. They didn't seem to be looking for 'the one' at all.

For example, men prefer women who are not overweight. You might think, then, that if on a particular evening twice as many overweight women as usual show up, it will be a night where fewer men propose. Not at all. The men propose just as frequently, so that when twice as many overweight women turn up, twice as many overweight women receive offers of a date.

Similarly, more women prefer tall men than short men, but on evenings where nobody is over six feet, the short guys have a lot more luck. Most people prefer an educated partner, but they will propose to school dropouts if the Ph.D.s stay away. If people really are looking for a partner of a particular type, we would expect them to respond to the absence of such people by getting the bus home with a disappointed shrug, resigning themselves to spending Saturday night in front of the televisIon, and hoping for a better turnout at the next speed date. But that simply isn't what happens. Instead, people respond to slim pickings by lowering their standards.

Note that this experiment doesn't suggest that people aren't fussy: even the men turn down 80 per cent of the women, and the women are choosier still. What it does show is that we are more fussy when we can afford to be and less fussy when we can't: crudely speaking, when it comes to the dating market, we settle for what we can get. Francesconi told me that, according to his estimates, our offers to date a smoker or a non-smoker are 98 per cent a response to—there's no nice way to put this—'market conditions' and just 2 per cent governed by immutable desires. Proposals to tall, short, fat, thin, professional, clerical, educated or uneducated people are all more than nine-tenths governed by what's on offer that night. Only when there is an age mismatch do people even seem to consider waiting for another evening and hoping for a more suitable range of potential mates. Even then, the importance of preferences is still less than the importance of the market opportunity. In the battle between the cynics and the romantics, the cynics win hands down.

'Who you propose a date to is largely a function of who happens to be sitting in front of you,' Francesconi explained to me.

Ian Buruma

2009-04-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

Inventing Japan

Suicide was the sacrifice demanded of all Japanese soldiers who were captured by the enemy. But it was demanded of civilians, too. By 1944, Japanese leaders knew that the war could not be won by conventional means, but diehards maintained that even if all Japanese had to die, the kokutai would survive forever. There could be no surrender. Thus an ancient privilege of the samurai caste became a national duty. When the Americans landed on Saipan, women and children were made to jump off the cliffs. Up to 170,000 civilians died in Okinawa. Thousands were driven into American machine-gun fire as cover for Japanese troops. Others were forced to make room in hiding places for soldiers by killing themselves and their families with razors, knives, or, if necessary, their bare hands. Hundreds of thousands more perished in the man-made firestorms of Tokyo, Osaka, or Fukuoka, and still Japan's Gotterdammerung was being blamed by the ruling elite on the insufficient spirit and loyalty of ordinary citizens.

Schoolchildren were ordered to write letters to Japanese soldiers at the front, telling them to 'die gloriously.' In 1945, military suicide tactics actually became national policy. The Divine Wind Special Attack Units were the brainchild of Admiral Onishi Takijiro, who committed suicide himself after Japan's defeat. Young men, often from the best universities, were pressured into volunteering for this last show of Japanese spirit. Submarines and fighter planes were constructed especially for the suicide missions. In fact, even though only one in three suicide fighters actually hit an American target, the tactic was damaging to U.S. ships and cost many lives. But even Admiral Onishi cannot have seriously thought it would win the war. He may have hoped that such tactics would, in the words of one elder statesman, develop a more 'advantageous war situation,' forcing the enemy to come to terms. The desired effect was certainly deadly, but it was also theatrical: a peculiar idea of Japaneseness, whose seeds were sown in the late Edo period but which became a national pathology in the late 1930s, had turned from outward aggression to pure self-destruction.

There was really just one man who could have put an earlier end to all this misery, and that was the emperor himself. Any decision by his war cabinet had to be unanimous; otherwise the government would fall. And on the all-important matter of ending the war, Hirohito's ministers were far from unanimous. In May 1945, Truman reiterated the Allied position that Japan surrender without conditions, after which the Allies would replace the militarist regime with a democratic government. Much against the wishes of Japan experts in the State Department, including the former ambassador to Tokyo, Joseph Grew, no promise was made to protect the imperial throne. Since the throne was the holiest shrine of the kokutai. the emperor was no more keen to accept an unconditional surrender than were his generals.

In June 1945, the imperial palace in Tokyo was hit by a bomb. Perhaps it was this that helped to concentrate the emperor's mind, or perhaps it was worrying reports that his subjects were beginning to get restless. The emperor had been startled by the lack of reverence—indeed, the air of almost hostile indifference—of the bombed-out people when he was whisked through the blackened ruins of central Tokyo. By this time the capital, as well as almost every other major city in Japan, was reduced to heaps of rubble. There was no sign of a civilian rebellion as yet, but the possibility could not be dismissed. Prince Konoe, the former prime minister, warned darkly of a communist revolution that would be an even greater threat to the kokutai than an Allied victory.

So the emperor decided to sue for peace without endangering his own divine right to rule. Overtures were made to Stalin, to see whether the Soviets could broker a peace. But Japanese offers were too vague and had come too late. The Soviets were not interested. Even as envoys went back and forth to Moscow, preparations were made for a fight to the end. What was left of the Japanese military industry cranked up production of human torpedoes, suicide planes, human rocket bombs, and special 'crash boats' for a final clash to the death with the invaders.

At the Potsdam Conference in July, Truman told Stalin about his 'new weapon of unusual destructive force.' Stalin already knew this from his spies, so he smiled his crocodile smile and wished the Americans good luck with it. The Potsdam Proclamation, issued by Truman, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-shek, demanded an unconditional surrender. Still, no guarantees were given about the preservation of the throne, but the Allies promised to install a government 'in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people.' Some Japanese, such as Foreign Minister Togo Shigenori, realized this was the best Japan could hope for. To have insisted on accepting Allied terms, however, could have landed him and his like-minded colleagues in jail as 'defeatists.' The military supreme command was still adamant to persevere to the end. Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro, a retired admiral, did what Japanese leaders had done so often before: he let things drift. The Potsdam Proclamation was ignored, Japanese preparations for a final battle continued, and on August 6 Truman unleashed his special weapon on the city of Hiroshima. In a flash, one hundred thousand, or possibly more, men, women, and children died. Two days later. Soviet troops invaded Manchukuo. Three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki was pulverized, too.

That night, after the news of the Nagasaki bombing had struck home, the emperor convened a meeting inside a stifling underground bunker with his Supreme War Leadership Council. The six members of the council sweated in their dress uniforms, while the emperor, sitting stiffly in front of a gilded screen, listened to their arguments. If consensus could not be reached on how to proceed, the government would fall and many more people would die. What followed was the grotesque culmination of a politics based on mystical dogma. All members agreed on one thing, the preservation of the kokutai. There was no agreement, however, on the meaning of that elusive thing. Foreign Minister Togo saw the imperial institution in terms of a secular, constitutional monarchy, an organ of state, as defined by the eminent Taisho-era jurist Minobe Tatsukichi. But his army and navy colleagues regarded the emperor's prerogatives in a divine light. His right to rule could not be compromised. Furthermore, the army minister would not accept an Allied occupation of Japan, let alone a war crimes tribunal.

So it had come down to this. Now that Japan faced total destruction after half a century of wars, it was down to a fundamental question about the definition of the Japanese polity. Millions of American, Chinese, European, Southeast Asian, and Japanese lives hinged on it. Admiral Suzuki, a vague Japanese consensus seeker of the old school, turned to the emperor to decide. The emperor still fretted about the sacred mystique of his office. If the enemy were to land near Ise Bay, they would be able to take over two of the most important Shinto shrines, where the sacred imperial regalia were kept. Under these circumstances, he later remembered thinking, protection of the kokutai would be difficult. He made the 'sacred judgment' that Allied terms should be accepted.

On August 15, millions of Japanese, many of them sobbing on their knees, heard the emperor's voice for the first time, on the radio. Many could barely understand his formal court language. The contents of his surrender speech were couched in terms similar to those of the Great East Asia propaganda. It was not just to stop further use of 'a new and most cruel bomb' that he had decided Japan should surrender, but 'to pave the way for a grand peace for all generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.'

The emperor left much unsaid. He did not mention the threat of a Soviet invasion or his anxieties about a rebellion among his own people. Like the war itself, its ending was seen by many Japanese as divine providence. But such providence too can be manipulated. Admiral Yonai, a member of the Supreme War Leadership Council, gave a candid account on August 12, 1945: 'I think the term is perhaps inappropriate, but the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war are, in a sense, gifts from the gods. This way we don't have to say that we quit the war because of domestic circumstances.'

John O'Sullivan

2009-04-11T02:42:00.000-07:00

The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister

Shortly after taking office, Gorbachev had given the Soviet armed forces two years to win the war in Afghanistan. In turn the Red Army had launched a much tougher and effective counter-insurgency campaign using helicopter gunships and fighter-bombers. Against these tactics the mujahadeen used Blowpipe ground-to-air missiles provided by the British and Soviet SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles purchased secretly in Europe by CIA. These were effective at first, but the Soviet forces eventually developed tactics to outwit them. Pakistan's president Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq told a delegation of U.S. congressmen in late 1985 that the rebels desperately needed better missiles, in particular the Stinger. It took almost a full year to overcome the resistance of the military and intelligence bureaucracies in order to get them to the Afghans. Reagan signed an order to do so in April 1986; the first delivery of Stingers was made in September of that year.

A U.S. Army study later concluded that the Afghan resistance fired 340 Stingers, downing 269 aircraft. The balance of war on the ground swung back strongly in favor of the Afghans at the very moment when Gorbachev's deadline for success was approaching. In effect, their supply was the decisive military event of the war.

It was also the decisive political event of the war. Radek Sikorski, now Poland's defense minister, then a young journalist covering the conflict from the mujahadeen side, reached both conclusions. He acknowledged the military effect of the Stingers, but he thought that the supply of British Blowpipes was also important because, though less effective than Stingers, they were an open political commitment that helped overcome the resistance of U.S. bureaucrats to supplying the Stingers. If the British could ignore 'plausible deniability,' so could the U.S. And the mere fact that the U.S. was now prepared to openly assist anti-Communist forces—which was the essence of the Reagan Doctrine—was itself a crucial strategic innovation. It added to the long list of reasons for the Soviets to reconsider their various Third World commitments.

Diplomacy, in particular the UN negotiations at Geneva, now took on some importance; these negotiations provided the diplomatic fig-leaf for a Soviet withdrawal. The Geneva accords were signed in April 1988, and Soviet troop withdrawals began in August. On February 15,1989, General Boris Gromov crossed the bridge to the Soviet Union—the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan—one decade after the Soviets had confidently invaded.

The Afghan war did not end there. The Soviets continued to send military supplies to their Afghan allies, who clung to power for another three years. Since the fall of Kabul in 1991, Afghanistan has suffered from endless sectarian conflict, a civil war, an invasion, and a revived civil war. It remains in crisis at the time of this writing. In 1989, however, the country had delivered a historic strategic defeat to the Soviets. Their friends and their enemies knew it. The subjects of their European empire were now encouraged to seek their own liberation. And Soviet influence elsewhere began to retreat.

As Rodman notes, almost all Brezhnev's military commitments to the Third World were abandoned between 1988 and 1992. Cuban troops were withdrawn from Angola following an agreement signed in December 1988 in New York. The Vietnamese withdrew from Cambodia in 1989. The Sandinistas were defeated in a democratic election in Nicaragua in 1990. And there was a political settlement that essentially reconciled the losing Communist guerrillas to a democratic status quo in El Salvador in 1992. These events, marking the end of the Soviet Union as a superpower, represented an astounding success for a foreign policy doctrine of four years' standing. But the Reagan Doctrine's victory in Central America had not come simply, painlessly, or without casualties. It wounded, in particular, the president of the United States—and almost fatally.

Central America—in particular aid to the Contras—was a recurring controversy in U.S. domestic politics from 1981 until the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. The broad American Left outside Congress bitterly opposed Reagan's policy. Congress, narrowly divided, regularly came close to cutting off aid and instead compromised by imposing restrictions on it (the various 'Boland Amendments'), and the administration sought ways around the restrictions. For five years, however, Reagan got most of what he wanted, in part because of the administration's willingness to compromise and in part because of the Sandinistas' intransigence and brutality. The Reagan administration showed its reasonableness in El Salvador, where it supported centrist Christian Democrat politicians, land reform, and restraints on the military. The Sandinistas showed their unreasonableness by sending out violent mobs to attack opponents in a 1984 election that had been designed to establish their legitimacy. They did so again, as Reagan biographer Richard Reeves dryly points out, by visiting Moscow whenever a close congressional vote on Contra aid was scheduled. Both these sets of actions enabled Reagan to win support for his Central American policy from a coalition of moderate Democrats led by Congressman Dave McCurdy.

But when the Iran-Contra scandal broke, this narrow but effective coalition was weakened. The germ of the scandal was the administration's attempts to get around the effective prohibition of congressional restrictions on aiding the Contras. Most of these attempts—encouraging private citizens and friendly governments to aid the Contras—were legal. But a White House cabal, led by deputy NSC director Admiral John Poindexter and the gung-ho Colonel Oliver North, who undoubtedly believed that they were carrying out Reagan's wishes, conceived an ingenious plan to direct funds to the Contras from profits on arms shipments to Iran that were themselves designed to secure the release of American hostages held by terrorists linked to the Iranian mullahs. Whatever the legality of this arrangement—the Iran-Contra planners believed they were operating through legal loopholes and, because of the unutterable legal confusion that eventually descended on Iran-Contra, their contention was never decisively disproved—it was the worst possible politics.

Ayatollah Khomeini was so despised in America that the idea of supplying him with rockets struck ordinary citizens as outrageous and allies as a betrayal of Reagan's principled stand against terrorism. There were arguably legitimate arguments for the supply of arms to Iran: developing a strategic rapprochement with a major regional power in the Middle East and saving the lives of U.S. hostages. In retrospect, however, these look unrealistic: the outreach to Tehran had failed in any event, the American negotiators had been taken to the cleaners, only a few of the hostages were released, the dealings in Tehran smacked of amateur conspiracy addicts, and an atmosphere of illegality and deception hung over the entire enterprise. The momentum of scandal familiar since Watergate now took over. Reagan's approval ratings dropped precipitously and for the first time since the attempt on his life he looked politically mortal. A quasi-legal process in control of both houses of Congress, moved to destroy the Reagan presidency. And for almost an entire year the business of the U.S. government was delayed and distorted by the scandal mania.

Reagan was forced into humiliating gestures of apology and amnesia in the course of this hunt. But he survived owing to two errors on the part of his partisan critics. What really agitated the voters was that Reagan had struck a deal with the mullahs only six years after the Tehran hostage crisis. His liberal critics were far more concerned with the diversion of funds to the Contras. They never managed to instill their indignation into the voters, who after a time accepted the president's apology for arms dealing. Second, the media and the Democrats had spent six years trying to convince America that Reagan was a doddering old dimwit asleep at the wheel. That now suited Reagan's defense perfectly. The Democrats' new image of him—a Machiavellian mastermind orchestrating a vast conspiracy—was actually closer to the truth, but it seemed so uncharacteristic that Saturday Night Live produced a hilarious sketch showing Reagan barking commands to juggle currencies and transfer arms in fluent French and Farsi and eventually exclaiming in exasperation, 'Do I have to do everything myself?'

In the end Iran-Contra dribbled into the sands of legal appeals and newspaper recapitulations. Reagan revived his presidency; some reforms of the NSC, including its own legal counsel, were introduced; stronger congressional oversight of the CIA was brought in; and George H. W. Bush won the 1988 election after campaigning as Reagan's heir. Even the Contras survived.

Paul Fussell

2009-04-06T22:09:00.000-07:00

Uniforms

The court of Nicholas II swarmed with uniform wearers, and even the youngest and tiniest students at the Imperial Ballet School wore dark blue uniforms with collar decorations of silver lyres. So ubiquitous was the uniformity impulse among civilians that aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and laboring classes alike favored quasi-military caps of black or dark blue material with shiny visors.

But it is to the military, naval, and diplomatic services that one must turn to appreciate the unique aspects of Russian uniform culture. Especially notable on Russian uniforms were extralarge shoulder boards proclaiming those two Slavic obsessions, tide and rank, by means of colorful stripes and stars of various sizes, and visor caps with outsized covers as big as ashcan lids. The shoulder boards were a favorite target of the Bolsheviks, who liked to indicate their attitudes and power by tearing the boards off the uniforms of officers they encountered. When they wanted to humiliate the czar upon his arrest in 1917, they stripped off his special, costly sovereign's shoulder boards, which signaled, as they had for generations, the sacred continuity of the autocracy. Nicholas's were adorned with the jeweled initials of his imperial predecessor, Czar Alexander in, just as the czarevitch's were with Nicholas's. He wrote in his diary, 'Shall not forget this beastliness.'

Shoulder boards were reintroduced by the Soviet army only in the Second World War. When not pursuing their trade in civilian disguise, secret intelligence officers of the NKVD and KGB wore uniforms in public, so powerful was their desire to show off. And so persistent is the popular association of the Russian official look with shoulder boards that the entrepreneurs founding a 'Russian' restaurant in New York City were careful to provide their 'Cossack' musicians with shoulder boards, together with fancy visor caps with red crowns. Indeed, before the USSR broke up, it retained the czarist sense that officers' uniforms should be extremely impressive, colorful if not gaudy. There's a similarity here to the fanciness of the Soviet subway stations' elegance, with their crystal chandeliers and elaborate ceramic work.

Uniforms worn by those of very high rank, like marshals of the army, consisted of an olive tunic with red piping around the cuffs and collar, collar insignia embroidered in gold bullion, and, on the shoulder boards, an immense single marshal's star. Each trouser leg had a wide red stripe. It was best if the chest, both sides, were covered not just with ribbons but with the whole medals. Marvin Lyons suggests one cause of all this showiness: most army officers were poor, and they tended to originate in remote, drab, unstylish places. 'To compensate, perhaps, Russian uniforms had a style and elegance which quite outshone those of foreign armies.' Despite the social-equality impulses of the Bolsheviks, this tendency was still visible during the Second World War, and may be taken to suggest acute psychological anxiety about not being valued sufficiently. A useful contrast would be the uniform style of, say, Douglas MacArthur, secure enough in his role to adhere to the understatement principle, wearing that filthy cap with no necktie. And no ribbons or medals.

Azar Gat

2009-04-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

War In Human Civilization

It is difficult for people in today's liberal, affluent, and secure societies to visualize how life was for their forefathers only a few generations ago, and largely still is in poor countries. Life is reputably hard, but it used to be much harder. Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies, yet, without depreciating the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems of modernity, this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. People in pre-modern societies struggled to survive in the most elementary sense. The overwhelming majority of them went through a lifetime of hard physical work to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, child mortality, premature death of spouses, and early death in general was inseparable from their lives. At all ages, they were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule prevailed, violent conflict between neighbours was a regular occurrence and, therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, and honour, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic. In this context, the suffering and death of war were endured as just another nature-like affliction, together with Malthus's other grim reapers: famine and disease.

By comparison, even contrast, life in affluent—liberal societies changed dramatically. The decline of physical labour has already been mentioned. Hunger and want were replaced by societies of plenty, where food, for example, the most basic of needs, became available practically without limit, with the historically unprecedented and paradoxical result of obesity rather than starvation becoming a major problem, even, and indeed sometimes especially, among the poor. Childhood and early death became rare occurrences, with infant mortality falling to roughly a twentieth of its rate during pre-industrial times. Annual general mortality declined from around 30 to about 7—10 per 1,000 people. Not only were infectious diseases, the number one killer of the past, mostly rendered non-lethal by improved hygiene, immunizations, and antibiotics, but countless bodily irritations and disabilities—deteriorating eyesight, bad teeth, skin disease, hernia—that used to be an integral part of life were alleviated by medication, medical instruments, and surgery. Anaesthetics and other drugs, from painkillers to Viagra, have dramatically improved the quality of life. People in the developed world live in well-heated and air-conditioned dwellings, household jobs. They have indoor bathrooms and lavatories. They wash daily and change clothes as often. They drive rather than walk. They are flooded with popular entertainment through the media that occupies their spare time.

Jonah Goldberg

2009-04-04T00:11:00.000-07:00

Liberal Fascism

Under the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of May 1918, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence (a law Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld years after the war, arguing that such speech could be banned if it posed a 'clear and present danger'). In Wisconsin a state official got two and a half years for criticizing a Red Cross fund-raising drive. A Hollywood producer received a ten-year stint in jail for making a film that depicted British troops committing atrocities during the American Revolution. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn't want to buy Liberty Bonds.'

No police state deserves the name without an ample supply of police. The Department of Justice arrested tens of thousands without just cause. The Wilson administration issued a letter for U.S. attorneys and marshals saying, 'No German enemy in this country, who has not hitherto been implicated in plots against the interests of the United States, need have any fear of action by the Department of Justice so long as he observes the following warning: Obey the law; keep your mouth shut.' This blunt language might be forgivable except for the government's dismayingly broad definition of what defined a 'German enemy.'

The Justice Department created its own quasi-official fascisti, known as the American Protective League, or APL. They were given badges—many of which read 'Secret Service'—and charged with keeping an eye on their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Used as private eyes by overzealous prosecutors in thousands of cases, they were furnished with ample government resources. The APL had an intelligence division, in which members were bound by oath not to reveal they were secret policemen. Members of the APL read their neighbors' mail and listened in on their phones with government approval. In Rockford, Illinois, the army asked the APL to help extract confessions from black soldiers accused of assaulting white women. The APL's American Vigilante Patrol cracked down on 'seditious street oratory.' One of its most important functions was to serve as head crackers against 'slackers' who avoided conscription. In New York City, in September 1918, the APL launched its biggest slacker raid, rounding up fifty thousand men. Two-thirds were later found to be innocent of all charges. Nevertheless; the Justice Department approved. The assistant attorney general noted, with great satisfaction, that America had never been more effectively policed. In 1917 the APL had branches in nearly six hundred cities and towns with a membership approaching a hundred thousand. By the following year, it had exceeded a quarter of a million.

One of the only things the layman still remembers about this period is a vague sense that something bad called the Palmer Raids occurred—a series of unconstitutional crackdowns, approved by Wilson, of 'subversive' groups and individuals. What is usually ignored is that the raids were immensely popular, particularly with the middle-class base of the Democratic Party. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was a canny progressive who defeated the Republican machine in Pennsylvania by forming a tight bond with labor. He had hoped to ride the popularity of the raids straight into the Oval Office, and might have succeeded had he not been sidelined by a heart attack.

It's also necessary to note that the American Legion was born under inauspicious circumstances during the hysteria of World War I in 1919. Although it is today a fine organization with a proud history, one cannot ignore the fact that it was founded as an essentially fascist organization. In 1923 the national commander of the legion declared, 'If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country's institutions and ideals as the fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy.' FDR would later try to use the legion as a newfangled American Protective League to spy on domestic dissidents and harass potential foreign agents.

Vigilantism was often encouraged and rarely dissuaded under Wilson's 100 percent Americanism. How could it be otherwise, given Wilson's own warnings about the enemy within? In 1915, in his third annual message to Congress, he declared, 'The gravest threats against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags...who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign intrigue.' Four years later the president was still convinced that perhaps America's greatest threat came from 'hyphenated' Americans. 'I cannot say too often—any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready. If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic.'

This was the America Woodrow Wilson and his allies sought. And they got what they wanted. In 1919, at a Victory Loan pageant, a man refused to stand for the national anthem. When 'The Star-Spangled Banner' ended, a furious sailor shot the 'disloyal' man three times in the back. When the man fell, the Washington Post reported, 'the crowd burst into cheering and handclapping.' Another man who refused to rise for the national anthem at a baseball game was beaten by the fans in the bleachers. In February 1919 a jury in Hammond, Indiana, took two minutes to acquit a man who had murdered an immigrant for yelling, 'To Hell with the United States.' In 1920 a salesman at a clothing store in Waterbury, Connecticut, received a six-month prison sentence for referring to Lenin as 'one of the brainiest' leaders in the world. Mrs. Rose Pastor Stokes was arrested, triecLand convicted for telling a women's group, 'I am for the people, arid the government is for the profiteers.' The Republican antiwar progressive Robert La Pollette spent a year fighting an effort to have him expelled from the Senate for disloyalty because he'd given a Speech opposing the war to the Non-Partisan League. The Providence Journal carried a banner—every day!—warning readers that any German or Austrian 'unless known by years of association should be treated as a spy.' The Illinois Bar Association ruled that members who defended draft resisters were not only 'unprofessional' but 'unpatriotic.'

German authors were purged from libraries, families of German extraction were harassed and taunted, sauerkraut became 'liberty cabbage,' and—as Sinclair Lewis half-jokingly recalled—there was talk of renaming German measles 'liberty measles.' Socialists and other leftists who agitated against the war were brutalized. Mobs in Arizona packed Wobblies in cattle cars and left them in the desert without food or water. In Oklahoma, opponents of the war were tarred and feathered, and a crippled leader of the Industrial Workers of the World was hung from a railway trestle. At Columbia University the president, Nicholas Murray Butler, fired three professors for criticizing the war, on the grounds that 'what had been wrongheadedness was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason.' Richard Ely, enthroned at the University of Wisconsin, organized professors and others to crush internal dissent via the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion. Anybody who offered 'opinions which hinder us in this awful struggle,' he explained, should be 'fired' if not indeed 'shot.' Chief on his list was Robert La Follette, whom Ely attempted to hound from Wisconsin politics as a 'traitor' who 'has been of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter of a million troops.'

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it has been estimated that some 175,000 Americans were arrested for failing to demonstrate their patriotism in one way or another. All were punished, many went to jail.

John McMillan

2009-03-03T00:08:00.000-08:00

Reinventing the Bazaar

The stallholders, who are mostly women, sell fish, vegetables, grains, canned foods, and basic household items. They operate on a tiny scale, a typical day's turnover being just a few dollars. The marketplace, housed in several large dirt-floor sheds, is overcrowded and dusty. The press of people, the noise, and the smell of fish overwhelm a visitor.

First impressions are misleading. Primitive as it may look, the Makola market is an intricate system. The stallholders are not just retailers but also wholesalers: they buy in bulk to sell small quantities to consumers, and they aggregate small purchases for resale to other sellers. They organize the transportation of goods—not a simple matter in a country with inadequate roads and railroads—serving as intermediaries between widely scattered producers and consumers. They do some rudimentary manufacturing: Grafting with beads and processing raw materials into foodstuffs, condiments, and cosmetics. They find recycling uses for cans, bottles, and newspapers. Assessing their customers' creditworthiness and granting some of them credit, they take on the role of banks.

Being illiterate, the stallholders must keep their business records in their heads, using impressive powers of memory. They make precise calculations of their input costs so as to keep track of their profits. The price a vendor charges for a string of beads, for example, reflects the price she paid for the beads and thread, the time she or her employee spent stringing the beads; and her target profit margin.

The stallholders have developed their own miniature legal system. Informal property rights have arisen. Although they do not have legal title to their stall space, which is technically owned by the Accra city council, they act as though they do. Spaces are inherited. Often the current stallholder acquired the space from her mother or sister. Spaces are also rented, bought, and sold. Certain respected merchants, called 'queen mothers,' play the part of judges, arbitrating when disputes arise.

Gains from trade are generated. The vendors make others—as well as themselves—better off by making food available to the urban poor, and by providing income to farmers with which to buy necessities like clothing. Thus they exemplify Adam Smith's analysis of the merchant: 'By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.'

The Makola marketplace has continued to operate despite periodic, sometimes violent attempts by the Ghanaian government to shut it down. These attempts reached a height of brutality in 1979 after the military government accused marketplace traders of violating its price controls. Soldiers looted the stalls and then dynamited the marketplace. Later, in the town of Kumasi, soldiers armed with machine guns raided the marketplace and beat up the traders. Accusing one of profiteering, a soldier ripped her baby off her back and shot her. Bulldozers then ground the marketplace stalls into the dust. A soldier remarked, 'That will teach Ghanaian women to stop being wicked.'

The Ghanaian government, invoking the 'market women menace,' was using the merchants as a scapegoat for its own policy failures, which had led to severe shortages and inflation. Newspapers parroted the government's line. One described the market demolition as a 'happy tragedy' which produced 'tears of joy in the worker, the common man,' who was 'helpless at the hands of the unfeeling Makola conspirators' (that is, the vendors).

Within a week the merchants were back where their stalls had been, selling their fish and vegetables, though now without a roof over them. The Makola traders' accomplishments, Robertson wrote, 'have been triumphs of intelligence, determination, and sometimes desperation.'

An American case of the spontaneous development of markets came during Prohibition. From 1920 to 1933 it was illegal to sell alcohol in the, United States. In spite of the law—or perhaps because of it—the liquor trader flourished, as respectable people flocked to illicit bars, or speakeasies. Prohibition had its costs. Thirsty drinkers paid exorbitant prices, as the need to do business covertly meant transaction costs were high. Prices were pushed up threefold. Some of the liquor was toxic, manufactured from dubious ingredients. Gangsters like Al Capone tried to monopolize the liquor trade, murdering their rivals and corrupting police officers.

Despite all its efforts, the government utterly failed to squelch the alcohol market. Alcohol consumption, toward the end of the Prohibition era, was still about two-thirds its pre-Prohibition level. 'Detesting the interference with their liberties, sober and high-minded Americans, who had hardly ever touched liquor before, now made it almost a point of honor,' says Scottish historian Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart, 'to drink on all social occasions.' The bizarre episode that was Prohibition brings to mind a line from Robert Burns: 'freedom and whisky go together.'

Goetz Aly

2009-03-03T00:06:00.000-08:00

Hitler's Beneficiaries

During World War I, the German government scandalously neglected the welfare of soldiers' families. Indeed, civil servants in Wilhelmine Germany seemed intent on reducing them to poverty. Millions of working-class women and children who had been scraping by on their own suddenly faced deprivation when their breadwinners were called to the front. While the men were shedding their blood on the front lines, their dependents were forced to do without basic necessities at home. The state provided just enough to live on, but not a scrap more. The existing legislation to provide for support for soldiers' families during wartime dated back to 1888, and although it had been amended many times, it utterly failed to meet the requirements of modern mass warfare.

The obliviousness of the Wilhelmine government to the needs of military families was a sign of its inability to empathize with the economic situation of the working classes. Decision makers under Kaiser Wilhelm II had sufficient funds at their disposal, but they lacked the social and political imagination to allocate them properly. The idea that mass warfare, for psychological reasons, required equity in the distribution of resources was alien to Wilhelmine elites. As a result, an outmoded system of class rule condemned itself to extinction, squandering what remained of its popular support through indifference—if not actual malice—toward the welfare of the population at large. It was not until September 1918, far too late, that the press secretary to the Reich chancellor finally realized that 'homelessness, lack of clothing, and above all starvation cannot be overcome with indoctrination.'

The experience of 1914 to 1918 still resonated among the majority of Germans twenty-one years later. When the Nazi leadership drafted the Compensation for Military Deployment Law on August 28, 1939, one key paragraph stipulated: 'Previous standards of living and peacetime income levels are to be taken into account when calculating degrees of family support for members of the Wehrmacht.' The law aimed at 'maintaining [families'] level of personal assets' and 'prior economic standing,' pledging to subscriptions, life insurance policies, payments on goods bought on the installment plan, and mortgages. In general, the state supplements strove 'to maintain fighting spirit and will and to secure home-front morale.'

The vast majority of Germans were much better off than they had been in World War I. The paternal state no longer demeaned ordinary people. It distributed material goods that improved the popular mood. The political leadership unambiguously directed civil servants 'to act, in light of their special responsibility toward all the people, with corresponding understanding of the concerns and needs of family members of frontline soldiers.' 'The greatest possible speed and facility in the delivery of mandatory family support payments' was to be treated as a 'duty and point of honor for every branch of the civil service.' In disputed cases, decisions were to be made to the benefit of claimants. Without exception, the administrative directives that followed the outbreak of military hostilities strengthened the rights of beneficiaries. In October 1939, German newspapers reported that, at Goring's behest, family support measures had been expanded: 'The National Socialist state leadership has freed the frontline German soldier from all worries about the (maintenance of his family.' From then on, rents were paid in full, and extra benefits of all kinds were handed out. The goal of these generous initiatives was to win over 'the heart of the soldier' through demonstrations of 'abiding concern.'

The immediate response was overwhelmingly positive, and in the euphoria following Germany's victory over France, the state combined the various individual benefit payments under the Law on Deployed Family Maintenance, or EFUG (Einsatz-Familienunterhaltsgesetz). Significantly, at the same time, tax exemptions for overtime, night, Sunday, and holiday wages were being introduced. According to EFUG, family maintenance was not considered a kind of welfare payment but rather 'an honor-bound duty of the ethnic community [Volksgemeinschaft] carried out by the state.' There was no suggestion that state supplements and subsidies should be paid back, nor was there any means of testing for eligibility. A major difference for millions of Germans was that, in contrast to normal wages, family maintenance payments were exempt from garnishment to settle unpaid debts. This regulation cost the state nothing; the burden was transferred to creditors.

Supplemental benefit payments for rent, insurance, coal, potatoes, and other daily needs were paid out with minimal bureaucratic delay. The state offered household assistance to families with large numbers of children. It also provided money for special expenditures such as dental bills or children's education costs. In daily practice, civil servants did their best 'to compensate for special circumstances and treat [recipients] as individuals.' As a matter of course, family maintenance payments were tax-free, and recipients were exempt from consultation charges under their health insurance. As a result of these handouts, working-class women could suddenly afford to give up their factory jobs.

In fact, the government soon had to impose a cap to prevent maintenance payments from exceeding the prewar net income levels of family breadwinners called to fight at the front. The limit was set at 15 percent less than what a soldier had earned, after taxes, on his last monthly pay-check, but the cap meant that most women still received 85 percent of their normal household income. For the first time, many of them were able to keep house without being subjected to the moods and whims of their husbands. Thus, although average household income levels were somewhat lower than in peacetime, stable prices, a freeze on rents, and an exemption from asset seizure made it possible to live in material comfort. If one factors into the equation soldiers' wages and their food rations, many German families actually had more disposable income in war than in peacetime.

An academic study of the family maintenance program conducted in 1943 defined its purpose as 'shoring up the popular mood and, in particular, the morale among the broad masses.' The program's generosity sometimes worked against its aims, however, by creating envy among neighbors, an appetite for additional benefits, and the desire to take the state for whatever one could get. Some recipients expressed frustration at the increasing scarcity of goods available for purchase. Nonetheless, by and large, the program achieved its goal of neutralizing potential political opposition on the home front, which consisted primarily of women.

In total, the Third Reich spent 27.5 billion marks, an astonishing sum for the time, on family maintenance benefits during World War II. average, family members of German soldiers had 72.8 percent of peace-time household income at their disposal. That is nearly double what families of American (36.7) and British soldiers (38.1) received.

As part of this massive handout, the government increased subsidise to families under the rubric 'population policy measures' from 250 to 500 million reichsmarks between 1939 and 1941. In 1942, the turning poult of the war, the total doubled again, and by the end of the war, it still hovered around one billion marks annually. These figures reflect increases in child support and family household subsidies of 25 percent in 1939, 28 percent in 1940, 56 percent in 1941, and 96 percent in 1942. The basis for domestic stability in Hitler's Volksstaat was its continual bribery of the populace via the social welfare system.

In 1943, determined to bolster the Third Reich's war chest, Nazi economics minister Walther Funk suggested that 'the current tax exemption for family maintenance payments and other such compensation payments should be abolished.' His proposal was shot down by the triurmvirate of Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels, who saw themselves, together with the party gauleiters, as the ultimate guarantors of popular morale on the home front. 'We've been too lavish in our wartime budgeting,' Funk remarked dryly in a letter to a colleague. 'It will be difficult to break out of the spiral.'