“The Hebrew Bible: Kings” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction by introducing the Deuteronomistic influences that pervade the Book of Kings. “The Book of Kings proper exhibits an approach to politics, character, and historical causation that is quite different from the one that informs the David story…. The Deuteronomistic compiler repeatedly invokes the stipulation that there can be only one legitimate place of worship, which is the temple in Jerusalem—an idea that became firmly entrenched only with King Josiah’s reforms around 621 B.C.E., scant decades before the Babylonian exile…. Again and again, the compiler, with his overriding concern for the exclusivity of the cult in the Jerusalem temple, inveighs against both northern and southern kings in formulaic language for allowing the people to burn incense and offer sacrifice on “high places,” that is, local ritual altars…. It seems likely that a good deal of circumstantial detail about the various kings was deemed irrelevant to this narrative, encompassing four centuries of Israelite history, that is meant to expound the cumulative chain of actions that led to two nationally traumatic events, the destruction of the northern kingdom in 721 B.C.E. and, 135 years later, the destruction of its southern counterpart.”

Alter begins his textual analysis by going into detail about the Deuteronomistic interpolations in the book, beginning in 1 Kings 2:3-4, “These two relatively long verses are an unusual instance of the intervention of a Deuteronomistic editor in the dialogue of the original David story that was composed perhaps nearly four centuries before him…. The very mention of the Teaching [torah] of Moses is a hallmark of the Deuteronomist, and as phrase and concept did not yet have currency in the tenth century. The long sentences loaded with synonyms are also uncharacteristic of the author of the David story.”

In 1 Kings 3:1, Alter relates the historical political background that is often incorporated into the biblical story. Alter also includes a bit of semantic exposition, “And Solomon became son-in-law to Pharaoh. The Hebrew verb, although it involves marriage, indicates an establishment of relationship between the groom and the father of the bride. The marriage is thus politically motivated and will be the first of many such unions for Solomon in his effort to consolidate the mini-empire created by his father…. took. This ordinary verb often has the force of “marry,” as here.”

Alter describes the defining trait of Solomon, wisdom, which is evidenced repeatedly in the biblical narrative. In 1 Kings 9:2, “the LORD appeared to Solomon a second time. Solomon’s royal enterprise is framed by two revelations. Early in his reign, God appears to him at Gibeon and grants him the gift of wisdom (3:5-14). The wisdom is first manifested in the episode of the Judgment of Solomon and in his composing proverbs. His great building projects, now completed, may reflect another kind of wisdom because they consolidate his rule. Now God comes to him to tell him that the sanctity of the Temple is divinely ratified.”

Alter often informs when the biblical story conforms or contradicts the extant historical records. In 1 Kings 14:25, “Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. Finally, the biblical text gives us a Pharaoh with a name. An inscription at one entrance of a sanctuary at Karnak in fact offers a list of towns in Judah and Israel that Shishak attacked in the course of a sweeping military campaign in 926 B.C.E. Jerusalem, however, does not appear on the list. The language of the biblical text here is a little vague: Shishak “came up against Jerusalem” and “took the treasures.” This leaves open the possibility that he besieged the city without conquering it and that he extorted the treasures from Rehoboam in return for lifting the siege.”

The prophet Elijah is often cited as a biblical precursor to Jesus. In 1 Kings 17:14 and in 17:24, “The jar of flour will not go empty nor will the cruse of oil be drained. This is the point at which Elijah’s role as a miracle worker becomes explicit…. It is obviously Elijah, not Moses or Isaiah, who establishes the template for many of the stories about Jesus in the Gospels. It was also this aspect of Elijah as a miraculous and compassionate intervener on behalf of the wretched of the earth that was picked up by later Jewish folklore. His other role, as implacable reprover, was not embraced by folk-tradition…. Now I know that you are a man of God, and the word of the LORD in your mouth is truth…. The two aspects of Elijah’s mission—wonder worker and prophesier-reprover—are interdependent, the former demonstrating to skeptics the authority of the latter. This pattern, which will be picked up in the stories about Jesus, does not appear in the reports about the prophets before Elijah.”

In 2 Kings 20:17, Alter again reconciles the historical record with the biblical narrative, “a time is coming when everything that is in your house and that your fathers stored up till this day will be borne off to Babylonia. This dire prophecy is presented as punishment for Hezekiah’s imprudence in exposing all his treasures to the eyes of the Babylonian visitors. Many scholars think that the episode was added over a century later in an effort to explain the despoiling of Jerusalem during the reign of Jehoiakim in 597 B.C.E. or in the final destruction of the city in 586 B.C.E.”

Alter notes a final moment of Deuteronomistic insertion into the narrative in 2 Kings 22:8, “I have found a book of teaching. The identical designation sefer hatorah occurs in Deuteronomy 30:10…. For two centuries, the scholarly consensus, despite some dissent, has been that the found book is Deuteronomy. Although attributed to Moses, it would have been written in the reign of Josiah…. The book “found” in 621 B.C.E. was also not altogether identical with Deuteronomy as we have it, which almost certainly included some later elements, and was not edited in the form that has come down to us until the Babylonian exile. The major new emphases of the book brought to Josiah were repeated stress on the exclusivity of the cult of Jerusalem (“the place that I shall choose”) and the dire warnings of imminent disaster and exile if the people fail to fulfill its covenant with God.”

“The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Daniel Steuer)

Han, for once, delves explicitly into eastern thought, though, as usual, comparing and contrasting its tenets with western philosophy, particularly the Greeks and German idealists, along the way. His focus is on Zen, but he also describes Buddhism more generally. Han begins with the concept of nothingness and the lack of an inner subject in Zen. “The Buddhist nothing is opposed to inwardness…. The Buddhist nothing’s lack of ‘exclusive subjectivity’ or ‘conscious will’ is not a ‘deficiency’ but a strength of Buddhism. The absence of ‘will’ or ‘subjectivity’ is precisely what constitutes the peacefulness of Buddhism…. Buddhism’s foundation is an empty centre that does not exclude anything…. The Zen sayings about Buddha being ‘broken tiles and pebbles’ or ‘three pounds of flax’ indicate the orientation towards immanence in the spiritual attitude of Zen Buddhism. They express the ‘everyday mind’ that makes Zen Buddhism a religion of immanence…. The worldview of Zen Buddhism is not directed upwards, nor is it oriented towards a centre. It lacks a ruling centre. One might also say: the centre is everywhere…. In a single plum blossom, the whole universe blooms…. The nothing of Zen Buddhism does not offer anything to hold on to, no solid ‘ground’ that one could be sure of or ascertain, nothing that one could cling to…. The path does not lead into ‘transcendence’. One cannot flee from the world, because there is no other world.”

Having dealt with both a lack of inwardness and of transcendence, Han moves on to the Buddhist concept of emptiness. “Substance (Latin: substantia, Greek: hypostasis, hypokeimenon, ousia) is without a doubt the fundamental concept of occidental thought…. The central Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) is in many respects a counter-concept to substance…. It empties out all being that remains within itself, that insists on itself or closes itself up in itself. Sunyata spills such beings into an openness, into an open, stretched-out distance…. Emptiness, however, is not a principle of creation; it is not a primary ‘cause’ from which all beings, all forms, ‘emerge’…. It does not mark a ‘transcendence’ that precedes the forms as they appear. Form and emptiness are situated on the same level of being…. Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen…. One individual being reflects the whole in itself, and the whole dwells in this one being…. Emptiness thus does not mean the negation of the individual…. The emptiness or the nothing of Zen Buddhism is therefore not a simple negation of beings, not a formula for nihilism or scepticism. Rather, it represents an utmost affirmation of being. What is negated is only the substance-like delimitation that produces tension…. In just one thing, then, the whole world dwells.”

As is his want in almost all of his books, Han brings in Hegel. “Hegel’s notion of spirit, with inwardness being its fundamental trait, is certainly opposed to the Zen Buddhist notion of spirit. Zen Buddhist practice is an attempt at de-internalizing spirit without, however, immersing it in, or turning it into, a pure ‘outside’ and without hollowing it out by reducing it to a ‘vegetative covering’. The aim is to empty out the spirit, to make it awake and collected without inwardness. Satori [understanding] may well refer to that state of the spirit in which spirit flowers, so to speak…. Satori is the other of selfhood, the other of inwardness…. Spirit de-internalizes itself in an indifference, even in friendliness.”

Of course, Han also brings in Heidegger, in opposition to the Zen concept of wandering through life and being at home nowhere. “Dasein perceives the world only with regard to itself, to its own possibilities of being…. The heart that dwells nowhere is opposed to the kind of subject whose fundamental trait is the continual return to itself…. Dwelling nowhere, wandering, presupposes a radical renunciation of possession, of what is mine. Basho walks himself and his possessions away…. The temporality of his hiking is without future…. His wandering is free of any teleological or theological meaning. Basho has always already arrived…. Basho is hiking because he strives to be nowhere…. Dwelling nowhere radically questions the paradigm of identity…. The heart that dwells nowhere, that does not cling on to anything, follows the changing circumstances…. In its detachment, the heart is not tied to anything, and it knows neither joy nor sorrow, neither love nor hate. The heart that dwells nowhere is too empty, so to speak, to be capable of love or hate, joy or sorrow…. Emptiness, however, cannot be an object of desire, for it is nothing. It empties out all desire…. Emptiness, however, is not the wholly other of the multiform, manifold world. It is the world…. To dwell nowhere is not to flee from the world. It is not the negation of dwelling in this world.”

Han finishes this short treatise by taking on death and friendship—an odd pairing. “Death does not put an end to what is mine. Instead as my death, it calls forth an intense I am. I am dying therefore means: I am…. In Zen Buddhism, death is not a catastrophe or a scandal, but nor does it set in motion a labour of mourning that works compulsively against finitude…. In the face of death Zen Buddhism cultivates an attitude of letting go [Gelassenheit] that is free of heroism and desire…. Finitude begins to shine, without the brilliance of infinity or the semblance of eternity…. The impermanent world is not transcended towards infinity. You do not move somewhere else. Rather, you immerse yourself in impermanence.” Finally, Han concludes, “Emptiness must be understood as a medium of friendliness. In the field of emptiness, there are no strict demarcations. Nothing remains isolated in itself or within itself. Things nestle up to one another, reflect each other. Emptiness de-internalizes the I into a rei amicae that opens up like a guest house…. Original friendliness is not something that is exchanged between persons; it is not a case of ‘someone’ being friendly towards ‘someone’. Rather, one should say: no one is friendly…. It is a gesture of emptiness.”

“Either/Or” by Elif Batuman

This sequel in Batuman’s chronicle of her narrator, Selin’s, time at Harvard takes the reader through sophomore year. There is her still unrequited love for her now-graduated beau, Ivan, her deep late-night conversations with her best friend, Svetlana, her navigating the living situation with her new roommate, Riley, and her budding attempts at her own career in writing. “Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.” In her creative writing class, at least, she is self-aware, “Everything we wrote was awful. Why did we have to talk about it? All the suggestions felt random and performative.”

Despite her more grownup aspirations, Selin is still very much a college student. “I was still the kind of person who thought it was interesting to see what happened if you only ate cashews for a week.” Her discussions with Svetlana drip with academic jargon. “We talked a lot about whether different things were a content or a form.” Selin also continues to take intensive Russian language classes, “A famous Soviet bard died. All the Russian instructors were depressed…. In his honor, all the Russian students had to memorize poems by Pushkin. This made sense according to Russian people’s logic, where everything always connected to Pushkin.” Much of this novel focuses on Selin’s attempts to get over Ivan and to develop her own love life. “Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness…. This thing with the boyfriends—it wasn’t a passing fad. Nothing would go back to how it had been. It would become more and more like the way it was.”

Re the title of the novel, there are numerous Kierkegaard-inspired digressions on the nobility of the ethical versus the aesthetic life. “I felt it was the time for stocktaking: for looking back at what I had learned about the aesthetic life…. In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This is what I had learned from books…. What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic.”

“Cratylus” by Plato (translated by C.D.C. Reeve)

This dialogue, by Plato, involves Socrates debating both Hermogenes and Cratylus. It focuses on the concept of names, their origins, and their innate correctness. Socrates suggests, “It’s the work of a rule-setter, it seems, to make a name. And if names are to be given well, a dialectician must supervise him…. So Cratylus is right in saying that things have natural names, and that not everyone is a craftsman of names, but only someone who looks to the natural name of each thing and is able to put form into letters and syllables…. This much is clearer than before, that names do possess some sort of natural correctness and that it isn’t every man who knows how to name things well.”

Later on in the discussion, Socrates considers the history of naming, “We are most likely to find correctly given names among those concerned with the things that by nature always are, since it is proper for their names to be given with the greatest care…. If we ever get hold of a name that isn’t composed out of other names, we’ll be right to say that at last we’ve reached an element, which cannot any longer be carried back to other names…. And if primary names are indeed names, they must make the things that are as clear as possible to us…. We said that the correctness of a name consists in displaying the nature of the thing it names…. Now, a name is an imitation, just as a painting or portrait is…. Both convention and usage must contribute something to expressing what we mean when we speak…. When you know what a name is like, and it is like the thing it names, then you also know the thing.”

Socrates concludes by assessing whether the name or the thing itself is what must first be comprehended. “The name-giver might have made a mistake at the beginning and then forced the other names to be consistent with it…. That’s why every man must think a lot about the first principles of any thing and investigate them thoroughly to see whether or not it’s correct to assume them…. It seems like it must be possible to learn about the things that are, independently of names…. It’s really the case that one can learn about things through names and that one can also learn about them through themselves…. It is far better to investigate them and learn about them through themselves than to do so through their names.”

“The Way We Live Now” by Anthony Trollope

This standalone novel, by Trollope, originally published in serial form, is much to do about money in Victorian England—who has it, who is making it, and who needs it. It is about an aristocracy with land and titles, but short on ready cash and a speculative merchant class with seemingly unreserved flows of new wealth, now hungry to also increase their status and rank within polite society. Marriage was often the most common way of uniting these two needy factions. Debts, mortgages, stock shares, speculations, and leverage were the coin of the times. “He never for a moment thought of paying his bills. Even the large sum of which he had become so unexpectedly possessed would not have gone far with him in such a quixotic object as that; but he could now look bright, and buy presents, and be seen with money in his hands. It is hard even to make love in these days without something in your purse.”

Melmotte, the wealthy financial speculator, is viewed by much of society as the greatest man of his age, while others never let him forget his common origins and his ignoble profession. “I look upon him as dirt in the gutter. To me, in my old-fashioned way, all his money, if he has it, can make no difference…. No one pretends to think that he is a gentleman. There is a consciousness among all who speak of him that he amasses his money, not by honest trade, but by unknown tricks—as does a card sharper. He is one whom we would not admit into our kitchens, much less to our tables, on the score of his own merits. But because he has learned the art of making money, we not only put up with him, but settle upon his carcass as so many birds of prey.”

The aristocracy maybe in want of money, but still lives within the bounds of its own eccentric code. “I’m not very good at saying my prayers, but I do think there’s something in that bit about forgiving people. Of course cheating isn’t very nice: and it isn’t very nice for a fellow to play when he knows he can’t pay; but I don’t know that it’s worse than getting drunk like Dolly Longstaffe, or quarreling with everybody as Grasslough does—or trying to marry some poor devil of a girl merely because she’s got money. I believe in living in glass houses, but I don’t believe in throwing stones…. I often think I shouldn’t have been the first to pick up a stone and pitch it at that woman. Live and let live—that’s my motto!”

In the battle between new and old money the tides were quickly shifting within society. “Augustus Melmotte was becoming greater and greater in every direction—mightier and mightier every day. He was learning to despise mere lords, and to feel that he might even domineer over a duke. In truth he did recognize it as a fact that he must either domineer over dukes, or else go to the wall. It can hardly be said of him that he had intended to play so high a game, but the game that he had intended to play had become thus high of its own accord. A man cannot always restrain his own doings and keep them within the limits which he had himself planned. They will very often fall short of the magnitude to which his ambition has aspired. They will sometimes soar higher than his own imagination. So it had now been with Mr Melmotte. He had contemplated great things; but the things which he was achieving were beyond his contemplation.”

But in this time of speculation and castles of wealth built on foundations of sand, the faster one’s rise, often, the harder one’s fall. “A failure! Of course he’s a failure, whether rich or poor—a miserable imposition, a hollow vulgar fraud from beginning to end—too insignificant for you and me to talk of, were it not for that his position is a sign of the degeneracy of our age.” Eventually, even those in society who initially praised the bold men of business would begin to question this method of acquisition of wealth. “Hazily, as through a thick fog, Lord Nidderdale thought that he did see something of the troubles, as he had long seen something of the glories, of commerce on an extended scale, and an idea occurred to him that it might be almost more exciting than whist or unlimited loo.” The men of business, themselves, had always been clear-eyed from the start. “Fisker was not only unscrupulous himself, but he had a thorough contempt for scruples in others. According to his theory of life, nine hundred and ninety-nine men were obscure because of their scruples, whilst the thousandth man predominated and cropped up into the splendour of commercial wealth because he was free from such bondage.”

“The Cultural Transplant” by Garett Jones

Jones’ thesis, in a nutshell, is “immigration, to a large degree, creates a culture transplant, making the places that migrants go to a lot like the places they left.” In other words, assimilation is overstated and cultural transmission works in both directions.

This short book is filled with data, charts, and citations of various academic research. As Jones is quick to point out, not all cultural attributes are equally important for a country’s economic success. One that matters is the degree of trust within a community. He cites a study that found, “current trust attitudes back in the ancestral homeland did a very good job predicting trust attitudes of Americans…. Forty-six percent of the home-country attitude toward trust survived…. Looking only at those fourth-generation immigrants, people whose great-great-grandparents were the most recent ancestors to live their full lives overseas… [the authors found] the same 46 percent persistence.” Trust attitudes are sticky and culturally determinant. “Some attitudes from the ancestral country get transplanted to the second generation, and some don’t. But among the attitudes that substantially survive migration, many matter for the wealth of nations: savings rates, views on trust, and views toward government regulation and personal responsibility.”

Another focus of Jones’ book is Deep Roots research, the idea that culture is so sticky that you can tell a lot from a peoples, on average, by looking at their distant ancestors. This is a theory that claims that lineage, and not geography, matters most. “For both State History and for Agricultural History, migration-adjusted scores are twice as good as migration-unadjusted scores for predicting a nation’s prosperity in 2000…. If you’re trying to guess a nation’s income per person in 2002, the migration-adjusted tech measure handily beats the migration-unadjusted measure. The relationship is always at least twice as strong, and the year 1500 migration-adjusted tech measure explains well over half of all cross-country income differences today.” So, the traits that matter most for predicting contemporary economic success are how far back legible state formation occurred, when agriculture started, and, foremost, the degree of technological proficiency and innovation within a community by the year 1500. Jones is quick to add, “The key trait we’re interested in is always the comparison between the migration-adjusted scores and the migration-unadjusted scores…. Cultural transplant theory predicts stronger migration-adjusted relationships.”

After many more cross-country comparisons, Jones digs deeper with a case-study of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. “Outside China, every country with a majority that’s of Chinese descent is strongly capitalist, strongly market oriented, and prosperous: Taiwan, Singapore, tiny Macau, and Hong Kong…. China is, by far, the world’s poorest majority-Chinese country…. Taiwan, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong—those four Chinese-majority countries appear to be grafting China’s Deep Roots of prosperity, China’s high SAT [State-formation, Agriculture, Tech] scores from 1500, China’s legacy of good governance and competent bureaucracy, and China’s legacy of Confucian culture onto multiple lands…. All are among the top 10 percent of richest countries per person; all have higher average incomes per person than Australia or Canada or France. And none have natural resources to thank for their prosperity. Their best geographic feature is excellent access to the ocean.” Furthermore, Jones brings in the rest of the Chinese diaspora, “Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines—people from China moved to all these nations, usually thinking they’d move back. But they often ended up staying, though typically keeping up some degree of Chinese cultural practices and retaining the Chinese language…. And on average, first-, second-, and third-generation Chinese immigrants wound up much richer, more prosperous, and better educated than the indigenous populations in the countries they moved to…. Across Southeast Asia, there’s a strong relationship between the Chinese share of the population and current prosperity.”

Finally, Jones admits to what the research has yet to figure out. “We know pretty clearly that culture persists and that culture substantially survives migration, but we really don’t know exactly why it persists.” Nonetheless, he concludes, “My most important claim—that culture persists and, to a substantial degree, survives the process of migration—is backed up by the types of evidence that have a lot in common with good experiments. Since 1500 people have moved around the world, and they’ve tended to carry much, often most, of their economic heritage with them from their old countries…. Looking at shorter time horizons, the second-, third-, and even fourth-generation descendants of immigrants around the world today hold political and social attitudes a lot like those in the countries their ancestors came from long, long ago…. On average, migrants make the places they move to a lot like the places they left…. If a country wants prosperity and peace over the next century, it’s prudent to choose an immigration policy that raises its Tech History score; that imports cultural attitudes that are friendly to competent governance, markets, and individualism; and that gives some attention—but nowhere close to overwhelming attention—to the risks that often accompany greater cultural and ethnic diversity.”

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman

Batuman’s turn at auto-fiction is lightly amusing with academic flourishes peppered throughout. The plot details the narrator, Selin’s, first year at Harvard. She is a typical freshman. “I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.”

Much of the novel focuses on Selin’s complicated relationship with a senior boy from her Russian class, Ivan, with whom she has fallen in love. “I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.” Her dorm-mate, Svetlana, is always giving out advice, “I get that you despise convention, but you shouldn’t let it get to the point that you’re incapable of saying, ‘Fine, thanks,’ just because it isn’t an original, brilliant utterance. You can’t be unconventional in every aspect of life. People will get the wrong idea.”

Selin visits a campus shrink for more advice. “I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people—people they could get rid of.” Through the challenges of her first year, she also lives by her own heuristics. “My policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous.” She often philosophizes to herself. “There were lots of ways things could have turned out, and you had to memorize the particular one that was real. Or . . . did you? Was there only one way the world could have turned out? If you were smart enough, could you deduce it? A tiny part of me held out the hope that you could.”

Selin ends up spending the summer teaching English in Hungary, primarily because Ivan is from Budapest. Ivan also philosophizes, in his own way. He also really likes Dostoevsky and is a fan of Raskolnikov, “What’s so bad, practically, about killing an old woman who nobody likes? Personally, that old woman makes me really mad. I see women like that on the train all the time. They always expect you to give them your seat. Sometimes I’m reading, and it really makes me mad that I have to give her my seat so she can just sit there and think nothing.” Selin wonders how much of Ivan’s personality is tied in with the Hungarian national character. “How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?” She is young, in love for the first time, and trying to figure it all out. “But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.” 

“Critique of Judgment” by Immanuel Kant (translated by Werner S. Pluhar)

This is the final of Kant’s three treatises in his series of critiques. This book is divided into his critiques of the judgment of aesthetics and the judgment of teleology. But to start, Kant waxes on his theory of judgment, in general. For Kant, judgment is a bridge between the subjects of his first two critiques, “Judgment will bring about a transition from the pure cognitive power, i.e., from the domain of the concepts of nature, to the domain of the concept of freedom…. Judgment in general is the ability to think the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, law) is given, then judgment, which subsumes the particular under it, is determinative…. But if only the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely reflective…. Determinative judgment, [which operates] under universal transcendental laws given by the understanding, is only subsumptive…. Reflective judgment, which is obligated to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal, requires a principle, which it cannot borrow from experience.”

Regarding the judgment of aesthetics, Kant begins, “What is merely subjective in the presentation of an object, i.e., what constitutes its reference to the subject and not to the object, is its aesthetic character…. When the senses present things outside me, the quality of the space in which these things are intuited is the merely subjective [feature] of my presentation of them (and because of this [feature] I cannot tell what such things may be as objects in themselves), and because of this subjective reference the object is moreover thought as merely appearance…. That subjective [feature] of a presentation which cannot at all become an element of cognition is the pleasure or displeasure connected with that presentation…. Not all aesthetic judgments are judgments of taste, which as such refer to the beautiful; but some of them arise from an intellectual feeling and as such refer to the sublime.”

Kant continues on about aesthetics, its subjectivity, and its necessary relationship back through the subject, “He will talk about the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment were logical (namely, a cognition of the object through concepts of it), even though in fact the judgment is only aesthetic and refers the object’s presentation merely to the subject…. Since a judgment of taste involves the consciousness that all interest is kept out of it, it must also involve a claim to being valid for everyone, but without having a universality based on concepts. In other words, a judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality…. In their logical quantity all judgments of taste are singular judgments…. There can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful. No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful…. Beautiful is what, without a concept, is liked universally.”

Kant contrasts aesthetic beauty with the sublime, “Suppose we call something not only large, but large absolutely [schlechtin, absolut], in every respect (beyond all comparison), i.e., sublime. Clearly, in that case, we do not permit a standard adequate to it to be sought outside it, but only within it. It is a magnitude that is equal only to itself. It follows that the sublime must not be sought in things of nature, but must be sought solely in our ideas…. That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small…. In order for the mind to be attuned to the feeling of the sublime, it must be receptive to ideas…. It is a dominance [Gewalt] that reason exerts over sensibility only for the sake of expanding it commensurately with reason’s own domain (the practical one) and letting it look outward toward the infinite, which for sensibility is an abyss. It is a fact that what is called sublime by us, having been prepared through culture, comes across as merely repellent to a person who in uncultured and lacking in the development of moral ideas…. We say that someone has no feeling if he remains unmoved in the presence of something we judge sublime.”

Kant returns to the concept of taste. “Taste lays claim merely to autonomy; but to make other people’s judgments the basis determining one’s own would be heteronomy…. Following by reference to precedent, rather than imitating, is the right term for any influence that products of an exemplary author may have on others…. Taste is precisely what stands most in need of examples regarding what has enjoyed the longest-lasting approval in the course of cultural progress…. Taste needs this because its judgment cannot be determined by concepts and precepts…. A judgment of taste, just as if it were merely subjective, cannot be determined by bases of proof…. The fact that others have liked something can never serve [the subject] as a basis for an aesthetic judgment.”

Finally, Kant discusses the nature of fine art. “What is essential in all fine art is the form that is purposive for our observation and judging, rather than the matter of sensation (i.e., charm or emotion). For the pleasure we take in purposive form is also culture, and it attunes the spirit to ideas…. Ideas, in the broadest sense, are presentations referred to an object according to a certain principle (subjective or objective) but are such that they can still never become cognition of an object. There are two kinds of ideas. One of these is referred to an intuition…. The other kind is referred to a concept…. Rational ideas are transcendent concepts; they differ from concepts of the understanding, which are called immanent because they can always be supplied with an experience…. An aesthetic idea cannot become cognition because it is an intuition (of the imagination) for which an adequate concept can never be found. A rational idea can never become cognition because it contains a concept (of the supersensible) for which no adequate intuition can ever be given…. I think we may call aesthetic ideas unexpoundable presentations of the imagination, and rational ideas indemonstrable concepts of reason.”

In the second section of his treatise, Kant lays out his critique of teleological judgment. He suggests, “Organized beings are the only beings in nature that, even when considered by themselves and apart from any relation to other things, must still be thought of as possible only as purposes of nature. It is these beings, therefore, which first give objective reality to the concept of a purpose that is a purpose of nature rather than a practical one, and which hence give natural science the basis for a teleology…. An organized product of nature is one in which everything is a purpose and reciprocally also a means. In such a product nothing is gratuitous, purposeless, or to be attributed to a blind natural mechanism.”

Kant concludes with man’s purposive role within nature, “Now in this world of ours there is only one kind of beings with a causality that is teleological, i.e., directed to purposes, but also so constituted that the law in terms of which these beings must determine their purposes is presented by these very beings as unconditioned and independent of conditions of nature, and yet necessary in itself. That being is man, but man considered as noumenon. Man is the only natural being in whom we can nonetheless cognize, as part of his own constitution, a supersensible ability (freedom) and even cognize the law and the object of this causality, the object that this being can set before itself as its highest purpose (the highest good in the world)…. His existence itself has the highest purpose within it…. Now if things in the world, which are dependent beings with regard to their existence, require a supreme cause that acts in terms of purposes, then man is the final purpose of creation…. Only in man, and even in him only as moral subject, do we find unconditioned legislation regarding purposes…. For the moral principle that determines us to action is supersensible. Hence it is the only possible [thing] in the order of purposes that is absolutely unconditioned as concerns nature, and hence alone qualifies man, the subject of morality, to be the final purpose of creation to which all of nature is subordinated.”

“Paradise Lost” by John Milton

I found reading Milton’s epic poem much more relevant when I saw it as an allegory for his travails during the English Civil War. One can see why so many readers are surreptitiously attracted to the character of Satan. After all, Milton was a Cromwellian Puritan who felt betrayed by the restoration of the monarchy. Even without that background, the lyricism of the words on the page, as he spins the tale of mankind’s fall, is transcendent. In epic Greek fashion, Milton begins with a proem of sorts, “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/ Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/ Brought death into the world, and all our woe,/ With loss of Eden, till one greater man/ Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,/ Sing heavenly Muse….”

Satan, already banished in hell, gives a rousing speech to his minions about how he would rather stay there than be restored to heaven, forced to resubmit to God’s rule, “Suppose he should relent/ And publish grace to all, on promise made/ Of new subjection; with what eyes could we/ Stand in his presence humble, and receive/ Strict laws imposed, to celebrate his throne/ With warbled hymns, and to his Godhead sing/ Forced hallelujahs; while he lordly sits/ Our envied sovereign, and his altar breathes/ Ambrosial odours and ambrosial flowers,/ Our servile offerings? This must be our task/ In heaven, this our delight; how wearisome/ Eternity so spent in worship paid/ to whom we hate….” Satan’s scheme quickly turns to the corruption of man, “To waste his whole creation, or possess/ All as our own, and drive as we were driven,/ The puny habitants, or if not drive,/ Seduce them to our party, that their God/ May prove their foe, and with repenting hand/ Abolish his own works….” As Satan reconnoiters the Garden of Eden, he stumbles upon the weak link, “One fatal tree there stands of knowledge called,/ Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidden?/ Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord/ Envy them that? Can it be sin to know,/ Can it be death? And do they only stand/ By ignorance, is that their happy state,/ The proof of their obedience and faith?”

Alone in the Garden of Eden, Satan comes upon Eve, in the form of the serpent, ready with his best arguments to tempt her, “Shall that be shut to man, which to the beast/ Is open? Or will God incense his ire/ For such a petty trespass, and not praise/ Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain/ Of death denounced, whatever thing death be,/ Deterred not from achieving what might lead/ To happier life, knowledge of good and evil;/ Of good, how just? Of evil, if what is evil/ Be real, why not known, since easier shunned?/ God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just;/ Not just, not God; not feared then, nor obeyed:/ Your fear it self of death removes the fear.” Adam, reunited with Eve, immediately senses all that has gone wrong, “O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear/ To that false worm, of whomever taught/ To counterfeit man’s voice, true in our fall,/ False in our promised rising; since our eyes/ Opened we find indeed, and find we know/ Both good and evil, good lost, and evil got,/ Bad fruit of knowledge, if this be to know,/ Which leaves us naked thus, of honour void,/ Of innocence, of faith, of purity….” Finally, the archangel Michael foretells mankind’s fate to Adam and gives him hope for the future, “This having learned, thou hast attained the sum/ Of wisdom; hope no higher, though all the stars/ Thou knew’st by name, and all the ethereal powers,/ All secrets of the deep, all nature’s works,/ Or works of God in heaven, air, earth, or sea,/ And all the riches of this world enjoyed’st,/ And all the rule, one empire; only add/ Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith,/ And virtue, patience, temperance, add love,/ By name to come called Charity, the soul/ Of all the rest: then wilt thou not loath/ To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess/ A paradise within thee, happier far.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Samuel” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter makes the case that the Books of Samuel were originally one book, divided for pragmatic reasons—the maximum length of an ancient scroll. “No one knows with certainty when the main part of the original narrative was written, though there is good reason to place it, as a recurrent scholarly view does, quite close to David’s own time, in the first half of the tenth century B.C.E.” In his introduction, Alter posits, “The story of David is probably the greatest single narrative representation in Antiquity of a human life evolving by slow stages through time, shaped and altered by the pressures of political life, public institutions, family, the impulses of body and spirit, the eventual sad decay of the flesh.” Next, Alter gives a pen portrait of Samuel, “The prophet Samuel may have God on his side, but he is also an implacable irascible man, and often a palpably self-interested one as well. His resistance to the establishment of the monarch may express a commitment to the noble ideal of the direct kingship of God over Israel, but it is also motivated by resentment that he must surrender authority, and the second of his two antimonarchic speeches is informed by belligerent self-defensiveness about his own career as national leader…. Samuel is invested with prophetic power by an act of God. But the writer understands that he is also a man, all too human, and that any kind of power, including spiritual power, can lead to abuse.”

In 1 Samuel 2, Alter begins by explicating the context of the poem within the larger narrative work, “Hannah’s psalm has been set into the story at a later stage in the editorial process than the original tale…. The reference to the anointed king at the end of the poem assumes the institution of the monarchy, not established until two generations after the moment when Hannah is said to have pronounced this prayer…. But the larger thematic assertion in the poem of God’s power to reverse fortunes, plunging the high to the depths and exalting the lowly, is a fitting introduction to the whole Saul-David history…. There is a sequence of body parts at the beginning of the first three versets of the poem, two literal and the middle one metaphorical: “my heart,” “my horn,” “my mouth.” The raising high of the horn is crucial to the thematic unfolding of the poem, which reiterates a pattern of vertical movement, elevation and descent, that manifests God’s power to reverse the fortunes of humankind.”

In 1 Samuel 6:14, Alter points out a thematic link between the main line of this book and a previous episode in the Torah, “the cows they offered up. One connection between the Ark Narrative, with its concern for sanctity, and the Samuel-Saul-David cycle, with its preoccupation with politics, is a kind of brooding sense of the cruel price exacted for dedication to the higher cause. The milch cows are burned on the improvised alter; Hannah and her son, Samuel, must be separated in his dedication to the sanctuary; and later both Saul and David will pay terrible costs in their personal lives for their adhesion to power.”

In this book, Alter makes the case that Samuel, the prophet, is stood up as a counterpoint to the institution of monarchy. In 1 Samuel 8:11, Alter relates an explicitly anti-monarchial speech, “Your sons he will take. Samuel’s speech is solidly constructed as a hammering piece of antimonarchic rhetoric. All the cherished possessions to be expropriated by the king are placed emphatically at the beginning of each clause…. The speech moves systematically from the expropriation of sons and daughters to land and produce to slaves and beasts of burden, ending with the climactic “you will become his slaves.”

In 1 Samuel 17:10, Alter highlights a translation choice that he makes that conflicts with the standard versions, “I am the one who has insulted the Israelite lines. Nearly all the English versions render the verb here as “defied,” which is one end of the semantic range of the Hebrew heref. But the verb is transparently linked withe noun herpah—insult, disgrace, shame. By his taunting words, Goliath has laid an insult on Israel that only a victorious champion can “take away.””

Alter describes the two conflicting introductions of David into the narrative in 1 Samuel 17:55, “Whose son is the lad, Abner? It is at this point that the evident contradiction between the two stories of David’s debut is most striking. If David had been attending Saul in court as his personal music therapist, with Saul having explicitly sent a communication to Jesse regarding David’s entering his service, how could he, and Abner as well, now be ignorant of David’s identity? Efforts to harmonize the two stories in terms of the logic of later conventions of realism seem unconvincing…. The prevalent scholarly view that chapters 16 and 17 represent two different traditions about David’s beginnings is persuasive…. In the Greek tradition, there were competing versions of the same myths, but never in a single text…. Here, in the first, vertically oriented story, with its explicit instructions from God to man, David is emphatically elected by God, is associated with the spirit and with song, and gains entrée in the court of Saul by using song to master the spirit. In the second story, with its horizontal deployment in space, David makes his way into Saul’s presence through martial prowess, exhibiting shrewdness, calculation, and rhetorical skill.”

In 1 Samuel 27:2-3, Alter makes the supposition of historical accuracy based on the unflattering portrayal of David, “he crossed over … to Achish … king of Gath…. David stayed with Achish in Gath … each man with his household…. Why would a much later, legendary, and supposedly glorifying tradition attribute this act of national treachery to David? The compelling inference is that the writer had authentic knowledge of a period when David collaborated withe Philistines…. Now he comes with six hundred men under his command, a fighting unit that could be of great use to Achish, and essentially offers to become Achish’s vassal.”

In 2 Samuel 1:17, the narrative repeats the detail of David’s relationship with music, “And David sang this lament. We have been aware since 1 Samuel 16 of David’s gift as a lyre player and (presumably) as a singer. Only now do we hear him in action as a singer-poet. This grandly resonant lament, cast in archaic epic diction, marks a great moment of transition in the larger narrative, as the David-Saul story becomes the David story. It is also another public utterance of David’s that beautifully serves his political purposes, celebrating his dead rival as it mourns his loss and thus testifying that David could never have desired Saul’s death.”

Alter points out a notable instance of military description in 2 Samuel 10:9, “there was a battle line against him in front and behind…. Such attention to military detail is quite untypical of biblical narrative…. The point of such detail is surely to show Joab as a superbly competent and resolute field commander, just before the great pivotal episode in the next chapter in which Joab maintains the siege against Rabbath-Ammon while his commander in chief slumbers, and lusts, in Jerusalem.”

The appearance and significance of blood is a recurring motif in the Torah. Alter, in 2 Samuel 16:7, describes how blood has stained the spotless image of David as he ages. “Get out, get out, you man of blood, you worthless fellow. The blood that, according to the narrative itself, David has on his hands is that of Uriah the Hittite, and of the fighting men of Israel who perished at Rabbath-Ammon with Uriah. But the Benjaminite Shimei clearly believes what David himself, and the narrative with him, has taken pains to refute—that the blood of the house of Saul is on David’s hands: Abner, Ish-Bosheth, and perhaps even Saul and Jonathan (for David was collaborating with the Philistine Achish when they fell at Gilboa). Hence the phrase Shimei hurls at David in his next sentence, “all the blood of the house of Saul, in whose place you became king,” suggesting a conjunction of murder and usurpation.”

Alter often points out when the Hebrew wording adds significant meaning, style, or context. In 2 Samuel 18:28, “All is well. This is one word in Hebrew, shalom. That word is the last two syllables of Absalom’s name in Hebrew, ‘Avshalom, a link David will reinforce when he nervously asks, “Is it well [shalom] with the lad Absalom [‘Avshalom]?””

Alter returns to the theme of song in 2 Samuel 22:1, “And David spoke to the LORD the words of this song. It was a common literary practice in ancient Israel to place a long poem or “song” (shirah) at or near the end of a narrative book—compare Jacob’s Testament, Genesis 49, and the Song of Moses, Deuteronomy 32…. There is, of course, a persistent biblical notion of David the poet as well as of David the warrior-king, and the idea that he actually composed this poem, though unlikely, cannot be categorically dismissed…. The archaic character of the language makes the meaning of many terms conjectural. Even in the ancient period, some of the older locutions may already have been obscure to the scribes, who seem to have scrambled many phrases in transmission…. It should be noted that this same poem occurs in the Book of Psalms as Psalm 18 with a good many minor textual variants.”

Finally, Alter suggests the provenance of 2 Samuel 23:8, “These are the names of the warrior of David. This list of military heroes and their exploits is perhaps the strongest candidate of any passage in the Book of Samuel to be considered a text actually written in David’s lifetime. The language is crabbed, and the very abundance of textual difficulties, uncharacteristic for prose, reflects the great antiquity of the list. These fragmentary recollections of particular heroic exploits do not sound like the invention of any later writer but, on the contrary, like memories of remarkable martial acts familiar to the audience.”

“Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney

Typically, this novel, by Rooney, focuses on a set of relationships between friends. Alice and Eileen have self-described disastrous lives, in their own unique ways, in which they commiserate and misunderstand one another by email exchanges, which Rooney intersperses amongst her chapters. “But this sense of the continuous present is no longer a feature of our lives. The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content.”

All the while, both friends have an equally complicated relationship with their mutual friend, Simon. “Needless to say, the idea that Simon—who was already a grown man in his twenties when I was fifteen—is having regular sex with a woman six years my junior makes me want to crawl directly into my grave.” Felix, an Amazon warehouse worker and burgeoning love interest of Alice, adds to the knotty mix. “I fucking hate the place. But they wouldn’t be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.” As always, for Rooney, it is quite the complicated web of relationships.

When the plot begins, Alice, a twice-successful novelist, has just come out of a mental hospital and moved to the Irish countryside, away from her friends in Dublin. She has met Felix on Tinder and their relationship teeters between confused, antagonistic, and passionate. “But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions. That’s a little like myself and Felix, I think. There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed.” And as usual, Rooney intersperses into her plot critiques of capitalist culture, which bubble up again and again. Alice whines, “Whatever I can do, whatever insignificant talent I might have, people just expect me to sell it—I mean literally, sell it for money, until I have a lot of money and no talent left. And then that’s it, I’m finished, and the next flashy twenty-five-year-old with an impending psychological collapse comes along.”

The critique of modernity is another through-line in Rooney’s novels. The email exchanges between the two female friends often alternate between banal relationship gossip and big philosophical conundrums, within the same email, “Alice, do you think the problem of the contemporary novel is simply the problem of contemporary life? I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day…. And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?” Sometimes, Rooney’s critique of nihilism even touches on the conservative. “But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing.” In the emails, there are also debates on aesthetics, relativism, and morality, “Even if we suppose that the beauty of ‘Kind of Blue’ is in some sense objectively superior to the beauty of a Chanel handbag, which philosophically speaking is a lot of ground to give, why does it matter? You seem to think that aesthetic experience is, rather than merely pleasurable, somehow important. And what I want to know is: important in what way?” In some ways, this feels like Rooney’s most personal novel to date, “On one hand, I know the human body can be incredibly resilient. On the other, my sturdy peasant ancestors did little to prepare me for a career as a widely despised celebrity novelist. What do you think?”

“Memoirs of a Revolutionist” by Peter Kropotkin

This is the autobiography of the anarchist Peter Kroptkin, from his birth in Moscow in 1842 through his life in exile in London in 1899, having survived and escaped from the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, as well as a two year prison stint in France for his revolutionary agitations. His anti-authoritarian leanings, if not his anarchism, began at a young age, “In 1859 or early in 1860, I began to edit my first revolutionary paper. At that age, what could I be but a constitutionalist?—and my paper advocated the necessity of a constitution for Russia.” At around this time, Kroptkin also refused to accept the honorific “Prince” before his name. Although he was admitted into the esteemed Corps of Pages by order of the Tsar himself, Kroptkin did not follow the typical career path, “That I should not enter a regiment of the Guard, and my life to parades and court balls, I had settled long before. My dream was to enter the university—to study, to live the student’s life. That meant, of course, to break entirely from my father, whose ambitions were quite different, and to rely for my living upon what I might earn by means of lessons…. My thoughts turned more and more toward Siberia.”

After serving with the Tsar’s army in Siberia, Kroptkin travelled for the first time to western Europe. He astutely sized up the differences in national characters, “Two days before I had left St Petersburg thickly covered with snow, and now, in Middle Germany, I walked without an overcoat along the railway platform, in warm sunshine, admiring the budding flowers…. I never before had realized so vividly what Russia’s northern position meant, and how the history of the Russian nation had been influenced by the fact that the main centres of its life had to develop in high latitudes, as far north as the shores of the Gulf of Finland. Only then I fully understood the uncontrollable attraction which southern lands have exercised on the Russians, the colossal efforts which they have made to reach the Black Sea, and the steady pressure of the Siberian colonists southward, further into Manchuria.”

By 1872, Kroptkin was a full-blown anarchist revolutionary. He was opposed to autocracy, but also to the centralizing tendencies of the communists and social-democrats. He refused to believe that infiltrating the government, even with good men, could produce a better life for the workingman. “The middle-class revolutionists of the old school who had entered the International, imbued as they were with the notions of the centralized, pyramidal secret organizations of earlier times, had introduced the same notions into the Workingman’s Association…. Marx and Engels were its leading spirits…. The general council was not satisfied with playing the part of a correspondence bureau; it strove to govern the movement…. In 1871, the general council, supported by a few delegates, decided to direct the forces of the association towards electoral agitation. It set people thinking about the evils of any government, however democratic its origin. This was the spark of anarchism.”

Kroptkin explains his anarchist philosophy, “Nihilism is confused with terrorism…. The Nihilist declared war upon what may be described as ‘the conventional lies of civilized mankind’. Absolute sincerity was his distinctive feature, and in the name of that sincerity he gave up, and asked others to give up, those superstitions, prejudices, habits, and customs which their own reason could not justify. He refused to bend before any authority except that of reason…. He broke, of course, with the superstitions of his fathers, and in his philosophical conceptions he was a positivist, an agnostic, a Spencerian evolutionist, or a scientific materialist; and while he never attacked the simple, sincere religious belief which is a psychological necessity of feeling, he bitterly fought against the hypocrisy that leads people to assume the outward mask of a religion which they continually throw aside as useless ballast…. Nihilism, with its affirmation of the rights of the individual and its negation of all hypocrisy, was but a first step toward a higher type of men and women, who are equally free, but live for a great cause.”

By 1875, Kroptkin had been arrested as a traitor to the Tsar and locked up in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress. He describes a peculiar encounter, “The Grand Duke Nicholas, brother of Alexander II, who was inspecting the fortress, entered my cell, followed only by his aide-de-camp…. ‘How is it possible, Kroptkin, that you, a page de chambre, a sergeant of the corps of pages, should be mixed up in this business, and now be here in this horrible casemate?’ ‘Every one has his own opinions,’ was my reply…. Thoughts went whirling in my head. To play the part of Marquis Posa [from Verdi’s Don Carlos]? To tell the emperor through the grand duke of the desolation of Russia, the ruin of the peasantry, the arbitrariness of the officials, the terrible famines in prospect? To say that we wanted to help the peasants out of their desperate condition, to make them raise their heads—and by all this try to influence Alexander II? These thoughts followed one another in rapid succession, till at last I said to myself: ‘Never! Nonsense! They know all that. They are enemies of the nation, and such talk would not change them.’”

Kroptkin, having escaped from prison in Russia, was crisscrossing between Switzerland, France, and England, hounded by their respective security services and by Russian informers and infiltrators. Over the years, the split between the communists and anarchists had grown more distinct and hostile. “The conflict between the Marxists and the Bakunists was not a personal affair. It was the necessary conflict between the principles of federalism and those of centralization, the free Commune and the State’s paternal rule, the free action of the masses of the people and betterment of existing capitalist conditions through legislation—a conflict between the Latin spirit and the German Geist.”

Finally, Kroptkin summarizes his anarchist position and the long road ahead before the realization of his political dreams, “Long years of propaganda and a long succession of partial acts of revolt against authority, as well as a complete revision of the teachings now derived from history, would be required before men could perceive that they had been mistaken in attributing to their rulers and their laws what was derived in reality from their own sociable feelings and habits…. When I made a closer acquaintance with the working population and their sympathizers from the better educated classes, I soon realized that they valued their personal freedom even more than they valued their personal well-being…. For the very success of socialism the ideas of no-government, of self-reliance, of free initiative of the individual—of anarchism, in a word—had thus to be preached side by side with those of socialized ownership and production…. There is, in mankind, a nucleus of social habits, an inheritance from the past, not yet duly appreciated, which is not maintained by coercion and is superior to coercion. Upon it all the progress of mankind is based…. Anarchism represents more than a mere mode of action and a mere conception of a free society…. It is part of a philosophy, natural and social, which must be developed in a quite different way from the metaphysical or dialectic methods which have been employed in sciences dealing with man. I saw that it must be treated by the same methods as natural sciences.”

“The English Understand Wool” by Helen DeWitt

This novella has all of the wry sense of humor one can expect from DeWitt. The narrator, a seventeen-year-old girl named Marguerite, is delightfully biting. Much of the story revolves around tailoring—thus the book’s title. Speaking of her Maman, Marguerite reveals, “Linen she did not have made up in London; she took it to a Thai seamstress in Paris. She had in fact accommodated the woman’s desire to move to Paris from Bangkok; it is, after all, quite simple to make brief visits to Paris from Marrakech, whereas one cannot always go to Bangkok when one has had an idea for a frock, a redingote, a smoking.”

As to Marguerite’s home life with Maman, “It was her practice to spend Ramadan abroad…. The servants remained on full pay. They might stay in the riad in Marrakech or visit their families, as they pleased. It would be mauvais ton to be waited upon by persons who were fasting. It would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.” And her upbringing, “One must not expose adults to childish prattle. She insisted that I should learn bridge at the age of seven because one cannot always assume that a child can be kept out of sight.”

During the course of the novella it does not give too much away to reveal, “At the age of 20 months I had disappeared from the house of Bernard and Marie-Therese Dessanges, the guardians appointed in my parents’ wills should both parents die while I was a minor, and a great deal of money left for me, some 80 million euros… had disappeared.” Marguerite takes it all in stride, “It seemed to me that it would be mauvais ton to unleash the forces of the law on the Thai seamstress, or a young man working his way up through the ranks of a hotel in Geneva…. I was conscious, above all, of extreme anxiety not to be guilty of mauvais ton…. I was conscious of a slighter anxiety. It would not be possible for quite some time, perhaps years, to go to the Thai seamstress—I would inevitably be followed, and whether or not this led to the apprehension of the fugitives it would certainly cause chagrins. Where was I to find a seamstress?”

After her kidnapping has become world news, it seems to surprise Marguerite that others do not comprehend her relationship to her Maman, “I accept that the woman in the early photographs with the infant was my biological mother. At the time of her death, I am told, I was 18 months old. It goes without saying, I could not have made an intelligent choice of guardian at 18 months. Maman gave me the chance, many chances to show I was not a mediocrity, and in this way I earned the right to participate in the life bought with this money by a person of distinction. If I had not done so, she would not have been ungenerous; she would have made provision in accordance with my capacity.” Finally, Marguerite comes to an epiphany, “I had hesitated to approach the Thai seamstress, but I now saw that I had been foolish…. Those who understand clothes might understand the importance of the relationship, but the investigators had shown themselves to be wholly oblivious to matters of taste.”

“Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of Self” by Andrea Wulf

This is a group biography of the Jena Set, a group of playwrights, poets, professors, novelists, scientists, and philosophers, who gathered around the university town of Jena at the turn of the nineteenth century. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller were the rambunctious group’s mentors, rivals, foils, antagonists, friends, and inspirations. The feelings were somewhat mutual. Often complicated relationships were involved.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte might be said to have been the philosophical originator of the subjective perspective, which most distinguished the Jena Set. “The only certainty, Fichte told his students, was that the world was experienced by the self—by the ‘Ich’. The Ich, he said, ‘originally and unconditionally posits its own being’ and through this powerful initial act the ‘non-Ich’—the external world that included nature, animals, other people and so on—came into existence…. This ‘non-Ich’ was everything ‘which is different from and opposed to the Ich’. That didn’t mean that the Ich creates the world, rather it creates our knowledge of the world. Put simply, the world is the way we think it is.”

Schiller, although closer in age to the rest of Jena Set, was paired more with Goethe in his role as part-time mentor and counselor to the young, unruly crew. “Among Schiller’s own [journal] Horen contributions was Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, a long essay composed of twenty-seven letters addressed to his Danish aristocratic patron. Over more than one hundred pages Schiller argued that art was the tool for an alternative revolution to that of France…. Reason, rationality and empiricism had brought powerful knowledge, but what was missing was the refinement of moral behaviour. All the knowledge in the world could not develop a person’s sense of right and wrong…. ‘Utility is the great idol of our time,’ Schiller wrote, ‘to which all powers pay homage.’ Profit, productivity and consumption had become the guiding light of modern societies…. But it was beauty that transports us towards ethical principles and makes us better people…. For Schiller, taste and beauty were the bulwark against brutality, greed and immorality…. Beauty, Schiller now argued, had the ability to unite our sensual and rational sides…. The struggle between the sensual and the rational was a battle between the heart and the head which neither could win…. Only art could mediate the two.”

The Jena Set was a diverse and talented lot. “During that spring of 1797 the Jena Set met almost every day. ‘Our little academy,’ as Goethe called it, was very busy. Wilhelm von Humboldt was labouring over a verse translation of one of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies, which he discussed with Goethe. Meanwhile, Goethe was working on his prose poem Hermann and Dorothea, for which he consulted the older Humboldt brother on verse metre, while conducting experiments with Alexander [von Humboldt] for which they set up an optical apparatus to analyse light and to investigate the luminescence of phosphorus. August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel worked on their Shakespeare translations, while Schiller was writing his play Wallenstein. Interested in everything—art, science, and literature—their interdisciplinary approach would become a major theme as their thinking evolved…. In the afternoons or evenings, after they finished lecturing at the university or working at home, they all rushed along the cobbled streets to Schiller’s apartment near the Old Castle. Here, in Schiller’s parlour, Goethe recited his poems and others presented their work until late at night. Over the course of several evenings in the middle of March, Wilhelm von Humboldt read Fichte’s latest edition of the Wissenschaftslehre aloud to everybody. After that, he read extracts from Friedrich Schlegel’s publication on ancient Greece and Rome as well as August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel’s translation of Julius Caesar, and Alexander von Humboldt presented the results of his animal electricity experiments.”

Although Novalis was often stuck working at his family’s mines, he regularly rode on horseback the five hours to Jena to commune with his friends. Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel’s pet project was the genre of intentionally written fragments. “Novalis had written more than one hundred fragments of various lengths, collectively published under the title Pollen. Another set of more than four hundred were simply called Fragments and mostly written by Friedrich Schlegel but also included several dozen by Caroline and August Wilhelm…. Pollen and Fragments, became the foundational texts of a new movement, launching Romanticism on the public stage—it was ‘our first symphony’, as August Wilhelm Schlegel said. It was here, on the pages of the [journal] Aethenaeum, that the term ‘romantic’ was coined and first used in print in its new literary and philosophical meaning.” Friedrich Schlegel declared, “Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the society poetical; poeticise wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humour.” Novalis added, “By giving the commonplace a higher meaning, by making the ordinary look mysterious, by granting to what is known the dignity of the unknown and imparting to the finite a shimmer of the infinite, I romanticise.” Wulf explains further, “They wanted to romanticise the entire world, and this meant perceiving it as an interconnected whole…. Romantic poetry was unruly, dynamic, alive and forever changing, they believed, and should not be corseted by metric patterns because it was a ‘living organism’. Its essence was ‘that it should forever be becoming, never perfected’, Friedrich Schlegel explained. It was inherently incomplete and unfinished…. Ideas were formulated, overturned and discarded. They were not interested in a closed system bound by rigid rules but in a world view that was open and in flux…. At the centre of everything was poetry—but not poetry as we understand it today. The friends turned back to the original ancient Greek term poietikos—‘creative’ or ‘productive’. For them, romantic poetry could be anything: a poem, of course, but also a novel, a painting, a building, a piece of music or a scientific experiment…. Friedrich Schlegel believed that the novel was the genre best suited to expressing the spirit of the modern age. Novalis agreed and even spoke about spending his entire life working on one novel—never completed, forever being written, infinitely evolving and thereby filling a library with what would be the ultimate romantic project.”

At the end of 1798, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling moved to Jena, taking up a professorship of philosophy. “Where Fichte’s Ich was shaped by its opposition to the non-Ich, Schelling believed that the self and nature were identical…. Schelling now insisted that everything was one…. Schelling’s new universe was alive. Instead of a fragmented, mechanistic world where humans were little more than cogs in a machine, Schelling conjured up a world of oneness. The living and non-living worlds, he explained, were ruled by the same underlying principles. Everything—from frogs to trees, stones to insects, rivers to humans—was ‘linked together, forming one universal organism’…. He reunited what the scientific revolution had separated: nature and humankind.” Schelling explained, “At the first moment when I am conscious of the external world, consciousness of my self is there as well, and vice versa—at my first moment of self-awareness, the real world rises up before me.” On the nature of the human mind, he expanded, “Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind…. As long as I myself am identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand myself.”

Schelling arguably provided a synthesis for the evolving philosophical ideas of the Jena Set. The rest of its various participants would almost certainly not have agreed. “Goethe had always believed that the process of gaining knowledge—Erkenntnis—came through direct observation. Most idealists, including Fichte, rejected this idea and insisted that all knowledge of reality originated in the mind. But not Schelling. He was an idealist who believed that ‘absolutely all of our knowledge originates in experience’…. During those autumn weeks in 1799, Schelling prepared his new lecture series…. Published a few months later as the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling’s lectures introduced aesthetics and the arts as the tools that reveal the union between the subjective world of the self and the objective world of nature…. Schelling explained that it was the unconscious self which brought the external world into existence, and through this act it became the conscious Ich. ‘The objective world’, Schelling believed, ‘is merely the original, still-unconscious poetry of the mind.’”

Although much older than the rest, Goethe ended up being the glue that held this bickering, backstabbing, and brilliant crew together. He counseled, cajoled, and mended broken friendships. Through his poems, plays, and novels, as well as his scientific experiments, he also offered inspiration. “So much had changed since Goethe and Schiller had first spoken after the meeting of Jena’s Natural History Society on that hot July day in 1794. Goethe had watched everybody leave: first Fichte, in 1799, then the Schlegel brothers, and finally Schelling and Caroline, in 1803. They were not alone. The ‘current exodus’, as Goethe described it, continued with the departure of several other professors…. As quickly as Jena had risen, it seemed to tumble.” Living to the last in nearby Weimar until his death in 1832, Goethe would proclaim, “I took in and used whatever came before my eyes, my ears, my senses. Thousands of individuals contributed to the creation of my works—wise people and fools, intellectuals and idiots, children, men in their prime, and old people…. I often reaped what others had sown. My life’s work is that of a collective.”

“Slouching Towards Utopia” by J. Bradford DeLong

This is DeLong’s magnum opus, decades in the making. It is an economic history of the long-twentieth century, an epoch he defines as between 1870 and 2010. He posits that this time period was both unprecedented and the most consequential in human history. “The value of the stock of useful ideas about manipulating nature and organizing humans that were discovered, developed, and deployed into the world economy, shot up from about 0.45 percent per year before 1870 to 2.1 percent per year afterward…. A 2.1 percent average growth for the 140 years from 1870 to 2010 is a multiplication by a factor of 21.5…. As a rough guess, average world income per capita in 2010 would be 8.8 times what it was in 1870.”

DeLong points to four factors which made the long-twentieth century unique: “Technology fueled growth, globalization, an exceptional America, and confidence that humanity could at least slouch toward utopia as governments solved political-economic problems…. Twice, in that long century, 1870-1914 and 1945-1975, something every preceding generation would have called near utopia came nearer, rapidly. But these generation-long episodes of economic El Dorados were not sustained.” He gives his guesses as to the why, “Driving it all, always in the background and often in the foreground, were the industrial research labs discovering and developing things, the large corporations developing and deploying them, and the globalized market economy coordinating it all. But in some ways the market economy was more problem than solution. It recognized only property rights, and people wanted Polanyian rights: rights to a community that gave them support, to an income that gave them the resources they deserved, and to economic stability that gave them consistent work. And for all the economic progress that was achieved during the long twentieth century, its history teaches us that material wealth is of limited use in building utopia…. The shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, blessed by John Maynard Keynes, that helped raise the post-World War II North Atlantic developmental social democracy was as good as we have so far gotten.” DeLong quotes the eminent sociologist, Max Weber, “Material interests may drive the trains down the tracks, but ideas are the switchmen.”

In the meat of his text, DeLong goes through the broad strokes of world history during the long-twentieth century, with a focus on economic factors and a focus on the global North, while also digressing to involve Japan, China, Korea, Argentina, Botswana, and others to give a global picture. “What changed after 1870 was that the most advanced North Atlantic economies had invented invention. They had invented not just textile machinery and railroads, but also the industrial research lab and the forms of bureaucracy that gave rise to the large corporation. Thereafter, what was invented in the industrial research labs could be deployed at national or continental scale…. Not just inventions, but the systemic invention of how to invent. Not just individual large-scale organizations, but organizing how to organize…. Successful economic development depends on a strong but limited government. Strong in the sense that its judgments of property rights are obeyed, that its functionaries obey instructions from the center, and that the infrastructure it pays for is built. And limited in the sense that it can do relatively little to help or hurt individual enterprises, and that political power does not become the only effective road to wealth and status.”

DeLong’s preeminent focus is on the rise of the United States, in all its fits and starts. The most notable downturn was the Great Depression. DeLong gives much credence to the role of contingency in shaping history, “Why did the Great Depression not push the United States to the right, into reaction, or protofascism, or fascism, as it did in so many other countries, but instead to the left? My guess is that it was sheer luck—Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were in power when the Great Depression started, and they were thrown out of office in 1932.” Another huge downturn, necessitating the slouch—as opposed to the march—to utopia, was World War II, preceded by the twin rises of communism and fascism. “Before the twentieth century, ideology—as opposed to religion—did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited a combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer.”

The main success story outside of the global North, for DeLong, was East Asia. “The lesson of history throughout the Pacific Rim is that as long as exports earn enough dollars for domestic businesses to obtain access to the global-north-produced machines they need, and the global-north-invented technologies they embody, and as long as the machines go to firms that are efficient and effective, this formula enables a country to advance…. And this is why it is important that subsidies go to companies that successfully export—pass a market-efficiency test, albeit a market-efficiency test applied not in some home free-market economy but among the import-purchasing middle classes of the global north.”

For DeLong, after the Great Recession, neoliberalism was discredited by the economic events of history. Instead, he remains a cheerleader for social democracies. However, DeLong is not above criticizing their actual failures. “In retrospect, the social democratic insistence on government production of goods and services is puzzling. Governments were not merely demanding, nor distributing, nor regulating prices and quality. They were engaged in production…. Even today, in the twenty-first century, there are still immense state-owned and state-managed enterprises: railroads, hospitals, schools, power-generating facilities, steelworks, chemical factories, coal mines, and others. None of which have ever been part of governments’ core competence. Organizations such as hospitals and railroads ought to be run with an eye on efficiency: getting the most produced with the resources available…. As a result, government-managed enterprises—whether the coal mines of Britain or the telecommunications monopolies of Western Europe or the oil-production monopolies of developing nations—have tended to be inefficient and wasteful.”

Perhaps, most relevant today is DeLong’s discussion of the inflationary crisis of the 1970s. “By 1969, the United States was not a 2 percent but a 5 percent per year inflation economy…. President Richard Nixon took office in 1969, and the economists of the incoming Republican administration planned to ease inflation with only a small increase in unemployment by reducing government spending and encouraging the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. Their plan only half worked: unemployment did indeed rise—from 3.5 percent to almost 6 percent between 1969 and 1971, but inflation barely budged…. Their attempts to fight inflation by marginally increasing unemployment no longer worked because no one believed that the administration would have the fortitude to continue those efforts for very long…. One possible “solution” was to create a truly massive recession: to make it painfully clear that even if [unemployment] rose to painful levels, the government would not accommodate, and would keep unemployment high until inflation came down. No president wanted to think about this possibility. It was, in the end, the road the United States took, but largely by accident and after many stopgaps.” DeLong later explains why the public has such a hatred for inflation, “People do not just seek to have good things materially; they like to pretend that there is a logic to the distribution of the good things, and especially its distribution to them in particular—that their prosperity has some rational and deserved basis. Inflation—even the moderate inflation of the 1970s—stripped the mask away.”

Finally, DeLong concludes with the period of hyper-globalization and what economist Richard Baldwin coined “the second unbundling” of industry and intra-firm communication. DeLong states, “With the coming of the internet, it was no longer necessary for a firm’s sophisticated industrial division of labor to be geographically concentrated. You no longer had to be able to walk or drive to your supplier’s offices and factories…. It may have been the transoceanic nonstop jet flight and the international hotel chains that were the key link in this second unbundling…. Attaching to the global trade network is an immense opportunity, but it requires that everything, or nearly everything—infrastructure, scale, public administration, governance, and foreign knowledge of your production capabilities—be working just right…. Still, by 2010 the world’s deployed technological capability stood at more than twenty times what it had been in 1870, and more than twice what it had been in 1975.”