“The Ambassadors” by Henry James

James’ novel takes place in turn-of-the-century Paris. But the story is just as much about American industry. Strether is tasked with bringing the scion of an American manufacturing fortune, Chad Newsome, back from his extended sojourn in Europe to attend to business back at home. Strether has been led to believe that the completion of this task will result in nuptials between him and the wealthy widow, Chad’s mother. But Chad loves Paris. And has a woman, perhaps, in a complicated situation, perhaps. “‘I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!’ — Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone.”

Strether had not sailed across the Atlantic prepared to be converted to the lifestyle of the man he was sent over to escort home. But converted by Paris, as much as Chad, he was. “Miss Gostrey gave him a look which broke the next moment into a wonderful smile. ‘He’s not so good as you think!’ They remained with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found itself on each renewal of contact with Chad defeated by something else. What could it be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense, constantly renewed, that Chad was—quite in fact insisted on being—as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn’t but be as good from the moment he wasn’t as bad.”

From the American side of the Atlantic, the Newsome family was certain of a disreputable love interest of some kind or another that was holding Chad in Paris. Strether was to discover, to his initial chagrin, that even more than by Chad, he was being swayed by the personal charms of Madame de Vionnet. “The pressure of want—whatever might be the case with the other force—was, however, presumably not active now, for the tokens of a chastened ease still abounded after all, many marks of a taste whose discriminations might perhaps have been called eccentric. He guessed at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right. The general result of this was something for which he had no name on the spot quite ready, but something he would have come nearest to naming in speaking of it as the air of a supreme respectability, the consciousness, small, still, reserved, but none the less distinct and diffused, of private honour.”

After thoroughly enjoying his months-long visit of Paris, Strether concludes, “I don’t get drunk; I don’t pursue the ladies; I don’t spend money; I don’t even write sonnets. But nevertheless I’m making up late for what I didn’t have early. I cultivate my little benefit in my own little way. It amuses me more than anything that has happened to me in all my life. They may say what they like—it’s my surrender, it’s my tribute, to youth.”

“Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England” by David DeLaura

This is an intellectual and spiritual biography of John Henry Newman, Mathew Arnold, and Walter Pater. Their lives were intertwined by their respective associations with Oxford, both the University and the Movement. While Newman left the Church of England for Rome, Arnold remained nominally Anglican, and Pater moved from years flirting with deism and atheism to the High Church in latter life. Despite these differences, the aesthetic and moral aspects of Christianity played a great role in the lives and works of all three men.

Owen Chadwick reminds us just how Oxford united these disparate individuals, “probably it is this element of feeling, the desire to use poetry as a vehicle of religious language, the sense of awe and mystery in religion, the profundity of reverence, the concern with the conscience not only by way of beauty, but by growth towards holiness, which marks the vague distinction between the old-fashioned high churchmen and the Oxford men.” Their religious differences also did not serve to distance these men from each other, but united them in their struggle for truth, as Newman expressed in one of his sermons, “controversy, at least in this age, does not lie between the hosts of heaven, Michael and his Angels on the one side, and the powers of evil on the other; but it is a sort of night battle, where each fights for himself, and friend and foe stand together. When men understand each other’s meaning, they see, for the most part, that controversy is either superfluous or hopeless.” This was not a battle between Rome and Westminster, or deism, or doubt, or even atheism, but each individual’s struggle with truth, revealed or not. 

Newman, as the elder statesman, spelled out in his Sunday sermons, which Arnold would have heard and Pater would have read at Oxford, his position on the ideal mind, “the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world… [a] habit of mind… of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom.” This habit of mind is not for the masses, however, but for a select few. Arnold (and Pater after him) shares in this evaluation, “a very few of mankind aspire after a life which is not the life after which the majority aspire, and to help them to which the vast majority seek the aid of religion… the ideal life- the summum bonum for a born thinker, for a philosopher like Parmenides, or Spinoza, or Hegel- is an eternal series of intellectual acts… this life treats all things, religion included, with entire freedom as subject-matter for thought, as elements in a vast movement of speculation. The few who live this life stand apart, and have an existence separate from the mass of mankind;… the region which they inhabit is a laboratory wherein are fashioned the new intellectual ideas which, from time to time, take their place in the world.” This is not your opium for the masses. It is all rather Straussian really: religion as different things for different people, the same canonical texts read individually and uniquely, for a higher purpose. This theme is repeated again and again by Newman, Arnold, and Pater. There is a supreme life for the select few: the remnant.

Pater, always ambivalent about doctrine, highlights the soundness of a religious character, “longing, a chastened temper, spiritual joy… have an artistic worth distinct from their religious import… [They have value] not because they are part of man’s duty or because God has commanded them, still less because they are a means of obtaining reward, but because like culture itself they are remote, refined, intense, existing only by the triumph of a few over a dead world routine in which there is no lifting of the soul at all.” And it is this higher standing in the world which is of most import. That is why Arnold placed culture even above religion. Culture “is a moral orientation, involving will, imagination, faith… Culture may best be described as religion with the critical intellect super-added.” Religion was the means, but culture was the end. “All forms of religion are but approximations of the truth.” And as Newman writes in an epistle to Arnold, “it is that sympathy you have for what you do not believe, which so affects me about your future.”

But in this effort these men were also against reason as being the final arbiter. For them reason alone was not enough. Newman preached what was lacking, “reason does not, like faith, attend to what is at once so great and so simple. The difficulty about faith is, to attend to what is very simple and very important, but liable to be pushed by more showy or tempting matters out of sight. The marvel of faith is, that what is so simple should be so all-sufficing, so necessary, and so often neglected… [Knowledge] never healed a wounded heart, nor changed a sinful one.” Arnold, quoting Benjamin Jowett, is kinder to reason and knowledge, “the moral and intellectual are always dividing, yet they must be reunited, and in the highest conception of them are inseparable.”

The other great unifying aspect of the three men’s lives was the preeminence that they held for all things beautiful and sublime. It was a particularly Oxford aesthetic, what Arnold referred to as “the sweetness and light.” This came across in their love of poetry, as practitioner and as critic. Arnold described how poetry could rise above even religion, “but for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” But for him poetry was something not only sublime, but conservative and anti-materialistic. It was against the currents of the age, “poetry has been cultivated and cherished in our later times by the Cavaliers and Tories in a peculiar way, and looked coldly on by Puritans and their modern representatives… Poetry then is our mysticism.” For Arnold, poetry “refreshes, fortifies, elevates, quickens, solaces, relieves, and rejoices; and thus it satisfies man’s deepest needs, both moral and aesthetic, even in the absence of the metaphysical system that once seemed to buttress these emotions.” Pater would agree, even equating the best of scripture with poetic writing, “may not our ‘most cherished sacred writings’ once belief in them has gone, ‘exercise their highest influence as the most delicate amorous poetry in the world?’”

For unsurpassed aesthetic taste there was one place where men of the age looked- and these three were no exception- to Greece. Arnold stated that “the governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.” Newman, in his lecture on the Idea of a University, suggested that the ideal education “is still mainly governed by the ideas of men like Plato” and that all the best of culture was “passed from Greece to Rome to the feudal communities of Europe.” Newman, of course, had a sweet spot for the unifying aspects of Rome, “Jerusalem is the fountainhead of religious knowledge as Athens is of secular… The grace stored in Jerusalem, the gifts which radiate from Athens, are made over and concentrated in Rome… Rome has inherited both sacred and profane learning.”

Pater would give more credit to the Greek forefathers. “Hellenism is not merely an element in our intellectual life; it is a constant tradition in it… [This] element of permanence, a standard of taste [in European art] is maintained in a purely intellectual tradition… [and] takes its rise in Greece at a definite historical period. A tradition for all succeeding generations, it originates in a spontaneous growth out of the influences of Greek society.” For Pater, Greek culture in all its forms is the pinnacle to be strived for in modern aesthetics. In Apollo, Pater finds, “the concentration of mortal achievement, an ideal of human development,” while, in Dionysius, he finds, “the power of a massive vitality external to man” and “the promise of the continuity of life in nature.” As expressions of culture, Pater finds perfection in the medium of sculpture that captures “the Greek spirit, the humanistic spirit” in its most “pure form.”

This Greek spirit is the essence of what Arnold refers to as “the sweetness and light.” It is a “keen desire for beauty” and “a desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are.” Pater echoes Arnold in suggesting that for life itself, and not just in art, “not the fruit of experience but experience itself is the end.” And to that end, “the service of philosophy, and of religion and culture as well, to the human spirit, is to startle it into a sharp and eager observation.” Arnold, saw things just a little differently, where “the model is Greek art and poetry”, “in which religion and poetry are one”; the ideal of human life is the aesthetic one of “beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection.”

“Stream System- The Collected Short Fiction” by Gerald Murnane

This is a collection of short stories written by Murnane over the past fifty years. Some stories are as short as five pages while the longest span around a hundred. What connects them all is Murnane’s use of imbedded stories within stories. “Somewhere today in a suburb of Melbourne is a man who calls himself a writer of fiction but who writes, in fact, a sort of diary of the man he wishes he could be.” He constantly mines the territory of his home state of Victoria, Australia. “I admired him, for one thing, because he preferred to look at his land rather than farm it.” He also returns to themes of writing, reading, and a relationship with books in general. “The writing of fiction was something that a certain sort of person had to do in order to explain himself or herself to an imagined parent or an imagined loved one or an imagined god.” Many of his stories involve the narrator describing the act of writing the very story Murnane is himself writing. Yet the narrator is not identical to Murnane. Or not quite. “I wrote fiction in order to learn the meaning of certain images in my mind.” Murnane again and again goes back to the craft of writing and the mind as the grounds for imagination. “I have always been interested in what is usually called the world but only insofar as it provides me with evidence for the existence of another world.” He is constantly plumbing the depths of the mind for both images and feelings. “A diagram of my mind would resemble a vast and intricate map with images for its small towns and with feelings for the roads through the grassy countryside between the towns.” Like in his novels, it is hard to decipher what comes from the facts of his real life and what details are made up whole cloth. “Even to his wife and children he had sometimes said that Sunday afternoon was the saddest time of the week: the time when you had to admit that you were no more than the person you were. To himself he would have added that Sunday afternoon was the time when he tried to understand how he had come to be who he was and where he was rather than someone else in some other place.” His nested stories and asides often seem more important and real than the original thread of his story. “I have trusted for many years that I will remember from every text that I read the few words or phrases that I need to remember.” His digressions into the recesses of his mind are so vivid and illuminating that one forgets where one is while reading his words. “Or I might finish this piece of fiction by mentioning that I have always been drawn to writers who have felt their minds threatened.”

“Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman” by Jeremy Adelman

This is a lengthy biography of one of the twentieth century’s most unique economists. In many ways he was a throwback to the Enlightenment thinkers, too cross-disciplined to be pigeon-holed into any one specific genre within the social sciences. Hirschman was a German Jew, a socialist in his youth, who had to flee from Nazi Germany, fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and fled France during its WWII occupation. Before he fled, he allied with an American, Varian Fry at the Emergency Rescue Committee, to help thousands of others flee the Nazis’ grasp, including Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Hannah Arendt. Hirschman’s role forging papers, procuring visas and passports under false names, and dodging Vichy spies and police could alone make for a compelling biography. In fact, he would later return to Europe as part of the US Army liberation effort. In Italy, he was assigned as the translator for the first German to be charged, sentenced, and executed for war crimes, General Anton Dostler. However, Hirschman’s role in shaping development economics and the field at large would not even begin until he was finally settled in America. 

His first contribution to the economic literature was the invention of a market concentration index. “This calculation gives an observer a consistent gauge of the size of a firm to a particular industry. Much later, the index became a standard measure for competition and antitrust enforcement.” Hirschman’s first book “National Power” sought to integrate economic policy with a nation’s political regime. Particularly, it showed how fascism, by its nature, sought to dominate others in all spheres of life, both political and economic. However, autarky did not mean that nations only looked inward, but in certain spheres adopted a bullying commercial strategy, instead of free trade. The strong state sought to manipulate trade with weaker states to influence political gain. This was his analysis of Mussolini and Hitler’s colonization policies. Welfare and warfare were inextricably linked. Hirschman concluded that “the exclusive power to organize, regulate, and interfere with trade must be taken away from the bonds of single nations.” After the war, he began work in Washington at the Economic Cooperation Administration. There he would argue for the Marshall Plan and a more integrated approach to Europe, as opposed to separate bilateral deals. He pushed for a European central bank and currency, arguing that a European Union gave “the best hope for a regeneration of Western European civilization and for a new period of stability and growth.”

Because of his past in European socialist youth groups and questions about his loyalty to America, Hirschman was blacklisted for promotion and plumb jobs at the FED or Treasury Departments. Instead, he found himself consulting for the newly formed World Bank in Columbia. In Bogota, he argued for the specificity and uniqueness of development projects and studied private, but collective, ways to help the poor. Instead of compiling national statistics, he pushed for case studies of successful businesses, analyzing the “personality and background of founders and managers.” He sought to affect change on the margins. “I am precisely no creator of systems, but I always only come up with small improvements or criticisms, which give me pleasure while I am doing them, but which, upon their completion, always throw me back into a vacuum in which it seems completely impossible to me to ever have a single new thought again.” He opted for modesty in his field and hated the role of the outsider expert. “Our abilities will sooner or later invite reactions of the type ‘But the Emperor has nothing on!’ [The economist] suffers from the universal desire for power” and fails to “admit that there are limits to his prowess” resulting from “an optical illusion that economics as a science can yield detailed blueprints for the development of underdeveloped societies.” Hirschman advocated a “propensity to experiment and to improvise [instead of] a propensity to plan…. Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan.” 

Hirschman’s next book was “The Strategy of Conflict”. Hirschman was always well spoken and well read. Besides German, he spoke French like a native, from his years as an exile and spy, and he also knew Spanish, Italian, and English fluently. He kept Montaigne’s “Essays” by his bedside and during his time in Bogota he was reading Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”, Dostoevsky’s “Demons”, Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France”, and rereading Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” However, the works that were having the most impact on him were Freud’s insights in psychoanalysis. He came away with the idea that normal anxiety served as a stimulus and a psychic resource to overcome subsequent difficulties. “Failure, and learning from it, was a strategy for success.” He was also focussing on the idea of unbalanced growth. It was the creation of “pressures, tensions, and disequilibrium" that put in motion further tensions and frictions. This chain propelled the economy along, as people were inspired to solve ever-new challenges. “Developing countries were not fragile infants at risk of being choked in the cradle without expanded infrastructures. Better to invest in industries, agriculture, and trade directly; allow them to expand and to create the obstacles and bottlenecks- and therefore create shortfalls in social overheads…. Capital was simply underutilized for lack of perceived opportunities.” The main contribution of this book was Hirschman’s idea of linkages. “There were two kinds of linkages- forward (what happens to a product as it gets refined or marketed to yield subsequent economic activity as it rolls to the consumer?) and backward (what sorts of inputs are necessary for the production and handling of the good?). Each yielded different kinds of activities. What was important was that a push in one industry or sector could set in motion tensions or scarcities and thus new opportunities for lucrative ventures in other industries or sectors “linked” to the original push. It was in the very imbalance and the disequilibrium created by the initial shove that the economy might develop.” Particularly in Latin America, but as a general notion, Hirschman strove for reform and not revolution. However, he saw the “increasing disorder of modernization as a virtue.” Development did not fail because it did not go as planned. Projects might not end up being efficient themselves, but they often would spawn imitators and even competitors in tangential fields. “Resistances propel further pressure to adapt and change.” Hirschman mused, “Instead of asking: what benefits [has] this project yielded, it would almost be more pertinent to ask: how many conflicts has it brought in its wake? How many crises has it occasioned and passed through? And these conflicts and crises should appear both on the benefit and cost side, or sometimes on one- sometimes on the other, depending on the outcome (which cannot be known with precision for a long time, if ever.).” He embraced the uncertainty and the need for adaptation on the fly. “Mankind only takes up those problems it thinks it can solve- and then, once bitten, engage, solves them- or fails.” It was this “hidden hand” that often “stumbled into achievement.” Only by going forth can one get to an end, often not of the original intention or design. “Ignorance of risk can offset usefully aversion to risk.” He viewed, “hope as a principle for action.”

Hirschman next wrote “Exit, Voice, or Loyalty”. One could either defect or speak out. (Loyalty was largely ignored in his book.) People were active actors who decided to choose between courses. He recognized that public institutions, from governments to companies to universities, were all in decline. Faced with decline, inherited patterns of loyalty no longer kept “consumer-members” in place. The choice was between raising hell within or withdrawal to without. When people still have a shred of loyalty they tend to favor voice instead of exit. Related to this was Hirschman’s idea of possibilism. Ever the moderate, he wanted to stake out ground between the revolutionaries and the conservatives. He pondered, “the real criticism of the reformer is not that he is ineffective but that he might just be effective and that he may thereby deprive the oppressed from achieving victory on their own terms.” He urged to push ahead even without complete knowledge, ensuring uncertainty. "Not only is history unpredictable but there can be no change without its unpredictability…. Aren’t we interested in what is (barely) possible, rather than what is probable?” The aim was “the search to invent new channels for voices to be heard.” To the revolutionary he cautioned, “envy is such a mean emotion” (and the “only one of the seven deadly sins from whose practice you don’t ever get any fun or enjoyment.”) He coined the metaphor of “the tunnel effect” for the feeling of drivers stuck in a traffic jam in the Logan Airport tunnel. As long as everyone was inching along everyone felt ok, but as one lane moved faster alone, the drivers in the other lanes felt cheated and their moods got even worse than before, when everyone was stuck together. “They were once gratified and now felt deprived.” Perceptions were as important as reality. Relative gains matter. “The concentration on economic discussions may mislead the government into thinking the principal problem is economic when what the people really want is something quite different.”

Hirschman’s next book was “The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph”. At this time, Hirschman was retreating back to the Enlightenment ideas. He was reading Machiavelli’s “Discourses” and “The Prince”, Adam Smith’s “Lectures on Jurisprudence", Montesquieu’s “Spirit of the Laws”, and also Hume, Ferguson, Mandeville, Helvetius, Vico, Herder, and Max Weber. Hirschman spent his career searching for the dissatisfaction with modernity and capitalism. “In my scheme the ‘distance that makes one gasp’ (the goal of all theory construction) is between the expectations and hopes that helped install & legitimize bourgeois society & capitalist activity, on the one hand, and the desperately disappointing results- so disappointing in fact that we have repressed the consciousness of those expectations & hopes (grundlichvergessen’ Freud)…. Capitalism was born alienated and already repressed and repressing.” He was toying with the tension between private selfishness and the social good- “rebranding personal passions into interests.” Following Machiavelli, he also sensed that the real danger was honor, power, and the fame of state control. “The expansion of commerce and industry is useful because it will deflect men from seeking power and glory, [and] will keep them busily occupied making money which is harmless and perhaps even socially useful.” Commerce and industry would promote the public interest indirectly, in the course of those pursuing personal gain directly. This was Hirschman’s style of republicanism- the balance between the individual and the common good. He always sought checks and balances- to countervail. “He wanted disruption and repression, harmony and  disorder- passions and interests. Each force contained within it its own tendency to resist it.” The passions and the interests were counterpoints to each other, as well as codependent. "The rules of passions could lead, without checks, to horrible utopias; the rein of interests to soulless pragmatism." 

Hirschman’s last major work was “Shifting Involvements”. Disappointment was also a counterpoint to hope. Trying to avoid mistakes led to as much regret and disappointment as action. “While a life filled with disappointment is a sad affair, a life without disappointment may not be bearable at all. For disappointment is the natural counterpart of man’s propensity to entertain magnificent vistas and aspirations." Search for “exits” to unhappiness propelled new success. “These efforts could be either private-pursuing or public-engaging; the point is that they were subject to similar propensities.” Consumer society often led to disappointment, as purchasing goods and luxury services led to diminishing returns. This led the consumer-citizen to “climb gradually out of private life into the public arena.” Public life, in turn, led to its own disappointments. “Casting ballots does not allow for the expression of different “intensities” of convictions. The result: voting has a “dual character"- to defend against the “excessive repressive” state while “safeguarding" it against “excessively expressive” citizens…. The franchise was an “antidote to revolutionary change”…. In short, the trouble with political life is that it is either too absorbing or too tame.” The pendulum was always swinging back and forth between the private and public spheres. The hope for Hirschman was to imagine incremental social change without complete overhauls to society. “Help the fallible citizen, this imperfect subject, to imagine alternatives without making them impossible." Hirschman advocated a morality to social science as distinct from the value-free physical sciences. In fact, morality “belongs in the center of our work, and it can get there only if social scientists are morally alive and make themselves vulnerable to moral concerns- then they will produce morally significant works, consciously or otherwise.” He was also concerned with group identity politics. He was troubled by “the systemic lack of communication between groups of citizens, such as liberals and conservatives, progressives and reactionaries…. The resulting separateness of these large groups from one another seems more worrisome to me than the isolation of anomic individuals in ‘mass society’ of which sociologists have made so much.” 

Hirschman thought his own legacy was not any grand system, but a series of what he called petites idees. “They are like aphorisms, very astonishing remarks, perhaps paradoxical in nature, but which are perhaps true because of it.” His lifetime was spent gathering and mulling over his own petites idees in countless journals and notebooks, sometimes coming back to them for a new insight after decades in the back of his mind. They took time to germinate. These “small ideas, small pieces of knowledge…. do not stand in connection with any ideologies or worldviews, they do not claim to provide total knowledge of the world, they probably undermine the claims of all previous ideologies.” Another term he used was Machiavelli’s “castelluzi” or little castles. “We can be distracted and diverted and divested by small things, since small things are capable of holding us. We hardly ever look at great objects in isolation; it is the trivial circumstances, the surface images, which strike us- the useless skins which objects slough off.” After all, it was not necessary to know everything in advance before making the biggest of decisions.