“Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy” by Kojin Karatani (translated by Joseph A. Murphy)

Karatani is a Japanese Marxist philosopher. This book, however, deals entirely with classical Greek philosophy and the political arrangements of Greek city-states. Karatani seeks to compare early Ionian philosophy with Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, to show what was truly groundbreaking about Ionian natural philosophy and political science. He contends, “nearly all of what is believed to be distinctive about Greece began in Ionia.” On the political unit of the polis, he asserts, “the principle first appeared in the early colonial cities in Ionia, and expanded from there through further colonization from those cities. It was only later that the principle spread to the Greek mainland.”

What interests Karatani most is the type of political institutions that flourished in Ionia. “What existed in Ionia was not democracy but isonomia.” Hannah Arendt expands, “Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy…. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word democracy, expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is “no-rule” is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.” Aristotle adds, “In a democracy the poor have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and [the majority] is supreme.” Karatani continues, “Modern democracy is a composite of liberalism plus democracy, that is to say liberal democracy. It attempts to combine, therefore, two conflicting things, freedom and equality.” He goes on, “The fact that realization of democracy requires a concentration of power as its prerequisite reveals that democracy essentially takes the form of a -cracy or rule…. In fact, in this people-as-sovereign, absolute monarchy is concealed. In other words, democracy is a form of rule realized by passing through the concentration of power.”

Karatani contrasts democracy with Ionian governance. “The Ionian polis came into being with a covenant (social contract) among these people. Their fidelity was directed not to kinship but to the covenant…. The new communities formed by the settlers in Ionia were independent from the city-states or tribal groups of their origin.” Ionian colonies had enough frontier land to enable free migration and, for a time, had no threat of external aggression from neighboring nations. This allowed a radical egalitarianism to spread. They brought no baggage from the clan-based loyalties of the mainland. Ionian “natural philosophy, with its rejection of the gods of the polis, was viewed as a denial of the polis (community) itself…. In Athens, people are subordinate to the polis, and all ethics flows from that point. However, for Democritus, a human being is in essence independent of the polis, and each person is “a world unto themselves” (microcosmos)…. In [Ionian] eyes, the world and human beings were themselves equally physis or nature. They were among the first to propose this universal perspective.” This perspective flowed from their general natural philosophy. “The love of humanity in Ionia is inseparable from the attitude of approaching humans, not through nomos, but through physis…. Isonomia, or no-rule, does not simply place people on an equal footing in terms of political participation. It means more fundamentally the absence of the ruler and ruled hierarchy in the relations of production.” It resulted in the absence of the Asian despotic division of labor. “In the civilizations of Asia, the “first form of ideologists, priests,” held a monopoly on technical and scientific matters…. In a sense, the power of the priests and bureaucrats was rooted in a monopoly over writing systems that were difficult to acquire, or a monopoly of the knowledge that could be obtained through reading. By contrast, the Ionians adapted the Phoenician script into a phonetic alphabet that anyone could easily master. Further, they minted coinage and left trade, pricing, and other matters of economic policy handled by the bureaucracy in the states of Asia to the market…. When the Ionian natural philosophers eliminated the personified gods of Olympus, they also rejected professional priests and ritualists, which is to say they rejected the implicit division of material and mental labor.” The Ionian philosophers were both anti-dualist and anti-idealist in their worldly outlook. Although they differed on what the primal element was, from Thales, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, to Parmenides, they were all strictly materialists.

Karatani suggests that the democracy of Athens was diametrically opposed to the isonomia of Ionia. “Athenian direct democracy was dependent upon the ruling and plundering of the other poleis. It is precisely this imperialistic expansion that was the condition of Athenian democracy…. The Athenian army was based on the mass tactics of the phalanx using a heavily armed citizen militia called hoplites. The success of these tactics provided the basis of the ascent of the democratic faction versus the aristocracy. During the Persian War in particular, the contribution of the lower class of citizens, who volunteered to row in the galleys of the warships, gained them a political position…. The motive for the promotion of democracy in Athens lay in this military exigency…. Athenian democracy is inseparable from this kind of nationalism…. In order to prosecute wars, and participate in political affairs, they had to rely on slaves for labor. A landowner with no slaves would be unable to carry out the obligations of a citizen. Slaves were, in this sense, a condition for citizenship…. Athenian democracy was a system that sought to equalize the people by redistribution of wealth. On the other hand, this democracy was rooted in the homogeneity of its members…. Whatever economic contribution a foreigner might make to the polis, there was no path to citizenship, nor legal protection under the law…. Direct democracy gave rise to demagogues, who inflamed the people.”

While Athens was rich in wealth and militarily dominant by the fifth century BC, it imported teachers of rhetoric and philosophers from the Ionian colonies. These were the so-called Sophists. “In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, rhetoric is portrayed as the art of persuading other people, and thereby ruling them, and the teachers of this art were the Sophists. However, the reduction of rhetoric to a set of techniques for domination was the view, not of the Sophists, but of the Athenians…. It is under democracy (majority rule) that rhetoric becomes a means of ruling over other people…. In Ionia [rhetoric] took the form of a means of collective inquiry (elenchos)…. Rhetoric was not a set of techniques for ruling over other people, but a method for understanding a nature that included humans.”

Karatani makes that case that Socrates, despite Plato’s portrayal, was, in fact, a direct descendant of the Ionian philosophers. “Socrates was the first person in Athens to attempt to lead his life as an individual. In that sense he was cosmopolitan, independent from the polis and the community of Athens…. Socrates rejected the generally recognized values of the Athenians, which held one’s deeds in public office and one’s political actions to be the foundation of virtue…. Socrates recognized no value in participation in the assembly and courts and the attainment of power. The art he taught was not for the purpose of action in the public sphere; rather, it was a means of severing one’s ties to it…. This further hints at a civil society where there is no split between one’s public and private lives…. Plato aimed at a condition where the soul ruled over the body. What Socrates aimed at, though, was the abolition of rule itself, that is to say, isonomia.”

“Sentimental Education” by Gustave Flaubert (translated by Robert Baldick)

This novel is, at heart, a story of desire and obsession. A young student, Frederic Moreau, catches a moment with the older Madame Arnoux, while traveling home to Nogent-sur-Seine on a steamship. It would begin a lifelong infatuation with the married lady. The novel’s plot, set by Flaubert in early nineteenth century Paris, intertwines the politics and intrigues of the post-Bourbon Restoration through the Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath.

Frederic lets his life be steered by fate and a certain capricious flippancy. “He asked himself in all seriousness whether he was to be a great painter or a great poet; and he decided in favour of painting, for the demands of the profession would bring him closer to Madame Arnoux. So he had found his vocation!” Living in Paris, ostensibly to study law, Frederic gradually ingratiates his way into Monsieur Arnoux’s circle of artists and republican radicals. But all the while he dreams of Madame. He lives for their brief, often silent, interactions. “He loved her without reservation, without hope, unconditionally; and in those mute transports, which were like bursts of gratitude, he would have liked to cover her forehead with a shower of kisses.” Even as Frederic gains an inheritance, which sets him up comfortably, if modestly, for life, he seems to float about with no set course, save for his fixation on Madame Arnoux. Speaking to her husband, Frederic can’t help exclaim, “What can a fellow do in an age of decadence like ours? Great painting has gone out of fashion. Besides, you can put a bit of art into every sphere of life. You know how devoted I am to the cause of beauty!” Frederic also becomes involved in all of the political intrigues floating around Parisian circles. Having no firm opinions of his own, he mixes easily with the old aristocracy, the capitalists, the republican reformers, and the socialist radicals alike. “Some people have got logs in their fireplace, truffles on their table, a comfortable bed, a library, a carriage, every luxury. If somebody else has to shiver in a garret, dine for a franc, work like a black, and flounder in poverty—is that their fault?” Stymied in his true love, Frederic distracts himself with minor flings. “He felt that something irreparable had just happened, and that he had lost his great love. And the other woman was there beside him, the happy, easy love! Tired out, full of contradictory desires, and no longer even knowing what he wanted, he felt an infinite melancholy, a longing to die.” Of course, Frederic could never get Madame Arnoux out of his mind. Every chance encounter with her stirred up his dormant passions in a way nothing else could. “She had not held out her hand to him, had not said a single affectionate word, had not even invited him to come and see her; but in spite of all that, he would not have exchanged this meeting for the most wonderful adventures, and he savoured its sweetness as he continued on his way.”

In February 1848, Paris burns, the National Guard sides with the people, and the monarchy is sent fleeing. “The people, less out of vengeance than from a desire to assert its supremacy, tore up curtains, smashed mirrors, chandeliers, sconces, tables, chairs, stools—everything that was moveable, right down to albums of drawings and needlework baskets. They were the victors, so surely they were entitled to enjoy themselves. The rabble draped themselves mockingly in lace and cashmere.” As early as June, the tables turn—the National Guard brutally suppresses the radical workers’ rebellion and conservative elements reestablish control of Paris and the country. “Despite their victory, equality—as if to punish its defenders and ridicule its enemies—asserted itself triumphantly: an equality of brute beasts, a common level of bloody atrocities; for the fanaticism of the rich counterbalanced the frenzy of the poor, the aristocracy shared the fury of the rabble, and the cotton nightcap was just as savage as the red bonnet. The public’s reason was deranged as if by some great natural upheaval. Intelligent men lost their sanity for the rest of their lives.” Frederic navigates these political storms distractedly, as he broodingly tries to steer his own affairs of love. He embarks on a handful of serious affairs. He honestly attempts to replace the place in his heart held by Madame Arnoux. To no avail. “Women’s hearts were like those desks full of secret drawers that fit one inside another; you struggle with them, you break your fingernails, and at the bottom you find a withered flower, a little dust, or nothing at all! Perhaps he was afraid too of finding out too much.”

“The Pine Islands” by Marion Poschmann (translated by Jen Calleja)

This a strange, short novel. It begins, “He’d dreamt that his wife had been cheating on him…. He couldn’t recall later on whether he had been shouting at her (probably), struck her (surely not) or spat at her (well, really, a little spittle may very well have sprayed from his mouth while he was talking animatedly at her), he had at any rate gathered a few things together, taken his credit cards and his passport and left…. In the plane en route to Tokyo he drank green tea, watched two samurai films and repeatedly reassured himself that he had not only done everything right, but that his actions had indeed been inevitable.” Thus begins Gilbert Silvester’s sojourn in Japan. He is a pretentious associate lecturer, severely disappointed he has yet to attain professorship. Gilbert researches the depiction of male beards in art. “He clung on to words that had long fallen out of usage and on to implements of a past age, there was something antiquated about him. Indeed, he had tried to offset it with postmodern ties and neon-coloured pocket squares. To no avail. He was regarded at the university as a reactionary aesthete.” Purchasing the works of Basho upon landing, Gilbert sets out to retrace the poet’s pilgrimage to Matsushima, the bay of pine islands. “The travelers to Matsushima were lunatics, moonstruck, eccentric. They composed their own sacred legends, everything was worthless to them apart from poetry, and for them poetry stood for the spirit’s path to nothingness.” Gilbert befriends a young man, Yosa, about to commit suicide on the subway tracks and ropes him into becoming his traveling companion. “The outer suicide and the inner suicide, he said to Yosa, are completely different things. Basho strove for the inner suicide, he wanted to be free of his ego in order to be freed up for his poetry.” Instead of tourist sites, Yosa takes Gilbert to the most famous suicide spots in Japan, while Gilbert tries to nudge Yosa to visit Matsushima with him. “He thought almost exclusively about pines. The Japanese pines on their scenic island—were they truly capable of teaching him to see something? And if they were, why couldn’t a completely normal pine, like one in the Brandenburg Forest, for instance, not be just as qualified to do so?”

“10% Less Democracy” by Garett Jones

In a way, Jones has written a timid book. Most of his proposed reforms are marginal. And yet, to many people, advocating ten percent less democracy will seem highly controversial. “Most prominent political thinkers… take the unalloyed merits of democracy for granted.” In his book, Jones suggests some “democracy-reducing reforms that take control of the state a little further away from the average citizen.” He suggests there might be a Laffer curve for democracy and that many rich countries in the modern world, particularly America, might be on the right side, sloping downward.

The book uses anecdotes to make some points, but Jones primarily relies on time-series or cross-country data. He claims, “there is no professional consensus at all on whether higher levels of democracy cause higher growth, cause slower growth, or cause nothing much at all.” First, he suggests longer terms for politicians. “We have three major areas where governments facing a looming election are reluctant to take the tough but probably effective medicine: trade policy, labor regulation, and exchange rate policy.” Politicians know when the voters are watching. “Senators… tend to backload the pork, delivering 15% more projects and 15% more dollars in home-state spending in the last two years of their cycle…. When a senator is in cycle, she’s 10 percentage points less likely to vote for a trade deal.”

Jones recommends those parts of the United States system that are more-shielded from politics and the voters. He praises the independence of the Federal Reserve. “Independent, generally less democratic central banks… averaged 4% lower long-run rates of annual inflation compared to countries with the most politician-dependent…. Countries with more independent central banks appear to have fewer financial crises.” The judicial branch and regulatory agencies are two other areas where Jones has found better outcomes from appointing, rather than electing, officials. “Appointed treasurers are able to get lower interest rates on the city debt—about half a percentage point lower on average—than elected officials.” Jones finds, “States with elected regulators are less likely to pass through cost changes into prices [and] utilities invest less in places with elected regulators.” One important measure of independence is funding. “Having to ask the government for annual appropriations… obviously weakens the political independence of the regulator.” Jones also suggests using executive headhunting-style firms to identify talent, especially those who might not be citizens, and filling local, state, and federal posts with them. Finally, Jones suggests expanding political independence into areas like an independent tax commission. “Let Congress decide on the values, let the Federal Tax Board iron out the details.”

Jones now gets into more controversial ground. He suggests tilting the scales of voting to give more weight to those who are smarter. “The more educated tend to know more about how government works and about how different policy proposals—even well-intentioned ones—may or may not work as planned…. Since politicians pander to voters, not to nonvoters, then any improvement in the skill level, the information level, or the human capital of voters will mean that politicians will be pandering to customers who know more about the product.” He suggests a practical idea, “Everyone with a current right to vote gets to vote in elections for the lower house and for the head of state, but only those with a college degree or equivalent can vote in elections to the upper house.”

Another controversial idea is to give voting rights to a country’s bondholders. “Bondholders are an important and useful check on the potentially reckless behavior of governments…. Long-term government bondholders—investors holding maturities of, say, ten years or longer—should be given an explicit advisory role in modern democracies as a check on the shortsighted, impulsive, frequently ignorant electorate…. perhaps through nonbinding public resolutions where one dollar of bonds means one vote.” Jones goes further, advocating for “formal annual shareholder-style meetings between elected bondholder representatives and elected government officials, formal appointments of bondholder representatives to high-level finance ministry positions, or even handing bondholder representatives limited forms of veto power over economic policy actions.” He even suggests to “grant the bondholder council a small number of seats in the upper house of the national legislature…. The number of seats that belonged to these bondholders would rise as the nation’s ratio of government debt to national income rose. One more seat in the upper house for every 10% increase in the debt-to-income ratio.”

Jones also suggests that political party machines have come to influence too little of policy in America today. “The machine has a longer political life than most politicians, so it cares whether the country will be rich enough, stable enough, safe enough, for it to remain strong for decades to come. The machine has patience…. Machines are to politics as banking is to the economy: being long-term, repeat players, they can extend something like political credit.” He also suggests staggering election cycles. “If there’s more noise in the public sphere, then any one election tells us less about what the public is really saying…. The bigger the random swings, the stronger the argument is for not listening too closely to any one election…. Any country with four, six, or… eight-year terms could easily stagger out the terms to create what the Senate calls “a continuing body.” And one benefit of a continuing body is that it will have a more stable, more coherent mind.” Jones concludes, “if a modern, relatively prosperous nation wants a greater degree of liberalism, it probably wants a little less democracy.”

“The Plotters” by Un-su Kim (translated by Sora Kim-Russell)

Kim’s novel is full of suspense and killing. It reads fast. The hero, Reseng, is an orphan trained as an assassin. His boss and adopted father, Old Raccoon, is a polio-crippled librarian. “Had Reseng continued to grow up in the orphanage, where divine blessings showered down like spring sunshine and kindly nuns devoted themselves to the careful raising of orphans, his life might have turned out very differently. Instead, he grew up in a library crawling with assassins, hired guns, and bounty hunters. Just as a plant grows wherever it sets down roots, so all your life’s tragedies spring from wherever you first set your feet.” Seoul’s underworld is the Meat Market, where murderers, arms dealers, kidnappers, and other crooks shop their wares. But behind it all are the plotters. “To the plotters, mercenaries and assassins were like disposable batteries. After all, what use would they have for old assassins? An old assassin was like an annoying blister bursting with incriminating information and evidence…. Plotters hated when lowly assassins took it upon themselves to change the plot. It wasn’t about pride. The problem was that if the plot changed, then the people waiting at their various posts would need new cues, and everyone’s roles would get out of sync. If incriminating evidence got left behind or if things went sour, then someone else would have to die in order to cover it up. And sometimes that someone was you. Changing the assigned plot was not just a headache but a potential death sentence…. Not that anyone could have said where the plot originated or what its ultimate goal was. No one ever knew the full truth. In the plotters’ world, everyone avoided having any more information than absolutely necessary. The more information you had, the easier it was to become a target. Ignorance was survival. You couldn’t just pretend, you had to genuinely not know. Why would anyone bother asking how much you knew when they could simply kill you?” Kim’s plot is filled with other unforgettable characters. There is the pet crematorium operator shaped like Winnie-the-Pooh, who offers soju to the gods, the cross-eyed librarian’s assistant, who never reads, but gives insightful book recommendations, and the wheelchair-bound knitter, obsessed with Barbie and Chester Cheetah. “In the end, none of us can leave the place we know best, no matter how dirty and disgusting it is. Having no money and no other means of survival is part of the reason, but it’s never the whole reason. We go back to our own filthy origins because it’s a filth we know. Putting up with that filth is easier than facing the fear of being tossed into the wider world, and the loneliness that is as deep and wide as that fear.”

“Virtue Politics” by James Hankins

Hankins has written a book about the Italian humanist scholars of the quattrocento and their effects on the politics of northern Italy. He states, “for most Renaissance humanists, freedom was a moral achievement, the fruit of virtue, and was prevented from collapse into license only by good character…. Their principle message [was] that cities needed to be governed by well-educated men and women of high character, possessed of practical wisdom, and informed by the study of ancient literature and moral philosophy.”

Quattrocento humanists were not necessarily republicans in the modern sense. They worked under, advised, and tried to influence princes and tyrants, but also aristocracies, oligarchies, and democracies. “What was common to humanist political literature was a commitment, not to a particular regime type or to “republican liberty,” but rather to a reform project that was in a certain sense supra partes, directed by political elites in general, whatever regime they served…. For the humanists constitutional form was far less important than the character of rulers.”

Hankins defines virtue ethics and virtue politics. “In contrast to the other two leading approaches to normative ethics in the modern world—deontology and utilitarianism—virtue ethics emphasizes the need to develop, through reflection and practice, excellent patterns of conduct (the virtues) so as to achieve human good and human flourishing (eudaimonia, or happiness)…. “Virtue politics” by analogy with virtue ethics, focuses on improving the character and wisdom of the ruling class with a view to bringing about a happy and flourishing commonwealth. It sees the political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of the rulers and especially their practice of justice, defined as a preference for the common good over private goods…. Legitimacy of exercise in the discourse of virtue politics must spring from the desire of a political leader both to be and to do good.”

Hankins begins with Petrarch. “It is still right to call him the father of Renaissance humanism, since it was he who created the new paideuma that opened Christian culture anew to the lost civilizations of the ancient world. It was he who deepened the admiration for ancient authors that had long existed in medieval culture into a kind of Sehnsucht, a longing for the restoration of lost qualities of mind, for the return of ancient virtue. It was he who turned the new paideuma that was the fruit of that longing into an institutio—a way of forming the mind, oriented above all to the acquisition of virtue, wisdom, and eloquence.” Petrarch was also able to convince his contemporaries that pagan philosophy was, not a threat, but complimentary to Christian faith. The pagan classics would instruct on the virtues of the world and Christ on matters of the spirit. “The studia humanitatis had to do with the edification of human beings in this life and the reform of human states and societies.” Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Tacitus, and, particularly, Cicero were their ancient lodestars.

Humanists were also concerned with moral character more than laws and justice. They thought beneficial laws would necessarily flow from a ruler with proper virtues. “Like Plato, they did not think obedience could be secured merely by writing down laws and institutions that conformed to abstract principles of justice. Human justice began in the soul, and a way had to be found of engraving laws in the souls of both rulers and ruled. Justice was not a right or entitlement, as most people believe today, but a personal commitment to give fellow citizens what they deserved, even citizens poorer or weaker than oneself. It was a virtue—an excellent character trait informed by practical wisdom.”

Quattrocento humanists were egalitarians. “Most humanists from Petrarch onward insist that even a person of humble birth can merit a place in the ruling class via the acquisition of virtue…. The humanists of the quattrocento may indeed by credited with inventing a new form of equality not found in modern political theory—nor in ancient for that matter—which might be labeled “virtue egalitarianism.”” Bartolomeo Platina expounds, “It is characteristic of nobility to follow the right, rejoice in duties, have command of desires, and restrain avarice. Whoever does this, even if he were by some chance born to the lowest human condition, merits being called and regarded as noble.”

Humanists saw partisanship as ugly and sought to act above that fray. “The humanists generally saw open partisanship as unseemly and, like other passions, a threat to virtue and the rule of reason, quite apart from the damage it caused to the state in affairs domestic and foreign…. The goals of the political project operated on a higher plane than that of partisan conflict and regime loyalties.” Humanist advisors had no problem mentoring new rulers and shifting loyalties when regimes changed from tyrant to tyrant or even from tyrant to Pope or republic. It was the virtue of the ruler and not the form of government that they sought to influence. “Loyalty to a particular constitutional form was no part of what it meant to be a man of virtue in the quattrocento.” Petrarch insisted, “Where there are no tyrants, the people tyrannize.”

The humanist scholars of the quattrocento were anti-scholastics. “Petrarch lays out a model of moral and intellectual self-cultivation that rejects the ethos of scholasticism. The latter for him represented a corrupt form of education, mere pre-professional training, oriented to power and money-making and transmitting expertise without concern for moral character. Scholasticism focuses on problem-solving in particular contexts; it is designed to train medical doctors or lawyers, future decision-makers in lay governments and in the Church. Petrarch’s otium litterarium by contrast—revealing its Stoic inspiration—is designed to instill wisdom and virtue. It broadens the mind so that it adopts a universal perspective, the perspective of all of time and space. By ranging through past times and around the globe the solitarius is drawn out of the moment.”

Hankins also extolls Leonardo Bruni as an exemplar of humanist philosophy. Bruni saw liberty and equality as the precursors to political virtue. “Liberty is valued above all because it produces virtue, and it is virtue that makes Florence worthy of leadership among peoples, perhaps even empire. It is the virtuous rule of Florence that in turn guarantees liberty to other towns and cities within their sphere of influence.” Bruni saw Florence as the natural successor to Rome, the classical model par excellence for most humanist scholars. Within Tuscany, Bruni saw Florence as first among equals and guarantee of liberty for all. He states, “Our magistrates and generals yearned to acquire the greatest praise from one thing alone, the fair and faithful defence of our provinces and of our allies. In this way we could more truly have been titled a protectorate [patrocinium] than an empire [imperium] of the world.”

Bruni identifies faction as Florence’s main obstacle to success. The Guelf and Ghibelline nobles vied for political power, even as both factions tried to suppress the rise of the popolo and the guildsmen. “Bruni’s approach is straightforwardly moralistic; he regards human vice as the ultimate cause of factionalism. The highest and lowest classes in the state are naturally uncivil and immoderate, while the broad middle classes—the popolo—have the greatest capacity for civic virtue. It is only the middle classes that have a real interest in observing the common good…. They can identify their own interests more closely with those of the state.”

Hankins ends by contrasting the quattrocento humanists with Machiavelli. For Machiavelli, “the study of letters and philosophy are a “dangerous deceit” that undermines a city’s institutio, the disciplines of civic life that buttress warlike virtue; and the softening of manners that result from literary study ultimately brings the state to ruin.” Machiavelli is not concerned with the virtues when governing affairs of state. “Necessity became Machiavelli’s watchword and the basis of his political science. Power, virtu in Machiavelli’s sense, is the condition of all other goods…. What should guide a ruler’s policies is the logic of necessity, which belongs to a different register entirely from the laws of morality…. Machiavelli teaches his prince that following habits of behavior, whether good or bad, as though on a kind of moral autopilot, will bring him ruin. He must learn moral flexibility, strategic inconstancy, selective clemency, and cruelty. Goodness must become the servant of necessita, the logic of power.” Rulers could not afford to be guided by personal morals and principles when dictating political affairs. “Machiavelli was the first to explore the paradox of the moderns: that evil must be done to safeguard the good. This a paradox of statesmen, not of philosophers, and it acquires moral gravity because, even in democracies, statesmen must choose not only for themselves but for others.”

“10:04” by Ben Lerner

Lerner has autobiographical fiction down. This novel is primarily about him struggling to write this novel. “I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work, that like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.” At this novel’s crux is a previously published New Yorker story embedded complete within it. That story’s real world literary strength was supposedly how Ben, the narrator, was given a six figure advance for this very novel. Sometimes it gets even more meta, as when the embedded New Yorker story references its author, Ben, reflecting on his first novel’s narrator, who is also a sometimes-less-than-flattering version of Ben (but named Adam). “He’d likely be asked what parts of his book were autobiographical…. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.” Ben, this novel’s narrator, is most definitely a gentrified Brooklynite. “I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river.” He is also an unabashed hipster—a supporter of Occupy Wall Street and a member of his local food coop. “As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.” But he also wants to show he is not one of those hipsters; he is not too cool for school (and still has his Midwestern charm). “I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar.” Some of his best stories are memories of his youth, which serve as asides on topics he is mulling over as his present narratorial self. “In the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he’d discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time.” Pages later, he returns to the riff. “Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence…. I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.”

“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth

Seth’s epic of nearly 1,500 pages centers around a few related families from Brahmpur and Calcutta, just after India’s Partition. The plot deals with religion, politics, gender roles, cultural traditions, and, particularly, family obligations. As India struggles with the birth pangs of independence, societal mores are changing in fits and starts. Socialists and Hindu nationalists contend with the Congress Party’s stranglehold on power. Those Muslims who did not leave for Pakistan try to integrate themselves into the new fractured society. Upper-caste Hindus assert their place replacing the British. Students protest for rights on campus and jobs after. Dalit cobblers strike for better terms with bazaar middlemen. Muslim sharecroppers are fitfully given new rights through land reform legislation. Zamindari feudal lords struggle to find new vocations, income, and purpose. Traditional Urdu songs and Bengali poems vie for attention with motion pictures, dance clubs, and pop records. The younger generation asserts new prerogatives, all the while careful to still defer to their elders.

Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s quest to find a suitable boy for her youngest daughter, Lata, propels the thrust of this novel. Mehra is an old school widow, devout in her prayers and completely devoted to the future of her children. She does not believe her youngest daughter should act in plays with boys, not to mention marry someone from another caste or, god-forbid, a Muslim or foreigner. Her children—Arun, a “brown-white” at a covented British Calcutta firm, Varun, a struggling student who drinks Shamshu and studies horse racing more than his books, Savita, the loyal daughter already fobbed off into an arranged marriage, and Lata, the rebellious student of English literature—all try her patience in varying ways. But for hundreds of pages at a time the Mehras fade into the background as the plot meanders through the stories of the Kapoors, Mehra in-laws from Savita’s marriage, whose patriarch is a local Congress cabinet minister, the Nawab of Baitar’s family, the local Muslim feudal lords, the Chatterjis, an eccentric Brahmo aristocratic family from Calcutta, who are in-laws of Mrs. Mehra through Arun, Saeeda Bai, a courtesan singer of alluring beauty who plies her trade for the best of Brahmpur society, Haresh Khanna, a shoe factory foreman from Delhi educated in England, Kabir Durrani, a history student more fond of cricket and poetry, Abdur Rasheed, a pious college tutor from a rustic Zamindari family, and many, many more. Even Nehru makes a few cameo appearances. As all of these diverse lives interconnect, Seth paints a picture of the tight web of relations within the upperclass Brahmpur community. But as characters strive to work for better futures for themselves their pasts are never far behind. “Look at history. It’s always been the same. The old men cling to their power and their beliefs, which admit all their worst vices but exclude the least fault and strangle the smallest innovation of the young. Then, thank God, they die, and can do no more harm. But by then we, the young, are old, and strive to do what little mischief they left undone.” 

“Something Deeply Hidden- Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime” by Sean Carroll

Carroll consistently writes books about dense scientific topics in terms that are easy for the layman to comprehend. This book deals with quantum mechanics, his specialty, as a theoretical physicist. “Quantum mechanics is unique among physical theories in drawing an apparent distinction between what we see and what really is…. The fundamental new element of quantum mechanics, the thing that makes it unequivocally distinct from its classical predecessor, centers on the question of what it means to measure something about a quantum system.”

Carroll begins by getting into the nuts and bolts of what we know about quantum mechanics. “Quantum systems are described by wave functions rather than by [classical] positions and velocities…. We can express Schrodinger’s equation in words as: “The rate of change of a wave function is proportional to the energy of the quantum system.”… A wave function can represent a number of different possible energies.” Next, Carroll lays out what the different interpretations of quantum mechanics hold in common. “Every version of quantum mechanics (and there are plenty) employs a wave function or something equivalent, and posits that the wave function obeys Schrodinger’s equation, at least most of the time…. [In the minimalist approach,] we take the wave function seriously as a direct representation of reality…. We don’t see wave functions; we see measurement outcomes, like the position of a particle…. If the wave function usually evolves smoothly in accordance with the Schrodinger equation, let’s suppose that’s what it always does…. The world is a wave function, nothing more nor less. We can use the phrase “quantum state” as a synonym for “wave function.”… Given two different objects… they are not described by separate, individual wave functions. There is only one wave function, which describes the entire system we care about, all the way up to the “wave function of the universe.”…  Although such a superposition in principle includes every possibility, most of the possible outcomes are assigned zero weight in the quantum state.”

Carroll begins to make the case for the particular interpretation of quantum mechanics he favors, Everettian Many-Worlds Theory. “The right way to describe things after the measurement, in this view, is not as one person with multiple ideas about where the electron was seen, but as multiple worlds, each of which contains a single person with a very definite idea about where the electron was seen…. The price we pay for this vastly increased elegance of theoretical formalism is that the theory describes many copies of what we think of as  “the universe,” each slightly different, but each truly real in some sense…. The potential for such universes was always there—the universe has a wave function, which can very naturally describe superpositions of many different ways things could be, including superpositions of the whole universe…. Once you admit that an electron can be in a superposition of different locations, it follows that a person can be in a superposition of having seen the electron in different locations, and indeed that reality as a whole can be in a superposition, and it becomes natural to treat every term in that superposition as a separate “world.”” Carroll summarizes, “Every version of quantum mechanics features two things: (1) a wave function, and (2) the Schrodinger equation, which governs how wave functions evolve over time. The entirety of the Everett formulation is simply the insistence that there is nothing else, that these ingredients suffice to provide a complete, empirically adequate account of the world…. Any other approach to quantum mechanics consists of adding something to that bare-bones formalism…. Reality is described by a smoothly evolving wave function and nothing else.”

Carroll builds on this picture by going into more details on the specifics of quantum mechanics. “Qubits can help us understand a crucial feature of wave functions: they are like the hypotenuse of a right triangle, for which the shorter sides are the amplitudes for each possible measurement outcome. In other words, the wave function is like a vector—an arrow with a length and a direction. The vector we’re talking about doesn’t point in a direction in real physical space, like “up” or “north.” Rather, it points in a space defined by all possible measurement outcomes.” Next, he explains entanglement and decoherence. “We know there is only one wave function, the wave function of the universe. But when we’re talking about individual microscopic particles, they can settle into quantum states where they are unentangled from the rest of the world. In that case, we can sensibly talk about “the wave function of this particular electron” and so forth…. In ordinary situations, there’s no way to stop a macroscopic object from interacting with its environment…. That simple process—macroscopic objects [becoming] entangled with the environment, which we cannot keep track of—is decoherence…. Decoherence causes the wave function to split, or branch, into multiple worlds…. To [the observer], the wave function seems to have collapsed…. The collapse is only apparent, due to decoherence splitting the wave function.” Carroll usefully defines exactly what measurements and observers are. “A measurement is any interaction that causes a quantum system to become entangled with the environment, creating decoherence and a branching into separate worlds, and an observer is any system that brings such an interaction about.”

Carroll goes back to discussing the specifics of Many-Worlds Theory and defending some of its more unintuitive implications. “Many-Worlds is a deterministic theory, and if know the wave function at one time and the Schrodinger equation, we can figure out everything that’s going to happen.” With perfect knowledge, we could look back into the past and future with absolute certainty. “Many-Worlds doesn’t assume a large number of worlds. What it assumes is a wave function evolving according to the Schrodinger equation. The worlds are there automatically…. The space of all possible wave functions, Hilbert space, is very big. It’s not any bigger in Many-Worlds than in other versions of quantum theory; it’s precisely the same size…. Other worlds could be detected in principle, if we got incredibly lucky. They haven’t gone away, they’re still there in the wave function. Decoherence makes it fantastically unlikely for one world to interfere with another, but not metaphysically impossible…. Branching happens when systems become entangled with the environment and decohere, which unfolds as time moves towards the future, not the past. The number of branches of the wave function, just like entropy, only increases with time…. The low entropy of the early universe corresponds to the idea that there were many unentangled subsystems back then. As they interact with each other and become entangled, we see that as branching of the wave function…. The picture of branching as “creating” an entirely new copy of the universe is a vivd one, but not quite right. It’s better to think of it as dividing the existing universe into almost-identical slices, each one of which has a smaller weight than the original…. You do not cause the wave function to branch by making a decision. In large part that’s just due to what we mean (or ought to mean) by something “causing” something else. Branching is the result of a microscopic process amplified to macroscopic scales: a system in a quantum superposition becomes entangled with a larger system, which then becomes entangled with the environment, leading to decoherence. A decision, on the other hand, is a purely macroscopic phenomenon.”

Carroll ends by questioning the very nature of physics as we know it. At this point, he concedes that this is still speculation. He posits, “Spacetime isn’t fundamental, but emerges from the wave function…. This emergent geometry on space evolves with time in exactly the right way to describe a spacetime that obeys Einstein’s equation of general relativity…. Starting from an abstract quantum wave function, we have a road map describing how space emerges, with a geometry fixed by quantum entanglement, and that geometry seems to obey the dynamical rules of general relativity…. If quantum gravity operates according to some version of the Schrodinger equation, then for almost all quantum states, time runs from minus infinity in the past to plus infinity in the future. The Big Bang might be simply a transitional phase, with an infinitely old universe preceding it…. The quantum state of the universe doesn’t evolve at all as a function of time.” 

“Lucky Per” by Henrik Pontoppidan (translated by Naomi Lebowitz)

This novel, set in nineteenth century Denmark, is a bildungsroman. The eponymous hero, Per, was born into a rural Jutland family, whose men had, for generations, taken the cloth. His father was a hard and cold pastor, who was feared and ridiculed by his own congregation in equal measure. Per was the black sheep in the family. As a boy, he was more fun-loving, than god-fearing. At night, he liked to sneak out of the parsonage to go sledding and to flirt with girls. “An unappeasable hatred of his family awakened in his hitherto carefree soul, a defiant and bellicose feeling of abandonment that would become the heart and driving force of his future life.” Per was shunned by his parents and siblings alike and eventually packed off to Copenhagen to study engineering. Science and progress had become the buzz words of the age. Since Denmark’s defeat in the war to Prussia, its leading lights preached industrialization and modernization. To the enlightened, even Copenhagen seemed like a European backwater.

Per is caught up more than most in the fever of the age. “His life’s motto, “I Will,” would now be tested. It would be all or nothing.” He wants to become a man of substance and influence. He derides the religious-tempered and aesthetes alike. Despite his blooming atheism, Per felt in his bones that he was destined for something special. “For he knew now he was born to become, in his domain, the morning horn-herald, the path breaker in this sluggish society of thick-blooded sons of pastors and sextons.” Per has romantic dalliances with all that Copenhagen has to offer, eventually settling down and becoming betrothed to a Jewish heiress from an illustrious banking family. She is a like-minded soul: modern, passionate, and headstrong. “They talked together about the future, envisioned the coming century that, eventually, would give mankind back its spiritual freedom, reawaken the courage to act and the instinct for adventure, erect altars to strong and great deeds on the ruins of the church.” Armed with a letter of credit from his perspective father-in-law, Per travels the Continent to further his budding engineering schemes. However, his relationship with his father’s Church keeps lingering in his life. He cannot escape his past. The pull of the Danish countryside again proves alluring when he meets in Rome the wife of the Master of the Hunt in his native Jutland. “Nature folk were, essentially, the happiest. With a curtsy before a pair of sticks nailed together to form a cross, they solved all the riddles of life and death and let the fiddles wail on.” Eventually, having absconded to the country, Per meets two rural parish priests with divergent world views, who both, nonetheless, once again tug on his heartstrings and threaten to pull him back into the Christian fold. “How poor was the worth of such a cheaply bought cheerfulness in comparison with the faith or the doubt that had cost blood and battles…. The citizens who sat comfortably protected by their own lack of passion…. had never felt a titanic urge to struggle with the gods.” Eventually, Per makes his own personal peace with himself. “When, in spite of all the good fortune that had come his way, he wasn’t happy, it was because he had not wanted to be happy in the general sense of the word…. It was in solitude his soul felt at home, and in affliction and pain.”