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Lake Kivu is the natural border between Gisenyi, a town of approximately 106,000 people in the northwest of Rwanda, and Goma, its Congolese neighbour. During the Rwandan genocide of 1994, 10,000 to 12,000 refugees fled into Goma each hour. Today, the two cities form a cross-border economic node that defies the physical boundary known by locals as “la grande barrière”.

While an uneasy security has been restored in Rwanda, a war economy continues across the lake and into its horizons as instability and insecurity reign in the DRC.

The reprieve of this borderland is simultaneously dream, vision, and stark reality. There is a sense of atonement in daily life around Kivu; and yet, the heavily contaminated “exploding lake” is prone to violent and dangerous outbursts of methane gas.

In a twist characteristic of such “post-conflict” spaces, the former seat of the genocidal government is now Lake Kivu’s star attraction, the popular upscale Serena Hotel.

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Sarah Leyla Puello is reading for a DPhil in Modern Languages at Wolfson College, Oxford. She specialises in the representation of Buenos Aires and Paris in 20th-century French and Latin American poetry. Sarah is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Andrea Purdeková is reading for a DPhil in Development Studies at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. She is researching the politics of reconciliation and nation-building in post-genocide Rwanda, where she spent seven months doing fieldwork last year.

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After three years and £61 million, the temple-sized doors of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology reopened on Saturday. Five days earlier, when clouds of dust still engulfed the back entrance gates, the Oxonian Review previewed the renovation of “one of the world’s leading museums”. The first impression was one of shining glass and steel, fresh paint, and last-minute bustle. Everywhere, designers, curators, conservationists, and technicians talked intently over coffee tables and added the final amphora or bass viol to the display cabinets.

Designed by architect Rick Mather, the new building contains six storeys of 39 galleries hidden behind Charles Cockerell’s original structure, whose pillared façade of 1845 still fronts Beaumont Street. At a cost of £3,572 per square metre, and with enough square metres to double the Ashmolean’s previous capacity, Mather’s complex is intended to elevate the world’s first university museum from the status of “dear old friend” to internationally recognised “cultural jewel”.

On these statistics alone, an historian of the future might judge that museums are to us what churches were to our medieval forebears: a society’s monuments and, simultaneously, its public centres for education, spiritual improvement, and a higher form of entertainment than bear-pits or night clubs. It appears museums are just as keen to attract pilgrims: the Ashmolean’s target is a 25% increase, to half a million visitors per year. Not having eternal salvation at their disposal, however, the Ashmolean’s curators have resorted to a renovated building, design strategy, and a restaurant to improve their “access” ratings.

Like many a cathedral, the Ashmolean’s new building is an artwork for artworks. Hemmed in on all sides—by the Taylorian, Sackler Library and the Classics Faculty— its internal architecture has been constructed to exploit space and light.  On each floor, gallery windows open onto a skylight-lined atrium, which cuts right down to the lower ground floor. Together with the chalky Wiltshire white walls, this layout creates a sense of cool, inviting depths. The open views and abundant glass work on a symbolic level, too, suggesting the interrelations between the cultures and periods on display. Cutting dramatically across this scene, six steel “bridges” literally and figuratively link the distinct collections.

Museums—here again, like churches—are in the business of selectively preserving and presenting the past. In redeploying the Ashmolean’s innumerable relics, designers have produced a new “strategy” for this old project, which they’ve dubbed “Crossing Cultures, Crossing Time”.  Rather than grouping artefacts by country or period, the Ashmolean’s curators have arranged its wares according to themes which prompt visitors to trace connections between the many cultures represented in the museum. The second floor exhibition, for example, juxtaposes European, Chinese, Japanese and Russian art from the Renaissance to 1900.

Through the combination of several such exhibitions, the renovated Ashmolean aims to present a single, coherent narrative of the evolution of civilisation from prehistory to the present day. According to its curators, the museum is ideally suited for such a task because its modest scale allows a wide range of artefacts to be presented within a relatively small compass. This bid for coherence raises complicated questions and produces some inevitable gaps: South American and modern African cultures, for example, are thinly represented.

To the many groups involved in the Ashmolean’s redesign, however, this holistic narrative is only part of a much broader didactic goal: to show how a comparative approach can be used to demonstrate the intrinsic value of cultural variety and to advance a diverse conception of human progress. The new Ashmolean thus enlists beauty and history in no less a task than a new salvation of souls, if one more subtle than sermons, through the effacement of prejudice and the propagation of tolerance.

To give their artefacts—if not immortality—at least a longer shelf life, the museum’s designers have taken great care in presentation. This has evident benefits: display cabinets fitted with state-of-the-art environmental controls allow fragile textiles, such as an embroidered hanging from the Ottoman Empire, to be shown for the first time; and in-cabinet lighting reveals artefacts’ intricate details, including what is perhaps the Ashmolean’s most prized possession, the crystal, enamel, and gold Alfred Jewel, whose Anglo-Saxon inscription reads “Alfred ordered me to be made”.  In the European porcelain room, a series of enormous glass cabinets has been used to glittering effect to display a collection of 1,100 pieces of crockery, as required by the terms of a bequest. Reflections from the glass and the faint daylight which filters through a cabinet-window create a luminous, ghostly atmosphere, appropriate to the strange detached existence of these dinner party veterans. Wiring and other support mechanisms are discreetly hidden in the walls; beauty must not be marred by practicalities.

These technological advances bring the inevitable paradox of rejuvenating a museum into view: its collection’s previous context—from room furnishings to display labels—must in some measure be abandoned to make way for the new. It is thus a relief to find that the Cockerell building’s familiar old ambiance remains largely unchanged. A few cabinets have been replaced, furniture re-upholstered, and walls repainted or re-papered. The floors in both old and new buildings have been freshly covered with European oak parquet, and Portland stone, a material also found in Brasenose College and other Oxford University buildings, appears in both structures. Touches like these provide a simple but tangible continuity between the two buildings and underline the value of both traditional and modern design materials. The rooms in the Cockerell are, however, a little barer and less comfortingly musty than visitors will remember. Where before an aura of haphazard curiosities collected by explorers and antiquarians lingered in the air, today this will not do; “access” requires that displays free from clutter and comprehensible to the most casual visitor. One is left feeling that the spirit of the new museum has subtlely but incongruously encroached on the old.

If the days of discoveries in dusty corners are over, it is nonetheless reassuring to see that some of the Ashmolean’s most intriguing relics have benefited from relocation to a modern setting. Guy Fawkes’ lantern, for instance, is now in the Mather building’s England Gallery, newly accompanied by the “Fifth of November” rhyme in full: “By God’s Providence he was catched/ With a dark lantern and burning match…” Legions of lekythoi which once stood in scattered cabinets among the other Greek vases now form a single display on the staircase down to the “Ancient World” section, with an information panel which quotes Aristophanes. It is also charming to find, in the Japanese section, a full-scale model of a tea-room, constructed in situ by master builders with authentic materials. (An inaugural tea ceremony was held there on 4 November by a Japanese tea-master flew over specially for the occasion).

In this renovated setting, it quickly becomes clear that 21st-century museum-goers demand more for free entry than our downtrodden progenitors. Exhibitions aside (and in addition to the boutique gift shop and subterranean tea-rooms), a modern museum would not be complete without an overpriced gourmet restaurant. Cue the Ashmolean Dining Room, touted as “Oxford’s first rooftop restaurant”, with views over St. John’s College and toward the Randolph Hotel. The air of pricelessness which lingers upon the treasures in the exhibition rooms is almost as tangible here.  Even the menu card, in the venerable spirit of Oxford benefaction dinners, includes eighty varieties of wine. In the evenings, the room’s large goose-feather lampshades will be seen glimmering onto the atrium’s cascading staircase; a tantalising reminder that beauty and history also have their price.

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Emma Park is reading for a DPhil in Classics at University College, Oxford. She is an editor of ORbits.

Akshat Rathi is reading for an MSc in Organic Chemistry at Exeter College, Oxford. He is the assistant editor at the Oxonian Review.

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Michael J. Sandel
Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?
Allen Lane, 2009
320 Pages
£8.98
ISBN 978-1846142130

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Two millennia after Socrates called Athenians to the examined life, Peter Singer, intellectual godfather of the animal-welfare movement, is the sole living philosopher even approaching household-name status. And it isn’t hard to see why. To most people, contemporary philosophers seem to have undergone a moral lobotomy: the meta-ethicist who spends her entire career distinguishing the shades of meaning between “wrong” and “right”; the normative ethicist who reduces the spectrum of values visible to most of us into the grayscale of a single good (like autonomy or preference-satisfaction); the self-appointed bioethicist, versed in neither biology nor ethics, who trades in terms he barely understands to defend pre-determined conclusions. What appears common to today’s moral philosophers, paradoxically, is a stunted moral sense—either never fully developed or deformed by the unnatural pressures of the struggle for tenure.

Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel aims to change all that. Sandel’s course “Justice”, one of the most popular in Harvard’s history, is available on American public television, boasts an interactive website, and has now spawned a book that proves that at least one academic has survived formal training with fully functioning moral capacities. With its balance of conceptual precision and popular idiom, moral analysis and political application, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? shows that intellectuals can make distinctive, salutary contributions to public discourse—in this case, a searching critique of moralities based only on utility, fairness, and freedom. But Justice also illustrates the perils of its genre; Sandel’s anecdotal and anodyne style —so central to his project—suggests neutrality where none exists and obscures important questions about the core of his preferred public ethic, the virtues.

Sandel opens Justice with a sketch of three basic moral approaches. Here as throughout, he begins not with surveys of great minds or abstract principles, but with a story. In August 2004, as Hurricane Charley swept out of Orlando, Florida, the price-gougers swept in, selling $250 generators for $2,000. The moral responses to this scenario vary: you might think that the market should prevail even here, in extremis, because it most efficiently promotes overall well-being (utilitarianism) or best respects people’s autonomous decisions (libertarianism); or you might oppose price-gouging on the ground that it erodes solidarity and fosters a rapacious greed (virtue ethics).

Sandel continues to clarify these options over the next 200 pages, showing a remarkable—perhaps unparalleled—knack for drawing moral principles from vivid stories. This is not the lyrical philosophy of a Roger Scruton, heavy on examples from Hamlet and Don Giovanni; nor is it informed by the rich if imprecise humanism of a Leon Kass, self-consciously open to the transcendent and inscrutable. No, Sandel offers important but resolutely earthy musings, translated for a broad audience. He’s comfortable with contractions, sentence fragments, and the occasional alliterative indulgence (he calls Kant a “Prussian paragon of probity”); and he draws more on current events than on thought experiments or great works. It’s Socrates meets Malcolm Gladwell.

If Sandel’s examples are accessible, they’re also more serious and provocative than the merely hypothetical dilemmas of Ethics 101: Four Navy SEALs came across apparently innocent Afghan herdsmen. Hours after freeing them, they were ambushed and killed by the Taliban. Should they have shot the herdsmen? But as he moves through such stories, related theories, and their originators, Sandel rarely stops long enough to develop original points. Against the utilitarian conceit that morality requires securing the greatest good for the greatest number, for example, he lodges the familiar objection that this stance eliminates the basis for individual rights. Against the libertarian acceptance of whatever results from informed consensual decisions, Sandel cites the common worry that this unduly emphasizes people’s natural endowments, which are as morally arbitrary as race. More problematically, Sandel’s emphasis on anecdotes can be unfair to opposing views, as when he describes—in uncomfortable culinary detail—a recent case of consensual cannibalism. Though his point is a sound one, its libertarian targets will be forgiven for thinking that Sandel aims to inspire emotional repugnance rather than detached reflection.

In contrast, Sandel’s most original and compelling contribution is a defense of the Aristotelian idea, anathema to the modern mind, that knowing what is just requires reference to virtues and vices. Take, for instance, his discussion of affirmative action in university admissions. For Sandel, fairness alone can’t settle this debate because fairness depends on treating equal merits alike, and what counts as a merit depends on a university’s civic goals. These goals are discretionary but also subject to broader moral constraints—an admissions policy based on, say, contempt for Jews is morally reprehensible; admissions auctions would also be wrong since commerce would obscure the point of education and weaken adherence to its ideals. For Sandel, we can’t make sense of any of these arguments, which rely on the purposes of academic institutions and the worthiness (or unworthiness) of those purposes, without reference to virtues and vices. Cue Aristotle: justice is about giving what is due—celebrating excellences and discouraging their opposites. And that requires making value judgments.

From this fertile ethic sprout fresh and often surprising conclusions that aren’t easily located on the contemporary political spectrum. Since fairness should be supplemented by solidarity, Sandel favors some redistribution; but since solidarity requires communal sympathies and a common history, he also favors limited immigration control for more than just security. He decries the burden that a voluntary military places on the poor, but he favors universal conscription in part to foster national pride. Supportive of legal abortion and gay marriage, he exposes the pretense that either issue can be settled in a morally neutral way or by reference simply to choice.

Sandel presents these often heated debates in the tone one would expect of a chemist describing carbon allotropes: careful, and wholly innocent of polemic. But where his coolness implies detached disinterest, a more partisan tone would actually be more honest. On radioactive issues like marriage, abortion, embryo-destructive research, organ-selling, and surrogate motherhood, Sandel lays out competing arguments while ostensibly leaving us to reach our own conclusions. But if he flagged his own positions on these topics, readers would be alert to any inadvertent bias in his direction—and in some cases, would find it in subtle forms.

With respect to marriage, for example, Sandel considers legally recognizing: same-sex unions, only opposite-sex unions, or no unions at all. But as critics from both sides of the political spectrum have pointed out, these options aren’t exhaustive. Sandel grants that fairness and freedom won’t tell us which unions to honour, or whether to honour any at all. But even considering the virtues to which he appeals instead—companionship and fidelity—we might wonder on what grounds he could exclude, say, permanent polyamorous unions. Scrubbed of its apolitical veneer, Sandel’s treatment of these more difficult issues reveals holes in an otherwise solid approach. He is right to argue that fairness and utility can’t settle every important question. But the virtues can also be too vague for this task, and they stand in need of justification and organisation.

There is ample precedent for such a project; for example, the natural law tradition (which, like virtue ethics, traces to Plato and Aristotle) identifies the human goods that make sense of the virtues in just this way. Such a framework is robust where Sandel’s is thin: if knowledge can be identified as a fundamental good, then clarity, honesty, and rigour are dispositions worth cultivating; likewise, if we can discern substantive human goods related to romantic relationships, medical treatment and research, procreation, and the like, then the norms and virtues we deem appropriate for these areas—indeed, the choice to regulate them at all—may make more sense. Rather than simply taking the virtues as inscrutable brute facts, we should try to discover which understanding of the human good best explains—and thus preserves—them. For preserving our institutions’ ends and ideals is, as Sandel has argued, central to justice.

By showing that the currency of utility and fairness has no purchase on the hard issues, Sandel has done us a service. But ironically, even as he has exposed the futility of such “neutral” solutions, he has, through an apolitical delivery and appeals to vague but generally agreeable concepts, projected a false neutrality of his own—a stylistic departure from the gadfly of Athens in an otherwise exemplary modern call to the examined life.

Sherif Girgis is reading for a BPhil in Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.

Jean Daive
Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan
Burning Deck, 2009
135 Pages
£8.50
ISBN 978-1886224791

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Soon after the death of his son, Anatole, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé began composing fragments with the aim of fashioning a poetic tomb. While Mallarmé never completed the work, over 200 such fragments survive. Standing somewhere between idea and first draft, these pieces are often so personal and incomplete as to be inscrutable. Yet they also succeed at conveying a crippling grief, a sorrow that made completion not only impossible but also undesirable. One fragment reads:

you can, with your little
hands, drag me
into your grave — you
have the right —
— I
who follow you, I
let myself go —
— but if you
wish, the two
of us, let us make.

(tr. Paul Auster)

Only the thought of a shared undertaking between the living poet and his dead son keeps the speaker alive; and yet the fragment trails off at precisely the moment such collaboration becomes articulable. Is it possible, Mallarmé’s fragments ask, to survive and (then) to make? Are wounds and words incommensurable?

Like Mallarmé’s “tombeau”, Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan is a memoir of fragments written under the sign of mourning. Published in French in 1996 but newly translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Under the Dome is Daive’s attempt to come to grips with the trauma of Celan’s 1970 suicide, which cut short a five-year friendship of walks and meals, conversations and explanations. The book is a menagerie of genres in miniature; Daive marshals stylistic elements of biography, autobiography, memoir, prose poem, and elegy to present the celebrated German poet as both a tender companion and a wincing, searing mystery, an interlocutor in past conversations and present grief. Ultimately, Under the Dome is a tribute to Celan and an exploration of his greatest concern, the conflict—and possible commerce—between language and loss.

Daive’s fragmentary style is not a problem of memory but an act of resistance to coherent narrative. Under the Dome takes seriously both the demand that form correspond to content and the notion that coherence seals off an enigmatic subject’s silence in the crypt of a single perspective. Accordingly, its fragmentariness, refusal to reckon with chronology, language games, and poetic improvisation will turn away readers looking for a succinct biographical account of Celan’s final years. (They should consult, instead, the closing chapters of John Felstiner’s sensitive, exhaustive, and rightly acclaimed biography, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew.) On the other hand, intrepid and familiar readers will be prepared for the difficulty, and an experience of Daive’s language, which follows in the stylistic wake of Celan’s, may be the best introduction to both poets’ work.

Fortunately, Daive is a poet in his own right—Celan translated his first book, Décimale Blanche, into German—and Under the Dome benefits from his artistry. The conversations Daive records with Celan are not far from poetic collaboration in their associative leaps and improvised experimentation. As a result, his work voices a plea as desperate as Mallarmé’s for an impossible collaboration: “the two / of us, let us make”. If Celan is named in the book’s subtitle, he is—posthumously—its author as well.

This seems fitting, for it was not until after his death that Celan gained a wide audience, in large part due to the efforts of his numerous translators and critics. Born Jewish in Romania as Paul Antschel, Celan shortened his surname to Ancel after the war (which claimed the lives of both of his parents). Then in 1947, presaging his experiments with the contours and contortions of individual words, he inverted its syllables to become Celan.

Celan studied languages and literature at university before settling in Paris in 1948, where he taught, wrote nine volumes of poetry, and translated French, English, and Russian literature into German. Although he grew up speaking Romanian and lived most of his adult life in France, Celan explicitly chose to write in German, the language spoken by his mother and, of course, by those responsible for her murder. The ebullient reception of his early poem, “Death Fugue”, still widely anthologized and taught in nearly every course on the literature of the Holocaust, disturbed Celan, who told Daive that it seemed “Germany’s bad conscience had finally found someone to talk to”.

Nevertheless, Celan continued to address the German literary world—and indeed, identified language as the sole survivor of the Nazi era. Upon receipt of a literary prize in Bremen, Celan discussed the role of language in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Complicating Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, Celan argued:

It, the language, remained, not lost, yet in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, “enriched” by all this. (Tr. John Felstiner)

After the Holocaust, poetry became Celan’s medium both for revealing language as the victim of “frightful muting” and as the instrument for its “com[ing] to light again”. (At one point, Daive recalls him saying, “The world always remembers poetry. Sooner or later”.)

This vision of poetry is evident in one posthumously published (and particularly Rilkean) poem, written during Celan’s friendship with Daive:

Do not work ahead,
do not send forth,
stand
into it, enter:

transfounded by nothingness,
unburdened of all,
prayer,
microstructured in heeding
the pre-script,
unovertakeable,

I miss you at home,
instead of all
rest.

Here, in Celan’s signature neologisms, the speaker’s assertions outpace his scars and convey the effects of friendship forged through wounds. Celan casts home as a place without rest, suggesting that he sought friendship that would heighten and even privilege tension rather than provide refuge from it. This vision comes across at all levels of Under the Dome; Daive details the tension of his friendship with Celan, but also devotes a number of fragments to musings on the central vehicle of this tension, poetry.

The two mens’ conversations about unclassifiable poetic technique, in particular Celan’s characteristic substitution of neologistic compounds like “Windgalle” [Wind gall] and “Treckschutenzeit” [Bargetrekking time] for verbs, are especially interesting in this light. Daive’s explanation of his friend’s work—that “the verb is absorbed into the energy of the composite noun”—simultaneously justifies his own fragmentary method in Under the Dome, for it is through such unclassifiable fragments that we can best understand Celan’s life: “Paul Celan chews a word like stone. All day long. It produces word-energy. It all goes into the energy of his composite words. Here we have his biography”.

Sadly, Celan’s assertions about the longevity of poetry stand in stark contrast to his early death. Despite his commitment to the contrary, the possibility that language could pass through and eventually overcome unspeakable harm was one that Celan himself never realized. He was reclusive, sometimes paranoid, and, in a word, tormented. During the nearly five years Daive knew him, Celan was briefly institutionalized, spoke often of anxiety and of survivor’s guilt, and underwent a painful separation from his wife. “Sometimes I dream I’m dead and looking for my grave”, Daive recalls him saying.

Such intensity of observation and concern characterized much of Daive’s and Celan’s time together, and constitute much of Daive’s recollection in this piece. In one particularly unsettling scene, for instance, Daive remembers when a breakfast of omelets prompted a discussion on the limits of friendship. Daive offers to exchange his omelet for Celan’s burnt one; Celan, serious to the point of farce, replies, “Impossible. What is burned cannot be changed or exchanged…it is a sign”. Daive’s naïveté appalls Celan, for whom the burdens and wounds of the past cannot simply be transmitted to an other. But the audacity of Daive’s offer to “exchange…a sign” also opens a door: for the first time in their friendship, the intensely private Celan asks to visit Daive in his apartment. When he does, Celan compares the language of his poetry to the shrimp Daive serves him: stripped down, boiled, unadorned.

Celan’s unyielding gaze can be unnerving in moments like these. More often, though, the man who called attentiveness “the natural prayer of the soul” articulates his reflections with a stunning lyricism. Daive is attentive, too, and his mentor’s influence shines through as he commingles the project of Under the Dome with Celan’s thesis:

He holds out his hand, and a golden light falls on our approaching fingers. The light disturbs the distance about to decrease to zero, a handshake, golden yellow. He goes on: — As soon as we talk the world seems to lose some of its solidity, and it’s this move toward loss that interests us. But we cannot always face it. It requires an availability that is scorching. What do you think, Jean Daive?

Daive’s desire to account for Celan’s effect on his life resonates with Celan’s own drive to be faithful to a trauma—”that which happened”, as he calls it in the Bremen address—an event so overwhelming that it can never really be said to have been experienced, much less named or narrated, by an individual. Writing the disaster that such a trauma unleashes inevitably comes at the expense of accessibility and, perhaps, the accepted uses of language, but Daive’s willingness to transgress the boundaries of genre is his work’s most salient and valuable legacy.

In the final paragraphs of Under the Dome, Daive questions his work and his duty as a survivor of Paul Celan, asking, “What does being touched by fire allow you to write?” Paul Celan once spoke to Jean Daive about poetry’s relationship with suffering, generously include Daive in a shared project: “We write with luminous wounds that illuminate our hands”. Daive’s memoir is an attempt to reciprocate his friend’s gesture. Its generosity and expansiveness make Daive’s achievement worthy of the loss that underwrites it.

John Steen is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Emory University.

Robert Harris
Lustrum
Hutchinson, 2009
484 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0091801007

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Though he lacked a noble birth, military glory, and money—the three currencies of political power in ancient Rome—Marcus Tullius Cicero won the consulship, the highest elected position in the Republic, at the earliest possible age. Overcoming provincial origins (his name derived from the Latin word for chickpea, cicer) and the status of a novus homo (”new man”), he went on to become a leader in the Senate, the bastion of aristocratic power. Before Lincoln, there was Cicero.

Yet unlike Lincoln’s career, which coincided with and (most would admit) sustained his nation’s democratic experiment, Cicero’s trajectory began at the start of his republic’s decline. In Robert Harris’s 2006 novel Imperium and his latest effort, Lustrum, we see Cicero win more and more elections as those elections matter less and less. For the real power in the late Republic did not lie in the offices themselves, but with the men who could bribe the officials.

Those men constitute a cunning cast of characters. In this fictional thriller grounded in fact, Harris balances narrative force with historical detail to give us a vision of Cicero, man of words. Where Imperium recounted Cicero’s prodigious efforts to join the inner circle of men who rule Rome, Lustrum conveys an exclusive club all too willing to tear Cicero apart: there’s Crassus, the richest man in Rome; Pompey, its greatest general; a psychopath named Catiline; the patrician pervert Clodius; and a reckless young man named Julius Caesar. Instead of the Plutarchan case studies that examine each in their isolation, however, Harris studies these characters in chorus: it’s Joseph Ellis’s Founding Brothers meets standing armies, assassinations, and incest. These giants of antiquity hang out in each other’s homes. House calls were never so blood curdling.

Where the early Republic was characterized by rotation and collegiality in office, the politicians in Lustrum simply cannot share. Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, and Catiline refused to bow down to rivals, or to the Republic. This collective failure is showcased best in Harris’s retelling of the Catlinarian conspiracy, one of the most infamous episodes in the history of the Roman Republic—and one that defined Cicero’s career.

Catiline, a patrician from one of the most distinguished Roman families, lost the consular election to Cicero in 63 BC. He subsequently planned a revolt, which included assassinating Cicero. Before it hatched, however, the plot was uncovered and Cicero denounced Catiline and his conspirators on the Senate floor. Cicero then strategically allowed Catiline to leave Rome, situating the legions to crush the revolt and kill Catiline on the battlefield. Events unfolded as planned and the Senate executed the remaining conspirators without trial, a fact that hung over the rest of Cicero’s public life. For his role in crushing the revolt, Cicero was given the title “Father of His Country” and the Republic gave a public thanksgiving in his honour, the first ever for a non-general.

This episode is comparatively well documented in Roman history largely because Cicero himself documented it. His manuscript, In Catilinam, along with Sallust’s detailed history of the conspiracy, Bellum Catilinae, survive to this day, as do many of Cicero’s finest speeches. Harris wisely borrows from both of these sources, letting Cicero speak for himself. An old hat in this fusion of narrative forms, Harris expertly deploys lines from Cicero’s letters to pepper the dialogue and mobilises original passages to serve as synecdoches for his speeches.

But where his research shines, Harris’ political analysis falters. Most notably, he implies—but fails to explain or explore why—the late Republic is so unruly.

Catiline’s conspiracy was not an aberration but a symptom of a disease that plagued the Republic. Despite executing the conspirators, Cicero quickly found himself squeezed by the same men and forces that fueled Catiline’s cabal—Catiline was crazy, but his supporters were not. Sure, some of them were, as a University of Chicago professor once called them, “frat boys with money”, but many of them were poor citizens and disgruntled veterans. Catiline seized on the cause of agrarian reform—promising to give land to the landless—because it had been the cause célèbre of every populist and (consequently) the bête noir of the Senate for the preceding 500 years. This agrarian promise propelled Marcus Manlius, the Gracchi brothers, and Marius before Catiline, and it was championed by Pompey and Caesar once Catiline was killed. Harris dutifully includes the details about these proposed reforms, but does not explain why they commanded such popular support—and hence, misses a crucial element of one of the central episodes of his book.

But if Harris fails in explaining the motivations of the masses, he expertly sketches the machinations of the elite. Indeed, he delivers two politicians with diametrically opposed visions of leadership in Rome, Julius Caesar and Marcus Porcius Cato. As Harris presents them, Caesar and Cato serve as instructive foils to Cicero and his political genius.

While Caesar’s career mirrored Cicero’s meteoric and unexpected rise, he never cared about the means to success—bribing, betraying, and killing his way to the top. Despite being too young for the office and in spite of his and his wife’s notorious reputation for immorality and adultery, Caesar became Pontifex Maximus, the head of religion in Rome; later, he compelled his daughter to marry Pompey, a man twice her age, in order to cement the alliance of the First Triumvirate. Many believed that he was involved in Catiline’s conspiracy.

If Caesar’s ambition was, as Harris has Cicero say, “not of this world”, Cato’s fierce attachment to republicanism was equally extreme. Bare-foot and barely washed, Cato became famous for his full-throated denunciations of the generals, the kleptocrats, and the rest of the rotten elite. It was Cato’s oratory, not Cicero’s, that convinced the Senate to execute the conspirators. A year later, Caesar’s men literally threw Cato out of the Senate. He is antiquity’s answer to William Wilberforce.

Cicero, though, is both Cato and Caesar—indeed, most great politicians are. They are vicious competitors, strategic and cunning, but idealists at the core, motivated by a vision of the state they seek to lead. Whereas Cato could not be bothered with bargains, Cicero brokered them; while Caesar relied on extralegal methods, Cicero painstakingly adhered to the law. Watching this alchemy of the compromised and the uncompromising occur in Cicero is an arresting sight, even while Rome burns.

Through Harris, Cicero tells us: “Caesar and Pompey have their soldiers, Crassus his wealth, Clodius his bullies on the street. My only legions are my words. By language I rose, and by language I shall survive.” As Harris elegantly shows, Cicero’s words made him, but could not save his country. Cicero was the consummate politician, but by his time, his country had moved beyond the republican politics of his predecessors. Cicero and Rome would not survive. And for that, we await the conclusion of Harris’s trilogy.

Andrew Hammond is reading for an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy at St John’s College. He is the executive editor of the Oxonian Review. 

G. A. Cohen
Why Not Socialism?
Princeton, 2009
92 Pages
£10.95
ISBN 978-0691143613

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As a teenager, Jerry Cohen was a counsellor in the Montreal Jewish socialist summer camp Kinderland, where, in the words of one of his young charges, “the sons and daughters of 1950s leftists spent July and August waging class struggle against mosquitoes and boredom”. These summer expeditions left a lasting impression: decades later, Cohen fondly recalled campfire songs from Kinderland at his inauguration as Chichele Professor in All Souls college chapel; and a camping trip serves as the prime illustration of the virtues of socialism in his latest and last work, a lively discussion of political morality.

While Jerry Cohen made a career out of intellectualising his personal journey from pro-Soviet schoolboy to doyen of Oxford political theory, it is in Why Not Socialism?—more than any other text—that we see as a whole his considered stance on justice. For this life-long socialist, socialism’s infeasibility does not entail its irrelevance, for its most basic merit lies in its encapsulation of an ethic of care for other human life. In a period when we are re-evaluating our economic priorities, this is a timely call for personal integrity—and a reminder that in necessarily compromising with self-interest, we must not lose sight of our ideals.

At the start of this thin book, Cohen outlines a camping trip run along socialist lines, where “people cooperate within a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly similar opportunity to flourish”. Cooking and washing up are distributed to each according to his abilities, and applesauce, apple pie, and apple strudel are distributed to each according to his needs. Cohen contrasts this trip to one run along market capitalist lines; in the capitalist alternative, meal preparation involves renting a potato peeler from a fellow camper and buying potatoes from another before selling the peeled potatoes to a third.

“[I]sn’t this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?” The difference between these two camping trips is that the first, unlike the second, embodies what for Cohen are the two core principles of socialism: radical equality of opportunity and community.

In masterful synthesis of the debates he dominated during the 80s and 90s, Cohen pushes the principle of equal opportunity to its logical conclusion. This principle, which underpins liberal efforts to counteract the effects of bigotry and socioeconomic deprivation, also justifies his claim that even our inborn talent should fall under the compass of redistribution. Cohen’s socialism applies with irresistible consistency the liberal notion that we should be held responsible for our choices, and nothing but our choices; our standard of living should not be affected by unchosen disadvantages, be they other people’s prejudices, deprived social circumstances, or —the socialist adds—a paucity of inborn talent. “When socialist equality of opportunity prevails, differences of outcome reflect nothing but difference of taste and choice, not differences in natural and social capacities and powers”.

Sizeable differences of outcome might still result from choices, however, and this creates the need for community. Cohen argues that one cannot truly associate with someone whose life challenges are very different to one’s own, where those differences result from resource disparities one has not attempted to remedy. Feeling entitlement to one’s easier life and feeling a bond with that person are then mutually incompatible. As early 20th-century socialist Eugene Debs famously asserted, “I do not want to rise above the working class, I want to rise with them”. For Cohen, this sentiment is an essential component of the socialist project.

The self-evident appeal of the small-scale socialist camping trip illustrates that socialist ideals are not inherently unattractive. It remains to be explained, then, why they are currently undesirable on a societal level. Here, Cohen revives a long tradition of Marxist thought: socialism is not ultimately unsuitable for society; society is not yet ready for socialism. Elaborating on this claim (and echoing his early defence of Karl Marx’s theory of history), Cohen suggests that we might think of social organisation—that is, the process of converting individual motives into social outcomes—as a form of technology.

Capitalism, a social technology which harnesses selfish desires to public benefits, is at present unrivalled as the organising spirit of our society. Socialism in Cohen’s sense, where citizens’ interactions are guided by their preference for community over inequality, remains technologically infeasible, for we do not understand how to orchestrate mass interaction and mutual dependence through the more elegant engine of altruism. Socialism might be compared to one of Da Vinci’s inventions: a vision for a splendid contraption which cannot be constructed for lack of tools.

Yet in yielding this, Cohen has already prised from the reader a greater concession: agreement that socialism is morally superior to the current capitalist ethos. When the necessary tools are developed, the vision becomes a blueprint, and the contraption ought to be assembled. Cohen’s strict distinction between desirability and feasibility moves the question from “why not?” to “when?” and “how?”

Readers expecting an answer to these more difficult challenges will be disappointed, however, for the principal limitation of this book is that it remains too faithful to its original question. After a survey of the current state of socialist economics—a discussion the complexity of which confirms the depth and breadth of Cohen’s interests but jars with his otherwise conversational tone—we are offered no assurances: “I do not think that we now know that we will never know how to do these things: I am agnostic on that score”.

Here, Cohen’s willingness to jettison belief in the immediate feasibility of socialism illuminates the core of his concern, expressed elsewhere in his insistence that justice is an ethos. What Cohen has retained of his socialist heritage is his strong commitment to equality, not as an ideal to be achieved in the abstract but rather as a practical principle to preside over everyday actions as a matter of conscience. Cohen’s vision is of justice as a mode of interaction between citizens rather than a state-fashioned framework against which we can act as we please—socialism cannot be delegated to the state, in the way that liberal democracy involves delegating politics to politicians. Even with the appropriate social technology, Cohen’s socialism can exist only if enough of us believe in it, and act on this belief.

In If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?, Cohen interrogated himself on the implications of believing in socialism’s desirability while doubting its feasibility. In Why Not Socialism?, it is his readers who are interpolated, and ultimately persuaded that our objections to socialism are practical rather than moral. We in turn must confront the question of how to lead our lives according to these ideals in our less-than-ideal world.

Though certainty of state socialism’s advent has all but melted into air, capitalist society still presents myriad opportunities for incremental progress. Cohen’s achievement is to convince us that we should not take the impracticality of state-wide socialism as an excuse for a sense of entitlement to our talent. Instead, integrity invites us to turn to the socialist value of serving the needs of others, not through expectation of reward, but out of care.

Alexander Barker is reading for a DPhil in Political Theory at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.