Jonathan Israel
A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the
Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy
Princeton University Press, 2010
296 Pages
£18.95
ISBN 978-0691142005

…

…

20 June 1789: the day radical thought became radical action. Or so Jonathan Israel would have us believe. This was the revolutionary moment when the National Assembly recognised that sovereignty rested with the people of France and declared its intention of “fixing” the constitution of France on the “solid foundations” of Enlightenment principles. Jacques-Louis David’s famous depiction of the Tennis Court Oath therefore appropriately adorns the front cover of this book. David’s masterpiece provides fitting imagery for Israel’s main thesis: that the revolution of fact was preceded, made possible, and given meaning, by “the revolution of the mind”. Yet Israel’s ambitious project, like that of the National Assembly, ultimately falls victim to the complexities of the political and intellectual landscape of the 18th century.

In this collection of essays (originally delivered as the Isaiah Berlin Lectures of 2008) Israel has extended his central ideas about the Radical Enlightenment. A Revolution of the Mind complements both Radical Enlightenment (2001) and Enlightenment Contested (2006), two weighty and influential works that celebrated the cohesion and relevance of enlightenment philosophy in response to the “dogmatic anti-intellectualism” of post-war Marxism and the relativism of postmodern multiculturalism. Frustrated by some historians’ attempts to break up the Enlightenment into a “family-of-enlightenments” dependent on respective socio-economic contexts, Israel champions the notion of an international intellectual movement. Moreover, he suggests, it is only by acknowledging this unified movement that we can understand the political thought of both the 18th century and today. It is no surprise, then, that this book concludes with an examination of the relationship between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This is indicative of Israel’s grand project, echoing that of the late Berlin: to draw philosophy and history into a more meaningful partnership.

Yet this latest instalment is more than a pithy introduction to the already considerable oeuvre of the Princeton-based historian. While the values set out in the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are today part of the common parlance of Western democracies, Israel argues that their modern political hegemony is reliant upon “the astounding intellectual victories of the radical philosophes” in the “fraught, bitterly contested decades” between 1770 and 1789. The principles of freedom of thought and expression, religious tolerance, individual liberty, political self-determination of peoples, and sexual and racial equality are all traced by Israel to their phase of adolescent dynamism in the charged atmosphere of late 18th-century political and social thought. These are the principles of Israel’s Radical Enlightenment; the ideas that emerged as the official values of a major part of the world after 1945, and whose origins precipitated and informed the “General Revolution” of the late-18th century.

Central to understanding this great awakening of political modernity is the schism between radical and moderate enlightenments, which became both inescapable and irreparable by the 1770s. The Moderate Enlightenment of Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Hume is characterised by Israel as one that upheld tradition and privilege. These thinkers sympathised with a providentialist (that is to say a “God-ordained”) conception of the universe and were reluctant to undermine the authority of kings and clerics. In direct opposition to this “moderate mainstream” were the intellectual heirs of Spinoza, whose influence is traced by Israel to the demands for radical reform and the condemnation of social inequality that intensified in the late-18th century. The Spinozist practitioners of the philosophie moderne are routinely referred to by Israel as “Diderot, d’Holbach, and their disciples”; a coterie of thinkers in the 1770s and 80s that coalesced around universal principles and democratic values.

Far from being Francocentric, however, Israel asserts that this radical/moderate schism was universal in scope. “The most crucial questions” of the Enlightenment project are presented as either/or: one was either for or against democracy, equality, a free press, the separation of church and state. The universal nature of this “vast chasm” between radical and moderate enlightenments proves a strong foundation from which Israel can expound his notion of a transnational “Revolution of the Mind”. Moreover, it allows him, in engaging and flexible prose, to incorporate a vast range of controversies over politics, economics, war, and moral philosophy, in all of which the radicals laid the foundations for a “General Revolution” out of Spinoza’s universal, egalitarian, and ultimately democratic principles. The result is a richly informative, coherent thesis that provides an original insight into the major controversies of the 18th century.

In this respect, Israel succeeds in his task of drawing history and philosophy closer together. But in his determination to identify within the Radical Enlightenment “the intellectual origins of modern democracy”, Israel has overstated the case. Throughout, Radical Enlightenment is “quintessentially defined” by its identification of “democracy as the best form of government”, but was there such consensus around democracy’s normative content in the 18th century? Israel insists that “it was plain what the radical thinkers intended” from the early 1770s, “when Diderot and d’Holbach began propagating their fully fledged democratic republican ideology”. We are told little, though, of the specific political institutions and reforms that this ideology entailed, whether constitutional monarchy, virtual representation, or universal suffrage. Israel’s thesis proposes that these issues were already settled amongst the radicals, yet the subsequent progress of the French Revolution suggests that this was not necessarily the case.

This conceptual confusion is frustrating, not least because Israel is ultimately attempting to identify the origins of “what we today would call ‘democracy’”. Yet this imprecision is a natural consequence of the variegated intellectual landscape in which Israel’s radicals operated. The likes of Paine, Sieyès, and Condorcet frequently used the terms “representative” and “republican”, but largely refrained from demanding “democracy”. To claim that these traditions constituted the same radical outlook is to neglect the inherent diversity of 18th-century political thought. As the recent scholarship of historian Mark Philp and others has shown, “democracy” did not become a popular term until the 1790s, and even then it lacked determinate political content. Israel is certainly correct in identifying monarchy, privilege, and civil inequality as the targets of Radical Enlightenment, but the radical camp had more conceptual confusion than Israel lets on. It takes more than a common enemy to create a “fully fledged ideology” between disparate radical thinkers, whether “republican”, “democratic”, or otherwise.

One is left with the impression that Israel has asserted this uniformity with contemporary debates in mind. By insisting so steadfastly on the primacy of mind over matter in history, he overlooks (ironically) the radical dynamism and rich variety of Enlightenment political thought. The complexities of a nascent radical politics are smothered and, to an extent, manipulated to fit a narrative of democracy’s march from Spinoza’s Dutch Republic, through the Atlantic revolutions of the 18th century, and down to Palais de Chaillot in 1948. Israel ultimately goes too far in imposing a universal dichotomy upon the Enlightenment, especially one that rests upon a nebulous notion of democracy, in an attempt to read into the 18th century the distant gestation of modern institutions.

That is not to deny the importance of A Revolution of the Mind. As a contribution to the history of late-18th century ideas it is informative and thought-provoking, invaluable in celebrating the role of ideas in history. However, one is ultimately reminded of David’s representation of the Tennis Court Oath. As a work of art, it magnificently celebrates the moment the National Assembly recognised the sovereignty of the French nation. Yet beneath history’s broad brush strokes lies a more complicated reality. Far from being the glorious realisation of radical thought, the Tennis Court Oath was in fact another rally in the Enlightenment’s grand contest of politics and ideas.

Oliver Cussen is reading for an MPhil in Political Theory at Pembroke College, Oxford.

Joseph Stiglitz
Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy
Allen Lane, 2010
400 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-1846142796

…

…

…

With the proliferation of esoteric financial instruments, a shift toward massive private and public sector leveraging, and the slow emergence of enormous real estate bubbles, the finance sector was primed for a meltdown. Predictably, the hidden spread of risk in financial instruments like derivatives and collateralised debt obligations, combined with a diffuse over-investment in toxic sub-prime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities, led to the now infamous crisis of September 2008 and unprecedented government intervention. The many looming signs of catastrophe that appeared during the heady years after the 2000 dot-com technology bust were ignored by many free market ideologues in the financial community, but the near collapse did not come as a surprise to everyone. A few prescient analysts, including famed New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and billionaire currency trader George Soros, had publicly voiced their concerns repeatedly by noting the dangerous confluence of flawed corporate governance, inadequate regulatory oversight, and myopic asset risk management.

Few commentators, however, were as consistently outspoken as Joseph Stiglitz, a visionary Nobel laureate in economic sciences from Columbia University and former chief economist for the World Bank. Stiglitz, a political centrist and neo-Keynesian economist who worked extensively in previous Democratic administrations, warned policy makers repeatedly that the United States was headed toward a deep, painful recession if pre-emptive interventions were not made. But Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had a close relationship with the private sector and saw no reason to reverse long-cherished beliefs in rolling back government oversight and keeping interest rates low—until it was too late.

As a result, Stiglitz’s latest writings are rife with righteous indignation. He spares no one—not even President Obama—in the absorbing, fast-paced Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy, a work that engrosses the reader and brings to life even the dullest of economic concepts. As he systemically confronts heavyweights like Obama’s chief economic advisor (and former Harvard president) Larry Summers, George W. Bush, and the CEOs of major investment banks from around the world, Stiglitz critically assesses the current state of everything from the euphemistically titled American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (i.e., the stimulus package) to the role of the Federal Reserve and  the policy responses of developing countries in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. His fast-paced prose reads like a thriller and his thoroughly researched insights are packed into an illuminating 297 pages as he scathingly separates fact from fiction, dogma from truth, and economic theory from hard and inconvenient realities.

Throughout the book, Stiglitz emphasises the borderline-jingoistic mentality that pervades much of the financial community. Emboldened by the sense of being “too big to fail”, banks engaged in increasingly risky activities and predatory lending practices. To support these activities, bankers initiated a multi-decade push for deregulation and significantly reduced government involvement in the financial sector. With hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions, the banking sector was able to wield considerable influence in the political sphere—often at the expense of average citizens. Once the 2008 collapse occurred, bankers were only too happy to reap the rewards of their political “investment” in the form of taxpayer-subsidised bailouts and hefty bonuses. Indeed, Stiglitz deadpans that “a country [i.e., the United States] in which socialism is often treated as an anathema has socialised risk and intervened in markets in unprecedented ways.”

Of course, with their combination of astounding potential rewards, excessive risk-taking, and aggressive virility, major Wall Street finance firms have a tendency to attract and encourage the ethically challenged—the kind of people who are willing to take risks with the assets of others and show little regard to the final outcome. Stiglitz argues that we should not be surprised when markets function in a suboptimal manner; indeed, individuals acting only in their own self-interest are likely to ignore the negative effects of their actions. It should be made clear that Stiglitz is not “anti-capitalist”—far from it. He makes it apparent, however, that we cannot assume that markets will be self-correcting in the absence of a progressive regulatory regime.

Interestingly, Stiglitz is particularly vehement in his criticism of President Barack Obama. He sees little  change from the Republican, far-right days of Obama’s predecessor, the justifiably vilified George W. Bush. Although Obama was elected on the promise of “hope” and “change” and was forced into the midst of an economic crisis from his first days in office, Stiglitz claims that he has taken little restorative action beyond placating Wall Street and maintaining the status quo of the troubled global financial system. He describes how the Obama administration has shown a disturbing ongoing complacency toward bankers and an unambiguous willingness to accede to Wall Street’s increasingly brazen requests. By failing to rein in rogue banking practices, Obama has allowed a resumption of, among other things, high-frequency, high-risk transactions and a culture of outsized bonuses. Additionally, Stiglitz notes that Obama missed a historic opportunity for reform by maintaining a holdover of many of Bush’s core team of advisors, raising questions surrounding the feasibility for change under the new president.

Stiglitz lucidly outlines the painful outcomes of the recession and demonstrates that the symptoms still show only limited signs of abating. The stimulus appears to be having some material effect, although it was likely too small and included too many tax cuts and transfer payments. Unemployment, often seen as a lingering indicator of economic stability, is still hovering around 10 percent.  Although investment portfolios have recovered substantially from the lows of late 2008 and early 2009, many have still lost cherished retirement and educational savings. Furthermore, university graduates find themselves lost in the current economic climate, with entry-level jobs becoming increasingly scarce as employers tighten their belts and become increasingly reluctant to assume new salary obligations.

Perhaps most alarmingly (especially for American readers), it appears that many developed countries have squandered the opportunity to secure their long-term financial future. Stiglitz describes the well-supported contention that there has been a gradual capital outflow from developed countries to developing countries from around the world.  Oil-exporting countries, flush with cash from America’s estimated $1.4 billion in oil imports per day, have set up sovereign wealth funds that run into the hundreds of billions of dollars (Abu Dhabi alone is estimated to have over $650 billion). In addition, emerging export-based countries like China have begun to assume an increasingly activist role in international economic policy. Through actions like purchasing enormous amounts of U.S. debt in the form of T-bills and treasury issuances, the Chinese have helped to maintain artificially low interest rates and the accompanying American debt-driven consumption patterns.

Leafing through the pages of Freefall, it becomes clear that the deeply engrained neo-conservative theories of the efficient, self-regulating nature of economies are hopelessly outdated. We have seen first-hand the economic, social, and environmental devastation wrought by an over-reliance on these economic models. Stiglitz argues that the developed world needs a reformed financial system that will perform the two core functions of a sound banking system; namely, providing an efficient payments mechanism while assessing and managing risk for loans.

In addition, Stiglitz makes clear that the inherent nature of economics has fostered  a lack of responsibility in the financial sector. If we hope to overcome the embedded propensity towards amorality and, indeed, immorality, tough choices will need to be made and tougher questions will need to be asked. Citizens, policymakers, government leaders, and the private sector itself might even need to (re-)consider how we value outputs in our economy.

Stiglitz is willing to ask these big picture questions. Are employees at hedge funds, arbitrage organisations, and aggressive private equity firms really worth their big bonuses and lucrative salaries? Shouldn’t we be looking to better reward those who bring tangible assets and innovation to the economy—the entrepreneurs, the developers, the innovators? What steps can be taken to make the financial system more equitable in the short-term, more stable in the mid-term, and more sustainable in the long-term? Whether we will be able to craft an economic regime that takes into consideration a broader set of stakeholder interests and concern is up for debate.  However, one thing is certain; if decisive action is not taken soon, it sure seems unlikely.

Joel Krupa is reading for an MSc in Environmental Policy at Mansfield College, Oxford.

BP is fast becoming the acronym that needs no introduction. For anyone with even a passing interest in current global affairs, no company in recent memory has dominated the newsstands and online op-eds in quite the same way as the London-based energy giant. A brand name that once proclaimed its synonymy with “Beyond Petroleum” is quickly losing its already tenuous environmental credibility as the April 20th offshore oil rig explosion systematically works its way through the Gulf of Mexico and the rest of the ocean. The spill is now being picked up by complex ocean currents and threatening not only some of America’s most prized coastline, but also vulnerable ocean ecosystems and biodiversity around the world.

BP CEO Tony Hayward has weathered the majority of the criticism to date, albeit with the occasional maladroit remark (“what the hell did we do to deserve this?” comes immediately to mind). Many analysts have praised his poise and composure under fire. Nevertheless, all of his eloquence may not be enough to avoid igniting a mini-revolution. Judging from recent comments by the BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP will likely be paying out a multi-billion dollar dividend to all shareholders. Such a move is likely to exacerbate severe tensions with outraged Americans, still burning from the jingoistic wealth transfers of the 2007-2008 bank bailouts and mortgage-backed securities crisis, who are unsure about the extent of the spill’s effects and the long-term implications for America’s food supply, tourism industry, and environmental quality.

BP, however, is in a bit of a bind. It is coming under fire from investors—from large institutional bodies like the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund to everyday British retirees—realising substantial losses in their stock price, epitomised in the 30% slump that followed the recent announcement that the leak will likely not be fully resolved until at least August. Moreover, after initially distancing itself from the contractor managing the spill, BP has promised to fully compensate all affected groups, exposing itself to untold and potentially indefinite liabilities and promising further undulations in share value.

If the spill was unexpected, it was not altogether surprising. As a company that lauds itself for exemplary safety performance, audit processes, and contributions to the growing low-carbon energy sector, BP has an unremarkable track record. In fact, this is not its first recent case of major corporate neglect. A 2005 BP oil refinery fire in Texas City killed 15 workers and seriously injured dozens more, with subsequent reports proving gross miscalculations in process safety and hazard analysis. Incredibly, subsequent safety failures were reported at the same refinery, including further casualties. Not surprisingly, rumours abound about the safety shortcuts taken on the Deepwater Horizon rig.

Many political analysts are ruminating over how these events will affect the political career of President Obama. Populist rage is growing, fueled by a steady stream of images of ravaged beaches, oily brown pelicans, ravaged coral reefs. A recent editorial in the New York Times speculated about the linkages that could be created with other crises, arguing that this event might be the defining moment in Obama’s administration. Will this be Obama’s “Bush during 9/11” moment, in which he unites a country and retains, and perhaps delivers on, his promise of believable change? Or will he be the scapegoat—a lame duck one-term president who for all his promise could not deal with the most pressing issues of the day and confront entrenched corporate interests?

Despite Obama’s less-than-prescient decision in April 2010 to substantially reopen offshore drilling in the United States (currently indefinitely suspended), his admirable unwillingness to engage in the “drill, baby, drill” mantra of the Republicans and persistent refusal to allow access to the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have helped keep off many potential critics so far. At recent press conferences, Obama has retained much of the cool and calm intellectual analysis for which he is best known; but this characterisation might end up undermining his perceived ability to take charge of a potentially catastrophic situation. His critiques of the tight industry-government relationship and the energy status quo, designed to convey genuine anger and frustration, are beginning to sound rehearsed and unconvincing in the face of mounting public fear and the spread of oil to previously unaffected areas.

It goes without saying that environmental disasters are not foreign to natural resource extraction industries like oil and, despite well-written energy-backed reports that argue the contrary, are expected to occur from time to time. The most famous example prior to the BP incident was the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, a preventable incident that jolted the US Congress into setting up an oil-financed spill liability trust fund. Fewer people remember a disturbingly similar 1979 spill in Mexico that was significantly bigger (emptying millions of barrels into the Gulf of Mexico), as well as the obliteration of Kuwaiti ecosystems after Saddam Hussein’s thugs released and burnt billions of gallons of oil after the Persian Gulf War; and fewer still are likely aware of Texaco’s (now part of Chevron) role in polluting a vast swath of Ecuadorian rain forest.

So what can be done to combat these injustices? The most obvious move is a shift toward large-scale investment in clean technology and energy efficiency, a repositioning that will require massive private sector capital flows into largely unknown territory. The challenges are significant, as governments are coping with the embedded technologies of yesteryear—coal, oil, and gas—and the deep pockets of their propagators. Government officials will need to send strong regulatory signals and develop attractive investment packages to ensure that the necessary infrastructural and energy policy frameworks are in place, as there is still no broadly accepted consensus on a one-size-fits-all policy for economies around the world. Furthermore, the requirements of emerging economies will need to be addressed. A recent study commissioned by the Renewable Energy and Efficiency Partnership argues that the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) all need to provide further detail for their existing, relatively progressive alternative energy policies if the requisite private sector investment flows are to occur in a timely manner.

Second, corporations will need to undergo fundamental changes in their managerial structures and incentives. A culture of quarterly reports and lavish bonuses encourages not only the shifty accounting measures and financial metrics of the Enrons and WorldComs of the world—it also leads to shortcuts in safety and environmental standards. Of course, the opportunities for reform may be limited. A recent survey of corporate executives showed that “short-term earnings” were the most important trend for corporate strategic focus, far outweighing employee safety and environmental responsibility—a troubling recurring theme in the big business community as a whole.

Third, governments will need to advocate for substantial improvements in corporate environmental disclosure. Professor Mitchell Crusto of the College of Law at Loyola University, New Orleans contends that corporate environmental disclosure needs to include three major components: an investor focus that allows shareholders to adequately assess risk, an economic focus that allows a business to fully account for the costs of environmental liabilities, and, most importantly, a human rights focus that ensures that high levels of human safety, health, and well-being are maintained. In a resource-constrained world, corporate environmental disclosure cannot be driven only by clever marketing campaigns, voluntary glossy promotional materials, and the minimum obligations imposed by federal securities acts and environmental compliance statutes. Instead, corporate disclosure policy must harness both market-based and command-and-control policy mechanisms to ensure that the needs of business, the state, and communities are realised, while ensuring that any reform is stringent enough without encouraging a mass exodus into less regulated business areas. Such a movement has strong backing from activist institutional investors like the aforementioned Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. Groups such as the non-profit Carbon Disclosure Project, which represents investors with combined assets over $20 trillion, are spearheading the push for reporting of greenhouse gas emissions figures and other environmental outputs from large publicly traded companies.

A fourth (and controversial) option has been debated in legal journals for decades and implemented in varying degrees in countries around the world. It could be possible to adopt a court-appointed steward for different natural areas that can “speak” on their behalf in the same spirit that those deemed incompetent or endangered are awarded a protective guardian. Under such a scenario, a group like Friends of the Earth could intervene in the event of an environmental injustice by appealing to a public administrative body that will consider the injury and possible relief. A natural object would then be able to seek redress, as it were, on its own behalf, overcoming present legal difficulties ranging from standing constraints to deciding the appropriate beneficiaries of favorable judgments. Of course, the legal and political implications of such a development are immense, and cannot be addressed here; suffice it to say that such a proposal might act as both a deterrent against events such as this, and a means of determining recourse and liability in the event of their occurrence.

Regardless of the chosen course of action, this crisis will be remembered for evoking political, economic, and technical questions about how society deals with nature, meets the energy needs of a growing population, and the effects of searching for energy in unconventional locations. There are the obvious questions of the technical feasibility of drilling in areas where we cannot easily arrest explosions, the economic feasibility of new unconventional energy supplies with even larger environmental impacts (such as the enormous Arctic oil reserves), and the political practicability of raising energy prices and levying stiffer taxes on the multi-trillion dollar global energy industry.

But there are also the profound philosophical and moral dilemmas that inevitably arise. How will BP repay all affected parties adequately and fully—including marginalised communities and impoverished individuals that rely on the Gulf of Mexico for their livelihoods? How can we quantify the value of the ecosystem of the Gulf and neighbouring natural areas that are now damaged or lost? More broadly, is it truly ethical to continue to rely on antiquated energy systems when the necessary technology is available, albeit at higher prices than conventional supplies? There is much to learn from this disaster; hopefully, we will be able to answer the questions and apply the lessons before another disaster strikes.

Joel Krupa is reading for an MSc in Environmental Policy at Mansfield College, Oxford.

Hannah Pakula
The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and
the Birth of Modern China
Simon and Schuster, 2010
848 Pages
£27.50
ISBN 978-0297859758

…

…

…

One might expect a biography of China’s “Last Empress” to be focused on Cixi, the notorious imperial concubine who became de facto ruler of China in the late 19th century. By instead attaching the title to Soong May-Ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-Shek (the leader of China from 1928 to 1948, and subsequently the first president of independent Taiwan up to his death in 1975), author Hannah Pakula seeks in The Last Empress to redress historical misconceptions of her subject. Rather than seeing May-Ling as an active nationalist striving to help her husband to create a modern, powerful China, we are encouraged instead to focus on her love of power and all of its material trappings. Certainly, Pakula appears to have little time for the standardly sympathetic opinions of May-Ling that persist in the Chinese media and elsewhere, despite the well-known revelations of corruption surrounding the Soong family.

However, Pakula’s work suffers from a common problem associated with historical biography: a lack of focus. Pakula attempts to fit the biographical details into a broader narrative of late 19th- and 20th-century Chinese history. While this context heightens the work’s interest, it unfortunately occupies too large a proportion of the book, detracting from the main subject. Thus, even after reading through nearly 700 pages of narrative, it is still not exactly clear that Pakula’s use of the word “empress” is vindicated. The case for May-Ling’s overarching political role is unconvincing, and the reader is left with an impression of her more as obsessed with the trappings of power than with wielding it. In many ways, Pakula fails to offer us any viable alternative to the established reputation of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.

Its meandering content aside, Pakula’s biography suffers from more technical shortcomings. While she is to be congratulated for the depth of research, the book’s editors have chosen to put all the footnotes at the end, and worse, have not identified on each page which remarks have received a citation. The reader is left haplessly flicking back and forth between the text and the endnotes—a tedious and easily avoided process. As a casual read “The Last Empress” is excellent, but its academic usefulness is sadly—and unnecessarily—limited.

Matt Wills is reading for a BA in History at Trinity College, Oxford. Matt is a managing editor at the Oxonian Review.

Joyce Appleby
The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
W.W. Norton, 2010
494 Pages
£19.99
ISBN 978-0393068948

Joel Mokyr
The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain
Yale University Press, 2009
550 Pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-0300124552

Richard Bronk
The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics
Cambridge University Press, 2009
400 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0521735155

The financial crisis goes back to the mid-20th century, when “I like Ike” echoed through a million American homes and TV adverts suddenly became the most important factor in election campaigns. “The expense of TV spots threw officeholders and their challengers into the arms of business interests.” Politicians began collaborating in a long process of deregulation that would shift the role of government from looking after citizens to fostering the growth of corporations. “The free market ideology dominating public discourse gave cover to those in government”, convincing voters they were doing the right thing. The conditions for collapse evolved from there.

This explanation is characteristic of Joyce Appleby’s book, The Relentless Revolution. Appleby seeks to bring out the connectedness of culture, politics, technology, and the economy. Indeed, each of the books under review here make a variation on the same point: understanding economic history, and economic crises, is more than a numbers game. Taken together, these books can be read as a critique of institutionalised economics based on mathematical modelling. On a meta-level, they help to reveal the cultural assumptions that have defined the modern practice of the “dismal science”.

For Appleby, “it can’t be stressed too much that capitalism is as much a cultural as an economic system.” So she discusses not just how the growth of England’s agricultural production in the 16th century created the potential for investment in new forms of manufacturing, but how “the intensification of trade triggered a public discussion that led to fresh ways to imagine the economy.” Ideas and imagination had a real effect on economic structures; at the same time, capitalism itself generated new ideas about progress and equality while undermining older values, good and bad.

The history of capitalism, then, quickly becomes global history, as the history of countries and communities becomes inseparable from that of economic change. For stretches, Appleby repeats a rather familiar tale of the rise of the West, focusing on Germany and the United States as they began to take the lead from England in the 19th century. But to the well-understood concept of globalisation, she adds a key insight: capitalism manifested differently in different places and cultures. This is particularly well observed in her accounts of India and China: here the politics of totalitarian communism and democratic pluralism have led to very different forms of integration into global markets. Regarding China, Appleby raises important doubts about whether the free market will, as many have hoped, lead the country on the road to a free politics.

Appleby is no evangelist for capitalism. She celebrates its wealth-generating effects, and links it with the rise of women’s rights, but does not miss the “wrenching social and moral pain” or the environmental damage it can cause. “The two faces of eighteenth-century capitalism” were the wonders of the machine revolution, with its brilliant entrepreneurs and rags-to-riches success stories, and the cruelties of the slave trade, as investment in human property “twisted relations among the races in a particularly ugly way”. Her aim is neither to attack nor glorify the system she describes, but to help reveal “the roles of contingency, culture, and coercion” in the history of its emergence.

Both Joel Mokyr and Richard Bronk make similar points in books published last year. The Enlightened Economy is narrower in place and time than The Relentless Revolution, and more rigorously scholarly in its approach, but it too argues that “the beginnings of modern economic growth depended a great deal on what people knew and believed, and how those beliefs affected their economic behaviour.” The question Mokyr sets himself to answering is, why did the Industrial Revolution happen first in England? His answer is of course not simple, but as well as the textbook explanations like coal and enclosures, he points to an ideology of the Enlightenment: “the drive to expand the accumulation of useful knowledge and direct it toward practical use.”

Mokyr establishes a number of different but related links between the economic transformation taking place in Britain from the mid-18th to mid-19th-century and the cultural and intellectual programme of the Enlightenment. The “formation and dissemination of useful knowledge” is perhaps the most important. He notes, for example, that standardised machine parts would have been impossible without the “rationalisation and coordination of weights and measures”. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on human rationality meant ordinary people could be relied on to make economic decisions in a free market. It promised not only the advancement of science but also the perfectibility of all aspects of human life.

But the Enlightenment was no monolithic set of ideas, nor was it confined to Britain. Mokyr sees the “great irony of European history” in the fact that the French Revolution—inspired by Enlightenment goals—led to a restriction of trade in Europe just as free trade principles, as championed by Adam Smith, were becoming dominant. In any case, Enlightenment-Age individuals soon came to recognise the dangers of the free market. Revelations that commercial bakers were using deadly chemicals in their bread “was an early example of the realization…that free and unfettered markets can at times produce socially undesirable and even dangerous results.” As Mokyr concludes, the Enlightenment influenced economic change in many sometimes contradictory ways, but it was “indispensable” to how that change worked, and it cannot be left out of the story.

If the Enlightenment provides one way of looking at the culture of capitalism, the ideas of the romantics are another. Like Appleby and Mokyr, Bronk is keen in The Romantic Economist to appreciate “the role of national institutions and cultures in determining economic outcomes”. His is not a history book, but a manifesto for a new approach to economics as a discipline. The basis of his challenge is that “creativity, imagination, and organic interdependence of people—all emphasised by romantics—have become as central to our future prosperity and happiness as the rational optimisation of trading possibilities and efficiency highlighted by standard economic theory.”

The lessons Bronk wants to be learned threaten some of the dearly held tenets of the dismal science. Most importantly, his aim would be “to explain actual outcomes after the event but not to [try to] predict them with any precision.” This would allow economists to move beyond mathematical models of human behaviour. They would acquire a new reverence for individuality, contingency, and culture. In fact their output would be very much like the economic histories I have discussed already. Both Bronk and Mokyr note their debt to Douglas North, who has been pioneering work on how “beliefs, modes of thought, and even our preferences are socially and culturally formed by our interaction with others and by institutional conditioning.” Perhaps the romantic economist is here already, in the guise of economic historian.

Most of the work on these three books was done before the economic meltdown of the last two years, though Appleby includes a closing chapter, “Of Crises and Critics”. Nonetheless, they very clearly represent a shared outlook that is alive to weaknesses, injustices, and blind spots in our economic system. They are the products of an era that had already long outgrown the triumphalism of free-market advocates who hailed “the end of history” when the Berlin Wall fell. Even before the crash, capitalism and its intellectual assumptions were increasingly vulnerable to nuanced critique.

These books are very far from prophecy or polemic. But in their emphasis on the contingent, unpredictable, and simply human factors that pervade our economic structures, they do serve as a warning to those who would put their faith in market forces or in rational, mathematical analysis of human action. Both capitalists—that is, the investment bankers, the hedge-fund managers, and the rest—and the economists who study them would have done well to heed the warning, had it only come in time. Had things been different, no doubt these books would have been read differently. Another historical contingency.

Tom Cutterham is reading for an MSt in United States History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford.

Mark Mazower
No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and
the Ideological Origins of the United Nations
Princeton University Press, 2009
232 Pages
£16.95
ISBN 978-0691135212

…

…

…

The creation of the United Nations in 1945 was a moment of great optimism in the wake of global devastation. The delegates to the San Francisco Conference spoke of a founding moment with few historical parallels. For US senator Arthur Vandenberg, previously a staunch isolationist, the UN Charter was “a new emancipation proclamation”. Wellington Koo, a member of the Chinese delegation, compared the charter to the Magna Carta and the US Constitution.

No one was prepared to draw comparisons between the UN and the failed League of Nations, established at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Yet, as Mark Mazower argues, the UN was in many ways a continuation of the earlier body. In No Enchanted Palace, he seeks to identify the common ideological origins of the League and the UN with British imperialist thought of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He offers only “the sketch of an argument”: a lightly linked series of capsule studies of thinkers and statesmen who played a part in the development of the League or the UN, or both. This mode of presentation makes for a stylish and lively tour of what can often be an arid subject matter; but it also means that the book lacks the nuance and persuasiveness of a more methodical delineation of the UN’s ideological foundations and of its relationship to the League. What it does offer, however, is a provocative counterpoint to studies of the UN that stress the purity of its origins. Mazower’s is a darker tale.

Mazower’s central claim is that both the League and the UN were conceived as instruments for the preservation of the moral leadership of the great powers. The League had been an attempt to sustain and expand the waning British Empire in the new international order that arose after World War I. It was the South African statesman and imperialist Jan Smuts, known as the father of the League’s mandates system, who saw in the League the possibility of uniting the moral leadership of Britain and the United States. These advanced nations were best placed to export the values of civilisation to the defeated powers’ colonies, and to undertake what the historian and politician Sir Geoffrey Butler described as “constabulary work” in the most “backward” corners of the globe.

Smuts’s belief in the civilising mission was echoed by an influential salon known as the Round Table, a group of thinkers dedicated to the preservation of the unity of the British Empire. One of its members was the classicist Alfred Zimmern, later to become the inaugural Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford, who conceived of the British Empire as a commonwealth of nations, bound together for the common good under the benign guidance of Britain, the Athens of its age. Since the British Commonwealth was “a world experiment” its reach and ethical purpose could be extended through the League.

By the time of World War II, it was clear that the British had failed in their efforts to forge a common cause with the United States and to advance the mission of empire through the League. For Zimmern and Smuts, the creation of the UN offered another opportunity for the great powers to remake the international order in their own image.

However, it was soon apparent that there was no shared image of what the new order should look like: the concept of an international society under the leadership of a select group of states held little appeal in a UN system founded on equality and universal membership. Through the UN Charter’s commitment to self-determination, the UN experienced a drastic expansion in its membership, and it was soon apparent that the great powers could no longer craft the direction of the organisation. Rival centres of power soon emerged within the UN system: the admission of newly independent former colonies meant that the General Assembly became a forum for the anti-colonialist cause, under the powerful leadership of the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The centre of power shifted from the great powers to their former colonial subjects, for whom the comforts and protections of sovereignty were more attractive than the pursuit of a common moral purpose; and this shift, Mazower suggests, created an impasse in the UN that persists today and leaves its future direction uncertain.

This is a powerful and provocative thesis. But Mazower’s focus on individual characters in the UN’s creation comes at a cost to accuracy. While there were undoubtedly similarities between the League and the UN, these should not be overdrawn at the expense of registering the significant differences between the two bodies. For instance, the UN’s approach to collective security—crucial to understanding the emphasis on the great powers in the UN Charter—is passed over. And in showing that there are similarities between the UN’s trusteeship system and the League’s mandates system, Mazower fails to consider the possibility that the trusteeship system represented an advancement upon, not merely a repetition of, the mandates system, and ignores the possibility that the UN Charter’s declaration on non-self-governing territories served as a catalyst for the subsequent wave of decolonisation.

At other moments, the differences between the League and the UN are overdrawn. The UN’s abandonment of the League’s system of minority rights protection is presented as an acknowledgement that international law had lost much of its strength in the aftermath of World War II, and is interpreted as evidence that the UN was less rule-bound than the League. This sweeping view not only understates the role of international law within the UN; it also fails to consider whether the UN’s emphasis on human rights was in fact an attempt to improve on the wholly inadequate system of minority protection under the League. In charting the differences, as well as the similarities, between the two bodies, Mazower at times seems reluctant to credit the UN’s advancements on the League.

For all of its omissions, though, Mazower’s thesis serves to illuminate enduring questions and recent debates concerning the role of the UN. Does the UN exist for the advancement of common values or for the protection of sovereign states? How should the UN Charter’s concessions to great power status be reconciled with its guarantees of sovereign equality? The concept of the “responsibility to protect” is an attempt to reorient states toward the responsibilities, rather than the privileges, of sovereignty. But the concept has been criticised as a new form of colonialism: the projection of imperial internationalism by other means. A similar criticism is advanced with regard to the international administration of territory, where the provision of “good governance” to “failed states” sits at odds with the demise of the view that a certain standard of civilisation is required for participation in international society.

Perhaps most importantly, Mazower provides a sound case for dismissing those voices within contemporary accounts that call for the UN to return to its lofty origins. For all the discussion of the prospects of UN reform, it would appear that the UN’s uneasy accommodation of the primacy of the great powers and the principle of sovereign equality will continue, probably as a friction to be managed rather than a conflict that can be resolved. But this should not be a cause for despair; as Mazower emphasises, a remarkable feature of the UN, which distinguishes it from the League, has been its durability and its many successes despite its uncertain foundations.

James Upcher is reading for a DPhil in Law at Merton College, Oxford.

Jad Adams
Gandhi: Naked Ambition
Quercus Books, 2010
288 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1849162104

…

…

…

Mohandas K. Gandhi’s life is the ultimate challenge for a biographer; it was so multifaceted, and there is so much surviving contemporary information. Where there is little or no biographical data for some world figures, for Gandhi there is a superabundance. Many people’s lives yield one or two aspects of interest—perhaps an incandescent political career and a lurid sex life—but nothing else worthy of comment. It is not unusual to encounter eminent people who have a complex relationship with food, or with religion. In the case of Gandhi, everything is fascinating: his political life, spiritual life, family life, and sex life. His relationship to food could fill a volume in itself.

In all these areas, Gandhi’s own testimony survives. His collected works run to 100 volumes of books, articles, letters, speeches, and written answers to questioners when he was observing silent days. He knew what use would be made of this material, and he was not encouraging: “My writings should be cremated with my body. What I have done will endure, not what I have said or written.” Notwithstanding his warning, I determined while writing Gandhi: Naked Ambition to work almost exclusively on primary sources: on his own writing and that of people who were close to him.

It may be just my fancy, but I think even the library assistants in the British Library were impressed with my diligently appearing day by day to work through 100 identical volumes in the course of a year. The 97 volumes of text (the other three are indexes) have their own problems. Published between 1958 and 1997, difficulties with the scheme set in early when new material was found for Gandhi’s student life in London. Consequently, the first volume was reprinted with additions in the correct chronological place. This led purchasers of the initial print run to question where they stood if new editions were going to be brought out for every volume. The publishers therefore printed the volumes from 1 to 90, then published seven volumes of supplementary information that had been uncovered since the appropriate volume had gone to press.

The resultant Collected Works were obviously not now in chronological order, and times had changed in the world of publishing, so a CD with all the works in chronological order was produced in 1999. This caused a storm among Gandhi scholars for its errors and omissions, but that version remains the most accessible. It has been available since 2002 on the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi website, headed with the remark: “Below volumes form the revised—erroneous—version of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi as published on the CD-Rom…Page and volume nos. are not identical with the original print version of the 1960’s-1990’s.” Greater attention paid to this helpful warning would have saved me much misery at the stage of proof-reading the references of my book.

So much for the practical problems of dealing with the material. There are further difficulties. Any reliance on Gandhi’s own writing immediately opens up questions of trust: did he tell the truth? His autobiography is subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth, but what kind of truth was it that he believed in? Any politician could say they experimented with the truth, but it would not increase our trust in them.

Many events in Gandhi’s development are far from clear by their own lights. There is some evidence that the personal incompetence Gandhi reported in his early public life has been exaggerated, giving a more dramatic impression of his later resounding success. It appears that his contribution to South African politics was greatly overstated in some subsequent accounts, perhaps because they relied so heavily on Gandhi’s version which never presented itself as anything but subjective. Maureen Swan in Gandhi: The South African Experience (1985) notes, among other matters, the extent to which Muslim merchants whom Gandhi represented were already deeply involved in political discourse before he stepped in to lead them. His followers were certainly left disappointed after his supposed agreements with the South African government unravelled.

It is not over such matters or their interpretation, however, that the real question of Gandhi’s veracity emerges. In terms of mere fact, Gandhi’s truth is selective not so much for what he wants to conceal as for what he wants to explore in his past: his moral development. His Autobiography (1927) started as a series of instructive articles in his newspaper Young India, where each separate chapter stood alone with its own moral. The work was therefore fashioned as a series of lessons, as “the trials of Gandhi” or “Gandhi’s progress”, in perhaps conscious imitation of one of his favourite books, Bunyan’s spiritual biography The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). In short, Gandhi was less concerned with the factual accuracy of an incident than with its spiritual meaning.

For Gandhi, the striving for truth was not a search for factual accuracy (to which a biographer might aspire) but a stretching out toward spiritual perfection. For him, truth was eternal; and conversely, if something were transient it could not be true. “Often in my progress I have found faint glimpses of the Absolute Truth, God, and the daily conviction is growing on me that He alone is real and all else is unreal”, he wrote. Gandhi’s truth was the divinity: “Truth is God, or God is nothing but Truth.”

He would elaborate his position to those bemused by it:

I am not at all concerned with appearing to be consistent. In my search after Truth I have discarded many ideas and learnt many new things…What I am concerned with is my readiness to obey the call of Truth, my God, from moment to moment, and therefore, when anybody finds any inconsistency between any two writings of mine, if he has still faith in my sanity, he would do well to choose the later of the two on the same subject.

More straightforwardly, he explained: “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with truth, as it may present itself to me at a given moment. The result has been that I have grown from truth to truth.” Hence the biographer’s dilemma in interpreting Gandhi’s writing about his own life.

The abundance of biographical material on Gandhi extends to material from first-person witnesses. Gandhi’s principal secretary from 1917 to his death in 1942 was Mahadev Desai. He wrote nine volumes of diaries, Day to Day with Gandhi. Most of these were letters and accounts of events that were later compiled in the collected works, or the ten volumes of biography titled Mahatma Gandhi. Another secretary was Pyarelal Nayar, always known simply as Pyarelal, who was second in command from 1920 until Desai’s death while in prison with Gandhi. In response to that bereavement, Gandhi called on his retinue to “keep ourselves so busy that there is no time for idle thought, depressing or otherwise.” One diversion he was persuaded to adopt was telling his own life story to his companions, so his principal biographers Pyarelal and his sister Dr Sushila Nayar (who was Gandhi’s personal physician) heard many details that do not appear in his autobiographies.

Between Gandhi’s death in 1948 and his own death in 1982, Pyarelal was keeper of the Gandhian flame, working on his ten-volume biography. Sushila Nayar, who was 15 years younger than Pyarelal, took up the task of completing the biography after her brother’s death. She died in 2001. The biography was published between 1958 and 1997 in more than ten books, as some volumes are in two parts.

These biographers were extremely close to their subject, so close that they have their own stories to tell—and to conceal. For example, Pyarelel followed Gandhi’s wishes in writing about Gandhi’s sexual experiments with young women including his 19-year-old grand-niece Manu. However, Pyarelal is surprisingly coy in not mentioning Gandhi’s naked bathing, naked massages, and sleeping with his sister Sushila. A biographer needs to be aware, too, of a further dimension here: 47-year-old Pyarelal was obsessed with Manu and wanted to marry her. Gandhi disapproved of his pursuit of Manu, but Sushila pressed her to accept Pyarelal, presumably because that would wrest her from Gandhi and leave a vacancy that she herself could again fill. The story then is also that of the biographers, living in close physical proximity to their subject.

More distanced writers proliferate—the British Library lists 2229 books with Gandhi as subject—most of them about “Mahatma” Gandhi (though with a sprinkling of books about other notables with the same name). A Baptist minister, the Reverend Joseph Doke, wrote the first adulatory biography of Gandhi in 1909 when his subject was 40. Fifteen years later came a biography of Gandhi that introduced him to a wide and sympathetic audience. The uncompromising title chosen by Romain Rolland, Mahatma Gandhi: The Man Who Became One with the Universal Being, suggests a certain lack of objectivity.

Journalism is a guide in part to what happened, but more importantly to how events were perceived. Gandhi always enjoyed a good press. His image—the loin-clothed sage, mischievous, defiant, devout, with an excellent command of English—was made for journalists, many of whom made no pretence to impartiality (“Saint Gandhi” was TIME magazine’s man of the year in 1930). Two of the reporters who travelled with him in 1947, from the UPI agency and The Hindu, took over typing Gandhi’s letters for him as a labour of love. The governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burrows, was reported as being “very relieved that Gandhi had left Bengal at this time, as it had taken 20 of his best police to protect him; and he was sarcastic over an American correspondent’s article headed ‘Gandhi walks alone’.” As well as the police, Gandhi had a considerable entourage and, of course, the press themselves.

Much truth resides in anecdote. After Gandhi had visited Oxford one of the dons he met, the missionary and historian Edward Thompson, remarked: “Not since Socrates has the world seen his equal for absolute self-control and composure”. But he was quite able to understand, he added, why the Athenians had made Socrates drink hemlock. It is a remark with which it is easy for a biographer to concur.

Jad Adams is an historian, author, independent television producer, and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His biography, Gandhi: Naked Ambition, was released by Quercus Books in March.

Lucia Zedner
Security (Key Ideas in Criminology)
Routledge, 2009
216 Pages
£19.99
ISBN 978-0415391764

…

…

…

“Security”. No word so instantly conjures to mind the opposite of its meaning. Home security systems are an ever-present reminder of the potential for burglary. Security guards at schools suggest to students that even their own peers pose a threat. And at airports, security screening is as much about reminding patrons of the imminent risk of flying in the post-9/11 world as providing assurance that planes are safe.

The various uses and meanings of security are not only personally troubling in everyday settings, but also academically challenging for those keen to define, study, and understand the term. In her most recent book, Security, Oxford’s own Lucia Zedner, professor of criminology at Corpus Christi College, dissects and reconstructs the significance of the term to contemporary studies in fields as diverse as law, criminology, philosophy, sociology, and international relations. This deconstruction covers an impressive range of topics, from the war on terror to risk management, from private security apparatuses to surveillance and biometric technology.

One of Zedner’s early goals in Security is to identify the contours of this “promiscuous” concept, one regularly deployed in contexts as varied as social security, private security, national security, and human security. Thus, her early chapters explore its use across time, space, and discipline, noting importantly that the imprecision of the term may at times be politically useful in defending policies that are themselves indefensible. In national security, the post-9/11 Bush administration’s quest to pursue absolute security at nearly any cost (Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act) all too perfectly illustrates the political capital that this elusive term may yield.

Precisely because the term is so slippery, Zedner herself has difficulty pinning down a single working concept of security for any considerable length of the text. As a result, Security is both a sweeping and thin overview of the role that security plays in everything from schools to suburbs, anti-terrorism policies to anti-social behaviour orders. At times light on more empirical analysis, Security is most penetrating in its assessment of the rising private security industry that has married capitalism with counterterrorism. Zedner is particularly damning in her critique of the Bush administration’s attempt to “normalise” extraordinary procedures for ever-looming but ever-elusive threats to the state. Yet Zedner is not only concerned with the implications of private security forces in warfare and conflict zones; she is equally wary of the outsourcing of security within the domestic context.

It is here, in schools, neighbourhoods, and public places, that Zedner seems most troubled by the emergence of private security regimes. For Zedner, much of this expansion in the United States and the United Kingdom can be traced to the ascent of neoliberal domestic policy, the deregulation and decentralization of the state that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, private security forces are deeply integrated into securing the home, the school, the workplace, public places, and prisons. Counter-intuitively, Zedner observes, while the rise of private security has at times displaced the state’s monopoly on the claim of security, it has actually led to an unprecedented expansion in the penal state and the criminal justice system. Heavy demands for security have mirrored the rise of what Malcolm Feeley and Jonathan Simon have described as the “new penology”: the shift away from concerns for punishment and rehabilitation of the individual and toward a system of mass-incarceration that manages risk posed by aggregated groups through the expanded use of surveillance and custody mechanisms.

Zedner is at times shrewdly critical of private security systems: she highlights the paradox of an industry that, because it feeds on insecurity, must evoke the very feelings of threat and harm it is designed to eliminate—always for a price. In this context, she writes, “security has an unattainable quality”, with threats that may be reducible, but never eradicable. The existence of private security forces suggests the possibility of crime prevention, and so as the state shifts its focus away from the treatment and rehabilitation of fellow citizens and toward the mass prevention of crime, private security has facilitated individuals’ desire to isolate themselves from threats.

Yet Zedner could go further in describing the troubling emergence of private security operations, particularly the creation of a fundamentally inegalitarian approach to security provision that has transformed the citizen’s relationship to community and the state, especially in the United States. Clifford D. Shearing and Philip C. Stenning have argued that North America is undergoing a transformation toward a so-called “new feudalism”, where huge tracts of privately owned public spaces are controlled and policed by private parties. They have observed that the growth of privately owned shopping centres, residential estates, university campuses, and commercial and industrial complexes has facilitated the mass expansion of private policing. Because these forms of private property often function as public spaces, an increasingly large portion of day-to-day public life takes place in privately secured spaces.

Zedner’s chief concern with private security appears to be its potential to displace public modes of security provision. Yet more concerning is that the massive shift from public to private ownership of public space over the past several decades has also facilitated the retreat of truly public spaces. Unplanned neighbourhoods are surrounded by gated communities; downtown stores are subsumed in privately owned shopping centres. As a result, citizens have slowly grown accustomed to private modes of security in many facets of their public lives. A cynic would observe that since failures on the part of private security (in instances of mall shootings, gang violence, or even petty crime) still require public police intervention, when security breaches do occur, the state and society—not private security—ultimately remain responsible, and therefore culpable, for crime prevention failures in the eyes of citizens.

Concomitant with increased scepticism of public security has been a decline in and public support for the state. Those benefiting from private protection have less incentive to participate in and help to fund public policies that encourage the abatement of crime in those areas not privately secured. The rise of private schools, planes, and athletic facilities all increase an individual’s security while reducing his or her reliance on the government and the public sector. Zedner is right, in part, to blame neoliberalism: just as neoliberal economic policies have facilitated the accumulation of private wealth, so too do they promote private modes to secure it. In this respect, it is unsurprising to find that self-identified members of the seemingly populist, but fundamentally anti-government, Tea Party movement in the United States are of above average income.

This has implications beyond public finance and budgeting: private security may be viewed in many ways as both a cause and a symptom of the larger transition away from broad civic participation and a sense of vested interest in robust public institutions. Classics of American film and fiction, such as Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), both of which glorify adventures while hitchhiking with and befriending complete strangers in predominantly public spaces, are almost impossible to envision in a contemporary society where parents must get background checks before volunteering in their own children’s schools and Harvard law professor Henry Louis Gates is arrested for trying to open his own front door. The American sense of spontaneity, adventure, and trust in fellow citizens that was characteristic of these works of the early to mid-20th century are all but extinct 50 years later in the 21st-century world of fear and paranoia about crime and security.

Zedner astutely identifies problems with the emerging prominence of the concept of security in both domestic and international contexts, and her suspicion of the displacement of public security with private is well-placed. Yet the vast expansion of the security state, both public and private, is as much a result of the public’s distrust—with each other as well as with government—as with neoliberal decentralization, though the expanding gap between the rich and the poor only lends further credence to worries of “new feudalism”. Our chief concern should not be whether private security undermines government, but whether this quest for security helps undermine the very civic well-being and participation that gives the state its purpose and meaning.

David Louk is reading for a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated in 2009 with an MPhil in International Relations from Balliol College, Oxford.

Holger Hoock
Empires of the Imagination:f Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850
Profile Books, 2010
544 Pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-1861978592

…

…

…

In a violent evening assault in 1776, an equestrian statue of George III built of lead and gold leaf was knocked down by a crowd of soon-to-be American soldiers and commoners who took exception to His Majesty’s rule. The severed and mutilitated head was carried off with processional festivities, while the remaining lead from the statue was reportedly melted into 42,088 bullets. As one bemused writer commented, George III’s “troops will probably have melted majesty fired at them”. To the modern reader, this story might well call to mind the equally savage treatment of Saddam Hussein’s likeness in Baghdad.

Holger Hoock’s Empires of the Imagination is a veritable treasure trove of such stories, which put recent events into perspective and reveal the equal amounts of passion and absurdity ideologically invested in art. Hoock’s latest comes at a propitious moment in history when an introspective mood prevails across the globe. While questioning the ethics of recent war, countries are also attempting to salvage and restore the antiquities of battle-scarred countries and to encourage an artistic witness to war. Hoock’s book charts similar developments in an 18th- and 19th-century Britain driven by military and colonial enterprise.

Following memorialised heroes, painters, diplomats, and art collectors, Hoock expounds an original understanding of Britain between 1750 and 1850 as the crucible in which the country emerged into artistically informed maturity. Most histories of the period see little state involvement in the promotion of art when compared to countries like France. Hoock’s originality lies in recognizing precisely the opposite—galvanised by war and empire, the state was in fact vitally involved in shaping the artistic character of the nation. By studying the “interplay between aesthetically performed politics and politically inflected art” through acts of artistic commemoration, creation, and collection, Hoock frames the state, war, and empire “as powerful agents and sites of cultural change”.

In the first half of his book, Hoock analyses heroic memorialisation in the sculptural and artistic responses to the American and French wars. The strength of his analysis lies in revealing the contingency and pragmatism from which heroic art materialises. Though purported to embody patriotic ideals, heroic monumentalisation is often the result of the vying power-plays and agendas of a moment in time. For instance, the British parliament’s only commission for a military monument during the American Revolutionary War, the one erected to Admiral Rodney, is found on close study to emerge from an attempt to salvage the political reputation of the House of Commons amidst a furore of criticism and embarrassment. Navigating politics and the market, American artists too displayed a canny pragmatism in the ambiguity or candour with which they displayed their loyalties on canvas.

Hoock’s analysis is of an astonishing breadth and this is never more in evidence than when he charts the shifts in the character of British heroism from the 18th to the 19th century. He writes of the reconciliation of neoclassical allegory with naturalism and reportage; examines the differencing of Scotsmen in depictions of battle; demonstrates how educational discipline and the hot debate over corporal punishment fed harder codes of masculinity; surveys the responses of churches and preachers to earthly heroism and military glory; and integrates the revival of chivalry with that of Gothic architecture and medieval romances. Like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, the various pieces of literary, social, educational, and religious history lock into place. Through this intricate assemblage, Hoock illuminates not just the subject of political art but how parallel cultural movements mutually shape each other.

The section on collecting takes us to the East and to stories about such icons as the Elgin marbles and the Taj Mahal. Here Hoock’s argument hinges on recognizing the varying levels of state involvement entirely apart from a consistent official policy. The state’s artistic investment emerges through a complex web of relationships between the government, diplomats who had antiquarian interests, other  diplomats who used antiques as bargaining chips, and local antiquarians and translators.

It is in this section that we begin to see the contours of modern collecting emerge from the informal mess of public-private partnerships. Men like Alexander Cunningham began to argue for a responsibility concerning Indian antiques for no other good than the “honour of the British government”. We also witness the subsequent emergence of government policy concerning the preservation of antiques and the gradual standardization of archaeological practice. It is the peculiar conditions of colonial India that catalyze the emergence of the in situ ideal of preservation. The following period of the 1830s to 1840s saw the state’s effusive investment in the arts. This period, by Hoock’s demonstration, became the natural summit of several decades of state interest in the arts inspired by war and empire.

For a book that frequently discusses art’s accessibility to the public, Hoock’s narrative architecture renders his book pleasurable to the academic and the amateur historian alike. It proves equally entertaining and encyclopaedic by virtue of good story-telling. Opening with his dramatically coloured account of the coronation of George III, Hoock whisks us through groups perched on scaffolding to get a good view of the procession, street-viewers munching meat pies and drinking wine, and the nobility listening to the bishop’s sonorous tones at Westminster Abbey. The stories continue to roll with engrossing momentum. That said, the laboured conclusions to each section might pall on the non-academic reader.

But Empires does not just set out to regale the reader with its anecdotes. Hoock’s relish of a good story is integral to his methodology, for the book is itself a carefully constructed edifice of many inter-linked narratives. It is from attentively following the turns of each that Hoock teases out his precise and original conclusions. By his deft discernment of pattern in detail, he proves himself master of his subject in this empire of political and artistic tales.

Deborah Rosario is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

When Hillary Clinton stood on the stage of the Democratic National Convention in Denver on 26 August 2008, she exhorted her spirited party and a rapt country to “keep going!” She meant that the country should elect Barack Obama as its next president. America did. And with her unexpected appointment as the 67th US secretary of state, Clinton has kept going, too. In her first 15 months, she travelled nearly 300,000 miles to 54 countries over 127 days. She has redefined the State Department in ways small and big. The staid seventh floor of Foggy Bottom has been jazzed up with eclectic modern art, while, overnight, the State Department has become the fulcrum for a new beginning in American foreign policy.

Her agenda is stacked: Islamist extremism, Iraq withdrawal, Afghanistan surge, Iranian nuclear proliferation, Israeli-Palestinian relations, the global economic crisis, US-China tensions, US-Russia “restart”, and renewal of the transatlantic alliance. Not to mention climate change and development. Sometimes the agenda is waylaid by horrific events like the Haiti earthquake. Other times it is pleasantly distracted, as it was by her daughter Chelsea’s engagement. Clinton’s “smart power” has been put to the test, the institutional influence of the State Department challenged, and the seeds of her legacy planted.

The first 15 months have seen the potential of and challenges to Clinton’s integrative foreign policy—smart power. As academic Joseph Nye explains, smart power is “the combination of…the soft power of engagement” and “the hard power of sanctions”, where “soft power” takes presumptive priority. Clinton and her advisers believe in the value of engagement with international institutions, from the UN Security Council to the G-20, as a way of legitimising and empowering diplomacy with adversaries, acquaintances, and friends. This foreign policy appears so pragmatic—how could anyone be against using institutional leverage or seeking a re-start with rankled friends and adversaries?—because it has so subsumed ideology: a liberal vision of a globalised world where problems are overcome or contained not through naïve optimism, but through American-led institutions, military and civilian creativity, and the setting of standards for global justice through a focus on the development of poorer countries. To critics, it seems like a hodge-podge of liberal institutionalist hooey ultimately overridden by realpolitik. To its practitioners, it is what foreign policy should be about: successful problem-solving as the best indication of a nation’s power.

The evolving tit-for-tat between the West and Iran over the latter’s nuclear programme is already a case study in the implementation of smart power. By the middle of 2009, it became clear that President Obama’s repeated overtures to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were not being reciprocated. The failure of engagement with Iran means a shift to “hard power”: Clinton and the rest of Obama’s foreign policy team must now convince the UN Security Council to act on a fourth round of sanctions. To do so, they have to reconcile the council’s competing interests within the Middle East and beyond. Much of the constant evaluation and re-evaluation of strategic interests—ranging from China and oil to Turkey’s uncomfortable history with the Armenian genocide—occurs at the level of the unseen, and at times unseemly, diplomacy conducted below that of the high-profile principals, and is led most notably by well-regarded and realist-minded William Burns, former ambassador to Russia and the current under secretary of state for political affairs.

Smart power is, at its heart, Clintonian. Wherever she travels, Clinton engages civil society, whether in Islamabad, Doha, or Moscow, as a way of bypassing some of the official filters to lend that valuable Clinton-family touch: I feel your pain, and I’m here to listen. Her up-and-down trials in American presidential politics gave her a deftness in handling the unpredictability of civil engagement. There was plenty of that at an October 2009 town hall meeting in Lahore, Pakistan—not exactly a setting her predecessors would have enthusiastically embraced. Why do Americans view Pakistanis as terrorists? Why does America “always” support India over Pakistan? How can Pakistanis trust Americans when it’s a “fact” that development-focused USAID “did betray us?” Would the madame support trying for treason former president Pervez Musharraf? How will the madame reduce the collateral damage from Predator strikes on suspected terrorists? Here, Clinton’s calm presence of mind and deliberate debating style, most evident in her presidential primary debates with Obama, come to the fore.

For all its novelty, Clinton’s State Department has encountered on the home front many of the same challenges as those faced by previous secretaries. A 10-to-1 budgetary advantage for the Defense Department over the State Department is only the beginning. Over the past 50 years, the State Department has waxed and waned in influence, usually because of presidential prerogative. The president sometimes wants to be his own secretary of state, as Kennedy and Nixon did. Or he magnifies latent turf battles by allowing the national security adviser to move many daily operations into the White House, as Carter managed to. Sometimes, like Johnson, he has a secretary of defense with a strong personality. And occasionally, like George W. Bush, he cedes too much power to the vice president. As for Clinton’s performance, foreign policy expert and academic Robert Paarlberg explains, “It is still too early to judge…especially relative to President Obama’s experienced and highly competent Defense Secretary Robert Gates. She has been smart, so far, to avoid any fights with Gates that she might lose.”

So far, though, Clinton stands out from her predecessors on the strength of the relationship she appears to share with Gates. Clinton and Gates, who lunch together, share a comity that is historically rare between their two offices. In a February issue of Time, Elizabeth Rubin writes, “Since 2007, when Gates re-emerged on the government speaking circuit, he has had one consistent obsession—the relationship between State and Defense … Gates has gone out of his way to woo Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, so much so that they’ve come to seem inseparable.” Gates told Congress he supports a substantial increase in the State Department budget, noting that there are more personnel in military bands than in the US foreign service. As for her relationship with the president, Clinton, it seems, cannot hold a grudge. By all accounts, her working relationship with Obama, manifested in weekly meetings, is cordial and effective.

There is room for the State Department to further amplify smart power and its newfound influence, especially in US-China relations. In the late 1990s, policy toward China focused on economic affairs. The Treasury Department dominated foreign economic policy and the response to the East Asian financial crisis. The rise of China is not merely an economic rise, however—it is political. This demands not only the particular focus of the Treasury Department, but the generalist understanding of foreign policy brought to the table by the State Department. With the Treasury Department slowed down by personnel issues, Clinton plainly stated in a July 2009 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, “I am committed to restoring a significant role for the State Department within a whole-of-government approach to international economic policy-making.”

To that end, the State and Treasury departments jointly launched the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, bringing together counterparts across the two governments and reflecting a strategy academically propounded by Clinton’s pick for director of policy planning, admired scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter. By broadening the agenda with China and contributing to American foreign economic policy, Clinton’s State Department can show that in this area and others, it is more innovative, creative, and influential than its predecessors ever were.

Anywhere Clinton walks, from the hallways in Congress to a tarmac in Kabul, she leaves in her wake a coterie of loyal aides, the usual throng of scribbling reporters, and pleasantly shocked passers-by. We know that the legacy she leaves will ultimately hinge on the outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Middle East peace process, and the showdown with Iran. Discerning her legacy, and extricating it from the massive US foreign-policy making apparatus, are tasks far too early to undertake. What, then, can we say? Here, like so many of Hillary’s noted forebears, we might take direction from Henry Kissinger. Asked by a journalist last November to write a 1000-word assessment of Hillary, Kissinger admitted struggling to get beyond the first three: “I like Hillary.”

Rahul Prabhakar is reading for an MPhil in International Relations at St John’s College, Oxford.