Happy Fourth of July. I'm thinking today of something the late Jacques Barzun wrote about "revolution" as a historians' category of event, and I think I will share it with you. Barzun defined "revolution" in a somewhat narrow way. Nowadays, if someone invents a new vacuum cleaner that can get the dust in the corners more easily than the older cleaners, he is likely to call it a revolutionary product. Even aside from marketing, you can find in dictionaries broad definitions of revolutions such as this: "far-reaching and drastic change." Thus, the late Helen Gurley Brown is both credited with and blamed for contributions to a "sexual revolution," the Vatican II council is said to have worked a "revolution" in Catholic doctrine, and the development of steam engines in the 18th century is widely said to have set off the "industrial revolution." Although each of those events fits in its own way into the broad story Barzun ...
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What can or should philosophers say about history as a field of study? History in the first instance is as I understand the term simply the human past, especially in the millennia subsequent to the invention of writing. But history in the second instance is the name we give to the systematic study of that vast subject. And the "philosophy of history" encompasses both of those, it is analogous both to the philosophy of nature AND to the philosophy of science. There are three major questions that the philosophy of history asks. The first two concern each half of the distinction I just made: the third cuts across that distinction. Here they are: what are the key units we should invoke in studying or discussing this past: individual lives and actions? social classes? ethnic/racial identities? civilizations? sovereigns? faiths and churches? something else? [If “all of the above,” or some combination of the above, we still may have to rank them in cen...
I've discussed both Taleb and Pinker in this blog at various times, but I've never brought the two of them together. Yet reality has brought them together for me. One of Pinker's books for a broad popular audience is called THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE (2011). It argues that the world is making progress toward peace. Violence still occurs, but it becomes less common century after century, peaceful methods of the resolution of differences advancing. An example: it is almost possible to imagine France and Germany on opposite sides of a war in the next fifty years or so. Yet not TOO long ago as meta-historians reckon time they were on opposite sides of three different wars within about 3/4s of a century. What has happened? See Pinker's title for his answer -- the better angels of our nature are slowly prevailing and giving us a better world. Taleb has been sharply critical of this book. With the help of statistican Pasquale Cirillo, Taleb wrote a couple of es...
And so the utmost a student of sociology can ever predict is that if a genius of a certain sort show the way, society will be sure to follow. It might long ago have been predicted with great confidence that both Italy and Germany would reach a stable unity if someone could but succeed in starting the process. It could not have been predicted, however, that the modus operandi in each case would be subordination to a paramount state rather than federation, because no historian could have calculated the freaks of birth and fortune which gave at the same moment such positions of authority to such peculiar individuals as Napoleon III, Bismarck, and Cavour. William James, "Great Men and their Environment," 1880. James was here rehabilitating something akin to the Carlylean theory of history as a set of the biographies of certain extraordinary individuals. Not exactly Carlylean -- there are important differences -- but this passage indicates the real similarity. Napoleon II...
I wonder ... whether there are any statues of Erwin Rommel anywhere in North Africa. The usual statements made by enthusiasts of Confederate statutes would seem to apply. "The statues don't celebrate a cause, they celebrate valor." Rommel had valor. "Lee [or Stonewall, or whomever] was a great strategist [or tactician, or whatever]." Rommel was excellent in the craft of war, as Churchill himself acknowledged. "Lee was actually against secession and/or slavery." Maybe, but on the other hand we know for sure that Rommel joined in near the end of the war in a rebellion against Hitler. That should earn him some posthumous brownie points.
I have sometimes before mined Yahoo!Answers for posts here when I've been lazy. So I am lazy today. Someone on YA asked for the "reasons for the Holocaust." I said the following: It's a complicated question. Contra some of the others who have answered, I don't believe one should focus too much on Hitler personally in responding to this question, to "what happened at Linz" as Auden said. My strong suspicion is that if Hitler had died of some childhood disease, the whole thing would have happened in much the same way with some other front man, and we'd be talking about that other guy's childhood! I think you have to start by taking Hegel seriously. Hegel was the figure in the history of thought who most clearly represented a wrong turn, and a specifically German wrong turn at that. Hegelians who prefer the color red became one sort of totalitarian and Hegelians who preferred the color brown became another. And Jews became the victims of...
Here's a simple question: Why did William James take the approach that he did in Varieties of Religious Experience, an approach to that field marked by the individual experiences of believers in some higher power? There is on one level the 'official' answer: the one that James gives. He told his lectures' audience that he has been invited to give lectures about religion, a wide-open mandate, and that in order to proceed he would have to select "out of the many meanings of the word [religion] ... the one meaning in which I wish to interest you particularly." The selection is presented as an arbitrary one, defining religion only "for the purpose of these lectures" as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." But no careful student of William James thinks that this is the whole answer. There are at least th...
Restating yesterday's list: The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1951. Mere Christianity , C.S. Lewis, 1952. Philosophical Investigations , Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1953. The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley, 1954 Eros and Civilization , Herbert Marcuse, 1955 The White Negro, Norman Mailer, 1956 Anatomy of Criticism , Northrop Frye, 1957 Verbal Behavior, BF Skinner, 1958 Some Notes on H.P. Lovecraft , August Derleth, 1959 The Lotus and the Robot, Arthur Koestler, 1960. A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee; 1961; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn, 1962 Can we break these down at all in thematic classification? There are three that don't help much with classification. They don't fit with each other or any of the other nine: that is, they constitute a natural "other" group. The "other" is usually listed last,. Here, in a transgressive spirit, I list it first. These three are: a work of Christian ...
I've been thinking about the Jim Croce song, "Don't Mess Around With Jim." SPOILER ALERT: If you don't know the song, and want to be surprised by the final verse thereof should you someday listen to it, don't read further. It's a song about what is sometimes nowadays called "micro-history." Micro-history is a term for scholarly inquiries into a narrow slice of space and time, a specific and localized event, and usually not one that strikes a non-professional reader as the obvious concern of History with the capital "H." So, for example, a careful study of a miller brought to trial by the Inquisition for heretical views in the 16th century became a micro-historical classic. This is in part because the narrow slice of time and space involved, but also because the miller at the heart of the story was an ordinary fellow, not an aristocrat, diplomat, judge. And that brings us back to Jim Croce. The song tells the tale of a confli...
If you wanted to write the recent history of global oil markets, and you wanted to take a Carlylean (or Jamesian) view thereof, who are the outstanding individuals on whose work you might focus? Working from a recent WSJ feature, here are six: Nikolay Buynov: Russian entrepreneur Mohammad al-Sabban: Saudi economist/consultant Gary C. Evans: US/Texas based CEO Yin Shenping: China, entrepreneur on the oil/IT interface Scott Saxberg: Canadian CEO involved in oil sands Adnan al-Janabi: Business & political figure in post-war Iraq. Because I'm feeling lazy, I'll leave you with the list, and a photo of Janabi, above. He's the one on the right.
The opening two paragraphs of William James' last book, Some Problems of Philosophy are presented below. "The progress of society is due to the fact that individuals vary from the human average in all sorts of directions, and that the originality is often so attractive or useful that they are recognized by their tribe as leaders, and become objects of envy or admiration, and setters of new ideals. "Among the variations, every generation of men produces some individuals exceptionally preoccupied with theory. Such men find matter for puzzle or astonishment where no one else does. Their imagination invents explanations and combines them. They store up the learning of their time, utter prophecies and warnings, and are regarded as sages. Philosophy, etymologically meaning the love of wisdom, is the work of this class of minds, regarded with an indulgent relish, if not with admiration, even, even by those who do not understand them or believe much in the truth which they...
As some of you may have gathered from my "experiment in chronology" last week, I'm giving a lot of thought to how I will organize my next book. This is going to be the more scholarly re-working of my last book that I've mentioned both in that book and in some of my responses to critics. But it won't simply be Gambling with Borrowed Chips with end-notes and a bibliography added. It will be different in important organizational respects. A narrower chronological focus, in particular. I won't be going back over the Renaissance and Reformation. I probably won't even be going as far back as 1990, last week's "experiment" notwithstanding. I may start in 1994, when a lot of remarkably pertinent things happened. The above photo, BTW, is of a 1994 Ford Ranger. Anyway, my book would distinguish between the big picture items one first thinks of when thinking of a year, and the little pictures. It would discuss the little pictures in four ...