Category: History

Here is the result of one survey, thanks to www.crookedtimber.org. First place goes to Rosa Luxembourg, I suppose that Marx himself is out of the running by definition.

Why is she number one? Could it be because of her violent murder in 1919, which both martyred her, and likely prevented her from later endorsing totalitarian regimes?

You will note that numbers three (Lenin) and seven (Mao) on the list are mass murderers, don’t neglect to follow this link to Bryan Caplan’s award-winning site on the communist slaughter of innocents.

I don’t want to go on record as, well, “pushing” for Stalin, but I can’t help noticing that he doesn’t even make the top thirty. There is, after all, a book called The Essential Stalin, on his theoretical contributions. Nor can it be said that mass murder is an immediate disqualification from doing well on the list. Note that the creator of this poll, who calls himself anti-communist, is both highly intelligent and honest in his writing. He questions whether a poll of “top Nazis” would be no less legitimate, remarking that “greatness” and “goodness” are not the same thing.

My question: Would they have let me vote for David Horowitz?

I was amused to see Conrad Black writing with shock:

Jim Powell of the Cato Institute (cited approvingly in a recent column by Robert L. Bartley) argues in a new book that FDR actually prolonged the Depression!

Of course, Powell is correct. Imagine, increasing the power of unions to strike and raise wages during a time of mass strikes and mass unemployment. Imagine thinking that cartelizing whole industries thereby raising prices and reducing output could improve the economy. Not everything Roosevelt did was counterproductive – he did end prohibition (although in order to raise taxes) – but plenty was and worst of all was the uncertainty created by Roosevelt’s vicious attacks on business. (See, for example, the work of Bob Higgs especially this important paper and historian Gary Dean Best’s overlooked classic Pride, Prejudice and Politics.) Business investment failed to recover because business people legitimately feared a regime change like that which had occured in Germany and Italy. Sound extreme? Roosevelt himself threatened/promised this in his first inaugural:

…if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good… I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems….in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for… the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

Rooms were equipped with vegetarian food, beer and wine, French pornography, and a copy of Mein Kampf. Read here, thanks to www.aldaily.com.

This is Ed Asner speaking:

“I think Joe Stalin was a guy that was hugely misunderstood. And to this day, I don’t think I have ever seen an adequate job done of telling the story of Joe Stalin, so I guess my answer would have to be Joe Stalin.” – actor, Ed Asner, responding to the question, “If you had the chance to play the biographical story of a historical figure you respected most over your lifetime, who would it be?”

From www.andrewsullivan.com.

Addendum: The original source modifies his account, it looks much less bad for Asner than originally reported.

Giorgione, one of the most significant painters of the Venetian Renaissance, is represented today by only four works we can be entirely confident are wholly his. Only ten authenticated paintings by Leonardo da Vinci are now in existence. A small fraction of Mantegna’s majestic output survives in reasonable condition. We have forty-eight paintings by Hieronymus Bosch; literary sources indicate there were once at least twice as many. Only a third of the works lovingly described by Vasari in his Lives of the Painters are now known. We have thirty-six Vermeers. He was a slow worker, to be sure, but he made his living as a painter for nearly a quarter of a century and is believed to have finished nearly a hundred.

Of course all capital depreciates. The mean service life of an office building is thirty-six years, and most components of the capital stock are not close to being this durable.

The quotation is from Art: A New History, the very latest book by public intellectual Paul Johnson.

Researchers have now found hard evidence that the Amazon had a sophisticated and populous civilization, before the arrival of Columbus.

The finds lay to rest the notion that the region was pristine forest when the explorer landed in 1492…Although there was probably some untouched forest in the region, Heckenberger [the researcher] reckons that most was managed by the inhabitants and kept for cultural and symbolic, rather than economic, reasons. “It was probably very important to them just as Central Park is important to New Yorkers,” he says.

Here is the original link from Nature. Many individuals have been attached to “crankier” versions of this theory, suggesting that “prehistory” in the Americas was quite advanced, see here for a more skeptical take.

Leo Strauss is often considered a leading influence behind the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration. Or perhaps you have met a “Straussian” at a Liberty Fund conference. Or perhaps you have read Allan Bloom praising Strauss. To my mind Strauss is one of the most important twentieth century intellectuals, either directly or indirectly, he taught several generations of scholars how to read classic texts. I’ve had many economists ask me about Strauss (note: I am not a Straussian), here is one good recent summary, by Steven Lenzner and William Kristol, drawn from The Public Interest.