Category: History
Some Jimmy Carter observations from the 1970s
Usually I am reluctant to criticize or even write about the recently departed, but perhaps for former Presidents there is greater latitude to do so.
I never loved Jimmy Carter, and I saw plenty of him on TV and read about his administration on a daily basis in The New York Times.
I fully appreciate his legacy of deregulation, which far exceeded that of the Reagan administration. Plus Carter appointed Volcker and stood by him. He was honest right after the Watergate scandals, and Camp David was a major achievement and furthermore it has stood the test of time in Egypt. Those are some significant accomplishments, and at the time I felt he was a decent President.
But I did not like his overall vibes, and for a President that is important.
He struck me as a pious moralizer who did not have a great sense of the differences between good and harmful altruism. Somehow morality had to be packaged with some strange form of gentlemanly, southern, cloying self-abnegation.
He sent his daughter Amy to an inferior public school in Washington, D.C., instead of to a top-quality private school.
He went on TV in a sweater and told us to think in terms of privation rather than opportunity. The Cowen family did indeed turn down the thermostats.
He confessed to lusting after women in his heart in a sincere manner that made him sound absurd and out of touch.
Unlike Ronald Reagan, he was not able to moralize effectively about the Soviet Union and its role as evil empire. Yet I always felt he was lecturing me.
He emphasized “human rights” as important for American foreign policy. I am not opposed to that approach, but he made it sound so preachy and unappetizing. Nor was he able to realize that vision, so the country and its leadership simply became more hypocritical.
He seemed to have exactly the wrong temperament for confronting the various crises in Iran.
His voice grated on me, perhaps because I identified it with a particular kind of unself-conscious, preachy moralizing? I do understand we might do well to have some of that moralizing back. Still, I am not going to like it.
Was he ever funny?
I much preferred Ford, and even the evil Nixon and Clinton, not to mention Reagan. It’s a good thing Carter had some major pluses on his record.
Top MR Posts of 2024!
The number one post this year was Tyler’s The changes in vibes — why did they happen? A prescient post and worth a re-read. Lots of quotable content that has become conventional wisdom after the election:
The ongoing feminization of society has driven more and more men, including black and Latino men, into the Republican camp. The Democratic Party became too much the party of unmarried women.
The Democrats made a big mistake going after “Big Tech.” It didn’t cost them many votes, rather money and social capital. Big Tech (most of all Facebook) was the Girardian sacrifice for the Trump victory in 2016, and all the Democrats achieved from that was a hollowing out of their own elite base.
Biden’s recent troubles, and the realization that he and his team had been running a con at least as big as the Trump one. It has become a trust issue, not only an age or cognition issue.
I would also pair this with two other top Tyler posts, I’m kind of tired of this in which Tyler bemoans the endless gaslighting. Tyler is (notoriously!) open-minded and reluctant to criticize others, so this was a telling signal. See also How we should update our views on immigration in which Tyler notes that serious studies on the benefits and costs of immigration are quite positive but:
…voters dislike immigration much, much more than they used to. The size of this effect has been surprising, and also the extent of its spread…Versions of this are happening in many countries, not just a few, and often these are countries that previously were fairly well governed.
…Politics is stupider and less ethical than before, including when it comes immigration…We need to take that into account, and so all sorts of pro-migration dreams need to be set aside for the time being
In short if you were reading MR and Tyler you would have a very good idea of what was really going on in the country.
The second biggest post of the year was my post, Equality Act 2010 on Britain’s descent into the Orwellian madness of equal pay for “equal” work. It’s a very good post but it wrote itself since the laws are so ridiculous. Britain has not recovered from woke. Relatedly, Britain’s authoritarian turn on free speech remains an under-reported story. I worry about this.
Third, was my post The US Has Low Prices for Most Prescription Drugs a good narrative violation. Don’t fail the marshmallow test!
Fourth was another from me, No One’s Name Was Changed at Ellis Island.
Fifth, the sad Jake Seliger is Dead.
Sixth, I’m kind of tired of this, as already discussed.
Seventh was What is the Best-Case Scenario for a Trump Presidency? Rhetorically Trump isn’t following the script I laid out but in terms of actual policy? Still room for optimism.
Eighth was Tyler’s post Taxing unrealized capital gains is a terrible idea; pairs well with my post Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains and Interest Rate Policy.
Ninth, Venezuela under “Brutal Capitalism”, my post on the insane NYTimes piece arguing that Venezuela is now governed by “brutal capitalism” under Maduro’s United Socialist Party!
Tenth, Tyler’s post Who are currently the most influential thinkers/intellectuals on the Left? More than one person on this list now looks likes a fraud.
Your favorite posts of the year?
Manmohan Singh, RIP
I am sad to hear about the passing of Manmohan Singh at age 92.
Singh was perhaps the most influential Indian policymaker in the last five decades. An Oxbridge educated trade economist, he became India’s most important technocrat in the 1980s and 1990s – occupying every top position in economic policy – finance secretary; deputy chairman of the planning commission; governor of the RBI, and chief economic adviser. And as finance minister in 1991, when he brought the Indian economy out of socialism to embrace markets and global trade. After Modi and Nehru, he is also India’s longest continuously serving prime minister over two terms from 2004-2014.
For more about his work and long career in economic policy read Changing India – a five volume collection on Singh’s work as an academic, policymaker, politician and on the family man, Strictly Personal by his daughter Daman Singh. And to learn more about India’s liberalization and economic reforms, follow the 1991 Project at the Mercatus Center led by Shruti Rajagopalan and her team.
Full-length documentary on the life and legacy of Rene Girard
Very well done.
Is academic writing getting harder to read?
To track academic writing over time, The Economist analysed 347,000 PhD abstracts published between 1812 and 2023. The dataset was produced by the British Library and represents a majority of English-language doctoral theses awarded by British universities. We reviewed each abstract using the Flesch reading-ease test, which measures sentence and word length to gauge readability. A score of 100 roughly indicates passages can be understood by someone who has completed fourth grade in America (usually aged 9 or 10), while a score lower than 30 is considered very difficult to read. An average New York Times article scores around 50 and a CNN
article around 70. This article scores 41…We found that, in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences (see chart), with average Flesch scores falling from around 37 in the 1940s to 18 in the 2020s. From the 1990s onwards, those fields went from being substantially more readable than the natural sciences—as you might expect—to as complicated. Ms Louks’s abstract had a reading-ease rating of 15, still more readable than a third of those analysed in total.
Here is more from The Economist, via the excellent Samir Varma.
Jefferson’s DOGE (that was then, this is now)
Jefferson swiftly undid twelve years of Federalism. He allowed the Sedition Act to expire and adopted a more catholic naturalization law. He reduced the federal bureaucracy — small even by today’s standards — particularly in the Treasury Department (a slap at Hamilton, who had been Secretary under Washington), slashing the number of employees by 40 percent and eliminating tax inspectors and collectors altogether. He cut the military budget in half, which was then 40 percent of the overall federal budget. He eliminated all federal excise taxes, purging the government of what he called Hamilton’s “contracted, English, half-lettered ideas.” Reluctantly he kept the First Bank of the United States, but paid off nearly half the national debt. “No government in history,” the historian Gordon S. Wood has observed, “had ever voluntarily cut back on its authority.”
That is from the new and very good book Martin van Buren: America’s First Politician, by James M. Bradley. Later things were different:
Martin van Buren went into office deermined to avoid Andrew Jackson’s fateful staffing mistakes. The backbiting and intrigue wasted two years of Jackson’s presidency. This van Buren could not afford.
And a wee bit later:
Then the voters had their say. The November elections in New York were an absolute bloodbath for the Democrats. There were 128 elections for assembly in 1837, and the Whigs won 101 of them.
The book is well-written.
*Goethe: A Faustian Life*
By A.N. Wilson, an excellent book and worthy of being addended to the year’s best non-fiction list. In addition to appreciating the work of Goethe, which one can never do enough of, Wilson argues (with reasonable evidence) that Goethe was bisexual, including with Jacobi (!). Goethe also had, at the very least, alcoholic tendencies, at times drinking three bottles a day for extended periods of time.
Of course there are the extensive Nicholas Boyle volumes (in the works) as well, fortunately you do not have to choose. Recommended, noting that many of Goethe’s best works make sense only in German. Here is a Henry Oliver podcast with Wilson.
Recreating the past isn’t easy (but is possible)
Hidden above the stone vaults of Notre-Dame de Paris, the 13th-century timber structure that once supported the cathedral’s steep lead roof was so extensive it was known as “the forest”. When the cathedral caught fire in 2019, the flames spread quickly through the lattice of oak beams, each one hewn from an individual tree by medieval carpenters. Around two-thirds of the roof was destroyed in the blaze.
By March 2024, the entire roof frame—la charpente in French—had been identically reconstructed by a small army of 21st-century carpenters trained in the traditional technique of working freshly harvested “green wood” by hand with an axe. (This time, however, the frame is protected against fire risks by an automatic misting system, thicker roof battens and fire-resistant trusses separating the spire from the nave and choir on either side of it.)
After generations of mechanisation, this ancient skill had almost disappeared in France when an association called Charpentiers Sans Frontières (Carpenters Without Borders) began promoting its revival in 1992. The movement’s workshops now attract volunteers from around the world. Among their members are father and son Rémy and Loïc Desmonts, whose specialist family business in Normandy shared the winning bid to restore Notre-Dame’s charpente with Ateliers Perrault, a large carpentry company near Angers with a track record of restoring historic monuments.
*The Triumph of Politics*
The author is David A. Stockman, and the subtitle is Why the Reagan Revolution Failed. This is for me a re-read, all DOGErs and aspiring DOGErs should give this book an initial read, as it covers why the Reagan attempts to pare back government largely failed. Excerpt:
But I hadn’t recoked that there would be so much opposition on our side of the aisle. I was shocked to find that the Democrats were geting so much Republican help in their efforts to keep the pork barrel flowing and the welfare state intact. I had been worried because the votes didn’t add up, not the economic plan.
I had also come to realize that in my haste to get the Reagan Revolution launched in February, we had moved too fast. There were numerous loose ends. The spending reductions needed to pay for the tax cuts had turned out to be even bigger and tougher than I had originally thought.
And:
Over the next eight months, the President’s pen remained in his pocket. He did not veto one single appropriations bill, all of which combined came in $10 billion [sic] over the line. Come to think of it, he did use his pen — to sign them.
Stockman of course was what you might call the DOGE leader of the early 1980s. His final take is that the Reagan Revolution failed because it misunderstood what the American people truly want from their government. For better or worse, they want privilege and also protection from misfortune, not efficiency or maximum economic growth.
Essential reading, for some of you.
My Conversation with the excellent Paula Byrne
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why Mary Robinson was the most interesting woman of her day, how Georgian theater shaped Jane Austen’s writing, British fastidiousness, Evelyn Waugh’s hidden warmth, Paula’s strange experience with poison pen letters, how American and British couples are different, the mental health crisis among teenagers, the most underrated Beatles songs, the weirdest thing about living in Arizona, and more.
This was one of the most fun — and funny — CWTs of all time. But those parts are best experienced in context, so I’ll give you an excerpt of something else:
COWEN: Your book on Evelyn Waugh, the phrase pops up, and I quote, “naturally fastidious.” Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious?
BYRNE: Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? [laughs]
COWEN: I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you. It’s in the book.
BYRNE: Give me the context of that.
COWEN: Oh, I’d have to go back and look. It’s just in my memory.
BYRNE: That’s really funny. It’s a great phrase.
COWEN: We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right?
BYRNE: Yes, we can.
COWEN: I’m not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were, but the stiff-upper-lip tradition seems weaker with time.
BYRNE: The stiff upper lip. Yes, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious, yes, it’s different to reticent, isn’t it? Fastidious — hard to please, it means, doesn’t it? Naturally hard to please. I think that’s quite true, certainly of Evelyn Waugh because he was naturally fastidious. That literally sums him up in a phrase.
COWEN: If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. That’s quite different from this country. Would you agree with that?
Definitely recommended, one of my favorite episodes in some while. And of course we got around to discussing Paul McCartney and Liverpool…
Tetlock on Testing Grand Theories with AI
Testing grand theories of politics (or economics) is difficult because such theories are always contingent on ceteris paribus assumptions but outside of a lab, all else is rarely the same. The great Philip Tetlock has run multi-decade forecasting experiments but these are time and resource consuming. Tetlock, however, now suggests that LLMs could speed the process of testing grand theories like Mearsheimer’s neo-realism theory of politics:
With current or soon to be available technology, we can instruct large language models (LLMs) to reconstruct the perspectives of each school of thought, circa 1990,and then attempt to mimic the conditional forecasts that flow most naturally from each intellectual school. This too would be a multi-step process:
1. Ensuring the LLMs can pass ideological Turing tests and reproduce the assumptions, hypotheses and forecasts linked to each school of thought. For instance, does Mearsheimer see the proposed AI model of his position to be a reasonable approximation? Can it not only reproduce arguments that Mearsheimer explicitly endorsed from 1990-2024 but also reproduce claims that Mearsheimer never made but are in the spirit of his version of neorealism. Exploring views on historical counterfactual claims would be a great place to start because the what-ifs let us tease out the auxiliary assumptions that neo-realists must make to link their assumptions to real-world forecasts. For instance, can the LLMs predict how much neorealists would change their views on the inevitability of Russian expansionism if someone less ruthless than Putin had succeeded Yeltsin? Or if NATO had halted its expansion at the Polish border and invited Russia to become a candidate member of both NATO and the European Union?
2. Once each school of thought is satisfied that the LLMs are fairly characterizing, not caricaturing, their views on recent history(the 1990-2024) period, we can challenge the LLMs to engage in forward-in-time reasoning. Can they reproduce the forecasts for 2025-2050 that each school of thought is generating now? Can they reproduce the rationales, the complex conditional propositions, underlying the forecasts—and do so to the satisfaction of the humans whose viewpoints are being mimicked?
3. The final phase would test whether the LLMs are approaching superhuman intelligence. We can ask the LLMs to synthesize the best forecasts and rationales from the human schools of thought in the 1990-2024 period, and create a coherent ideal-observer framework that fits the facts of the recent past better than any single human school of thought can do but that also simultaneously recognizes the danger of over-fitting the facts (hindsight bias). We can also then challenge these hypothesized-to-be-ideal-observer LLM s to make more accurate forecasts on out-of-sample questions, and craft better rationales, than any human school of thought.
Science and religious dogmatism
Today’s leading historians of science have “debunked” the notion that religious dogmatism and science were largely in conflict in Western history: conflict was rare and inconsequential, the relationship between religion and science was constructive overall. This view stands in sharp contrast to that of a group of economists, who are beginning to report empirical evidence suggesting pervasive conflict, either in the present or during various historical settings. Who is right? This article provides quantitative evidence—from the continental level down to the personal one—suggesting that religious dogmatism has been indeed detrimental to science on balance. Beginning with Europe as a whole, it shows that the religious revival associated with the Reformations coincides with scientific deceleration, while the secularization of science during the Enlightenment coincides with scientific re-acceleration. It then discusses how regional- and city-level dynamics further support a causal interpretation running from religious dogmatism to diminished science. Finally, it presents person-level statistical evidence suggesting that—throughout modern Western history, and within a given city and time period—scientists who doubted God and the scriptures have been considerably more productive than those with dogmatic beliefs.
That is from a new paper by Matías Cabello. Of course you can believe those results, and still think Christianity was a necessary institutional background, even if being Christian did not help the individual scientist.
La ciudad lineal
When does it make sense to organize most of your urban activity on a (more or less) straight line?
If land transport is very costly, as in much earlier times, and a river is available, you might build much of the town right on the river bank. You can see remnants of this if you travel along the Rhine, though those developments have since expanded in other directions. Volgograd partially matches this description as well, or so I am told. But since river transport has declined in importance, such modes of urban organization have fallen out of favor and for obvious reasons.
Might some new technology resurrect the relevance of linear spatial organization?
Perhaps a very rapid airport people mover can make linear organization non-crazy, but I do not see that it would privilege linear organization. Does not Istanbul airport have a fairly linear structure? But how scalable is that?
The Saudi plans for Neom attempt to resurrect a very strong and strict linear model, based on a new mode of transport. From Wikipedia:
The Line is eventually planned to be 170 kilometres (110 miles) long. It could stretch from the Red Sea approximately to the city of Tabuk and could have nine million residents, resulting in an average population density of 260,000 per square kilometre (670,000/sq mi)…Early plans proposed an underground railway with 510-kilometre-per-hour (317 mph) trains that could travel from one end of The Line to the other in 20 minutes.
Supposedly all the shops and sites would be within a five-minute walk of line stops.
Of course this plan may not happen. But the 317-mph train is essential to the idea. Just hop on, and travel at super-rapid speeds to where you want to go. Presumably there are enough tracks with enough stops, like those newish programmable elevators, that you won’t have to accelerate and decelerate too many times. But, as the number of desirable stops proliferates, that ends up translating into an impractical number of separate individual train tracks.
The core problem seems to be that a linear city requires both super-rapid transport and not too many desirable stops. It is hard to pull off that combination in the modern world.
Is Conakry the closest the world has to a truly linear city?
Probably that map is a bear sign for the idea.
To read about this topic, you might try:
von Thunen, The Isolated City.
Arturo Soria y Puig, La Ciudad Lineal.
Cerda, The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization, edited by Arturo Soria y Puig.
N.A. Miliutin, Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities.
And ask your local GPT.
How to read a book using o1
You don’t have to upload any book into the system. The Great Cosmic Mind is smarter than most of the books you could jam into the context window. Just start asking questions. The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions. And now you have someone/something to ask!
I was reading a book on Indian history, and the author reference the Morley reforms of 1909. I did not know what those were, and so I posed a question and received a very good answer, read those here. I simply asked “What were the Morley reforms done by the British in India in 1909?”
Then I asked “did those apply to all parts of India?”
You can just keep on going. I’ll say it again: “The core intuition is simply that you should be asking more questions.”
Most people still have not yet internalized this emotionally. This is one of the biggest revolutions in reading, ever. And at some point people will write with an eye toward facilitating this very kind of dialogue.
My excellent Conversation with Stephen Kotkin
It was so much fun we ran over and did about ninety minutes instead of the usual hour. Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn’t just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin’s Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife’s work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he’s progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: What did you learn from Michel Foucault about power, or indeed anything else?
KOTKIN: I was very lucky. I went to Berkeley for a PhD program in 1981. I finished in 1988, and then my first job was at Princeton University in 1989. In the middle of it, I went for French history, and I switched into Habsburg history, and then finally, I switched into Russian Soviet history. I started learning the Russian alphabet my third year of the PhD program when I was supposed to take my PhD exams, so it was a radical shift.
Foucault — I met him because he came to Berkeley in the ’80s, just like Derrida came, just like Habermas came, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the anthropologist, came through. It was California. They were Europeans, and there was a wow factor for them. Foucault was also openly gay, and San Francisco’s gay culture was extraordinarily attractive to him. It was, unfortunately, the epoch of the AIDS epidemic.
One time, I was at lunch with him, and he said to me, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if somebody applied my theories to Stalinism?” I’m sitting there, okay, I’m 23 years old. Imagine if you had traveled to Switzerland in the late 19th century, and you went up in those Engadin mountains, and you were at some café in the mountain air, and there’s this guy with a huge forehead and hair up in the air sitting there, and you went and introduced yourself. You said, “Hello, I’m Tyler,” and he said, “Hello, I’m Friedrich Nietzsche.” You would say, “Well, geez, this is interesting. I should have more conversations with you.”
So, that’s the experience I had. I had read Foucault in seminar because it was very fashionable to do so, obviously, especially at Berkeley, especially in a culture that tilts one way politically, and I think you’ll guess which way that might be. But I didn’t understand what he said, so I went up to him as a naïf with this book, Madness and Civilization, which we had been forced to read, and I started asking him questions. “What does this mean? What does this mean? What is this passage? This is indecipherable.”
He patiently explained to the moron that I was what he was trying to say. It sounded much more interesting coming from him verbally, sitting just a few feet away, than it had on the page. I was lucky to become the class coordinator for his course at Berkeley. He gave these lectures about the problem of the truth-teller in Ancient Greece.
It was very far removed from . . . I had no classical training. Yes, I had Latin in high school because I went to Catholic school, and it was a required subject. I started as an altar boy with the Latin Mass, which quickly changed because of what happened at Vatican II. But no Greek, so it was completely Greek to me. Forgive me, that wasn’t planned that I was going to say that. It just happened spontaneously.
Anyway, I just kept asking him more questions and invited him to go to things, and so we would have lunches and dinners. I introduced him to this place, Little Joe’s in Little Italy, part of San Francisco, which unfortunately is no longer there. It was quite a landmark back then, and then he would repair after dinner to the bathhouses in San Francisco by himself. I was not part of that. I’m neither openly nor closeted gay, so that was a different part of Foucault that I didn’t partake in, but others did.
Anyway, I would ask him these things, and he would just explain stuff to me. I would say, “What’s happening in Poland?” This is the 1980s, and he would say things to me like, “The idea of civil society is the opiate of the intellectual class.” Everybody was completely enamored of the concept of civil society in the ’80s, especially via the Polish case, and so I would ask him to elucidate more. “What does that mean, and how does that work?”
He told me once that class in France came from disease in Paris — that it wasn’t because of who was a factory worker, who wasn’t a factory worker, but it was your neighborhoods in Paris and who died from cholera and who didn’t die from cholera. A colleague of ours who was another fellow graduate in Berkeley ended up writing a dissertation using that aside, that throwaway line.
I was able to ask him these questions about everything and anything. What he showed me — this is your question — what he showed me was how power works, not in terms of bureaucracy, not in terms of the large mechanisms of governance like a secret police, but how all of that is enforced and acted through daily life. In other words, the micro versions of power. It’s connected to the big structures, but it’s little people doing this. That’s why I said totalitarianism is using your agency to destroy your own agency.
That means denouncing your neighbors, being encouraged to denounce your neighbors for heresies, and participating in that culture of denunciation, which loosens all social trust and social bonds and puts you in a situation of dependency on the state. You’re a gung-ho activist using your agency, and the next thing you know, you have no power whatsoever. So, those are the kinds of things that I could talk to him about.
After he passed away from AIDS in the summer of 1984 — it was the AIDS epidemic, horrific. He passed away, and we had a memorial for him. I was still a PhD student, remember. I didn’t finish until ’88. There was this guy, Michel de Certeau, who wrote a tribute to Foucault in French that he was going to deliver at the event. It was called “The Laughter of Foucault.” I had these conversations with de Certeau about his analysis of Foucault and the pleasure of analytic work, which had been a hallmark of Foucault.
De Certeau taught me a phrase called “the little tactics of the habitat,” which became one of the core ideas of my dissertation and then book, Magnetic Mountain, about this micropower stuff. Even though Foucault was gone, I was able to extend the beginning of the conversations with Foucault through de Certeau.
I learned how power works in everyday life, and how the language that you use, and the practices like denunciation that you enact or partake in, help form those totalitarian structures, because the secret police are not there every minute of every day, so what’s in your head? How are you motivated? What type of behavior are you motivated for?
We say, “Okay, what would Stalin do in this situation?” Many people approach their lives — they’ve never met Stalin; they’ll never meet Stalin — but they imagine what Stalin might do. That gets implanted in their way of thinking; it becomes second nature. I learned to discuss and analyze that through Foucault.
I have to say, I didn’t share his analysis that Western society was imprisoning, that the daily life practices of free societies were a form of imprisonment in its own way. I never shared that view, so it wasn’t for me his analysis of the West that I liked. It was the analytical toolkit that I adapted from him to apply to actual totalitarianism in the Soviet case.
Excellent throughout.