Results for “straussian reading” 66 found
*Wall Street II*
It was not a great movie but it was better than I had been expecting and I am glad to have seen it. Moral hazard was explained — well, and using that term – numerous times. The central role of leverage behind the crisis was stressed, as were the political economy elements. The movie was chock full of economics, to a remarkable degree, albeit in an unbalanced fashion, especially when it came to explaining "speculation." The film very well captured the feeling of sick dismay which unfolded with the events of the financial crisis. As an inside joke, they had a wonderful silent stand-in for Geithner. In this movie men don't seem to care about women very much, not even for sex. The Charlie Sheen cameo was my favorite moment, as it rewrites one's understanding of the first Wall Street movie and raises broader questions about the motivations of "good" people. The female lead was flat; I suspect this was poor execution although a Straussian reading will attribute that to a brilliant savaging of her character. I wished for a different ending. A comparison with the parent film shows that New York has become less interesting.
The Show So Far
MR has many new readers, especially since the financial crisis, so I thought I would offer this brief guide to what we are all about. Plus one of the readers, under "requests," asked for a foundation statement for this blog. Here, in six easy steps, is "The Show So Far":
2. A "public choice" and indeed Straussian reading of Star Wars.
3. Alex ponders immortality and it changes his life.
5. The economics of relativity.
6. Alex explains the difference between Tyler and Alex.
For this New Year I remain thankful to have what I consider the very best readers in the world.
Sunday assorted links and stuff
1. Lookism in sentencing decisions.
2. An autonomous vehicle was set on fire by a crowd in San Francisco. In some alternate universe, a small drone would emerge from the burning vehicle and strike them all down.
3. Have you noticed that Michelle Obama was, less than 24 hours ago, up to #3 in the betting markets for likelihood of being the next U.S. President? She was at about 7%. Now it is Gavin Newsom who is #3 at about ten percent. At the same time, the NYT Editorial page, other MSM sources, and Hillary Clinton all seem to be turning on Biden, on the issue of age of course. I would not place too much emphasis on that seven percent number, or that ten percent number, as I suspect there is private information at work here — either private information that Biden is toast, or private information that he isn’t toast. The problem is I don’t know which. Still, this is a live issue.
It is also a good test of public intellectuals. Obviously, the issue is not just about Biden’s current competency (which I cannot judge — articulateness is overrated!), but also a) how the public perceives him, b) how his staff and other countries perceive him, and c) how matters will be four to five years from now, when he is still President, if he is still President. (Start by reading Shakespeare on political leadership.) If you’re defending Biden, for reasons related to your expected value calculations, I hope at least you are being honest with yourself about your Straussianism here. But please do add to your calculations the notion that the American public is pretty fed up with this kind of response from our mainstream political institutions.
One possible lesson here is that our political establishment really cannot coordinate on making needed changes. The other possible lesson is that they can. I am prepared for Bayesian updates, as my status quo assessments by necessity will be disturbed.
4. Susie Essman is a comic genius (NYT).
5. A three-minute clip on how various top chess players walk into a tournament entrance. Can you guess who shows up last?
*Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy*
That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP. It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory. It has been selling very well.
It still comes across as a doctoral thesis, but I feel any reviewer should excuse the unusual modes of presentation. The doctoral thesis of BAP is going to come out, one way or the other, and better something than nothing.
I am more worried that the main claims are a mix of not true and also too bold. Take the opening sentence — “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market.”
In contrast, I find it odd how little of contemporary society revolves around sex and breeding, relative to what a reading of Darwin might predict. You might feel, a’la Hanson, that so many of our social proclivities evolved from initially sexual and mating impulses, but how autonomous they have become! People spend so much time not having sex. Fertility rates are plummeting, and that is at best a marginal political topic. Rich CEOs very often utterly fail to create the harems that some might be expecting. If there is a missing figure in this book it is Adam Smith and his TMS, who can explain so much of our social world with only minimal reference to sex.
Or take this sentence, again from early on: “Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted.”
That seems obviously false. There is simply a massive influence through socialization, and much of that is quite separate from the roles people may or may not have as “breeders.” For the most talented, breeding in fact might be a highly inefficient way to influence the world’s broader future. Intermediary institutions are systematically missing from the narrative of this book, so already the stage is set for everything to be darker than it needs to be, and for nature to have a stronger role than it ought to.
In any case it is hard to stay on the track of this argument, as the book is sprawling and repeatedly starts over again with new building blocks. Perhaps the actual underlying belief here (see p.45) is that the Western intellectual class is boring and decrepit? (Compared to what? Has the author spent too much time at Yale? It never has been easier to learn real stuff.)
We are led down paths of Nietzsche, Strauss, decaying political regimes, Pindar, and the ancient Greek world. Frazer enters with the Golden Bough. What I like best in the author is his willingness to throw himself into these worlds with convincing abandon. What I like least is how little space is carved out for morality, or for the view that there is still plenty of progress in the world, and that there is a broadly common intersubjective judgment that some states of affairs are better than others. I long for the Masons, and chatter about Hiram the Master Builder — there is a reason why ancient Greek philosophy no longer fits our world. The simple truths of a suburban real estate developer, and the spouse and kids and dog back home, are swept under the rug.
The truly dark move would be to argue that nature must be violent, that man cannot remove himself from nature, and thus to flirt with the fascist view that violence amongst humans must be acceptable as well. And, in this take, all of our moralities are phony adjuncts to the desire to breed. But the exposition is somehow too winding and too replete with fresh turns for those issues to surface in a meaningful way. Maybe some would argue they emerge from the Straussian muck? I would have no objection to seeing them addressed directly, as surely the author at current margins is not afraid of additional cancellation.
Would more adherence to the hypothesis testing methods of the economist have done Alamariu some good?
I do agree with his view that Nietzsche was more sympathetic to Christianity than is usually realized. The expositions and interpretations of Nietzsche probably are the best part of the book.
By the end we are given a new conclusion: “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.” On that I can agree, but a simple libertarianism would have gotten us there more easily. Alamariu can’t quite bring himself to make this conclusion either an empirical claim (too little actual hard evidence), or a logical claim (too many other variables in the model), and so it continues to hover uncomfortably in between, being put on the table with lots of drama but never receiving actual validation.
There is definitely material of interest in here, but it remains a book of its time. Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.
BAP once wrote: “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…” For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.
The EJMR doxxing issue
The only summary I have seen is from Karlstack, noting that he is siding against the doxxers and has defended EJMR in the past. Most of the people who care already know the details, so I won’t repeat them. I will however add a few observations:
1. I don’t read EJMR, so however bad it is, or however useful it sometimes may be, is a closed book to me. It is not the next marginal thing I might read if I had more time. And I have never posted there. So my comments should not be taken as reflecting any deep knowledge of the site itself. I would rather listen to Wings songs, if that is what it came down to.
2. The soon to be published paper supposedly reveals IP addresses of many EJMR posters. This seems wrong to me, noting that many posters (presumably) are making entirely innocent observations, or if not innocent remarks nonetheless remarks that should not be doxxed. They may wish to criticize a colleague or superior, or express a repugnant political opinion. Or whatever.
2b. What about posters from Turkey, China, Russia and elsewhere, who have expressed political opinions? Isn’t this point enough on its own to settle the matter?
2c. Two side notes — first, I am delighted to see that GMU does not appear in the list of top baddies — and yes we do have a large graduate program. I strongly suspect we have significantly better mental health. Perhaps the rest of you could learn something from us?
2d. All those “nice” real economists who write such terrible things — and people say I am the Straussian! Instead, I am the one who teaches you Straussian codes.
3. It is often possible to turn an IP address into an identity of a specific person. There is a raging debate about various statistical methods for doing this, presumably to be done by non-authors of the paper. It seems wrong to me to offer weakly coded information to the world on matters that were originally confidential, even if (let us say) ten percent of the posters were engaging in illegal libelous or harassing activities. The others were not.
There are always ways of identifying some IP addresses and tying them to specific humans, even if the above-mentioned statistical methods do not succeed. (No, I am not going to mention them, but they do not require rocket science.)
4. GPT-4 says it is hacking. (The answer I received included: “It is both unethical and illegal, as it infringes on various privacy and computer misuse laws.”) But what does it know? The fact that, through mistakes of the hosting site, some of the information was semi-public may change the legal status of the hacking claim, but I don’t think it alters the moral issues. What if Amazon, by mistake, left a bunch of credit card numbers out there to be scraped, and then you picked them up? That is still the wrong thing to do, even if those card numbers were used to order nasty books.
5. Some significant percentage of hostile on-line posters are mentally ill, or whatever other word you may wish to use. (There is plenty of good evidence for mental health problems being rampant in economics academia.) In other cases, these individuals may simply have a very different understanding of social reality, whether or not they would count as mentally ill. I believe in generosity of spirit and behavior toward the mentally ill, rather than taking their worst pronouncements and spreading them around and immortalizing them. I would not go running down the halls of Bellevue with a tape recorder, and then post the contents on-line, with possible voice identification, on the grounds that the shouted ravings were “toxic.” Not even if the ravings were accompanied by written posts.
6. It is striking to me how little regard cancel culture has for the mentally ill, for bipolar individuals, for schizophrenics, and also for many autistics. These individuals, at least at times, have very different standards for what they will say publicly. I don’t believe in punishing them per se for those different standards, though I do believe in trying to help or educate them when possible. I don’t believe in doxxing them.
7. If a platform is say 20 percent malicious libel and harassment (not making this claim about any specific place!), and that same platform is 20 percent the mentally ill (with who knows what degree of overlap?), I don’t believe in pulling down the entire curtain on the whole thing and exposing everybody, or exposing a significant share of those on the platform. That is deontologically wrong. Instead, you ought to find a way of dealing with the problems from the first twenty percent without so seriously harming the interests of the second twenty percent, the mentally ill ones. I don’t believe in promoting toxic behavior against the mentally ill, just to punish some earlier toxic behavior, much of which was done by the non-mentally ill.
So — and I do not say this lightly — I believe the authors of the paper under consideration are behaving unethically, and I hope they will retract their work and then destroy it.
Ask the beast
“why does tyler cowen mean when he says something is “Straussian”?”
That is perhaps the question I have received the most often over the last five years, subbing in “what” for “why.” And, via Jeremy Davis, here is the answer he received:
Tyler Cowen is an economist and author who is known for his use of the term “Straussian” to describe certain ideas or perspectives. The term “Straussian” is a reference to the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who was active in the mid-20th century. Strauss is known for his belief that there is a fundamental tension between reason and tradition, and that the best way to understand political ideas is to look at the underlying assumptions and hidden meanings that are present in the text.
When Cowen says something is “Straussian,” he typically means that it is characterized by a focus on underlying principles and hidden meanings, rather than surface-level appearances. He might also be referring to the ideas of Leo Strauss, who is known for his emphasis on the study of classical texts and his belief that political philosophy should be grounded in an understanding of the great works of the past.
In general, when Cowen uses the term “Straussian” he is using it as an adjective to describe a perspective or approach that is characterized by an emphasis on careful reading, attention to detail, and an appreciation for the complexity of ideas. It is often used by Cowen to point out that some perspectives are not as straightforward as they seem, and that there is always more to be discovered if we look beneath the surface.
Now you can stop asking!
Wednesday assorted links
1. Swedish Zoom reading group on classical liberal themes.
2. Monty Python Argument clinic, but with an app.
4. Legislation looks to stop insurers from rating/excluding coverage based on dog breed.
5. EU may block Polish nuclear investment.
6. Admission to a research university causally shapes your politics. But it is more about the peers than the instruction.
Collective action problems with testing and vaccines
About testing, Megan McArdle writes:
The high rate of false negatives means that testing provides the most protection when it’s deployed at the population level. At the group level, it’s only a weak, adjunct tactic to other precautions. And at the individual level, it’s borderline useless.
it depends on the test of course (I think she is too negative on the individual test), but the general point is well taken. So basically, in the Straussian sense, one might wish to exaggerate the private (and social) benefits of testing.
Alternatively, consider vaccines. If thousands of people use a vaccine early and it goes badly, that might lead to adverse publicity for vaccines in general. If only one person uses a vaccine early, and keels over dead, probably it goes unnoticed.
So for vaccines in the early, still quite unsafe stage, the Straussian might wish to exaggerate the risks, to limit the number of those trying it (whether on grey or black markets or flying to China, or whatever). All the more reason to talk up testing.
Once vaccines are confirmed as safe enough, there are increasing returns to spreading the vaccines in a particular area. One person getting vaccinated won’t materially lower R, but half of the community being vaccinated will drive R well below one, allowing most economic activity to resume normally.
So the Straussian will wish to exaggerate the private (and social) benefits of getting the vaccine, at least once a certain security is present about vaccine safety.
That is a lot of Straussian tightrope walking to be done!
Why We Can’t Have Nice Things–Elon Musk and the Subways
In New York it costs billions of dollar per mile to build new subways, a price far higher than anywhere else in the world. That’s one reason why Elon Musk’s The Boring Company has been anything but. Even if hyperloop technology doesn’t pan out, Musk’s goal of reducing tunneling costs by a factor of ten is laudable. The Boring Company purchased a tunnel boring machine in April of 2017 and incredibly has already completed a two-mile test-tunnel underneath Hawthorne, LA! Awesome, right? Well, some people just can’t be happy.
“[I]nvaders are coming from underground” proclaims Alana Semuels in a big story in The Atlantic. The title and splash page indicate the theme:
When Elon Musk Tunnels Under Your Home
The billionaire is drilling for futuristic transit under Los Angeles. He didn’t have to ask the neighbors first.
Billionaires are undermining your home. And democracy! Grab your pitchforks! Yet dig a little deeper underneath the lurid headline and the actual complaints are–dare I say it–boring.
I talked to a dozen people who live along the tunnel’s route, and most said they hadn’t witnessed any extra noise or traffic. But none had been informed ahead of time that a private company would be digging a tunnel beneath the street.
But what about all the displaced people?
As the tunnel neared completion, disruptions to the community increased. The company bought another building, this one on the corner of 120th Street and Prairie Avenue, for $2 million, according to public records, to allow for the extraction of tunneling equipment. Adrian Vega had run a cabinet business in that building for 18 years. When his landlord sold the building, the Boring Company came in and offered Vega’s company, Los Vegas Kitchen Cabinets and Doors, extra cash to get out in three months. Vega took the money, and asked for even more time from the Boring Company, which he was granted. But he couldn’t find another space; since moving in August, his business has been closed and his customers don’t know that he’s moved, he told me.
…Shunyaa Turner lives in a small house on 119th Place with his wife and two kids. He said that in the past year, they’ve had to battle more pests, such as raccoons, mice, skunks, and opossums, which they’ve never seen before. He isn’t sure if this is related to the digging; the Hawthorne airport has also been doing more construction as it gets busier, so the animals could have fled from there. He and his wife said they’ve also noticed more cracks in their impeccably maintained walkway.
…The initial document also claimed that the test tunnel would not involve digging under private property, but that, too, has changed—though the company has now bought all the private property it is tunneling underneath. The company has also closed a lane of Jack Northrop Avenue, a street on the other side of SpaceX headquarters
In the author’s own words:
Meanwhile, in Hawthorne, the company that promised its transit test projects would be completely unnoticeable by the community has since uprooted a small business, purchased a house, and closed a lane of traffic indefinitely.
The horror.
The whole framing of the piece is ass-backwards. Semuels is correct that:
[this] would have been unimaginable in a higher-income neighborhood. Indeed, when Musk tried to build another underground tunnel in a wealthier neighborhood in West L.A., residents quickly sued. The project got tied up in court, and [died].
In comparision:
The CEQA allows residents 35 days to push back against granted exemptions…in Hawthorne, the 35-day window passed with little fanfare.
But unfortunately Semuels takes the posh, lawsuit-loving, NIMBY crowd as the appropriate normative standard and any deviations from that as suspect and indicative of the power of billionaires to run roughshod over other people’s rights. Instead, the Boring Company, the Hawthorne city government, and the people of Hawthorne should be applauded for their sensible, forward-thinking, and optimistic approach to new ideas. Bravo to Hawthorne! Hawthorne: Where the future is being made!
I do give Semuels credit, however. She writes honestly so that one can see the real story behind the false frame and she even tips the audience to the correct (Straussian?) reading in her final clever paragraph.
Vega [the owner of the cabinet business who was paid to vacate] has nothing negative to say about the Boring Company—he just blames himself for agreeing to be out so quickly. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, so he didn’t know what was fair. Nor did he know how hard it would be to set up a new store—the process of getting new city permits, he said, is a lengthy one, and he can’t find a way to cut through the red tape.
Do we need a Journal of Controversial Ideas?
That is the topic of my latest column for Bloomberg, here is one excerpt:
Now enter a newly announced project, called the Journal of Controversial Ideas. It will publish one issue per year, devoted to ideas that otherwise may not receive a fair hearing, and it will allow for anonymous or pseudonymous publication. Princeton philosopher Peter Singer is one of the names associated with the journal, which does not yet have an agreement with a publisher.
I am skeptical though not hostile toward this enterprise. It is sad that such a journal is seen as necessary. But I would suggest instead putting forth your ideas on a blog, on Twitter or on YouTube. Many politically incorrect figures have done just that. A Jordan Peterson YouTube lecture might range from the Bible to Jung to a critique of contemporary feminism, none of it refereed, but he has attracted millions of viewers. At the end of it all you get the Jordan Peterson worldview, which I suspect has more resonance than any particular empirical claim Peterson might make along the way.
In an internet-centered intellectual world, what persuades people is reading or hearing a charismatic personality, year in year out, promoting a particular view of the world. A lot of controversial ideas will have to ride that roller coaster, for better or worse.
The Journal of Controversial Ideas is intended to be open access, though without a publishing contract we can’t know if it will have an open online comments section. It would be odd if not (would we have to create a companion Journal of Controversial Comments?), but with open comments you have to wonder whether a prestige publisher will take on the associated libel and reputational risks, and how high status the journal actually will be. It would not be practical to referee the comments, but that may mean the truly open internet, with its free-for-all atmosphere, will remain the dominant source for controversial ideas. “Controversial for me but not for thee” hardly seems like a winning slogan for such a revisionist enterprise.
Overall, I think controversial ideas will do best on the non-refereed internet, but I am not opposed to giving this venture a try. Refereeing is supposed to boost status, but will anyone put a publication here on their tenure vita? And:
To make a controversial idea stick through the academic process, maybe you do have conquer the biases and beat the odds against you, as Harvey Mansfield, Robert P. George and Oded Galor have done (to name just three). You also might pursue a “Straussian” approach, embedding subversive messages in your paper and covering them up with flowery rhetoric, hoping that some but not too many people notice what you are really saying.
Do read the whole thing.
My Conversation with Ross Douthat
I think Ross, along with Steven Pinker, received the hardest (though never hostile) questions from me, but of course that is a measure of respect. Plus serious questions about God are difficult by their nature. Here is how the summarizers described the ground covered:
…Douthat’s views on religion and theology, but then moves on to more earth-bound concerns, such as his stance on cats, The Wire vs The Sopranos, why Watership Down is the best modern novel for understanding politics, eating tofu before it was cool, journalism as a trade, why he’s open to weird ideas, the importance of Sam’s Club Republicans, the specter of a Buterlian Jihad, and more.
Not to mention Reformicons, CRISPR, Thiel/Girard, Godwin’s Law, euthanasia, what Ross learned his mother, and the dangers of too much smart phone use. Ross responded in fine form, here is the audio and transcript. Here is one excerpt:
DOUTHAT: I suppose that I’m drawn to the idea that the truth about human existence lies in what can seem like paradoxical formulations, and this is of course very Catholic in certain ways. Certainly a G. K. Chestertonian idea, so I’m just stealing it from other people. But the idea that various heresies of Christianity, Calvinism included — with apologies to my Calvinist friends — tend to take one particular element of you that’s supposed to be in synthesis and possibly in tension, and run with it. And therefore the truth about things lies in a place that may seem slightly contradictory.
And I think this is borne out in many ways in everyday experience. This both-and experience of human existence. The idea that you can’t split up grace and works in any kind of meaningful way. It’s connected to larger facts about the nature of human existence. The tension between determinism and free will that persists in any philosophical system. You can get rid of God and stop having these Jansenist Jesuit arguments about predestination and so on, but you’re still stuck with the free will–determinism debate. That debate doesn’t go away.
So, yeah, there’s a point at the intersection of different ideas that is as close to the truth as our limited minds can get and in Christian thought, we call that point orthodoxy. Now, how that is connected to my political views is a really good question.
And:
COWEN: We all know the Marcionite heresy: the view, from early Christianity, that the Old Testament should be abandoned. At times, even Paul seems to subscribe to what later was called the Marcionite heresy. Why is it a heresy? Why is it wrong?
DOUTHAT: It’s wrong because it takes the form . . . It’s wrong for any number of reasons, but in the context of the conversation we’re having, it’s wrong because it tries to basically take one of the things that Christianity is trying to hold in synthesis and run with it to the exclusion of everything else, and essentially to solve problems by cutting things away.
The Marcionite thesis is, basically, if you read the New Testament, Jesus offers you a portrait of God that seems different from the portrait of God offered in Deuteronomy; therefore, these things are in contradiction. Therefore, if you believe that Jesus’s portrait of God is correct, then the Deuteronomic portrait of God must be false; therefore, the God of the Old Testament must be a wicked demiurge, etc., etc. And the next thing you know, you’re ascribing to, again, a kind of . . . What is the Aryan Christianity of the Nazis, if not the Marcionite heresy given form in the 1930s and 1940s?
And so the orthodox Christian says, “No, any seeming tension between the Old Testament and the New, any seeming contradiction, is actually suggesting that we need to look for a kind of synthesis between them, and for a sense in which there is not contradiction, but fulfillment in some way, which —
COWEN: Bringing us back to Hegelian Douthat.
DOUTHAT: Yes, yes.
And:
I think it’s probably fair to say that Chesterton’s Father Brown stories had as much influence on my worldview as his more sort of polemical and argumentative writings. And, again, I think therein lies some important insight that I haven’t thought through, but I think you’re correctly gesturing at, about a particular way of thinking about God and theology that isn’t unique to Christianity, but that is strongly suggested by just the structure of the revelation that we have. Marilynne Robinson has a line, I think in Gilead, about — one of the characters is imagining that this life is like the epic of heaven. That we’re living in the Iliad or the Odyssey of heaven. This is the story that will be told in the streets.
And:
COWEN: When you see how much behavior Islam or some forms of Islam motivate, do you envy it? Do you think, “Well, gee, what is it that they have that we don’t? What do we need to learn from them?” What’s your gut emotional reaction?
On another topic:
I’ve been always disappointed that there hasn’t been a kind of sustained Watership Down revival because it’s such a great book and it’s a book about — essentially, it’s about a founding.
It’s connected, in a sense, to the kind of things that the Straussians are always arguing about and so on. What does the founding mean, and so on? But you have a group of rabbits who go forth and encounter different models of political order, different ways of relating to humankind, that shadow over rabbit-kind at any point.
You have a warren that has essentially surrendered itself to humanity and exists as a kind of breeding farm, and you have a warren that’s run as a fascist dictatorship essentially. And then you have this attempt to form a political community that is somewhere in between the two, getting back to the Hegelian synthesis and so on. And you have sort of this primal narrative where the problem is of course that they don’t have any females, and so there’s this competition, this competition for reproductive power that’s carried out between these different warrens where the rabbits from the good warren have to literally — not kidnap, because the does come willingly — but steal women from the fascist dictatorship, which maintains a ruthless control over reproduction.
So there’s just a lot of fascinating stuff there, and then it’s all interspersed with storytelling. There’s the sort of rabbit folktales that Richard —
COWEN: So, narrative again.
DOUTHAT: Narrative again.
Strongly recommended, and I do thank Ross for putting up with me. Do read or listen to the whole thing.
And I very much enjoyed reading Ross’s forthcoming book To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism, which I found totally engrossing.
Friday assorted links
1. The celebrity Z-list (NYT).
2. Books to help you understand Japan, by Noah Smith. And why are economists so OK with putting their work on-line?
3. Are Americans reading less literature?
4. Ha! Yoga is neo-liberal after all.
5. Google vs. Uber.
7. Reinhard Selten has passed away. And here is A Fine Theorem on Selten’s work.
Tyler Cowen’s guide to Enlightenment
No, that is not enlightenment about life, that is enlightenment about Enlightenment, as in the eighteenth century phenomenon. P., a loyal MR reader, wrote to me with such a request, noting correctly that “I usually find that broad, ambitious survey books are not the answer.”
That survey would be Peter Gay, recently a bestseller in China by the way, and then Ernst Cassirer, Jonathan Israel, and Roy Porter, but let me outline an alternative program of study. The goal here is to be practical, engaging, and vivid, not comprehensive or scholarly per se:
Books:
Geoffrey Clive’s short book The Romantic Enlightenment.
James Boswell, Journals, selected excerpts, he was an early blogger by the way, and David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I find that to be one of the wittiest of books. Plus Hume’s Essays.
Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew, and Rousseau’s Second Discourse. Condorcet, Essay on the Progress of the Human Mind. Voltaire I consider overrated.
Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, yes I know it is arguably “anti-Enlightenment,” better yet. If you insist on another Irishman, Bishop Berkeley is an entertaining writer as well.
Founding documents of the United States, and Ben Franklin, Autobiography.
Kant, Perpetual Peace, “What is Enlightenment?”, and Lessing, Nathan the Wise.
Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments.
If you have the time to tackle longer books, start with Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Boswell’s Life of Johnson and then Casanova and Tristram Shandy (there is by the way a splendid book on the postmodern in the Enlightenment but I can no longer remember the cite). Leave Montesquieu to the Straussians, although the returns are high if you are so inclined.
For history, read up on eighteenth century scientific societies, Robert Darnton on the rise of publishing and the book trade, Habermas on the coffeehouse debate culture and the public sphere, and Brewer and McKendrick on the rise of consumer society in England. Try Wikipedia for Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, and other rulers of the time. There is also Margaret C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, and books on 18th century Freemasonry. The French Revolution seems to require its own blog post, as does the Industrial Revolution, slavery too, in a pinch resort to the MR search function box on this blog. Foucault will give you a sense of the dark side of the Enlightenment, his history is unreliable but read him on Discipline and Punishment and on ideology try the rather dense The Order of Things.
That all said, I would start with music and the arts first.
Music:
Haydn, the London symphonies and late piano sonatas and string quartets Op.76.
Mozart, the major operas, including reading through the libretti while listening. If you can only do one thing on this list…
Gluck, assorted operas, noting he is not nearly the equal of Haydn or Mozart as a composer but he did capture the spirit of Enlightenment.
C.P.E. Bach, the Prussian Sonatas.
Painting:
Study French painting from Chardin through David, picture books will do if you can’t visit the original works. Focus on Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Vigée-Le Brun, Boilly, Hubert Robert, and others, how their works tie into the history of the period and how the styles transformed over time. Visit Paris, Huntington Gardens, and Tiepolo’s work in the Residenz in Würzburg. Do a tour of Georgian architecture in England, in a pinch visit the derivative works at Harvard, Yale, and Alexandria, Virginia. Study Tiepolo more generally, Goya, and also Antonio Canova.
Movies:
Why not? I’ll toss up Dangerous Liaisons (Vadim and Malkovich versions), Barry Lyndon, Casanova, Amadeus, A Royal Affair (can’t forget Denmark!), Marie Antoinette, Ridicule, and The Madness of King George.
What did I leave out that is of utmost importance?
Claims about Germany
When I say that growing up in Germany helps bestow independent thinking skills, I’m not saying that it’s because they’re all taught [the] Straussian art of close reading. Instead I’m arguing that society has suppressed the value of certain status indicators, and that encourages people to think for themselves. To put it another way, there are fewer tournaments for kids to go through, and the value of winning them is not so high. Germans I’ve met are incredibly humble. Nobody feels the need to perpetrate an international hoax about how desirable they are. In addition, people aren’t all drawn to the same fields like finance and consulting. They take up professions like baking or manufacturing, and work with the earnestness that comes from knowing that their work is dignified; it’s easier for them to do the equivalent of moving to Dayton to study widget machines.
That is from Dan Wang, who also offers remarks on the philosophy and writings of Peter Thiel. My reservation about Dan’s argument is that Germans may use their independent thinking skills to question the entire value of traditional metrics of success, thereby making Germany less suited to produce certain kinds of innovations.
Here is an interesting Simon Kuper FT piece on Germans, mostly positive although “Germans are frequently wrong.”
*Philosophy Between the Lines*
This is the new and fantastic book by Arthur M. Melzer and the subtitle is The Lost History of Esoteric Writing. It is the best book I know on esoteric writing and its history and furthermore it is clear and to the point! (I think)
Melzer starts his chapter eight with this quotation from John Toland’s eighteenth century Pantheisticon:
[Esotericism is] practiced not by the Ancients alone; for to declare the Truth, it is more in Use among the Moderns.
Here is another bit from the book:
To begin with, we need an author who, in his interpretations, is willing to follow the very un-Straussian injunction — often found on mathematics exams — “show all work.” We need to see, once or twice, how the sausage is made. The best writing for this purpose that I am familiar with comes from an appropriately un-Straussian source: Stanley Fish. His “Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays” is a brilliant and nuanced exercise in textual analysis that openly displays, at every stage of Fish’s encounter with the text, what he thinks and why he thinks it.
…Another excellent and highly communicative reader…is Robert Connor. His Thucydides is a very sensitive reading of Thucydides’s great history, a reading openly arrived at and clearly conveyed. In conjunction with this, one should also read Clifford Orwin’s superb The Humanity of Thucydides.
Recommended.