Kant: Political Writings - H. S. Reiss

When the first edition of this book was published (1970), Kant's political thinking was mostly overlooked by the experts. Twenty-one years later, and after the Rawlsian revolution of political science, Kant: Political Writings became a reference text for undergraduate and experts alike.

As H. S. Reiss, the editor of this volume summarizes in the postscript (p. 272), "Kant's political principles (...) express basic human aspirations". Do you want to know how George W. Bush perverted the idea of democratic peace? You only need to know Kant's Perpetual Peace. Do you know that Ghandi's idea of civil disobedience is partly based on Kant's ideas?

As great and influential as Kant's thoughts are today, I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, and as a matter of principle, I am against the idea of "selected works" volumes. If you want to know about an author's ideas, you should really read everything that person wrote. There is no escape around that. However, academics can do a pretty decent job summarizing and picking up pieces of an author's work for general and mid-level expert consumption. And they are partly paid for that. In other words, if you want to get an idea about an author's view of the World, go for this kind of books.

Experts on Kant's ideas may also want to read the introduction and the postscript of this book, which are basically Reiss' interpretation of Kant's works. I found particularly interesting his opinions about Kant and the right to rebellion, a topic Reiss wrote about and about which I would like to talk about for the remainder of this blog.

Democratic transitions were one of the most important subjects of study in political science in the second half of the 20th century. Samuel Huntington, Barrington Moore, Francis Fukuyama, Juan Linz, and more recently Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, just to mention a few, devoted at least part of their to study how one country goes from autocracy to democracy. All the democracy theoricians were, whether they admit it or not, influenced by Immanuel Kant, whose biggest contribution to political science was the idea that democracy (he called it republicanism) would bring perpetual peace and that democracy was inevitable. Kant, however, opposed the idea that democracy could be brought from abroad -and that's why Bush's Iraq War is a travesty of Kant's original theory- and he also opposed rebellion against government.

The reason why this is important is because, in practice, democracy has always been copied or implanted by some external power; the only country that was born fully democratic was the United States. Also, democracy has never been brought about peacefully by a benevolent dictator, as Kant wished. Democracy theoricians and practicioners like Freedom House, the Open Society, and NGOs like HRW or Amnesty International before they were coopted by communists, base their action plans on a theory that works magnificently on paper but has barely worked as expected in reality. Does this hinder Kant's contribution to political science?

The answer is complex. On the one hand, Kant could never foresee things like a dictator gazing his own people, or the degree of surveillance and repression exercised by modern totalitarian regimes. Kant lived before the Industrial Revolution; Hitler, Lenin, Saddam Hussein, and all the dictators of the 20th century were a direct product of industrialization and modernization. On the other hand, one could argue with some legitimacy and a high degree of speculation that the logical modern corollary of Kant's politica thought would be a rejection of totalitarianism and even some vindication of the right of rebellion.

Kant's political ideas became obsolete with the passing of time. That's the fate of most ideas, when you think about it. However, if we want to understand why we are where we are today, we need some minimal understanding of the ideas that brought us here. Two hundred years after Kantt, Rawls vindicated republicanism and the categorical imperative, and Michael Walzer tried to square the Kantian circle of democratic transition by force. Civilization is nothing else but a set of building bricks...

Imagined Communities - Benedict Anderson

Imagined Communities was first published in 1983. At the time, when fights over "Marxism" and "Capitalism" were still relevant and every concept was seen through the prism of these two ideologies, the book was considered as a History book. In 1991, right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book was seen as a prophecy, similar to what happened to Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations after 9/11. Today, Imagined Communities is a text book for students of nationalism and culture.

At the core of Anderson's argument is the idea that books printed in vernacular language and novels allowed members of the national bourgeoisies to communicate with each other, which allowed them to create, little by little, a common discourse that eventually ended up in the struggle to create Nation-States. If one assumes that Internet and cell phones changed the way people communicate with each other qualitatively with respect to books, it is easy to stretch the argument and buy the idea that Twitter, blogs, and cell phones will create new and different discourses that might change Nation-States. There is already  some academic evidence on how Internet has already changed the way in which we read and write.

The technological support determines what is written and who does it:

The first known texts are written in hard surfaces such as stone, an expensive and labor intensive activity that could be paid for only by large organizations such as empires. That's why the first written records are laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi.

Paper, clay, and papyrus lowered the costs of writing, which became an affordable activity that allowed the transmission of non-essential ideas such as religion more easily.

The printing press lowered even more the costs of passing ideas: novels, poems, and all kind of texts could be produced massively at a very low cost. Bourgeois could read, but also write very easily.

Twitter and the Internet represent the ultimate democratization of writing: anyone with a computer can create a blog or open a Twitter account and say whatever (s)he wants, with an added value: previous means of communication had some gatekeepers that guaranteed, up to an extent, the quality of whatever was published. Printing a book might have been cheap for some sectors of society, but a would-be writer still needed to convince the printer that his work was worth it. 

Gatekeepers have totally disappeared in the Internet age, resulting in a lot of noise and polarizing voices, but also in a richer debate in some cases -the blogosphere changed the terms and nature of the debate on Economics, to mention just one field. 

Internet is putting us in a more democratic and unregulated World. The left likes the "democratic" part, and the right likes the "unregulated" part. The result, like in most undemocratic and unregulated environments, is lack of depth. The clearest example is the United States, whose Founding Fathers found inspiration in the books by Locke and Montesquieu; the Tea Party, in Sarah Palin's tweets...

Internet and cell phones are changing the political debate, and they will eventually change Nation-States, just like books turned empires into Nation-States. It is obviously too early to say whether the final result will be  a more unified humankind or a multiplicity of isolated communities. Whatever we think the final result will be is pure speculation and a result of our preconceptions about human nature.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

I just completed Harper Perennial's edition of the complete works of Oscar Wilde. The book contains an introduction by Vyvyan Holland, Wilde's son.

A number of critics have dissected and studied Wilde's works. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece, and so are The Importance of Being Earnest and Wilde's short stories. The rest of his theater and his poems are OK, but nothing extraordinary. His essays on art and aesthetics require a very high knowledge on the topic; they are not designed for the general public. His essay on The Soul of Man Under Socialism is partly right when it says that Socialism deserves a chance if it makes individualism the core of its action plan -it didn't, in case you were wondering.

This edition also contains De Profundis, the poem that Wilde wrote during his time in prison his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (as usual, Wikipedia contains an excellent summary of the Wilde-Douglas love affair). De Profundis is one of the most intimate and touching texts I've ever read. If I had to recommend this book based on a hidden pearl few people know about, De Profundis would be it.

From Babel to Dragomans - Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis is the author one must read to start having a broad idea of the Middle East. For one thing, he was the creator of the expression "clash of civilizations", later popularized by Samuel Huntington, and taken as a guidance for policy by some neo-conservative ideologues in the aftermath of 9/11.

From Babel to Dragomans collects 51 essays written by Bernard Lewis on the Middle East. The topics covered range from gastronomy to U.S. foreign policy, passing through Turkish historiography and several comparative analysis of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The book is divided in three sections: part 1 deals with   "past history"; part 2, with "current history", and part 3 collects essays on historiography and Orientalism. By construction, books that collect essays tend to be repetitive and From Babel to Dragomans is not an exception. From that perspective, part 1 is probably the best part of the book by providing a quick introduction to Middle East from a scholar perspective -part 2 is too ideologized, and part 3 is too academic.

There are a lot of remarkable quotes in this book, though there is probably one that comes out for its prescience regarding the current events in the Middle East: 

"Where the so-called fundamentalist Muslims and democrats are both in opposition, the former have an immense advantage. In the mosques and preachers, they dispose of a network for meeting and communication that no government, however tyrannical, can entirely control and no other group can rival."

This quotation comes handy now that the popular revolts in Egypt and Tunisia are getting stopped by the military or kidnapped by the Salafists. 

People were too optimistic about the prospects of these two countries to implant functioning democratic regimes. Obviously, the images of young people going out to the streets and risk their lives is shocking and moving at the same time, but any cold and fact-based analysis could see from the beginning that both the military and the Salafists had something that the protesters have lacked since they took the streets: organization and command chains. A political movement cannot be run like an assembly if it really wants to survive. 

The Burden of Responsiblity - Tony Judt

This is a book about three Frenchmen: Léon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron. What these three men have in common is, according to Tony Judt:

 (...) their shared quality of moral (and, as it happens, physical) courage, their willingness to take a stand not against their political or intellectual opponents-everyone did that, all too often-but against their "own" side. They paid a price for this in loneliness, in reduced influence (at least for much of their life), and in their local reputation, which rarely matched the one they had gained among friends and admirers abroad (p. 20).

The example of a non-moral intellectual is, according  to Judt, Jean-Paul Sartre, that favorite of the progressive crowd. This is what Judt has to say about him:

According to Jean-Paul Sartres own version, in his notebooks from the "phony war" period, he spent the interwar years culpably unaware of what was happening around him, clinging to the apolitical pacifism born of World War I. Hence his later hyperengagement, a reaction above all to the risk of once again missing the vessel of History as it steamed past him in the night. Sartres motives may have been personal, but the pattern was widespread. Adrift and uncertain in the storms of the thirties, some intellectuals and public figures avoided or neglected to cast in their lot with the defense of democracy; some made choices, but the "wrong" ones; others made the "right" choices, but late (p. 15).

The Burden of Responsiblity is a a good introduction to the ideas of the three characters of the book. A basic knowledge of French modern history is required, though.

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble - Simon Schama

Simon Schama is a British historian at Columbia University. He writes regularly for The Guardian, The New York Times, The FT, Vogue, The New Yorker, and a bunch of other newspapers. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble is a collection of his essays written since the late nineties.

This book contains a lot of definitions are descriptions about a lot of places and persons. Here are some of them:

About Washington DC:

• Are there any city avenues more inhumanly broad than those of Washington DC¿
• (...) most of the young people who make up the clientele and who come to love the place aren't there because of the romance in the city, but because they need to live in an idea made architecturally visible: the idea of democratic government.
• (...) when the cherry blossom is doing its shameless thing, and the streets of Adams Morgan are warming to the kids on the block, it 's entirely possible to see Washington as not just DC, not just ideology made visible, but as an American community; and a good one at that.

About the Korean War:

• The Korean question is both relic and omen.

About 9/11:

• (...) if the script of Bloody Tuesday had been offered to a studio, it would have been turned down not for the scale of the horror, but for its failure to supply identifiable villains.

About Democracy:

• The first and greatest weapon a democracy has for its own defence is the assumption of common equity; of shared sacrifice.

About George W. Bush:

• Prayers (like vacations) are the default mode for this president, who knows how to chuckle and bow the head in the midst of disaster but not, when it counts, how to govern or to command.

About Isaiah Berlin:

• Though he genuinely admired American energy and forthrightness, the mistaken conviction that exhaustive iteration was the same thing as understanding depressed him.
• [he was] that unlikely thing: a seriously happy Jew.

About Winston Churchill:

• No leader who made jokes against himself was in much danger of turning dictator.
• Thrice he was the impassioned advocate of reduced arms expenditure, as Tory, Liberal and Tory again, and thrice again (in the naval arms race immediately before the First World War, in the 1930s and in the Cold War) he was gung-ho for rearmament.
• [it was] Churchill's fundamental decency, the quality that made Orwell forgive him his anti-socialism and and his sentimental imperialism. Though limited in education and social experience, Churchill nonetheless had no difficulty translating his own romantic feeling for nationality to the aspirations of other cultures. It was natural, then, for him to end up the friend of Michael Collins as well as F. E. Smith, Chaim Weizmann as well as Emir (later King) Abdullah, and to see that a two-state solution in both Ireland and Palestine was the only way to satisfy equally legitimate longings for homeland.

About Gérard Depardieu:

• Gérard Depardieu (...) must have worn the clothes of every generation after the Black Death.

About Pablo Picasso:

• Picasso regcognised in Rembrandt an ancestor of his own dangerous visual intelligence, which could move freely between the aesthetic convenience of the nude and the messier, sexier reality of the naked model: etched images of half-dressed women warming themselves by the stove. Nothing like that stripping truth would happen again until Manet and Degas.

About Bolognese sauce:

• Bolognese sauce isn't fast food.

About small children:

• Small children are nature's little conservatives. They are warmed by fulfilled expectations. They have favourites in the kitchen - and why deny them¿

About stews:

• Stews are bringers of contentment to a discontented world. I don't know of any other kind of food, except perhaps freshly baked bread and cakes, guaranteed to fill a kitchen with such a sense of abundance. They violate all the cool modern conventions, for they demand fat and time and copious carbs - mashed potatoes or parsnips, pasta or bread  to soak up the juicy mess.

But in general, this book is mostly aimed to the the Oxbridge / Ivy League Humanities crowd. For the rest of the World population, this book is a coin-toss: some bits are interesting, but most of it contains praises to artists and historians mostly unknown, at least to me (for instance: J. H. Plumb, Charlotte Rampling, Anselm Kiefer, John Virtue, Ruskin).

The book is also extremely verbose -or "eloquent", if you are British. British verbosity is something Americans love, which why they forgave Christopher Hitchens' atheism. But for the rest of the World, especially non-native English speakers, this book is a painful read.

The New Industrial State - John Kenneth Galbraith

The New Industrial State set the analytic foundations of the multinational corporation. Though he didn't name it, John Kenneth Galbraith discovered the principal-agent problem. In this book, Galbraith also dismantled the assumption that markets are composed by small price-taker units, but by large corporations who have interests of their own, including setting prices (quite obviously) but also reaching political power.

Given his style, which might be too formal for today's audiences, it is tempting to say that you can find his ideas on multinationals tempered down for the 21st century in the work of Naomi Klein. However, there is a significant difference between the two of them. Klein believes that the objective of the heads of multinational companies is to control the world, or something. Galbraith, however, makes the case that they just want to defend their vested interests (obviously in detriment of the common citizen). Evidence has been in the side of Galbraith and the same case has been made recently by conservative-turned-to-liberal-turned-to-independent thinkers like Francis Fukuyama and Fareed Zakaria.

The New Industrial State can be too burdensome at times, and is 500 pages long. If you really have to read it, you can save yourself a lot of time by reading the foreword, or even better, this article by Galbraith's son describing what the book is all about and how it is relevant today (the article was written in 2007).

This is the second book by Galbraith that I review, and I don't want to give the impression that Galbraith's work is useless today. He created the ideological framework of the American left; namely, corporations are bad (and small businesses inherently good), education will solve all of our problems, more money and resources should be devoted to liberal arts and public broadcasting (public goods in general), environment degradation is inherent to big-scale capitalism, and demilitarization should be priority number 1 in the U.S. foreign policy agenda. The fact that the American left has made mantras out of these ideas is not Galbraith's fult, but the left's, which has been unable to advance any significant part of the agenda, at least until Obama passed his health care reform.

Here is a 50 minutes interview with Galbraith done in the 80's.

A Fable of Modern Art - Dore Ashton

"(...) the archetypal modern artist, existing in a constant state of anxiety, plagued by metaphysical doubt"

In A Fable of Modern Art Dore Ashton tries to trace the origins of modern art to Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece (ebook in English here), on his least known books. The book is composed by 5 essays, each of which is dedicated to The Unknown Masterpiece, and its influences on Cézanne, Picasso, Rilke, and Schönberg.

This is not a  book for general audiences, so if you haven't read The Unknown Masterpiece, or if you're not familiar with the four artists mentioned above, reading this book will be very painful, or at least boring. Also, if you don't think that modern art is the ultimate stage of human creation, you will find Ashton's arguments biased and groupie-like. 

Shortly, this is a book for the NY modern art clique, whose members are most likely friends with Ashton, but which is, after all, a very small group. It shouldn't come as a surprise that A Fable of Modern Art is out of print and the University of California Press has no intention to re-issue it in the short or medium term. 

Below is part 1 (and here's part 2 and 3) of Pierrot Lunaire, on which Schönberg "used the human voice as an unearthly counterpart to the clear colors his instruments produced", according to Ashton (in their infinite wisdom, some Youtube users say that it's hard to appreciate this music unless you have a previous knowledge of the theory behind it; so please, go back to school if you're not ready for this).

Papeles inesperados - Julio Cortázar

¿Te bastan esos botones, o necesitás todo el costurero?

-Julio Cortázar, en uno de los textos clasificados como "Entrevistas ante el espejo"

Si fuera un crítico literario profesional, detestaría hacer una crónica de cualquier libro que, como Papeles inesperados, recogiera textos inéditos de un escritor fallecido consagrado. El crítico está en esas situaciones en una posición imposible. Por un lado, decir que los textos son malos lo coloca del lado de los detractores del autor consagrado en cuestión. Por el otro lado, decir que los textos son buenos lo coloca en una posición  totalmente contraria a la del escritor, quien, por razones imposibles de descifrar, decidió no publicar los documentos que se descubren después de su muerte.

Los libros como Papeles inesperados sólo sirven para dos cosas. La primera es para que los admiradores del escritor completen su colección y, en el caso específico de los admiradores que sí leen, para que tengan una pieza nueva de literatura del ídolo. La segunda cosa es para que las casas editoriales se llenen de dinero. Este tipo de libros no son útiles ni para conocer a un escritor (para lo cual lo lógico, aunque no siempre lo mejor, es leer su libro más conocido), ni para descubrir sus pensamientos (si el autor está muerto, es evidente que ya conocemos sus pensamientos a través de su obra publicada con anterioridad).

En ese sentido, Papeles inesperados es un libro imprescindible para los admiradores de Cortázar, pero no porque se encuentre en este ejemplar algo novedoso (quizá la única excepción sea un capítulo suprimido del Libro de Manuel), sino por el hecho mismo de que sea un libro de textos inéditos de Cortázar... Los que quieran conocer a Cortázar pueden iniciarse con Rayuela, o el Bestiario, o cualquiera de esos.

Para el resto de los mortales, es decir, para los que gozamos de la lectura de Cortázar sin llegar a ser expertos o admiradores incondicionales, Papeles inesperados es un libro prescindible con varios momentos memorables. En mi caso, esos momentos son "Manuscrito hallado junto a una mano", cuento divertidísimo, "Un cronopio en México", que narra las experiencias de Cortázar en ese país, todos los poemas, entre otros. 

Me parece que hay un exceso de ensayos y textos políticos en relación con piezas literarias. Más allá del fetiche de querer publicar todo lo que escribió Cortázar, me parece que los textos son prescindibles por repetitivos: toda persona que haya leído algo de Cortázar sabrá que apoyó al régimen socialista de Cuba hasta la ignominia, que fue un opositor incansable de las dictaduras militares de América Latina y, en general, un partidario de la revolución socialista mundial, permamente e imaginativa. Los textos no aportan nada nuevo para conocer el ideario de Cortázar, y no tendrían por qué hacerlo: no hay que olvidar que Cortázar no era un teórico político. Su comunismo era más bien hormonal, como el de la mayoría de la gente. En ese sentido, su pensamiento político no evolucionaba.

Papeles inesperados es un buen libro.