Surveys the phenomenon of bitcoin, blockchain, and other emanations from the realm of ‘trustless’ digital currency circa late 2014. Beginning with an overview of fiat currencies and a discussion of the opposing views of money as a store of value or a means of exchanges, the book then presents simplified explanations of bitcoin, the blockchain ledger than enables its interchange, and related digital currency projects, and highlights of spectacular business successes and scandals. Competing views within the development community are surveyed, and several new projects assessed. The promise of helping the ‘unbanked’ and black market opportunities are less jolting that the dystopian possibilities presented by blockchain applications. Undoubtedly soon to be dated, and reflects establishmentarian liberalism, but effectively done.
Book abstracts
19. Johnson, Churchill (21 Oct 2015)
A brisk treatment of the 20th century’s greatest statesman, written with Johnson’s characteristic flair. In a most interesting passage, the author assets five conclusions we can draw from Churchill’s life: 1) always aim high, 2) there is no substitute for hard work, 3) mistakes shall not get you down, 4) don’t waste time on low, mean thoughts, and 5) be joyful.
20. Everitt, Cicero (10 Nov 2015)
Narrates the political career of Cicero, whose hopes of preserving the Senate’s hegemony ran asunder on the monarchical ambitions of Julius Caesar and other contemporaries. Rising to power by means of his lawyerly skill, especially as an orator, Cicero was a modestly successful consul but was subsequently banished from Rome. After ingratiating himself with two of the Triumvirate to gain his return, Cicero again fell to the wayside. During this time, he sought to evaluate and popularize the Greek philosophers, thereby gaining lasting relevance in the West. He was then judicially murdered. Everitt’s treatment is a biography not a study of political philosophy.
21. Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (24 Nov 2015)
Fulminates against the American university’s abandonment of liberal arts education in favor of the postmodern left’s historicism and nihilism. The opening section blasts the contemporary student, circa 1985, and is forgettable. The meat of the book more usefully traces the passage from Weber and Nietzsche to Heidegger and thence, severely corrupted, to the postwar American faculty. The author contrasts classical understandings of the self, truth, and suchlike concepts with the studiously value-free conceptions of the moderns and postmoderns. The final section demonstrates how the Enlightenment university, established to safeguard academic freedom, has been transformed into a radically totalitarian institution. Erudite and interesting, if occasionally shrill.
15. [Mcintyre], Work of History (7 August 2022)
A festschrift narrating the career of Australian Marxisant Stuart Macintyre, evincing the effects of ‘commitment’ on professional study – however learned, surely limited and tendentious. An early historian of the British and Australian Communist parties, which pursuit was seen as groundbreaking because (modestly) critical, Macintyre moved on to Australian labor and government, and in as much as Marxist theories failed in history and they did in sociopolitics, then a Weberian sociology of the contemporary. He lamented the Hawke-Keating era didn’t go far enough in addressing utopian goals, criticizing ‘normative neoliberalism’, rejecting the search for ‘timelessness’. Effectively he and his student lodged the usual complaints of ‘winners and losers’, that unequal outcomes fall short of the general will. Macintyre was a ‘black armbander’ who controversially sought to put himself above the fray, a position which might have been more credible had he acknowledged the errors and outcomes of 20th-century communism.
22. Haskins, Rise of Universities (4 Dec 2015)
A collection of 3 lectures sketching the foundation of European universities in 12th-century Europe, reviewing the schools of Bologna and Paris, the professor, and the student. Asserts the Renaissance really began with this new institution (which lacked many modern trappings — buildings). Otherwise seems antiquarian.
23. Strauss, The City and Man (22 Dec 2015)
Modern political philosophy has become ideology, a phenomenon at the center of the crisis of the West, which is uncertain of its purpose. The modern treatment, which conceives of itself as political science, seeks to separate facts from values, and so cannot accommodate the pursuit of what ought to be, only what is. The classical treatment, best encapsulated in Aristotle’s
- Politics
because it originates the study of moral virtue, is the original and best approach to the ‘common sense’ understanding of political things. In three essays that chronologically work backward, from Aristotle to Plato’s
- Republic
to Thucydides, Strauss elucidates conceptions and problems of the best regime before turning to actual study of political history. In this way, Strauss makes the distinction between what is ‘first for us’ against what is ‘first in nature’, connecting history to philosophy without subsuming one inside the other. Philosophy is the ascendancy of events qua history. The search for the common-sense understanding of the city and man’s role as a good citizen and a good person leads the philosopher back to question: what is the nature of god? To be re-read.
24. Prest, William Blackstone (27 Dec 2015)
A narrative life of 18th-century jurist William Blackstone, renowned for distilling dense English common law into a more readily understood framework. The fatherless son of minor gentry, Blackstone rose through diligent classical studies to a place at Oxford’s All Souls, where postgraduate and administrative energies led to intra-university political activity. His initial foray as a London barrister was unsuccessful; his lectures on the common law made him a name; but his taking most of the income of newly endowed chair earned Blackstone a whiff of odium. Or was it more simply undignified ambition in Hanoverian and Georgian England? The future George III was a fan, Jeremy Bentham was not. The author’s counterbalances his own opinion. Later an MP, Blackstone was only modestly effective because of his back-bench independence and also a diffident speaking style: he failed notably during the rough-and-tumble of the Wilkes affair. But his practice grew, and some years after leaving Oxford for good, he won the judgeship he sought. Again opinions were divided, between churlish, high-church Tory and diligent national treasure. In fact he was something of a rationalist modernizer. Like Everitt’s
- Cicero
, the book could spend a bit more time elucidating the kernel of Blackstone’s thinking itself.
1. Bromwich, Intellectual Life of Burke (31 Jan 2016)
A patiently elaborated intellectual biography of Edmund Burke that falls short of its ulterior objective, to demonstrate the Anglo-Irishman is not a source of modern conservatism. A professor of English literature, Bromwich reads Burke’s published works and private correspondence alike as political action (i.e., thought leadership), concluding Burke treats politics as civic morality. So far so good. However, the author cannot reconcile Burke the reformer with Burke the defender of entailed inheritance qua tradition: he doesn’t or hasn’t understood that Burke ‘changed his stance but not his ground’ — a reasonable description of 20th-century neoconservatism, which is problematic for Bromwich. So he settles on a view of Burke solely as a reformer and seeks to read him out of the conservative canon. The ambition fails both by not considering Burke in contradistinction to, for example, the philosophes, as a historian would, and also in failing to show how the generations of conservatives who have drawn inspiration from Burke were somehow mistaken. Bromwich wrongly suggests that because Burke was not a contemporary Tory, he cannot be seen as the fount of the right. Prone to social psychology, but well written. A promised successor volume, which must cover the years following from the American Revolution, faces the bigger challenge of explaining away
- Reflections
.
2. Hamilton, Echo of Greece (7 Feb 2016)
Most of the leading thinkers of ancient Greece lived in the fourth century, after the democratic triumph of Pericles and the fall of Athens. Hamilton sketches the oeuvre of these men, particularly emphasizing the humanistic qualities and also contrasting Plato with Aristotle, the latter so long in the former’s shade. Ultimately, the Greeks sought to identify freedom, the Romans order. The conclusion is a departure: what would have become of the Christian church had it followed the Greeks?