Synthesizes historical research and journalism to sketch the socioeconomic trajectory of Oregon east of the Cascades since 1850, observing the arid yet variegated environment shapes the populace but its communities have never managed a workable approach to land usage. Between 1845-70, some 400,000 settlers passed through on the way to Portland and the Willamette Valley. Some stayed, others came directly in pursuit of mining, lumber, livestock, and dry farming, especially wheat in the north/northeast. The author rejects the ‘colonial’ economic paradigm: while outside capital was often required, these were individual agents in pursuit of a better way of living. The federal government initially sought to manage Indian claims – calling into question ‘Manifest Destiny’ as a policy. Later the Carey Act (1894), concerned with irrigation, the Taylor Grazing Act (1934), and others aimed to restrict and proscribe ‘exploitive’ land usage. Though Carey generally failed its purpose, it reshaped central Oregon, particularly Redmond and Bend (Oregon’s Jackson Hole, no longer belonging to the high desert paradigm). Indeed there is substantial evidence of Progressivism’s shortcomings: outside experts simply weren’t, but only another self-interested party. Late 19th-century railroads shaped regional economic development, but in the 1920s and 30s state-managed highways did more to enlarge eastern Oregon’s worldview, surprisingly including commodity export. In the postwar era, birds not the broader conservation movement drew in outside nonprofits, yet conflicts broadened into local defenders of property rights pitted against external, self-styled land managers. Cox devotes a large part to more recent controversies in the easternmost counties such as Grant, noting the state is deemed to evidence America’s highest degree of county autonomy. Detailed with personal anecdote and descriptive but not quite analytic, Cox leaves one yet searching for a balanced polity encompassing external actors.
Book abstracts
3. Millard, Hero of the Empire (19 Jan 2018)
Narrates Winston Churchill’s Boer War capture and escape, which launched the immodestly ambitious young man into his Parliamentary career. Following an election loss, Churchill secured a journalism commission but acted as a (very brave) combatant during a Natal reconnaissance mission. Held in Pretoria, his escape from the Transvaal countryside turned on the good fortune of seeking help from an English-born mining manager and smuggled transport in the rail car of a compatriot wool exporter. Although generalizations weigh down the outset, the main tale is well told and the book holds some insight into Churchill’s personality. However, the attempt to connect every thread is too ambitious – and Jan Smuts is left out!
4. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss (27 Jan 2018)
Surveys the German-American political philosopher’s primary teachings:
On political philosophy
• Political philosophy, which aims to replace opinion with knowledge, paradoxically pits the organic wisdom against rational inquiry
• The terrible truth of philosophy is there’s no objective need for it – the only critical necessity is intrinsic to its practice
• One of Strauss’ most enduring themes is Athens vs Jerusalem: Each is obligated to open itself to the other’s challenge. The two sides agree the need for morality, which is core to justice (and thus law). Athens is steadfastly moral; Jerusalem is alive to the possibility of revelation
• Jewish political thought evidences the particular rather than the universal. The Jewish state is modified exile. Strauss showed outward fidelity to Israel, inward commitment to philosophy, in order to combat atheism while preserving truth in knowledge
• Political thought is the first of the social sciences because human experience is practical, borne of action for a purpose (i.e., to preserve or to change). Political opinion presupposes a structured way of life, codified by law, underpinned by a theory of governance
• Justice is a mixture of freedom and coercion, or virtue and persuasion
• Straussian ‘esoteric reading’ is not a doctrine but a process. The emphasis on close reading, which may reveal hidden ideas and emphases, was taken from Heidegger. Politics is implicit in every text because texts are sure to be read in their social context
• Strauss avoided ontology, the nature of being. Not everything is permissible – thus political philosophy, not ontology, is the bedrock of humanity
• It’s safer to understand the low in light of the high (i.e., the ideal), in order to appreciate the best of man’s political traditions
• The experience of history and daily affairs cannot override evidence of simple right and wrong, which is the bottom of natural right. The problem of justice in every context persists
• The distinction between philosophy and ideology is the regard for permanent conditions of human nature – which makes some things insoluble
• Statesmanship is the highest non-philosophical pursuit: the pursuit of freedom and justice through prudence transcends lawyers, technicians, visionaries, and opportunists
• The cultivation of friendship (with one’s opposites) is imperative to practicing the craft
On the history of ideas:
• Like Burke, Strauss sided with the ancients because political thought is closest to the political community
• Classic political thought derives directly from the experience of newly conscious political society. Subsequent political philosophy was tempered by the traditions borne of the political context (i.e., the choices society made)
• According to the classics, honor is secondary to virtue and wisdom. Initiated by Machiavelli, the concern with virtu is shared by Strauss and also the ancients; but Machiavelli omitted the concern with moderation
• Plato’s Laws, Machiavelli’s Discourses, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws put issues of ‘political education’ front and center, in an ‘institutional’ or regime-based approach
• Machiavelli broke with the ancients in 1) abandoning the concern for morality in society and justice in government, 2) elevating politics’ concern for security and consumption over ideals, and 3) positing nature (i.e., the environment) as something to be exploited by technology
• Machiavelli’s view that the means justify the ends eliminated morality and paved the way for tyranny. The modern American concern for freedom runs counter to Machiavelli
• Property unbounded from classic, medieval limits to acquisition is at the core of modern capitalism. Initiated by Locke, this was a big change in natural law: the central value of labor shifted the moral center of property from nature to creativity
• There are three waves of modernity: 1) Hobbes and Locke grounded politics in passion and self-preservation; 2) Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx shifted to historical processes, which are fixed (in contrast to malleable passions; 3) Nietzsche and Heidegger introduced radical historicism so as to reintroduce theology into politics. But the ‘accidental advantage’ of the ‘dead god’ enables the recovery of idealism
• The elasticity of Heidegger’s thought accommodates very bad political philosophy, ideology such as Nazism. Concern for being, versus for humanity, lead to indifference to tyranny. Thus Heidegger had dismissed ethics from the center of philosophy
• Strauss returns to the primacy of politics as a basis for criticizing Heidegger. Both held the West to be in crisis, Heidegger for its loss of culture – the spiritual decay facing Germany – Strauss because Western liberalism was being undermined by relativism and historicism
• Strauss recovered Plato as a source of modern liberalism, by showing Plato denied the possibility of a completely just city and by showing the dialogue as a vehicle of authorial intent – it’s the content that counts
• Natural Right and History seeks to restore natural right, in response to the inroads made by Heidegger’s relativism, to shore up liberalism’s defenses against tyranny. Natural right itself points toward admiring the excellence of the human soul for its intrinsic value, without regard for material conditions
• Strauss has been criticized for his focus on the end of a just society, which implies hierarchy (i.e., political inequality)
On liberalism and tyranny:
• The regime is core to classical political philosophy, both in a factual and a normative sense
• The completely open society will exist on a lower level than a closed society aiming at perfection
• Moral behavior arises from obligations to others, felt needs and strong attachments, not arbitrary commitments
• The Counter Enlightenment was an effort to save morality from determinism of reason. Divesting religion of its public character was a victory for the Enlightenment
• Liberal education is a ladder from mass democracy to ‘democracy of everybody’, but it is elitist and not egalitarian
• Liberalism entails a public-private divide. To abolish the liberal framework would be to pave the way to tyranny
• The contrast between core defense of personal liberty and agnosticism of personal liberty is symptomatic of the crisis of the West. The root problem is attenuated understanding of liberalism, triggered by Nietzsche and Heidegger, and refracted by Berlin
• From Carl Schmitt, Strauss learned to see politics defined as ‘friend or enemy’. A world without conflict would be conformist. When man abandons what is (seen to be) right in favor of comfort, he forsakes human nature
• Evil is ever present. Ideals require moral fervor but also political prudence. The revolutionary’s goal, post-Enlightenment, is to fix it now. The crisis of the West can be treated by prudence, by recourse to liberalism
• Social scientists haven’t recognized fascism and communism as modern tyranny
• The so-called fact-value distinction is at root of nihilism. Social science which can’t distinguish tyranny has no value
• Not only ideology but also science and technology (the conquest of nature) are instruments of social control. The path was blazed by Machiavelli, who sought to connect ‘virtu’ with the ancients albeit without moderation
7. Machiavelli, Prince (18 April 2022)
In the most famous example of Machiavelli’s modern, ‘scientific’ approach to government, the Florentine observes there are leaders with the means of forcing the issue and those who must rely on persuasion: the former leverages either fortuna or, better yet, prowess (skill). The prince must understand and even foresee circumstances and boldly, opportunistically match his behavior to the times: the ends justify the means, and certainly the people will judge him on results. (He must know how to act the lion and also the fox, and to seize the womanly fortuna.) His foremost skill should be in warfare. Regarding the populace, men worry less about a ruler they love than one they fear – punishment is worse than dishonor – but he should not be hated. he prince rewards those who increase the city-state’s prosperity, and devises ways to promote the citizenry’s acquiescence and dependency. Governing according to an ideal of how people should live is dangerous to a ruler who must solve for how they actually do live (p.50). Men, especially councilors, will behave badly unless forced to do otherwise (p.77). On the surface, Machiavelli’s realism is no longer shocking and he is well described as the father of sociology; on the other hand, it is clear break with Christian Aristotelianism and the embarkment of modern political philosophy.
Coda: intelligence may lie in understanding things in their own right, in what others will understand, or in neither(?).
5. Strauss, Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism (21 Feb 2018)
In a series of lectures / essays addressing the history of Western ideas, as well as the interplay of philosophy and religion, Strauss makes the case for the primacy of political thought as a bulwark against tyranny and argues the main threat is liberalism’s crisis of confidence. Strauss also recurs to the practice of political philosophy itself.
On practice of philosophy:
• Philosophy begins when the quest for origins is to understood in light of nature, not myth. The gods are the engine by which man believes he can control chance. By contrast, Christian religion prompts one to search inside oneself
• Philosophy is the highest end of political life, for it seeks to answer the question of what is virtue? and to supply practical references; however, the philosopher has to understand things as they are understood in the political community. It has no independent justification
• The poet imitates the legislator in seeking justice, but acts the valet, according to Nietzsche. Plato, to the contrary, says the poet possesses genuine knowledge of the soul. In this sense philosophy is psychology; however, modern psychology and sociology (which do not seek to distinguish between the noble and the base) cannot articulate a higher purpose for life. Thus philosophy, which works by logic, and poetry, which acts by demonstration, are more similar, seeking a solution to the problem of happiness. But philosophy is concerned with all things (the whole); poetry (especially as tragedy) prepares men for the philosophic life
• Aristocracy is the form of government in which the virtuous don’t have to compromise with democratic predilections for common behaviors
• Socrates is the philosophic model, the ‘loving skeptic’. The Socratic dialogue is the main vehicle for classical ideals of civic virtue and justice, the Socratic model is the highest possibility of liberalism
• Dialectic is skill in conversation: Socrates used ‘what if?’ when contradicted, proceeded to general opinions when unchallenged, each in pursuit of consensual agreement (if not truth)
• Rational philosophy is guided by the distinction between objective (true) and subjective. Existentialism says what was objective is superficial and problematic (debatable), and what was subjective is profound but not demonstrable. It rejects a return to metaphysics
• There may be many ways to understand an author, but only one way to understand him as he understood himself
On the sequence of political thinking:
• The ancients were not addressing intelligent men but decent men, and sought to settle controversy in a kind way for the good citizen. No intellectual effort is required to grasp ordinary morality, which consists of doing, whereas the highest morality – virtue – is knowledge
• After Socrates, history exemplifies the precepts of political philosophy. And history remains political history because statesmanship and legislation are the one thing needful. Politics is not the highest but is first (i.e., most urgent), because human things are close to the nature of all things
• By understanding the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides presents the highest ascent of Greek civilization (i.e., politics) and the fragile character of ancient Greek justice, as against barbarians. The Thucydidean speeches are meant to enlarge the character of the speech, to fill the space between the talk (essence) and deeds (wisdom) of the actors. By understanding Periclean Athens we understand the wisdom of moderation: wisdom cannot be said, only practiced. In the act of pursuing wisdom, Plato qua philosopher emphasizes individual choice (i.e., nature) while Thucydides qua political historian points up fate (i.e., events are too big)
• But contrary to Plato, Thucydides sees virtue as a means. He sees unrest, barbarism, war as the norm, where Plato seeks rest, Greek civilization, peace. Thucydides’ highest is unknown, Plato’s highest is nature’s highest. Thucydides’ cause of Periclean Athens is Periclean Athens, Plato’s Periclean Athens is a condition not the cause. For Thucydides, the highest is fragile, for Plato it is the strongest.
• Plato suggested three parts to the soul: reason, spiritedness, desire. Spirit is deferential to reason whereas desire revolts. Strauss says spiritedness thus links the highest level of man to the lowest, but spirit arises from desire’s being rechanneled
• The Middle Ages was the first era to foster the dialogue between philosophy and religion
• Philosophy is more precarious in Islamic and Jewish society than the Christian West. In these cultures religion is law, and does not admit of science; philosophy is highly private, as it was among the ancient Greeks. This explains the collapse of philosophy in Islam after the Middle Ages
• Aristotle says the paramount requirement of society is stability. The classic of the Christian world was Aristotle’s Politics, in the Jewish world Plato’s Laws and Republic, featuring the prophetic philosopher-king. Nor is there Roman thinking or the natural law is the Islamic and Jewish traditions
• Hume viewed man as the reference to unchanging nature. Logical positivism followed the ‘discovery of history’, which emerged from Kant’s distinction between validity and genesis
• Classical political philosophy did not need to demonstrate the essence of courage, justice, kindness, virtue: it knew these were good. Hegel rejected the ancients for lack of demonstrability
• Heidegger defined ‘to be’ as to exist as man, whereas the ancients saw it as perpetual existence. His sein (‘being’ or ‘essence’) replaces knowledge as the goal of the virtuous life
• There is no universal hermeneutics, no semiotics; all dialogue is localized to context, and rhetoric is further individualized
• Sophistry is related to classical political philosophy as the French Revolution to German idealism, as exemplified by Hegel (?)
• Modernity sees philosophy not in service of truth and good but of society and its ethics. Modernity is unusually quick to dismiss the clams to truth of previous eras
• Modern science is more powerful than ancient science but incapable of suggesting how to use this power because of its aversion to values. It can’t speak of progress but only of change. It no longer aspires to perfection
• Rational conduct means to choose the right means for the right ends. Relativism, because it requires unequivocal causality, is actually a flight from reason. Thus the modern flight from scientific reason is a consequence of science’s flight from reason
• Political science is concerned with the normative, while political philosophy regards the best. The former obsesses over method, the latter umpires competing claims to good and justice. Legislation is the architectural skill of the latter
• The problem with social sciences is not abstraction per se but abstraction from the essential things of human society. Social science is concerned with regular behavior, whereas classical politics is concerned with good government
• Political history supposes freedom and empire as manifestations of power, as mankind’s great objective, but history is now seen to be broader. Philosophy can be seen as mankind’s effort to free himself of the binding premises of civilization or culture, so history now threatens philosophy; historical sequences teach us nothing about values
• The acceptance of the past (the return to historical thinking) is different from unquestioned continuing on the current path – the so-called discovery or engine of history (p233)
On the decline of the West
• Existentialism is historicism rooted in Nietzschean relativism: life-giving truth is subjective; it cannot be the same for all men, all ages. Existentialism is the attempt to break free of Nietzsche’s solution to relativism – ‘relapsing’ to metaphysics or recourse to nature. Existentialism belongs to declining Europe, for it is unsure of its absolutes
• Modern philosophy is anthropocentric, as compared with Biblical theology or Greek cosmography, and tends to regard the human mind. In the 17th century, virtue itself came to be seen as a passion; freedom then took the place of virtue. The good life does not correspond to universal truth but consists of creating an original pattern.
• The rediscovery of classical times points up that Athens and Jerusalem have never been harmonized; but the commonality remains justice-morality-divine or natural law. The spring of Western vitality is the irresolvable tension between philosophy and religion, Athens and Jerusalem
• To combine exactness and comprehensiveness, start at the strategic points
• The well-being of the city depends on law and its observance. Justice is primarily a political goal. The wise rule indirectly through the law; the rule of wisdom is diluted by consent
• The difference between progress, which is a moral claim, and change, which makes no claim to improvement, is a major compromise of the modern West. Good and evil were replaced by progressive and reactionary in the 19th century. This substitution failed once it became obvious there is no motor of history; facts don’t teach anything about values; social sciences can only rationalize; the values of barbarism are as defensible as those of civilization
• The impossibility of Irving Berlin’s grounding the case for liberal freedom (‘inviolable boundaries’) indicates the crisis of liberalism as it moves from an absolutist claim to relativism
• The counter to Heidegger’s nightmarish world society is the individuated, the noble, and the great, which are cultural (i.e., explicit to the nation-state)
16. Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (24 August 2021)
A series of essays and reviews elucidating characteristic elements of Leo Strauss’ political thought. Political thought considers humanity’s greatest objectives, freedom and government, those matters which lift men above their normal, daily concerns. It complements actual practice but stands above the here-and-now because philosophy is a neutral manner of consideration, firstly interested in the best regime and only then in contemporary circumstance.
The pursuit of truth entails value judgements, honestly derived. Contemporary political science, sociology, etc., seek to proscribe subjective criteria but admit judgments via assumptions or conceptual frameworks. Better to acknowledge we must first address what is or should be political, a question that is dialectic or pre-scientific, that is common sense. Philosophy rejects the ‘charms of competence’ (e.g., math) or ‘humble awe’ (meditation on the human soul and its experience): it is a matter of intellectual courage and moderation. Whereas positivism inevitably becomes historicism, which rejects the question of the best society and contends the fundamental questions cannot be answered once for all.
Whereas most philosophers have considered the combination of what is best with what is possible in given circumstance, the historicist insists that circumstance entails a determinative ‘historical conditioning’. But the necessity of all doctrine being related to a particular setting does not preclude the doctrine’s truth or utility. Political thought does not become obsolete because times have changed. Historicism believes in continuous progress, however, that we are necessarily ever closer to the truth. The nature of contemporary politics is superseded by trends, the question not of what is just but what should forthcome.
In political thought, the fatherland is the substance, the regime the form, the latter higher because it is compared to the best form. Virtue emerges through education in the form. Universal education requires technology free of moral or political control, something the ancients would not have countenanced. Moderns are not entitled to say they were wrong that such control would lead to dehumanization.
Machiavelli commenced the shift from government forming character to trust in institutions that deliver justice, implying belief that man is plastic. But the new prince may easily be a bad man disguised by public ambitions. Machiavelli lowered standards to increase the probability of the ‘success’ of the social order. Locke substituted acquisition for virtue as the individual’s goal. Montesquieu, contrasting the Roman republic with English political liberty, seconded the effect, substituting trade and finance for virtue. Rousseau represented the second wave of Machiavelli, wherein the criterion of justice is the general will. Democracy is government by the ill-educated; Rousseau taught that sufficient knowledge stems from conscience, the preserve of simple souls, that man is already equipped for the good life. German idealism sought to restore classicism but replaced virtue with freedom, which required an engine of history, an actualization of the right order which occurs from selfish behavior. Nietzsche commenced the third wave of modernity, characterized by individual will to power, the conquering of nature and chance, the renouncing of ideals and eternity – evidencing radical historicism.
Also:
• High ambition – hard problems – plus the question for wisdom defines philosophy. Ethics is the study of virtues, politics the study of man’s temporal ends. The philosopher ceases to be when he adopts subjective certainty of a solution that surpasses recognizing the problems / challenges to the solution. Similarly, detachment from human concerns regarding the eternal questions degenerates into provincialism
• The classic political philosopher is not a mediator but a neutral. Political science is transferable from one community to another, a teacher of legislators. It is concerned not with the purpose of the nation-state or foreign policy, for these are givens, but with the best political order
• Compared with classical political thought, all subsequent treatments are derivative, estranged from these primary issues. There is an important distinction between independently acquired knowledge and inherited knowledge. Special effort is required to discern what is true of the latter. Lessons must always be relearned if their vitality is to persist
• The law of nature is based on the distinction between the nature of being and the perfection of being
• Classic political thinkers sought the best way; Hegel demanded neutrality; thus thought became theory
• For Hobbes, justice does not exist outside of human institutions. Yet there is no basis but natural law for following the sovereign, so he resorts to disqualifying civil disobedience, but is nonetheless upended by the nature of charity and thus justice
• Locke denies knowledge of natural law by nature, says understanding must come from god. But: proof of the first mover does not prove natural law
• Both Hobbes and Hegel view human society as based on a humanity which lacks awareness of sacred restraints, and is guided by nothing other than thymos (i.e., desire for recognition).
• Spinoza championed pantheism and liberal democracy, running against his era, but was rehabilitated by the philosophes; yet he was surpassed in the 20th century by Hobbes (atheism, Leviathan) due to the work of Hegel and Nietzsche
• The historian is unlikely to know the philosopher’s intention better than the original, no matter the benefit of hindsight. By invading one’s privacy, the historian does not know the subject better but ceases to see the subject as an individual
• Originality or invention of system does not equal depth or true perception, understanding
4. Keegan, Winston Churchill (23 March 2022)
Sketches the life of Britain’s foremost 20th-century statesman, whose wartime leadership merely punctuated his vision and achievements as a journalist and in office. Despite little formal schooling, Churchill mastered English rhetoric and consequently a romantic telling of British history, centering on a patriotism borne of personal freedom, the sanctity of (common law) justice, and limited government. Such principles colored his political leadership. A solder and student of warfare, he never forgot its consequences for the common man. An aristocrat who held to Tory democracy, he is little appreciated for championing the early welfare state (Lloyd George wrongly getting the credit for the People’s Budget). An imperialist, he sympathized with the Boers and Michael Collins’ Ireland but not Gandhi’s India – for the latter did not lead a warrior caste. In the 1930s, Gallipoli, opposition to Indian self-rule and support for Edward VIII, and obnoxious habits kept him from office and influence. Yet rightly seeing the perils of airborne war and Nazi Germany, he set the agenda for World War II and the subsequently the anti-communist Cold War.
22. Craig, Germany 1866-1945 (13 December 2021)
United Germany, though evidencing the thirst for liberty and flourishes of superlative culture, succumbed to the seduction of power and consequences of political failure to embrace liberalism, its people transformed from a Kulturvolk to a Machtvolk. Responsibility stems from Bismarck’s nationalism, which excluded simultaneous transition to popular sovereignty; Hitler’s cataclysm made it newly possible; but Craig’s account overlooks the historic loss of Prussia.
After the Austrian war, Bismarck conciliated liberal opinion in order to coopt the southern Catholic states (opposed to agrarian Prussian aristocrats) which had blocked the Zollparlament in 1868; Bismarck had overestimated the economy’s integrative capacity. No politician dared oppose the chancellor after 1870, yet still he reserved local prerogatives including education, policy, and revenue generation to the lander (especially Bavaria). The constitution, meant to be efficient vis-à-vis provincial rivalries without curtailing the Prussian monarchy or aristocracy, acknowledged 18 states plus Alsace-Lorraine; it contained no bill of citizen rights. Politics did not attract capable men and competing interests were seen to undermine the superior purpose of the Hegelian state. The Kulturkampf set Germans against one another, damaging the authority of civil courts and more generally liberalism. Simultaneously, the Grunderzeit kindled modern anti-Semitism. Foreign policy was defensive, but Bismarck’s manhandling the foreign service undermined its professionalism and his machinations (more so than his overt character) were responsible for his fall. At the end of his career, he had no answers other than threat of violence – a tactic which would tragically persist.
The country’s position deteriorated under the feckless Wilhelm II, who never read the constitution, holding to divine right and direct rule. With von Holstein he sought and failed to draw closer to Russia, seeking like all German elites recognition as a great power, when it would have been better to pull back and redress social imbalances. Bernhard von Bulow hoped an aggressive foreign policy would disarm the left; Bethman Hollweg succeeded to debt and a military which saw itself as an increasingly necessary independent actor. In these 1890s, trade unions sought for social democracy and responsible government, but were demonized by elites, while the parliamentarians had no experience of using supply to leverage the executive arm. Effectively blocked by parties organized on the basis of economic class and so averse to coalition, Bethman become reliant on military influence as well as reserves of power in Prussia, the Conservative Party, the Pan German league, and the agricultural and industrial lobbies. Aside from Wilhelm II himself, Bulow and Tirpiz were the most reckless ministers, the latter converting the Bismarckian policy into grasping Weltpolitik. The arms race with Britain, the imperialism evident in the Baghdad railway, and the exclusion of Russian grain (at behest of Prussians) as well as the social Darwinism of conservative Germany professoriate guided the country toward World War I
In 1914 the problem was to survive a protracted conflict with inferior resources, industrial organization, and sea power. Food was an immediate liability: prewar Germany had imported one-third of supply. Ludendorff’s appointment was a political revolution: power was overtly transferred to the high command. The shocking terms of Brest-Litovsk aroused Western antagonism as well as resistance among Eastern nations which saw the nature of German aggression.
Normalcy persisted During the Berlin commune: ‘most don’t bother to participate in the political events which shape their lives’. The Kiel mutinists were liberals not Bolshevisks. Ebert, facing anarchy, decided to side with the military, at first understandably, over time less plausibly. Weimar ministries came to exist at the sufferance of parties or factions. Conversely, since federal law did not supercede the lander, Weimar’s true (anti-democratic) enemies exploited the gaps. Inflation was rooted not in the government fiscal policies but the wartime administration, which relied on loans not tax. Arts and culture were second to none in Germany history: poetry, novels, Expressionism, Bauhaus. But the bohemians, disappointed by 1918 and opposing contemporary ministries for their military affinities, did little to defend the political order. The universities remained conservative. The ‘average’ German resorted to glorifying war as an outlet for tragedy: the German sin is to take refuge in destiny; the ideal German resists politics, when submitting to the necessity, he works via force.
At the end of Weimar, the Mittelstand was disillusioned with Bruning’s reliance on Socialists, but industrialists did not rush to help Hitler (as often supposed). Conducted under the rubric of Gleichschaltung (‘putting into the same gear’), the Nazi takeover entailed dissolving state government and the Reichsrat, purging the civil service, abolishing political parties, and coopting trade unions and eventually (in 1938) the army. But in 1933’s preparations for purging the Brown Shirts, Hitler claimed revolutions should become evolutions.
Mein Kampf established Hitler’s aggressive foreign policy – but Russia was always the goal. The early success of Hitler’s foreign policy obscured the anarchy of competing planning agencies and willy-nilly commissions. Only SS terror prevented collapse. Germany could have been brought to heel by its balance of payments. Industry shifted from western lander to south central states. Wages kept pace with inflation (although the author notes 20 percent went to taxes!). The giant industrial concerns most benefitted from Jewish confiscation. Following America’s entering World War II, Germans blamed the Fuhrer, remembering the prior conflict. After 1942’s African reverses, Hitler descended from daring strategist to meddling tactician, prohibiting for example retreat from Stalingrad on grounds of morale.
Early on, Nietzsche is given commanding effect: military victories are not political wins; proficiency does not equal virtue or morality. While undoubtedly advanced by recent scholarship, a masterful telling.
20. Horne, Belle France (24 October 2021)
A swift, Whiggish survey of French history from the Middle Ages, learned but not especially pointed save perhaps for relaying French attitudes in native English. 1214’s battle of Bouvines, which won Anjou (the seat of Angevin England) for the Bourbons (and coincidentally prompted John to concede Magna Carta and shifted the balance of continental power from the Holy Roman Empire), commenced the building of the hexagon and national memory. The reign of Louis IX (St. Louis, d.1270), successor to Bouvines’ victor Philip August, extended the country by incorporating Languedoc, Provence, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Poitou, raising French populace (in 1330) to 22 million (with 300,000 in Paris) versus 2 million in England (40,000 in London). France passed into absolutism in 1483 upon Louis XI’s death, albeit the country staggered through a succession of wars and civil wars most every century, often devastating the metropole. Henri of Navarre’s (Henri IV) 1580 siege of Paris was such an event, killing an estimated 20 percent of residents. Rebuilding the city and proving an adept diplomat while the Duc de Sully tended to administration, he won the trust of both Catholics and Huguenots. Cardinal Richelieu, on the other hand, outshone Louis XIII; he saw France as caught between Spain, Austria, and Protestant Germany; and that necessity drives events more than volition. In the 17th century France produced such great intellectuals as Descartes, Corneille (who advocated freedom of will against tragic classicism), and Montaigne (a social critic); the author laments recent times have been more fallow. In 1643, France defeated imperial Spain at Rocroi, marking the beginning of the Habsburgs’ long fall, yet immediately after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) there was a contest for control of the regency. The Fronde facilitated Louis XIV’s absolutism and the irrelevance of Parlement. Colbert’s reforms produced prosperity for the Sun King, but the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) drove out some 400,000 of 18 million citizens (Europe’s largest populace by some 10 million, save Russia). Bourgeois disdain for effete aristocrats dates to this era. The Revolution’s greatest casualty was the Catholic Church. Napoleonic roads were built for the military, bypassing the provinces; from 1803 every Parisian workman had to carry a passbook, favoring employers. Taken together, the author seems to suggest the provincial working class remained apart. Nationalism came in only in the mid 19th century. Pax Britannica was good for France, which built its second overseas empire while also industrializing. Cohesion floundered in the Prussian War, the Paris Commune (fatalities of 20,000 – 25,000 exceeded the Terror), and the Dreyfus affair. French mutinies during World War I was not realized by the Germans until Petain remedied affairs; the French disliked Woodrow Wilson. The 1938 Matignon agreement, a labor victory at the expense of readying for war, marked the climax of the left’s interwar successes. Horne laments the impossibility of relaying the nature of World War II occupation, fairly abjuring the historian’s role. Sartre was guilty of Socrates’ crime (i.e., corrupting the youth): Camus pointed up existentialism justifies totalitarian systems which oppose individual responsibility. The French were more concerned with the Hungarian invasion than Dien Bien Phu or Suez; the Algeria crisis ended with the remarkable absorption of 1 million pied noirs. De Gaulle is treated respectfully. Mitterand, who broke the Communists, rebuilt the economy (flagging since Trentes Glorieuses), and drove European integration, has been De Gaulle’s only real successor.
6. Becker, Heavenly City of the 18th-Century Philosophers (6 Mar 2018)
The Enlightenment philosophes, so far from being the first modern cohort, were in fact premodern because of their unshakeable belief in reason and progress. Relying on nature to reveal the organic laws of society, although based on the Newtonian approach to the physical sciences, was simplistic and bound to fall short. Becker focuses on the philosophes’ inability to solve such problems as the nature of virtue, while sidestepping their manifest challenge to the received wisdom of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The philosophes are always compared with the scholastics: there is no discussion of classical antiquity, a comparison which would lend another perspective on the basis of inquiry. At the same time, Becker himself points out history was the most popular scholarly topic of the late 18th century. Following Hume, contemporaries sought to identify universal principles of human nature (i.e., natural law) as well as continuity and progress. Such as variegated field is hardly to be compared with religious doctrine. Heavenly City turns on his own assumptions. The world is factual not rational, the author asserts (as an aside, saying it’s more important to use things efficiently than to understand them!); there is no predetermined order of progress or end of things; and no contemporary cohort can really understand the world of its predecessors. Accordingly, intelligence is conditioned by the very forces it seeks to understand. Thus, Becker not only stands in direct contrast with Cassirer, who described the philosophes as the first moderns, but also as a neo-Romantic and a forerunner of the postmoderns. As the introduction points out, Becker’s work was well timed to match emerging relativism and has since enjoyed periodic revival, but the failure to consider Athens as well as its historicism is crucial.