Book abstracts

24. Kaiser, A Life in History (23 November 2023)

by kurto

Academic historians, having abandoned researching statesmanship and economic development for the Foucauldian sketching of marginalized groups, have torpedoed the discipline’s relevance to government and society. University professors can no longer synthesize or teach, but only present their abstruse pursuits. Although the trade holds too many important historical topics have been exhausted, one can inevitably discover new materials and so revised perspective (somewhat along the lines of Banner’s Ever-changing Past, albeit the latter seems more favorably inclined to sociocultural avenues). Through his own career, the author makes a persuasive case but routinely betrays conceit of unrecognized brilliance. A New Deal-Great Society liberal, he sees modern topics such as the Vietnam War in predictable terms.

Also of interest:
• The study of imperialism should entail the economic basis of hegemony, the administration of conquered territory, sources of resistance, military and naval factors, and the role of decision making process
• Camille Paglia (one of many with whom the author compares himself) first identified the cult of Foucault as reducing all events to relationships of power, indicated by language as interpreted by post facto critics.
• On his second appointment at Williams: ‘Political correctness was omnipresent, spread in a steady stream of emails to the whole campus from the dean’s office’ (p. 363) Also: ‘All
n— must die’ was revealed to him as a black student’s agit-prop by another student
• Training is how to do a task, education is how to think about the right tasks

21. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville (12 November 2023)

by kurto

A scholarly but anachronistic biography dwelling on what the 19th-century pioneer ought to have written were he a 21st-century academic. Tocqueville was a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background; Brogan is regularly unhappy he cannot be conscripted into the march of history, the telos of egalitarianism. Though the author seems to have read and re-read not only major works but surviving letters, it’s sometimes difficult to hear Tocqueville through the academic criticism. The Frenchman’s original identification of problems in democratic political philosophy is dismissed or denigrated.
Fundamentally a Norman aristocrat-cum-19th-century French nationalist, Tocqueville was born to lead as Brogan demonstrates in a thorough telling of his life. Upended by the French Revolution, schooling ‘failed’ to produce bourgeois manners, though his electoral politics in La Manche were painstaking. Primary intellectual influences included Montesquieu, Chateaubriand (source of the US sojourn), Guizot, Mill and to a less extent Pascal. He always opposed Bonaparte as representing tyranny.
By 1830, he had rejected his Catholic Norman heritage, eventually siding with the democratic age, but remained nostalgic for aristocracy. As a budding lawyer, he dealt with émigré / dispossession claims which provoked sympathy but also acknowledgement of the finality of French Revolution. The cataclysm had liberated man of tyranny of class, but exposed liberty to equality of ends. During his US tour he grasped the dynamics of entrepreneurialism and popular self-government, but missed the importance of cotton and didn’t address political parties. Subsequently, as a writer, his great themes became equality, liberty, and the Revolution.
As a politician, though seen by Bourbons (‘legitimists’) as a traitor and Orleanists as a time server (which exposure helped prompt his American sojourn), he most valued independence of party, and further advocated local self-government versus France’s traditional centralism. Liberty entailed the right to call power to account. Though he helped write the 1848 constitution, he opposed Louis Napoleon as tyrannical.
Tocqueville in Democracy in America emphasized the effects of equality, in The Old Regime and the French Revolution of liberty (or its loss). The secret to making men do good is appealing to high purposes. Society’s institutions reconcile liberty and equality. Democratic society (often) may prefer equality to liberty as a security. One of the French Revolution’s notorious legacies was dissolving freedom of association, in contrast with the American tendency of establishing voluntary associations. Having had little experience of politics, ancien French aristocrats had little knowledge of how to avoid catastrophe. ‘The general level of hearts and minds will never cease to decline while equality and despotism are partners’ (p. 567). It’s vital to understand the balance and the trend (tendency) – indicative of his contribution to what’s become sociology.
Brogan thinks Tocqueville a brilliant mind ‘trammeled’ by Catholic, aristocratic background, and considers his understanding of tyranny of the majority his ‘most serious mistake’. The Frenchman is criticized for consulting only American elites while ignoring the middle classes (notwithstanding his official mission of reviewing prisons and, separately, his rough-and-ready travels). He lived through a great epoch of arts but didn’t enjoy it.
He was a Romantic, drawn more to the old order (Old Regime) than the exemplar of the new (Democracy). Tocqueville ‘refused to admit’ the privileged, instrumental role of parties: power is the object of politics, each side pressing its case to have the better claim, not high purpose. His economic theory was antiquated and ‘obsessed’ by concern for property and the consequences of mob rule.
Tocqueville could not ‘admit’ that Algerian colonization would end badly, and ‘tritely’ predicted the US and Russia would predominate a future era. Repeatedly, the ‘game is given away’ when the subject’s conclusions don’t match the author’s. (Relatedly, Brogan dismisses Berlin’s theory of two liberties without explanation.)
In all, a frustrating read. See further Daniel Mahoney in Claremont Review of Books: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/a-noble-and-generous-soul/

10. Miller and Heiman, Strategic Selling (2004)

by kurto

There are six steps to complex sales and long-term commercial relationships: 1) get to know all four buying influences (economic, user, technical, coach), 2) informational gaps are red flags, objectives to address. ‘Leverage from strength’ describes using advantages to remove flags, 3) buyers are receptive when in growth or trouble mode, but not ‘even keel’ or overconfident mode, 4) results are objective; wins are subjective; buyers need both, 5) matching your company’s characteristics with candidate characteristics identifies ideal customers and so reduces wasted prospecting, 6) the sales funnel (prospect, qualify, cover the bases, close) is a forecast tool. Action plans help improve current position (moving prospects down the funnel) and are to be done every 2-4 weeks for key accounts.

1. Isaacson, Benjamn Franklin (2005)

by kurto

The most pragmatic of the founding fathers, Franklin’s business skill as a printer and postmaster enabled him to retire at 42. An inveterate community organizer, he advanced from lending libraries to politics. The Philadelphian was not immediately a supporter of independence from Britain, but always an opponent of the Penn family. Franklin had a modestly successful diplomatic career, crowned by French intervention in the Revolutionary War in 1781. Given to egalitarian/bourgeois identification and values, Franklin purveyed homespun morals and humor and enjoyed practical experimentation. He was not a family man, frequently having affairs and trysts. He was image conscious and used studied silence to good effect.

3. MacCambridge, America’s Game (2005)

by kurto

A magisterial study of how pro football surpassed college gridiron and then baseball to become America’s leading sport. Key to the league’s success was its collegial business administration. For example, TV revenues are pooled and shared, so that competitive merit is the distinguishing characteristic. In earlier postwar years, visiting teams received a share of the gate. The chronology includes closeup views of the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders. Technology and savvy use of electronic media played a key role, as did the accidental commissioner Pete Rozelle. TV, including Monday Night Football, also was a key driver — the NFL supplanted boxing and mastered the medium long before baseball grasped the possibilities. Football gained from the shifting cultural mores of the 1960s, but did not escape labor problems of the 1980s and 90s. The draft remains a key source of talent and public interest, although the rival AFL used superabundance of talent (athletes) to its advantage. The NFL now is an economic and social phenomenon as much as it is a sporting contest.

4. Gillmor, We Media (2005)

by kurto

A pedestrian and pedantic account of how interactivity is changing the craft of journalism. For newcomers, perhaps, the review of technologies (email lists, wikis, blogs, RSS) is useful. Clubby kudos to tech industry pals and transparent protestations of modesty (‘the audience is smarter than me’), as well as de rigeur fourth-estate antagonisms limit the possibility of any real insights. Lessig is more persuasive on the issue of copyright. Not useful as historical account or roadmap for development.

22. Ellmers, Narrow Passage (23 November 2023)

by kurto

The 1980’s ‘culture wars’, abating at Cold War’s end, resurfaced in the late 2010s, latterly the more bitter for the revelation of a Hegelian-Nietzschean split between leftists favoring technocracy (progressives) and latter-day Existentialism (postmoderns). Both strands of thought had already been identified as dead ends by Heidegger and Strauss, whose call for a return to classical rationalism is the main topic. Political thought is not academic but practical, and modern society is rational. When Western academics and government officials lose faith in reason, society is in crisis.

The Philosophes had sought to make reason universal; but the unbridled pursuit of philosophy in government damages the city’s ends (its latter-day myths and gods). What has been lost, as per Strauss’ ‘three waves of modernity’, is the conception of nature and man’s place in it. Inability to test authority by use of reason portends loss of agency, freedom. When social scientists speak of angst, unknowingly they refer to essentially political emptiness, reduced either to soulless technocracy or nihilism. (Foucault, who plays an unlikely role herein, observed power never disappears but takes on new forms, ever-changing because it is not bounded by reason.)

History, properly the imaginative reconstruction of places and events, was often seen by 19th-century intellectuals as a mechanistic process. Historicism failed (and continues to fail) because history is neither rational nor ending; but the view assigns man an uncontrollable place in an inexorable sweep, while isolating him within time. Science, which came on scene with Bacon and Descartes, promises mastery of nature but separates facts from values, and so can’t produce a view of the good. Only the pursuit of political thought free of philosophy of history and historicist determination can liberate the 21st century from nihilism and technocracy (the latter seeming the larger task).

Strauss’ unique contribution is an awareness of the moral-political equilibrium (tension) of philosophy. To become political, to establish conditions for virtuous life, human matters must be elevated to reason; otherwise, all is but a contest of will to power.

Plato’s importance to Strauss is evident. The ancient thought the whole consists of heterogeneous parts which cannot be understood as constitutive; but knowledge of the whole is impossible. His famous analogy of the shadowy cave – an argument for transparent use of reason in government – is reified in Foucault’s portrayal of unaccountable, amorphous sociopolitical elites exercising power (the insight giving rise to an otherwise misleading title). Yet it’s not clear why Plato among Strauss’ many influences is here singled out, just as it’s unclear what ‘narrow passage’ refers to. A bibliography is wonted.

5. Ellis, His Excellency (2005)

by kurto

Washington was a physically dominating figure who was not well educated, but married into elite society. Possessing an outsized ego, he managed his image closely, particularly regarding early military failures. After a successful French and Indian War, he accumulated land and aspired to fulfill the promise of the west, but his debts to British cotton agents transformed him into a revolutionary. Ideology played no real role, although he did wrestle with the question of slavery. As a general in the Revolutionary War, he is proclivity was to attack but he realized survival was the victory, a la Fabius. He grew to recognize the ineffectiveness of the Articles of Confederation during this time, and subsequently agreed to lead the Constitutional Convention and become the first president. He disliked partisan politics, reluctantly agreed to a second term, and all but dismissed Jefferson as a schemer. Hamilton was responsible for much of the administration’s success. Ultimately, says Ellis, Washington never conquered his ego but recognized posterity is the final judge and had the confidence to submit — unlike Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, etc.

6. Starr, Coast of Dreams (2005)

by kurto

A provincial, largely forgettable treatment of public life in California from 1990-2003. Starr, the state librarian for most of the term, ranges from establishmentarian to postmodern lite, writing as if to please the academy. As an assessment of important events, the book lacks context and reads like too many clipped essays strung together, especially on such matters as political economy or social issues like ‘diversity’. A major theme, the comparison of Los Angeles and San Francisco, is poorly constructed as the southern metropole should be compared to the greater Bay Area. Starr shortchanges the digital revolution, devoting a scant seven pages to the dot coms — focused on the downturn at that — and misses the cloud / collaborative trend that is more important than offshore production as a barometer of innovation. The book’s treatment of second-tier cities (San Diego, Sacramento, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs) is somewhat useful, and it is also helpful on the aerospace collapse, crime in LA, and a few other topics. But the decade’s principal triumphs are seen as large public works (often in the Southland), and much cultural analysis appears to be narrowly written for architects. There is little political narrative, even as the state was moving toward a single-party oligarchy. Starr’s primary question — wither California’s middle-class dream — is inconclusively answered. More rigorous historical treatment awaits.