A dual biography of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant which serves to portray the primary military campaigns of the Civil War. Lee, 15 years older, sought to prevail by making Northern opinion give up, albeit through winning a Napoleonic, climactic battle; Grant, the most offensive-minded of Northern commanders, was tasked to win in the Confederacy’s spiritual homeland. Defeating Lee helped Grant become ‘second to Lincoln’ as man of the century. Both were Whiggish West Pointers, Lee the scion of a Revolutionary War hero who was forced to become head of the household, and was made by the Mexican War. Grant was hard-working but left the army to become an indifferent businessman. Although Lee was a prized recruit to the Confederacy, because of rivalries and state sovereignty, he didn’t become primes inter pares until May 1863 – months before his failure at Gettysburg. Grant worked his way up through Mississippi Valley wins at Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Vicksburg, shrugging off a reputation for drunkenness and officer rivalries. Both Lee and Grant preferred surprise, indirect moves, and forceful follow-ups. In summer 1863, as he was charged to clear western Tennessee of Southern cavalry, he grasped the broader potential for destroying Southern resource base in Alabama and Georgia. His planning along with his successes made it inevitable he would be brought east to face Lee (which happened in April 1864). Also that summer, Grant came to appreciate the need to abolish slavery, though he was generally minded to avoid politics and in fact left the niceties to George Meade. When asked by politicians in March 1865 to recommend surrender, Lee declined; a month later he conceded to Grant’s generous terms at Appomattox. Swept to the presidency in 1868, he suppressed the KKK and was the first two-term president to display a modern approach. Lee, elected president of a struggling Virginian college, helped a Republican become governor of the state, thus enabling the Old Dominion to regain admission to the union in 1870 and side with Reconstruction (the only Southern state to do so). Lee, a fatalist, believed God’s intentions practically eliminated risk since events were preordained. Grant, the late bloomer, was prepared to take the good with the bad, to live life all over again.
22. Sampson, Mandela (5 Dec 2020)
An authorized biography, bolstered by the author’s contemporaneous journalism, seeking to assess the political temperament and performance of Nelson Mandela. Prepossessing the demeanor of a tribal chieftain and educated by Wesleyans, Mandela’s prison years instilled discipline and broadened vision, the crucial step toward peaceful revolution and African statesmanship par excellence. Taking to Johannesburg in the 1950s, where he practiced law and politics making expert (if ‘vicious’) use of the Socratic method, Mandela discovered a cultural energy comparable to the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. He was impulsive and of two minds, torn between multiracial communism and black nationalism. Mandela opposed the socialistic element of 1956’s Freedom Charter, but contemporaries thought that if he wasn’t a member of the South African Communist Party, it was ‘merely tactical’. Less enamored of nonviolence than Oliver Tambo or Walter Sisulu, he abandoned the approach after the Sharpeville riots failed to catalyze political change. Following his capture and trial, Robben Island isolated Mandela from daily tactics: the African National Congress inmates turned to collegial development of strategy while learning to master animosity toward the Afrikaners. Meanwhile, the author tends to jump ahead consistent with contemporary left-liberal views, blaming the CIA and Thatcher for opposing sanctions, being slow to reconcile to the ‘inevitable’ ascendancy of Mandela and the ANC (soon coming to power in 1987?!), and failing to anticipate the end of the Cold War (in 1978!). Sampson notably overlooks that the Cold War’s end made it safer for the Nationalist government to retrench. But the dynamics of Mandela’s negotiations with Botha and deKlerk read more reliably, particularly in the portrayal of his views on renouncing violence, as do his thoughts on opposing general amnesty in exchange for commencing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mandela misapprehended the cost of the ANC’s historic alliance with the USSR, and was slow to grasp the prospect of nationalization as deterring Western investors. In office, modeling is mixed (i.e., antagonistic) cabinet on Clemenceau’s, he displayed a quiet dignity, his forgiveness establishing moral supremacy, in contrast (the author says) to aggressive black American politicians. A persistent themes is the tension between the demands on a politician (i.e., winning power, projecting ideology) and the vision of a statesman (long-term good of the community). The last word: ‘You don’t lead by position but by the strength of your ideas’ (p. 529).
Longing for antagonism
In the 1980s, an art critic notes the establishment’s sharp turn to the left evidenced longing for the polarization of the 1930s:
For what we are now witnessing in this movement toward the politicization of art in this country is an attempt to turn back the cultural and political clock. And it is not to the radical counterculture of the Sixties that this movement looks back for its model and inspiration, despite the many resemblances it may bear to the outlook of the Sixties, but to the radicalism of the Thirties when so much of American cultural life was dominated by the hypocritical “social consciousness” of the Stalinist ethos. It is to a contemporary version of this old “social consciousness” that the protagnists [sic] of this political movement in the art world wish to confine the life of the artistic imagination. Hence the attacks on modernism and on such champions of the modernist aesthetic as Alfred Barr. For this new generation of radicals, it is the cultural life of the Forties and Fifties — when American art and literature finally vanquished the last respectable traces of the Stalinist ethos — that can never be forgiven. The Forties marked a great turning point not only in the history of American art but in the life of the American imagination, and any attempt to return American culture to the ideological straightjackets of the Thirties must inevitably attempt to discredit both the achievements and the values that belong to the post-World War ii period. Hence, too, the increasingly raucous attempts to dismiss the accomplishments of the Forties and Fifties as nothing more than the political products of the Cold War.
Kramer quotes Lionel Trilling: ‘…there was in the prevailing quality of the intellectual-political life a kind of self-deception: an impulse toward moral aggrandizement through the taking of extreme and apocalyptic positions which, while they seemed political, actually expressed a desire to transcend the political condition—which, as I saw things, and still do, meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny.’
Hilton Kramer, ‘Turning back the clock: art and politics in 1984’, New Criterion
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1984/4/turning-back-the-clock-art-and-politics-in-1984
18. Morgan, Genuine Article (23 Oct 2018)
A collection of book reviews treating Colonial and Revolutionary era topics, often revealing the author’s views of 1980s-90s historiographic fashion. Following Perry Miller, Morgan asserts the value of taking people (i.e., evidence) at their word; socioeconomic approaches are disparaged in that ‘hidden meanings’ can’t be interrogated and so tend to reveal what the historian is looking for’; reliance on statistics for obscuring the big picture, a la Lewis Namier’s structure of politics. Whereas the main value of written evidence is the ability to show changes in how people thought about themselves. As to the 18th century, Morgan sides with the thesis that the America’s was a revolution was not made but preserved. He writes the position of the revolutionaries was to trust men in power no more than necessary: the crowd (‘the mob’) held the same mistrust of Parliament and colonial governors, who were gaining in power as the century went on – notwithstanding the efforts of neo-Marxist historians to find an independent, class agenda. In separate essays, written at different times, he appears of two minds regarding the political position of the Antifederalists and also the legitimacy of popular sovereignty. John Winthrop is convincingly portrayed as pragmatic, the ‘first great American’, for leading the quasi-surreptitious transformation of the English joint stock company into a colonial charter for Puritans. The Puritans’ devolution of sexual morality to civic government is the first sexual revolution. Franklin is like Burke albeit quicker to recognize to the breach with England was irreparable; Hutchinson a man of Burkean principle who nonetheless ended a simple apologist for power. (In an aside, Morgan shows how absolute right was converted to parliamentary sovereignty: from the king can do no wrong to the king wants what is right; what we want is right; the king must want what we want.) The essay on Gordon Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution is strong. Those on Southern culture are learned but less gripping, perhaps because of the topics; as Morgan notes, the South became self-conscious of its culture only after it lay in the ruins of the Civil War. The co-authored essay on a successor to the Dictionary of American Biography is poor. Generally crisp and learned, yet Morgan often accommodates contemporary, fashionable liberalism.
19. Howard, Lessons of History (1 Nov 2018)
The French Revolution spurred the rise of nationalism in 19th-century Europe, a phenomenon which proved the major impetus for statecraft and warfare over the succeeding two centuries. More than simply self-conscious culture, nationalism in the 1800s was ideological, entwining a loose worldview with a defined sense of universal (often cultural) mission. It complemented economic modernization while overshadowing Marxism, which in its early phase had no conception of statecraft. Nationalism complicated life for Eastern Europe’s Jews, but (in its imperial guise) looked in colonial lands like routine military conquest. For social Darwinians cum nationalists, war was the ultimate test of folk strength – a view which died out after the carnage of World War I. In the 19th century, the Prussian mindset conflicted with German nationalism; Treitschke’s view that the essence of the state was power (macht), which required an army, bridged the two; ultimately, Nazism replaced Preussentum. Little is said of the interwar era. Howard coopts Churchill to makes a case for postwar British nationalism – as way to consensually accommodate postwar British decline – while giving the Russians a pass because the victorious Soviet army was ‘popular’ in postwar Eastern Europe! They and the Americans were the century’s inheritors of the universal mission, and in the current (when published) century, nationalism rather than social justice or economic equality remained the driver of public spirit. It provides the state apparatus with legitimacy: if unmoored (for example by supranational elites), the structure becomes alienating and oppressive. Turning to warfare, in which the author specializes, Howard’s primary insights are that 1) pre-WWI army doctrines failed to grasp the impact of mechanization despite the evidence of late-19th-century warfare – maneuver was ignored, and 2) in the greatest military literature, the hero cannot win, as abundantly demonstrated in WWI. As to history, the field is meant to train laymen – not professionals – to understand precedents of the contemporary. Howard asserts all ages of are equal interest to the historian, although the book fairly omits the developing world, and is comfortable with historicism though not polemical. In a ranging essay on ‘structure and progress’, he surveys why history has been held valuable and himself settles on its role in tracing society’s movement from the realm of necessity to the realm of choice. Such progress looks a leftward ratchet. The volume is not representative of his professional achievement and perhaps understates his contribution to understanding the relationship of warfare, society, and politics; however, it evinces the postwar bien pensant, the elite who could not see through the Soviets and uphold the enduring value of the liberal society.
20. Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell (4 Nov 2018)
Democracy has successfully established itself worldwide, but its record is poor. The author contends democracy is a formula for ‘direction of legitimate coercion’ over territory and population, for the citizen’s subjection to power without sacrificing dignity. Its good name owes to success of Western governments, particularly the USA, and its strengths are in the capacity to harness sociopolitical struggle; monarchy and aristocracy cannot allow for the possibility of conflict. However, democracy as commonly understood ‘equivocates’ between authoritative standard of right conduct and describing the political character of the regime. In an extended treatment of authoritarian China’s coming to terms with democracy, he shows that Chinese hierarchy includes an obligation to instruct the population. But his alternate example of good government rests on the country’s post-1980 economic growth (the real cost of which is not yet known to the West), and ignores that hierarchy has no tides to the commonweal. (Separately, he adds the true exemplar of democracy is India because of its size.) Dunn does not like democracy’s lack of alignment to egalitarian and leftist outcomes, which he dresses up as ‘reliable’ ties to justice and utility. He equates self-government with egalitarian outcomes, instead of opportunity. Ultimately, he seems to dislike Western (especially American) democracy because Americans don’t listen to their betters. He laments the failure of progressives to make the case for the folly of the Iraq invasion or the necessity of climate-change legislation, and proposes the university can steer the world out of its problems. He shows no concept of Thucydidean (or Lincolnian) persuasion (i.e., to know what to do and to be able to explain it), of knowing and representing the group. Dunn appears most concerned power that elites don’t hold power; it’s revealing that his critique lacks Fukuyama’s treatment of accountability and order (i.e., rule of law). The polemic scores a few points but abstruse language muddies the argument, which at any rate fails to really address the important questions of who should rule in the 21st century.
21. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of Great Powers (13 Dec 2018)
The rise and fall of leading nation-states is determined by the interplay of economics, technology, and military prowess. Expanding nations more easily support ever-rising costs of warfare; declining countries have to make fateful strategic choices. In the author’s multipolar framework, changes in trade patterns presage the outcomes of strategic conflicts, and so foreshadow the next political order. Individual leadership is less important because imperatives and choices are made in the context of Bismarck’s ‘stream of time’: strengths are relative. The outcome of warfare over 1450-1950 confirmed long-term economic shifts, often borne of new technology. Revised territorial order reflected redistribution, but peace did not freeze socioeconomic conditions.
Global powers tend to overspend on defense and underinvest in growth. Japan became a financial power (i.e., leading creditor nation) following its industrial rise: evidence – or the author – suggests the Asian country is most likely to supplant the ‘overstretched’ USA. The challenge to American longevity lies in defense commitments to overseas position obtained when it had a higher share of global GDP, a better balance of payments, and less debt. The most serious threat hegemons face is failure to adjust to change.
In the 15th century, European states trailed the Asian dynasties. War shaped its rising powers; distributed economic growth made it impossible to suppress all of them; the key economic development was the long-range ship. Within Europe itself, states were always spending to overpower another. Spain lacked manpower, grew slowly (aside from New World bullion), and suffered precarious finances. It was overstretched. French aspirations were checked by the balance of power, most importantly by result of the War of Spanish Succession, and backward finance. Following the Diplomatic Revolution of 1753, which crystallized England’s balance of power strategy, British mercantile prowess and ability to borrow fueled its win in the Seven Years War (one of seven with France over 1689-1815), and thus hegemony to 1945.
In the Victorian era, Britain’s industrial might was less oriented to the military than any era since the Stuarts. Further, it had no appetite for Continental interventions. Its power owed to its navy and colonies – productive investments – as well as the City of London. Despite the rise of late 19th-century US and Germany industry as well as Prussian military reform, the UK’s position circa 1914 was not so weak as often portrayed. Alliance diplomacy encouraged the drift to World War I, and prevented a quick resolution. The series of UK diplomatic concessions to the US (e.g., fisheries, the Panama Canal, Alaska) overturned conventional expectations of ‘natural’ Anglo-American hostility, and so won the UK a vital ally.
Kennedy observes the Versailles and peacetime politics were reshaped by ideology (Wilson and Lenin), one of the few nods to political ideas. The League didn’t deter aggressors but confused the democracies. Now comprising 27 countries, European consensus on colonies collapsed. Russia is seen as reactive instead of acquisitive in search of a ‘near abroad’ buffer. In the postwar era, the US rise was fueled by commanding share of world GDP, substantial tech innovation, a military proven in Europe and Asia, plus the atomic bomb. But Russia quickly erased the nuclear gap and America’s relative lead shrank after the 1960s: Vietnam, Iran, etc. indicate overstretch. The author applauds Kissinger for recognizing limits of American foreign policy; Nixon’s China overture changed the correlation of forces. Deng wisely recognized peace is necessary for the ‘four modernizations’: agriculture, industry, science, military. Kennedy sees less hope for Soviet Russia but suggests it will be hard to displace its Communist political system. Japanese central planning plus its lack of military commitments makes it the natural successor to the USA.
More like deterministic political science than long-view history, Kennedy’s work overlooks that power is a wasting asset, itself to be used as if an investment; that ideas have consequences, as fuel for socioeconomic events; and relative status is not a straight line – opportunities can be missed. Of course, he failed to anticipate two decades of Japanese stagnation due to real estate collapse, the fall of Soviet
4. Peter Drucker, Daily Drucker (27 December 2021)
Decomposes the management theorist’s postwar oeuvre, exposing key tenets of his ‘social ecology’. Much influenced by Bagehot, Drucker’s views reflect his time in Weimar Germany as well as his interests in the contemporaneous emergence of management and the knowledge economy. Notable principles:
• The strongest argument for business as a social organization is the function of loss: efficient abandonment
• There are three models of the corporation: the German, which emphasizes the social market; the Japanese, which favors the social; and the American, which prioritizes the economic
• Management creates development, not capital or labor. The proper direction of human energies generates progress and wealth (p. 56), whereas central planning cannot master information and its productive use
• Management is a practice, drawing from other disciplines as well as its own precepts. It must emphasize the whole – focusing on the parts obscures the objective of serving customers
• The question ‘what is our business?’ can be answered only by outsiders, for the purpose lies in society, and its mission is to create customers
• A theory of a business entails assumptions about its environment (society, marketing, custom, technology); its mission (what are the expected results); and its core competencies. A business audit comprises mission and strategy, the relevant market, innovation, productivity, people development, and profitability
• The innovator makes most of the profit, and profit is short lived. Nonetheless, he has best seen the future, which has already happened
• Schumpeter always asks: is there sufficient profit to re-invest? That is, to pay for the cost of creative destruction
• Leadership lifts men to higher ends. Day-to-day management should therefore emphasize strict conduct and responsibility, performance standards, respect for an individual’s work. Leadership multiplies strengths. Its requirements are listening, communicating, not making excuses, and subordinating itself to (its share of) the task (i.e., management by objective)
• Authority and responsibility should be congruent
• The first task in assessing knowledge work is to define quality
• The most effective route to self-renewal is to pursue unexpected success
• Focus on strengths, improve strengths, reduce disabling habits
• Decisions: start with what’s right, not what’s acceptable. There are two compromises, when half is better and when the compromise does not reach the boundary condition. Then build action into the decision: who has to know? who’s to act? what are the objectives of action?
• Managers set objectives, organize, motivate and communicate, measure, and develop people. Manage to objectives, using control, that is the discipline of reaching excellence
• The organizational unit must be single-minded or its members become confused
• To measure knowledge-work productivity, measure EVA (economic value added): value added / expenses. Capital investment should be assessed by ROI, payback, cashflow, and discounted present value
22. Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (27 Dec 2018)
Narrates Italian history since unification in 1861, when Piedmont-led monarchists annexed republican southerners. Through the 1990s, government alternated between idealism and materialism, but generally operated as a one-party state compromised by the burden of southern economic development. Italy traditionally lacked the agriculture of Europe’s northern plain, has no navigable north-south rivers to facilitate trade and communications, was for many years plagued by malarial swamps that forced people into the hills, and until 1850s, silk was its only major industry. Italy’s ruling class was small, with comparatively fewer commercial interests and more landowners. Roman cities persisted into the medieval ages, presaging a tradition of communal autonomy. Venice, Milan, Genoa, and Florence (along with Paris) were the five great cities of the early 14th century, the Florentines and Venetians being strongly republican, with imperial (Ghibelline) vs papal (Guelf) rivalries also prominent. Charles V’s 1530 conquest brought the Catholic Church patronage: the Counterreformation revitalized 16th-century Rome; the opening of Atlantic trade marginalized the great trading cities. The Napoleonic era resurfaced the national question. 1848’s failed uprising against ruling Austria showed lack of unity among federalist moderates and democrats. Over the next decade, Piedmont king Victor Emmanuel accepted the principle of the executive answering to parliament, not the crown. Prime minister Cavour, seeing the need for an ally, struck a secret treaty with France and then provoked Austria in 1859, drawing in the French, who won a minor engagement at Solferino and then concluded an armistice; Savoy and Nice were traded in exchange for Piedmont’s annexing Lombardy; the central states were to revert to Austrian-supported rulers but instead asked join Piedmont. Separately, Garibaldi’s volunteers swept the south and then conceded at Teano. Unification was completed by Prussia’s 1866 defeat of Austria, which gifted Italy the Veneto, and 1870 victory over France, which brought Rome. Northerners dominated government; with the latifundi frustrating reform and excluding southern peasants from voting, legitimacy was a problem. One-quarter of manufacturing jobs were in textiles; emigration was widespread; an economic surge in the first decade of the 1900s depended on remittance. Giolotti, the predominant figure prior to Mussolini, failed to ‘transform’ the socialists into a parliament party, to build intellectual support of the liberal state. Followers of Croce’s neo-idealist, anti-socialist La Voce and the Futurists paved the way for corporatist fascism. Italy entered World War I by result of secret diplomacy; the effect of the war was to increase fragmentation; Italy overreached at the Paris peace conference and so didn’t get Dalmatia or Fiume. D’Nunzio’s 1924 occupation of the Adriatic city forced the one-time socialist Mussoilini to move rightward. Mussolini wasn’t part of the March 1922 march on Rome – his appointment was constitutional – and until 1927 he was forced to alternate between conciliating the establishment and movement faithful. The Acerbo bill legally provided the fascists 2/3ds parliament. Fascism was never an ideology, never strong enough to do more than temporize. By the 1930s, the Romantic, rank-and-file angry young men (or junior WWI officers) had become a church-going family man. But as they were unqualified to run the state, the liberal machinery was never abolished, the bureaucracy never aggrandized, the police independent (until 1940). Italians believed they gained security in exchange for loss of freedom. Mussolini’s economic policy was hodge-podge, despite controlling 20 percent of industry (second-highest in Europe, behind the USSR), and there were no gains in the south. Consequently, although jealous of Hitler, Mussolini was ill-prepared for war and performed poorly in Greece. The slowness of 1943’s Allied counterattack mean partisan resistance formed in the north (unlike southern liberation). After the war, the monarchy was narrowly abolished but general amnesty granted, so fundamental disagreement remained. The Christian Democrats ruled an essentially one-party state via Church support (against the PCI) and southern clientelism; the lightly planned economy favored northern industrialization (i.e., rising employment and materialism) as well as EEC membership. Notwithstanding legislation to break up the estates, the price was continued southern subordination. Regional autonomy (from 1970) introduced a degree of leftist influence (in the red zone of Tuscany, Umbria, and Emilia-Romagna, while post-1968 industrial unrest was channeled into constitutional forms, marginalizing the Communists. The postwar system collapsed in the 1980s; the northern separatists Forza Italia (and Berlusconi) rose in 1994, via the latter’s domination of mass media. The country just squeaked into the Euro, potentially exacerbating an internally conflicted nation.
23. Buchholz, New Ideas from Dead Economists (25 December 2021)
A laymen’s portraiture of the giants of classical economy, coming to dwell on Keynes’ 20th-century predominance. Since Smith, the field has sought for a Newtonian (i.e., physical or cause-and-effect) set of laws governing socioeconomic activity but instead settled on a more Darwinian (biological or dialectical) approach, premised on any number of phenomena.
• Ricardo: specialization is determined by whomever has the lowest opportunity cost. Therefore, prudential reshoring is simply a revaluation of cost – it cannot be left to agency bust must be principally viewed (but see also ‘transfer earnings’)
• Mill: positive economics describes (predicts) the world as it works, as it should normatively govern a set of morals or ethics. When otherwise, there is need for reform. Following Burke, he sought for equality of opportunity; equally so, it is government’s obligation to demonstrate the likelihood of an intervention’s improving matters.
• Marx: economic changes are cause-and-effect, social changes (in the so-called superstructure) are ideological and potentially revolutionary. The Marxist focus on labor value shortchanges capital including ideas (entrepreneurship) and delayed gratification, which are not free goods
• Marshall: marginalism asserts the past is over, what counts is what’s nest. Microeconomics hold actors take new steps only if benefits outweigh the costs: man is not a constant. Look at one factor at a time, impound the rest
• ‘Old’ institutionalists hold that large (private) firms belied marginalism. ‘New’ institutionalists use Marshall’s neoclassical tools to study how firms influence society. For example, does efficiency equate to justice? The latter also identified the principal agency problem
• Keynes: when consumers boost savings and investment, so will merchants, thus decelerating the economy in times of crisis. Say’s Law (production creates demand) is false. He was, however, a capitalist: not robber barons but national actors cause slumps. Keynes’ multiplier theory (government pump priming) is contemporary economic evidence of progressive belief in expertise.
• Monetarism holds velocity is more stable than in Keynes’ view, so money supply is government’s foremost tool. Government spending does not influence price unless money also changes. In the 1980s and afterward, saving reduced velocity, as did inflation’s fall. Friedman (not Hayek, who gets little attention) is emblematic
• Public choice: government too is self-interested. Keynes seemed to be aware progressivism undermines popular sovereignty but offered no answer to the principal-agency problem. Instead he felt the bureaucrats meant well.
• Feldstein, Boskin, Krugman, Summers et al focus on aggregate supply, coalescing around government and productivity, toward improved living standards, which requires investment, which entails tuning the tax regime
• Deduction seeks conclusion in incontrovertible laws; induction in recognizing more limited patterns and unprovable hypotheses that lead to predictive models. Put another way, the more or the more importance that can be attributed to law, the more deduction pertains; the less, the more induction holds. Relatedly, Friedman observed the test of a model is its predictive value not its ex ante accuracy
The author touches on ‘rational expectations’, a somewhat nihilist approach, and behavioralism; the book is too early for modern monetary theory. Using a droll style, large free of technical terms (and no charts), the author often projects a protagonist’s conclusions forward to the 1980s and 90s.