Waltz and his legacy: a few reflections

I feel I should add my two cents to the torrent of IR-blogospheric comment on the late Kenneth Waltz, if only to justify my existence as a blogger. I never met Waltz[*] but like virtually every student of international relations I have read his two key books (not the third one). This post is basically a spur-of-the-moment thing, not the product of sustained thought, and it should be read with that in mind.

Man, the State and War (1959), hereafter MSW, and Theory of International Politics (1979), hereafter TIP, are rather different kinds of books, even if they both endorse a "structural" view of international politics. MSW is an analysis of what Great Thinkers in the (mostly) Western tradition have said about the causes of war. The book famously sorts these writers into three camps: those who locate the causes of war in human nature ("the first image"), in the characteristics of individual states ("the second image"), or in the 'anarchical' (meaning, essentially, no-world-government) structure of the international system ("the third image"). Waltz concludes that the third-image view is the most convincing, famously declaring that (to paraphrase him) wars occur because there is nothing to prevent them.

MSW is a very perceptive book that treats a subject of intrinsic interest, and for that reason it will continue to be read. But apart from the fact that (some) students are still required to read it, I doubt it exercises all that much influence over the field today. Few Ph.D. candidates in political science who "do" International Relations will write a dissertation these days about what this or that Great Thinker has said about the causes of war. Such dissertations are still written but I think they are rare, especially in the United States. Someone who is interested in both political/social theory and international relations is more likely nowadays to do what might be called critical disciplinary history (which is, for example, what Daniel Levine's book Recovering International Relations is, or so I gather from hearing him speak about it on one occasion before it was published). Disciplinary history is, obviously, about the development of the discipline or the field of International Relations; it is rather inward-focused. Waltz's MSW is not disciplinary history in this sense. That is not at all to criticize MSW, merely to note the difference.

The other aspect of MSW perhaps worth mentioning is that the phenomenon with which it was concerned, namely traditional interstate war, is now increasingly rare. When MSW was published in 1959, the Korean War had ended only six years before, World War II only fourteen years before. The Cold War was in full swing and there was no guarantee that it would not become hot. Today, although wars are, unfortunately, still with us, traditional interstate wars have become unusual events (the last really big one was the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s), and wars directly between two or more great powers are unheard of. Uncovering the causes of interstate war had an urgency in the 1950s which, at least arguably, it no longer has. The 'hot topic' now is civil war, as will be apparent to anyone who glances through the list of political science dissertations completed in 2012 (in the U.S.) that was recently published in PS. I am not saying MSW is passé or no longer relevant; it will always be 'relevant' because its subject is of intrinsic interest, meaning it has inherent interest regardless of what is going on in the world, just as the study of history has intrinsic interest regardless of what is going on in the world. I'm simply observing that the focus of attention in the field seems to have shifted to other things.

Turning now to Theory of International Politics. The reverberations of TIP are still being felt in the field in a much more direct way than those of MSW. The emphasis in TIP on the "shaping" influence of structure -- meaning, in essence, the distribution of capabilities (power) among states under anarchy -- is still a starting point for many, though by no means all, scholars of international politics. However, TIP has come under several different kinds of criticism since it was published -- in fact, too many to catalog exhaustively here. A sampling: Ruggie charged that Waltz in TIP ignored questions of historical change and transition between different kinds of state system, something the English School had always been more attuned to, while Wendt criticized Waltz for not seeing that 'power' and 'interest' are mostly made up of ideas and that the effects of power accordingly depend on the distribution of ideas in the system. Other writers threw doubt on the notion of 'anarchy' and the states-under-anarchy model. And finally (for the non-exhaustive purposes of this post), many have criticized what is perhaps the central substantive proposition of TIP, namely the argument that balances of power recurrently form and that, in Waltz's words, "if there is any distinctively political theory of international politics, balance-of-power theory is it." The other major aspect of TIP was Waltz's views on what 'theory' is; his epistemological-methodological position continues to be both influential and controversial, but I will pass over it here.

Despite all the criticisms, TIP will remain required reading for students, if only so that they can follow the flood of critiques it unleashed. The  appearance as recently as 2011 of a collection of essays about Waltz's work, Realism and World Politics (ed. Ken Booth), suggests that Waltz's writings will continue to generate interest and discussion for quite some time to come and will continue to be seen as canonical works in the field.

(Note: Post edited slightly after initial posting.)

Added later: Waltz's 1988 APSA presidential address, "Nuclear Myths and Political Realities," as published in the Sept. 1990 issue of APSR, is available here (pdf).
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*I did hear him speak on one occasion but that doesn't amount to 'meeting'. 

Two intellectuals and the Communist Party

The brilliant historian E. J. Hobsbawm (1917-2012; NYT obit here)  joined the Communist Party (CP) as a student at Cambridge, having earlier been a member of a Communist student group as a teenager in Germany. The brilliant novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) joined the CP as a student at Oxford. Their paths crossed briefly: Murdoch's biographer Peter Conradi notes that after her first year at Oxford, in the summer of 1939, she "attended a one-week Communist Party summer school in Surrey, where the future historian Eric Hobsbawm, then studying at Cambridge, was deeply impressed by her looks, character and intelligence...." (Iris Murdoch: A Life, p.98, citing a 1999 interview with Hobsbawm)   

Not too long thereafter their political trajectories diverged. Hobsbawm stayed in the Party for most of his life, whereas Murdoch left the CP before the Second World War ended. Hobsbawm's recent death brought out critics who charged him with blindness to the horrors of Stalinism, a charge that does not affect the bulk of his historical work, including the well-known three volumes on 'the long nineteenth century'. (To quote the NYT obit, "in 1994 [Hobsbawm] shocked viewers when, in an interview with Michael Ignatieff on the BBC, he said that the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens under Stalin would have been worth it if a genuine Communist society had been the result." On the other hand, in The Age of Extremes, p.380, Hobsbawm wrote of Stalin that "few men have manipulated terror on a more universal scale.")

As for Iris Murdoch's politics, they turned into fairly standard liberalism, in more or less the American sense of that word (see, e.g., the chapter on politics in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals), though she was much more interested in ethics and aesthetics than political theory. Peter Conradi writes: "It could be said that all [Murdoch's] fiction, and much of her moral philosophy, are acts of penance for, and attacks upon, the facile rationalistic optimism of her extreme youth...." (Iris Murdoch: A Life, p.78) That may be a bit of an overstatement but there is something in it, as anyone can attest who is familiar with, to take just one of many possible examples, Murdoch's portrait of the revolutionary theorist Crimond in The Book and the Brotherhood. Her novels do not, for the most part, take much notice of world events; an exception, The Accidental Man, in which the Vietnam War complicates the moral and practical life of a young American intellectual living in Britain, proves the rule.

Hobsbawm and Murdoch, markedly different in their interests and outlooks for most of their lives, wrote completely different kinds of books which are united only by the probability that people will still be reading them a hundred years from now. They are two of many gifted people for whom the Communist Party seemed, in the era of Depression and fascism, the right and necessary political choice.
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P.s. on Hobsbawm: The first sentence of the NYT obituary (linked above) refers to his "three-volume economic history of the rise of industrial capitalism." This is not a wholly accurate description of the "Age of..." volumes. I was glancing at my old paperback copy of The Age of Revolution several days ago, and it appears that some of the most engaging writing in it is in the chapter on the arts (ch.14).

Quote of the day

In The Abolitionist Imagination, Andrew Delbanco mentions an 1862 article by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Chiefly About War Matters," which Hawthorne published under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. After quoting a passage from the article in which Hawthorne, referring to a group of fugitive slaves, wrote that "For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger's land...," Delbanco observes (pp.28-9) that:

...this was an example of Hawthorne doing what he always did: arguing with himself. As F.O. Matthiessen put the matter, "the characteristic Hawthorne twist" was his habit, after making any decisive assertion..."to perceive the validity of its opposite." And so, in the Atlantic article, he not only acceded to the editors' insistence that the essay could be published only if accompanied by dissenting footnotes, but he supplied the annotations himself. "The author seems to imagine," he wrote in one note, that he has "compressed a great deal of meaning into" his "little, hard, dry pellets of aphoristic wisdom. We disagree with him."

New (to me) word of the day

Decoct = to extract the essence of something by boiling; boil down; concentrate.

Ran across it in James Wood's piece in the Jan. 23 New Yorker on the novelist Michel Houellebecq:

The power of Houellebecq's critique has less to do with its persuasiveness as social theory than with the spectacle it offers of the author's bared wounds. His relentless prosecution of his parental abandonment and his wild historicizing of what is only a personal fate give him license to decoct an uneasy mixture of Rousseau and Schopenhauer.

LeCarré note

I saw Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy about a week ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was in a packed theater and everyone seemed mesmerized. There was no whispering, no coughing, barely, or so it seemed at times, any breathing. I think people are perhaps just starved for old-fashioned (in the best sense) movies that are well-acted, intelligently scripted, suspenseful, and (at least to an extent) emotionally involving.

That the Cold War is long over turns out not to make much difference in how one takes in -- or I guess I should say, in how I take in -- Cold War espionage tales. They are, in essence, morality plays, however layered over by ambiguities, and morality plays are a very old genre. Their appeal doesn't depend on the contemporaneity of the factual setting.

The absence in Tinker of the sorts of 'action' scenes (car chases, explosions, etc.) that a Bond or a Bourne movie contains is an advantage in several ways; for one thing, the tension is heightened gradually, incrementally, rather than being interrupted periodically by gigantic pieces of metal being blown up (or whatever). The focus is on humans and what they are saying and doing, rather than on gadgets, things, and special effects. (There is a gun fired in one scene at the beginning and in one at the end, and that's it as far as on-screen discharges of a weapon are concerned.) This movie is, to get very pretentious (but only for a second), an unalienated spy movie, one that has not been estranged from the genre's essence.

Apart from The Russia House, which I don't remember too well, I haven't read much LeCarré. This afternoon (I'm writing this on Sunday evening) I picked up a paperback of Tinker, Tailor. Yes, the movie tie-in edition, but what can you do? It was the only one on the bookstore's shelf.

P.s. For another and somewhat more -- how shall I put it? -- baroque take on the movie, see here. That post has, among other things, the near-mandatory historical allusions (e.g., the Cambridge spies) that I've omitted here.

A bit of nonsense from Mark Lilla

Reviewing Corey Robin's book The Reactionary Mind in the New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla prefaces his critical remarks with a swipe at political scientists:

Though it sounds dull, we actually need taxonomy. It is what renders the political present legible to us. Getting it right, though, requires a certain art, a kind of dispassionate alertness and historical perspective, a sense of the moment, and a sense that this, too, shall pass. Political scientists, intent on aping the methods of the hard sciences, stopped cultivating this art half a century ago, just as things started getting interesting, as new kinds of political movements and coalitions were developing in democratic societies.

Mark Lilla must know that Corey Robin is a political theorist and that, whatever else they can be accused of, most political theorists cannot plausibly be accused of aping the hard sciences. So this passage, in the context of this review, is irrelevant rhetoric. I have no opinion on Robin's book, which I haven't read [update: I've now read it; see below], but I think it fair to say that someone whose CV reveals that he is advising a dissertation entitled "Civilization of the Living Dead: The Zombie as Mirror of U.S. Self-Destruction" is probably not too "intent on aping the methods of the hard sciences."

Added later (10/1/15): For the record, I have now read The Reactionary Mind (well, around 80 percent of it, anyway), and in general found it enjoyable and provocative (though not necessarily agreeing with everything in it).  

More on Kennan

I heard a talk by Gaddis this afternoon about his Kennan bio (save the first ten minutes or so, which I missed). On the question of Kennan's feelings about America (raised by a commenter here on an earlier post), Gaddis (and I assume this is also what he says in the book) views Kennan's critique of American culture (i.e., materialism, consumerism, the automobile, advertising, all of which Kennan loathed) as being akin to that of a "prophet" who holds his country to "an impossibly high standard." But Kennan did not "hate America," in Gaddis's view, quite the contrary. Personally I think the question whether Kennan "hated" or "loved" America is actually not a very interesting question. His criticisms of American culture are interesting, however, and one author (not Gaddis) has suggested that Kennan would have found some of the cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School (esp. Adorno and Horkheimer) congenial, had he read it. (More on this later, perhaps.)

A couple of other points that struck me as noteworthy from the talk: Gaddis emphasized how deeply Kennan was influenced by Russian literature, above all Chekhov, in the way he formulated his thoughts about the future evolution of the USSR, e.g. in the X article. (Don't have time to go into the details now.) The other thing that struck me was Gaddis's statement that although Kennan despised Ronald Reagan, the latter was actually the president who came closest to implementing Kennan's strategic vision. This I found, to put it mildly, less than persuasive (or at least very debatable), and I was tempted to ask Gaddis a question about it, but I didn't. (Which was probably just as well.)

Gaddis interview on ATC

I stopped by the All Things Considered site for another reason, and I found that they just aired an interview with Gaddis about his Kennan biography. Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet (I'm planning to do so this weekend if not before), but here's the link for those who might be interested.

The other Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch is in the news right now, but a friend tipped me off that today is the birthday of someone who contributed a lot more to the world: the late Iris Murdoch. (See today's installment of The Writer's Almanac.)

The first Murdoch novel I read, more than 20 years ago, was The Accidental Man (1971), one of her few novels with a clearly political context. The plot centers on a young American in Britain who opposes the Vietnam war and struggles with whether he is evading his responsibility by accepting an Oxford job and marrying an English girl (the appropriate word here, given her age) rather than returning to the U.S. to face the draft (and the possibility of prison).

Not Murdoch's strongest book by any means, something about The Accidental Man appealed to me and I went on the kind of binge that I've rarely done with any other author. By the time I was through I'd read a large number of her many novels (though I haven't read all of them -- she turned out almost one a year from 1954 through the mid '90s). Although critical and popular opinion seems to favor the books from her early and middle phases, e.g. The Black Prince or The Sea,The Sea (both of which won awards, the latter the Booker Prize), my favorites are three long, rambling ones she wrote in the '80s: The Good Apprentice, The Book and the Brotherhood, and The Message to the Planet (though I'm probably not quite as high on Message as the other two). These three have rather intricate plots and multiple characters, but nothing feels confused, and there are many pitch-perfect passages. For example, there's a moment in Good Apprentice when one of the main characters revisits, as a middle-aged man, the school where he was a star teenage athlete and student -- a kind of typical novelistic moment that in the hands of many writers, even good ones, would be banal and hackneyed and handled with a sledgehammer. Murdoch navigates it like Roger Federer hitting a cross-court forehand: everything is just right.

I've read some of her non-fiction, including the very rambling (probably by design) Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and I also have Peter Conradi's biography, which someone gave me. Both Murdoch's life and her books remain somewhat controversial, and her novels are definitely not to everyone's taste. She probably wrote too many, and the weakest ones are not very good; the best ones, however, are, in my opinion, pretty great.

I don't return to Murdoch again and again, re-reading the novels every few years, but then I don't really do that with any authors. It's somehow enough to know that they're all on the shelf, within easy reach.

An interesting life

I don't think I'd heard of Hans Keilson before reading this.

Morgenthau once more

An interesting post on realism (by dptrombly at Slouching Towards Columbia) raises the question of realists' attitudes toward public participation in, and influence over, foreign policy. The post suggests that Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980) and Henry Kissinger shared an elitism and a wariness about the participation of mass publics:

For the European realists who emigrated to the United States, mass politics was potentially the gateway to disorder and horror. Morgenthau’s “hidden dialogue” with [Carl] Schmitt is evident in both of their major works, and Kissinger’s admiration for Spengler and Metternich hardly lends itself to favorable opinions towards liberalism. Both thinkers acclimated themselves to their new homeland’s political traditions, but not without criticism. These German Jewish intellectuals inherited the Weimar-era sense of Verfallsgeschichte [history of decline] that seems rather lacking in the chastened internationalists and skeptical social scientists who practice and debate realist foreign policy today.

There is clearly some truth in this. In Morgenthau's case, however, Carl Schmitt was only one of several important influences on him; other influences, notably his mentor Hugo Sinzheimer, were on the left in Weimar's politics. (Sinzheimer was a prominent lawyer at the center of a circle of young leftist intellectuals.)

Fast forward to Morgenthau in his later years: From the late 1950s on, he developed a critique of American politics and society which informed his later strong and vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and which has been well analyzed by William Scheuerman in Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (2009). This critique, as expressed for example in The Purpose of American Politics (1960), drew on, among other things, a Tocquevillian concern about the threat of conformism and "the prospect of a novel form of mass-based or democratic despotism" (Scheuerman, p.189). This theme, which perhaps also reflected the wave of concern in the 1950s with the dangers posed by "mass society," does reflect a wariness of mass publics, and yet elitism does not seem quite the right word for it. Morgenthau in The Purpose of American Politics was also critical of capitalism in its consumerist guise and called for an expansion of the welfare state (Scheuerman, p.191).

Perhaps more significantly, in the 1960s a good deal of Morgenthau's writing about civil rights and other U.S. domestic issues strongly suggests that he thought too little democracy, not too much, was at the root of the country's problems. For example, in an essay published in Commentary (the old Commentary) in January 1964, Morgenthau began by declaring (echoing his Purpose of American Politics): "The unequal condition of the black American has been an endemic denial of the purpose for the sake of which the United States of America was created and which, in aspiration and partial fulfillment, has remained the distinctive characteristic of American society: equality in freedom." ("The Coming Test of American Democracy," reprinted in Morgenthau, Truth and Power [1970], pp. 209-210)

Morgenthau went on to argue in this piece (written shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination) that the related problems of segregation and structural unemployment threatened a breakdown of democracy and a descent into violence. He observed that the governments of Southern states already were ruling by violence and decried the power exerted by Southern legislators in Congress. (pp. 213-214)

In the Epilogue to the 1970 collection Truth and Power, which is undoubtedly one of the most radical-sounding pieces Morgenthau ever wrote -- parts of it read as if they could have been written by, say, the authors of the Port Huron Statement (the founding document of SDS) -- Morgenthau saw the American student revolt as "a national manifestation of a world-wide revulsion against the world as it is," a world that "sacrifices human ends to technological means, as well as the needs of the many to the enrichment and power of the few," a world in which mechanized and bureaucratized institutions exercise unprecedented power over individuals, drain life of meaning, and confront the student with "a Kafkaesque [condition] ...of make-believe, a gigantic hoax where nothing is as it appears to be and upon which what he feels, thinks, aspires to, and does has no effect except to provide inducements for harassment and repression." (Truth and Power, pp.433, 434, 437).

American society, Morgenthau concluded here, had chosen preservation of the status quo over its original animating purpose. "Abroad, the United States has become the antirevolutionary power par excellence, because our fear of Communism has smothered our rational insight into the inevitability of radical change in the Third World. Our interventions in Indochina and the Dominican Republic are monuments to that fear. At home, our commitment to making all Americans equal in freedom has been at war with our fear of change and our conformist subservience to the powers-that-be." (ibid.,p.439)

And here is the last paragraph (p.439), which should be read in light of his belief that nuclear war under the then-prevailing trends was not only likely but virtually certain:

The extent of the repression in store for the dissenters will depend upon the subjective estimate of the seriousness the powers-that-be place upon the threat to the status quo. Considering the thus far marginal nature of the threat, society will need only resort to marginally totalitarian methods. The dissenters will people our prisons, our graveyards, our Bohemias, or -- as utter cynics -- our positions of power. Those last will not be unlike the Marxist-Leninists of the Soviet Union: They will mouth a litany of slogans which they not only do not believe in but which they also despise. Such a society can carry on for a while, like a body without a soul, but sooner or later it must either recover its soul -- that is, the purpose that has given it life -- or disintegrate from within. Perhaps, then, a new society, with a new purpose, will be built upon the ruins of the old; or perhaps nothing will be left but ruins for later generations to behold.

In sum, although Morgenthau was perhaps not an especially profound or original democratic theorist (his most acute insights lay elsewhere), he did come to insist that the normative core of liberal democracy ("equality in freedom" as he called it) had to be reflected in U.S. foreign policy, and that U.S. foreign policy, in order to be justifiable and effective, had to retain a very close connection to the country's moral foundations. If one still wants to label Morgenthau a classical realist, his version of classical realism is arguably quite compatible with an enlightened, egalitarian, and progressive version of liberal democracy.

P.S. It may be of interest to note that Morgenthau was an original trustee of the Institute for Policy Studies and served on its board of trustees for five years. (Source: Letter of Marcus Raskin in The Washington Post's Book World, Sept. 22, 1991)

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Note: I also discussed Morgenthau, in a different connection, in this post.

Update: Response by DPTrombly.

Re-reading Barrington Moore

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, published in 1966, is a modern classic of historical sociology that has been assigned to generations of students. I read large parts of it in college and again in grad school, but it was not until the other day, when I had occasion to take it down from the shelf and look at the first chapter, that it fully dawned on me why the book is so famous. At the same time, I realized that the kind of social-scientific writing on display in Social Origins is an endangered species.

The first chapter, "England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism," shows Moore's remarkable ability to outline a centuries-spanning argument in less than 40 pages, and to do it in prose of such clarity and directness that it can be understood by virtually any interested reader. The chapter's main question is why England/Britain's route to capitalist modernity culminated in parliamentary democracy (as opposed to dictatorship of right or left) and why it took the relatively peaceful and gradualist form that it did from the eighteenth century on. Compressed into a few sentences, the basic argument runs as follows: The key social-political development in early modern England was the destruction of the peasantry. This was the result of the enclosure (i.e., the seizure for private use) of common lands by landlords and their richer tenants. The enclosures were under way in the sixteenth century but accelerated in the seventeenth century, after the Civil War severely weakened the power of the monarchy, which had served as a brake on enclosing landlords and a protection for the peasants. The destruction of the peasantry effectively removed from "the historical agenda" two possibilities: the reactionary/conservative route to capitalist modernity (as in Germany, e.g.) and the social-revolutionary route (as in Russia and China). (p.30) There's a whole lot more there, but in highly oversimplified form that is the core of the argument in the first chapter.

For the moment I'm not interested in how much validity this argument has; to be blunt, I don't care whether it's right or not, at least not here. I'm certain it's been challenged and debated many times since Social Origins was published (and indeed, several of Moore's students produced major works bearing on the themes of the book). Rather, what I want to emphasize is the lucid way the argument is presented and Moore's mastery in handling multiple strands without ever losing sight of the central thread. Moreover, I don't think this clarity is entirely accidental (it's no accident, as a Marxist would say).

Although Social Origins (SO) was published in 1966, Moore began working on it years earlier, before the so-called behavioral revolution in the social sciences became so influential that even some Marxists felt they had to wrap their writing in the language of variables and falsifiability. As Theda Skocpol observed in a critical review-essay on SO published in 1973, the book "is not organized or written in the style of a scientist trying to elaborate clearly and minutely justify a falsifiable theory of comparative modernization. It is, rather, like a giant mural painted in words, in which a man who has contemplated the modern histories of eight major nations seeks to convey in broad strokes the moral and factual discoveries that he personally has made, about the various routes to the 'world of modern industry' traveled by his 'subject' countries, about the role of landed upper classes and peasantries in the politics of that transformation, and about the consequences of each route for human freedom and societal rationality." (T. Skocpol, Review of SO, reprinted in her Social Revolutions in the Modern World [1994], p.26)

That SO is not written "in the style of a scientist" is no doubt one of the reasons I was struck so forcefully by the lucidity of the opening chapter when I looked at it the other day. My reaction, at a gut level, was something like: "My God, they're not writing like this anymore, are they?" In other words, Moore stands in contrast, it seems to me, to much of the historically-oriented social science being published today, which tends to be preoccupied with methodology, weighed down with references to 'causal mechanisms' and the like, and generally no fun to read. Perhaps that is academic 'progress'. Perhaps there has been a gain in scientific precision and cumulative knowledge. Indeed, as I have written in earlier posts, I think causal explanation is an entirely legitimate goal of social science.

Nonetheless, a growing methodological and theoretical sophistication has come at a cost. With one or two possible exceptions, I know of no work of historically-oriented social science (not history, but social science) published in the last 20 years that I could put into the hands of an intelligent, curious high school student and say: "Here, you will enjoy this and find it fascinating and your life will be changed and you will see the historical sweep of human sufferings and occasional triumphs and you will want to become a historical sociologist." No. Uh-huh. Not happening.

Well, look on the bright side: Social Origins is still in print.

P.S. (added 1/5): If you think the reference to methodological sophistication in this post is a throwaway, track down the Fall 2010 issue of the newsletter of the Am.Pol.Sci.Assn. Section for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research and look at the essays published under the heading "Symposium: Causal Mechanisms, Process Tracing, and Causal Inference."

Tocqueville on 'the military spirit'

Last month’s repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law has met with widespread and justified approval. Some voices, however, have issued reminders that military culture continues to be 'gendered' (see, for instance, here). Whether or not you agree with this, and whether or not you are troubled by it, it's perhaps worth reflecting on the degree to which attitudes on this bundle of issues have changed over time. Alexis de Tocqueville – not usually considered a militaristic thinker – wrote in this respect a revealing note to Volume Two of Democracy in America (which I quote below).

As Alan Ryan recently observed (“Tocqueville’s Lesson,” New York Review of Books, Dec. 9, 2010), Tocqueville in Volume Two of Democracy was concerned with "the dangers of ‘soft despotism,’ a condition in which the population were reduced to a sheep-like dependency on a state that made them comfortable, saved them the necessity of thought, and destroyed their will by enervation rather than oppression."

In the note to Volume Two to which I’ve referred, Tocqueville ruminated on what the taste for comfort might do to "the military spirit":

If the love of physical pleasures and the taste for well-being which are naturally prompted by equality [i.e., some social mobility and absence of a quasi-feudal class structure--LFC] should get such a hold on a democratic people that they should come to absorb it altogether, national mores would become so antipathetic to the military spirit that even the army, in spite of the professional interest leading soldiers to desire war, would come to love peace. Living in such a soft society, soldiers would come to think that slow but convenient and effortless promotion in peacetime was better than a more rapid rise in rank paid for by all the toils and privations of the battlefield. In such a mood, the army would take up arms without eagerness and use them without energy.... The remedy against such dangers does not lie in the army, but in the country. A democratic people which has kept its manly mores will always find courageous soldiers when it needs them.[1]

Today, this explicit equation of courage with 'manliness' would sound jarring to many people (though admittedly not to everyone). Which is an indication of, for lack of a better word, progress.

P.S. An interesting question is: when would this have started to sound jarring? Possibly not until quite late in the twentieth century. Note for instance that William James, writing almost a hundred years after Tocqueville, shared his general view of 'manliness' and concern about 'softness': "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy.... Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built -- unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood." [2]

Afterthought (added Jan.2): "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy": sounds like something that might have been said by a revolutionary who's just come to power and is trying to prepare the people for an extended period of hardship and adversity. Did Fidel ever read "The Moral Equivalent of War"?

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1. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (Anchor Books, 1969 [and subsequent editions]), p. 734.

2. "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910), in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. B. W. Wilshire (State Univ. of N.Y. Press, 1984), pp. 357-58.

Hounshell on Kaplan

From Oct. 27 [Reader: A little behind on things, are we? Me: Kindly shut up, thanks], this Blake Hounshell post on Robert Kaplan's new book and Kaplan's "seeming about-face on China." [H/t: IPE@UNC]

Noted

A new book collects interviews with Irving Howe from the last 15 years of his life, i.e., the mid-'70s to the early '90s.

P.s. (added 8/18): Some months ago I happened to run across a 1948 review by the young Howe of a book by Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw. Published in the Trotskyist New International, the review contains some things Howe would not have written in later years, but it shows the skills as writer and polemicist that were evident throughout his career.

Trundling out The Liberal Tradition in America

I know I said I was reverting to silence, but hey...one of the benefits of writing an obscure blog is being able to ignore one's own pronouncements.

I just skimmed through a piece by Michael Desch (published as part of a symposium in PS, available here), who uses a line from Louis Hartz's classic The Liberal Tradition in America to explain the continuity between the Bush and Obama counter-terrorism policies. There is in fact some continuity; indeed, in certain respects -- e.g., more use of special forces operations in various parts of the world, more use of drone strikes -- the Obama admin has taken a more 'pro-active' counter-terror line than the Bush administration. (On the other hand, the Obama admin has been less inclined to sacrifice civil liberties on the altar of counter-terrorism than the Bush people were.)

Hartz's book, published in 1955 (when he was in his mid-thirties), has had a long afterlife. Desch quotes a sentence about liberalism's finding non-liberal ideas "unintelligible" and the effect this has on foreign policy. (I confess to never having read Hartz's book; I have, however, read Robert Packenham's 1973 book Liberal America and the Third World, which uses Hartz to explain and criticize U.S. efforts to advance 'political development' in poor countries.)

As a postscript, it should be pointed out, to avoid possible misunderstanding, that Hartz was not using "liberal" mainly in the liberal-versus-conservative sense of contemporary political debate, but rather to refer to a basic set of ideas that go back to the Founding and that have been broadly shared across the American political spectrum.

P.P.S. For discussion of Hartz's career at Harvard, which ended with his early retirement from teaching in 1974, see Paul Roazen's introduction to The Necessity of Choice: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Transaction, 1990), his edition of Hartz's lectures on that subject.

Voltaire and coffee

A recent comment thread on Crooked Timber about the new Texas curriculum guidelines led me (once again inwardly bemoaning certain deficiencies in my education) to glance at the long-ish Wikipedia entry on Voltaire. At the end of the section headed "Legacy," there is this: "Voltaire was also known to have been an advocate for coffee, as he was purported to have drunk the beverage at least 30 times per day. It has been suggested that high amounts of caffeine acted as a mental stimulant to his creativity" (citing a 2005 Washington Monthly review of a book on the history of coffee).

Thirty times a day? Yikes. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning -- and not even every morning, sometimes forgoing it in favor of tea. But then, I'm no Voltaire (chorus: Boy, you can say that again!).

Fred Halliday, 1946-2010

Scholar of the Middle East and international relations. Obit from The Guardian here.

[Hat tip: The Virtual Stoa]

Update: More here.

Wherein the break is briefly interrupted

The local PBS station just aired Daniel Goldhagen's film about genocide, Worse than War (made to accompany his book of the same name). It has some powerful and emotional moments.

It also has an argument and a set of policy recommendations, none of which I have the time or inclination to go into, at least not now. But one or two reactions may be worth noting. Most of Goldhagen's scholarship (including his prize-winning undergraduate thesis and his Ph.D. dissertation, which became the famous and controversial book Hitler's Willing Executioners) deals with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. This film however deals with genocide in general, focusing on various instances of it, especially fairly recent ones (e.g., Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990s; Guatemala in the '80s; Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge; and Darfur).

Goldhagen argues in the film that genocidal political leaders are not "crazy" but are "rational calculators" (his phrase) who weigh costs and benefits; if they are made to realize that genocide will not 'pay' because they will be punished swiftly, then they will not order it. This description may very well apply to Slobodan Milosevic or Omar al-Bashir. Goldhagen does not say explicitly, however, that this description applies to Hitler. And whether the "rational calculator" label applies to perpetrators, as opposed to leaders, is less clear still. (As Goldhagen mentions at one point, surviving concentration camp inmates were sent on forced death marches in the very last days of Nazi Germany, even after officials in the Nazi hierarchy had ordered killings to stop; the organizers of the death marches ignored those orders.) Goldhagen also observes that genocidal leaders mobilize and play on prejudices that people already have; of course, since such prejudices are usually irrational, "rational calculators" have to know how to mobilize and harness irrationality. In the process, however, isn't it possible that these "rational calculators" may come to believe the myths that they start out by exploiting? If so, does that make them less rational? These questions were not really addressed in the film; perhaps they are addressed in the book.

[The break from posting will now resume.]

Kipling, again

Kipling has come up here before -- see this post and Hank's comment on it. Now I notice a BBC piece about Kipling's boyhood home in Mumbai: plans to turn it into a museum have been dropped and it will instead become a gallery for the work of local artists.

The piece, the transcript of a broadcast on BBC's Today show, contains this among other things:

"Some of Kipling's work, including lines like 'And a woman is only a woman; but a good cigar is a Smoke', jar with critics today [what a surprise--LFC]. But the debate surrounding their actual meaning remains active and vigorous.

For instance, one of his most famous poems, which begins: 'Take up the White Man's Burden/ Send forth the best ye breed' does not refer to British Imperialism at all but celebrates the US occupation of Cuba and the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War."

It's true that the poem "The White Man's Burden" was addressed to Americans in the wake of the Spanish-American War. It may also be true that there is "active and vigorous" debate about its meaning, although I would tend to doubt that it's all that active. It is, after all, hard to read a poem describing the colonized as "Your new-caught sullen peoples,/Half-devil and half-child," as an ode to universal equality.

An old textbook but still a good one, James Joll's Europe Since 1870 (1973), quotes the first stanza of the poem in a footnote (p.102) and adds: "It is worth noting that the general tone of the poem is pessimistic: the colonial administrator is there 'to seek another's profit and work's another gain,' and his reward is 'the blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard.'" Pessimistic or not, the poem's central message embodies, as Joll observes, the basic imperialist assumption that "advanced" peoples had a duty to "bring civilization and good administration to the backward ones...."