by George Scialabba

"Too much is expected of a writer," Albert Camus lamented to a friend in the late 1950s. The Algerian rebellion had grown into a full-scale guerrilla war for independence; and while Camus' initial sympathy for the uprising led the French right and the French Algerian settlers to denounce him as a traitor, he also came in for frequent criticism by the French left for not energetically and unequivocally supporting the insurgents. Criticism also came from the Algerian militants. Franz Fanon, the best-known Algerian writer, derided him as a "sweet sister." Sartre, formerly his close friend, mocked Camus' "beautiful soul."

Camus' complaint does him credit. He agonized over his political pronouncements in a way that the more brilliant, mercurial, doctrinaire Sartre never had to. In 1957, as the war ground on and positions hardened on both sides, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Despairing of the Algerian situation but determined to answer his critics and, with the prestige of the Nobel behind him, make one final effort for peace and reconciliation, Camus assembled a short collection of his writings about Algeria, which appeared in 1958. It appears now in English for the first time, ably translated by Arthur Goldhammer.

Algerian Chronicles spans two decades. In 1939, when Camus was a young journalist in Algeria - where he was born in 1913, to impoverished and barely literate working-class parents - a severe drought struck the region of Kabylia. Camus traveled there to report on it, and was horrified. He wrote a series of vivid and powerful dispatches, with which Algerian Chronicles begins.

Kabylia was a populous province that, like many other underdeveloped areas, derived a large proportion of its income from the remittances of émigré workers. During the Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment soared in France, many Algerian immigrants were sent home and new emigration was discouraged. Kabylia was already economically depressed when the drought hit, and the results were devastating. Hunger and unemployment were general; wages were below subsistence level; and few parents could afford school fees. Some public subsidies and private charity arrived from France but made hardly a dent.

Camus supplied statistics, anecdotes, and indignation, all in generous quantities. He also made specific and sensible recommendations: guaranteed credit for small farmers; experiments with new crops, like cherries and carob, and new techniques, like drying-houses for figs; the introduction of self-governing Arab communes under the supervision of French colonial authorities. More generally, he attacked the greed of the large colonial landowners, the grands colons, and called on the French government to make good its longstanding promise to extend the rights of Frenchmen to native Algerians. The latter suggestion was particularly unpopular among his fellow pieds noirs, the 80 percent of French settlers who were poor, but not as poor as the natives, and who enjoyed French citizenship. The reports were widely read, first in Algeria and later, as a small book, The Misery of Kabylia, in France, but with little practical result. Camus, however, was fiercely vilified by the French Algerian community and forced into exile.

Camus never again lived in Algeria, but it always dominated his literary imagination - The Stranger, The Plague, Exile and the Kingdom, and The First Man are all set there - and haunted him politically as well. (To an Algerian militant, an old friend, he wrote after one of the innumerable atrocities by both sides: "Believe me when I tell you that Algeria is where I hurt at this moment, as others feel pain in their lungs.") During the Nazi occupation of France, he became editor of Combat, the newspaper of the French Resistance, where his (anonymous) wartime writing was widely acclaimed. In 1945, with France newly liberated and political renewal in the air, Camus traveled for three weeks to Algeria and published a series of essays in Combat calling for a new relationship between France and her colony.

There was a depressing resemblance between these reports (which make up the middle section of Algerian Chronicles) and The Misery of Kabylia. Drought, wartime austerity, and the cessation of practically all imports meant another raging famine, this time countrywide. More statistics, anecdotes, and indignation from Camus. France must immediately send 240 ships, he insisted, each with 5000 tons of grain, and "if necessary demand that the world provide the necessary ships. When millions of people are suffering from hunger, it becomes everybody's business."

There was, however, a difference in Camus' analysis of the political situation. In 1939 he had pleaded for the long-promised assimilation of native Algerians. At that point, nearly 80 percent of the indigenous population wanted to become French citizens. By 1945 the promise had been too long delayed; scarcely anyone believed in it anymore. Moreover, as Camus pointed out, "hundreds of thousands of Arabs have spent the past two years fighting for the liberation of France." It seems incredible in retrospect that a new French government thought it could simply resume the old colonial relationship with only minor modifications, but that is evidently what it assumed. This was folly, Camus protested. The French would "have to conquer Algeria a second time," and "this conquest will not be as easy as the first."

Arab public opinion had shifted from assimilation to federation and a modified form of independence. Camus strongly supported this position, though he carefully couched his support in a patriotic appeal to French wisdom and grandeur. He knew all too well the intransigence of the French Algerian community; and he also recognized - almost uniquely among French intellectuals - that his fellow pieds noirs, though dismayingly many of them were pigheaded racists, nevertheless had rights too and were just as much oppressed as oppressors

The French government continued to dither. In 1948 it allowed elections for two separate assemblies, French and Muslim; but when it looked like the pro-independence parties would dominate the latter, the colonial administration rigged the elections and began arresting the leaders. Predictably, this led to further Arab protest, which led to further French repression. A National Liberation Front (FLN) formed, demanding complete independence. It was, of course, outlawed. In late 1954, it launched a guerrilla offensive, to which the French government responded by escalating its repression. In August 1955 the FLN massacred 120 French and Muslim civilians, and the French Army (along with paramilitary groups of pieds noirs) went on a rampage, killing thousands of guerrillas and Arab civilians. The Algerian War had begun in earnest.

Camus was distraught, not least because his family, including his elderly mother, and many close friends, French and Arab, were caught between two armed forces employing indiscriminate violence. In a series of essays published in late 1955 and early 1956 (and reprinted in Algerian Chronicles), he denounced the large-scale use of torture by the French Army and of terror by the FLN. In January 1956 he traveled to Algiers to give a speech. With a mob of pieds noirs outside howling for his scalp, barely restrained by almost equally disapproving armed guards from the FLN, which had guaranteed his safety, he delivered an eloquent plea for a civilian truce, a promise from both sides not to attack civilians. It was perhaps his finest moment, politically. But the men with the guns, on both sides, ignored him.

Moral imagination is not to be expected, perhaps, from politicians or military commanders. But even the intellectuals of Paris and Algiers failed to respond, preferring partisan commitment. Camus was profoundly discouraged, and moreover bore many scars from earlier Parisian polemics. Further ridicule was in store: at a press conference in Stockholm after the Nobel ceremony, Camus made a statement widely misreported as "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." Goldhammer and Kaplan perform a considerable service in pointing out that Camus said nothing so simplistic. What he said was: "People are now planting bombs on the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother." Not the same thing.

But by the time he put together Chroniques algériennes the following year, his bridges to his fellow intellectuals had been burned. In the preface he complained of "a peculiar French nastiness" and announced: "I have decided to stop participating in the endless polemics whose only effect has been to make the contending factions in Algeria even more intransigent and to deepen the divisions in a France already poisoned by hatred and factionalism." He kept to this public silence for the short remainder of his life. But he intervened privately on nearly 150 occasions to urge clemency for political prisoners. Some of those letters, along with a few letters to journals and newspapers, are included here.

The problem of revolutionary violence was perhaps the most fateful question of political morality in the 20^th century. Two texts are indispensable to anyone wanting to engage that question: Camus' "Neither Victims Nor Executioners" (1946) and Sartre's "The Wretched of the Earth" (1962), written sixteen years later and two years after Camus' death, but clearly addressed to him. As Sartre acknowledged in a generous obituary for his friend and adversary: "One lived with or against his thought ... He had to be avoided or fought: indispensable, in a word, to this tension which makes the life of the mind." That tension is everywhere in evidence in Algerian Chronicles.

                                                [END]

George Scialabba is a contributing editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and For the Republic (forthcoming in April).

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets  by Michael Sandel.

        Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages, $27.

Perhaps each of the seven deadly sins must have its day, politically. "Lust is good" might have been the rallying cry of the Sixties and Seventies counterculture. Twenty-five years ago Gordon Gekko announced mock-earnestly in Wall Street that "greed is good," ratifying the Reagan Revolution and boosting the morale of the one percent. Let us hope that an Age of Envy will dawn soon. American society today needs nothing more urgently than a growing conviction among the bottom half or two-thirds of the population that the gross economic inequality currently prevailing is unfair, undesirable, and unnecessary.

As the great theorist of nonviolence Gene Sharp has pointed out (and Gramsci before him, and Hume before both of them), every society - not only democracies - rests on consent. "Acceptance" or "resignation" may actually be a less misleading term - "consent" implies an active, explicit affirmation, whereas all Sharp, Gramsci, and Hume meant is that if the large majority of a population ever became sufficiently fed up to withdraw from participation in a society's dominant institutions, the society would cease to function, at least along the old lines. This suggests that the analysis of any drastically unequal, obviously unjust society like ours should begin with the question: why do most people put up with it?

The legitimating ideology of contemporary America is complex, but one main element of it is represented by the phrase: "free market." That phrase stands for something like this: except when fraud or violence in present, every economic transaction among adults is morally permissible, and any interference with it is unjust. Shorter version: everything's for sale.

Michael Sandel in What Money Can't Buy goes far to document the extent to which that radical proposition has penetrated everyday life. Honor is for sale: university buildings used to bear the names of great scholars or administrators; sports arenas of the teams that played there or the community that rooted there. Now they are named after donors or sold to corporations. The environment is for sale, in the form of a market for pollution permits, as well as the sale to rich sportsmen of the right to kill endangered species. Citizenship may soon be for sale: influential economists have proposed selling immigration visas at auction or for a set price, say $50,000. (Of course, this may require changing the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.) Sandel does not mention Citizens United; perhaps he thinks the fact that political office and influence are for sale in the United States is too obvious to mention.

Money buys other privileges. "Concierge medicine," the practice of putting doctors on lucrative retainers, assures the rich of immediate and individualized medical care. "Line-standing" companies take hefty fees for holding places in a queue for events like Congressional committee hearings, Supreme Court sessions, or "Shakespeare in the Park," which in theory are free and open to the public, first-come first-served. Ticket-scalping, corporate skybox seats, express-lane highway passes and exemptions from speed limits, bypassing lines to board airplanes - ever more fine-grained varieties of differential treatment are being priced and sold.

Since much of the value of Sandel's book lies in its demonstration of just how far the commercial spirit has penetrated everyday life, perhaps a few more examples are in order. There are legacy admissions: a fair number of less qualified applicants to prestigious universities are admitted each year in the expectation that their rich parents will become donors. There is the sale of organs: increasingly, kidneys are sold and wombs are rented, generally by people who are economically insecure, even desperate. There is the outsourcing of national security to private companies: in effect, the defense of the country by mercenaries rather than citizens. Public buses and even police cars are covered with ads. Apologies, wedding toasts, birthday gifts: no rich person need waste time personally attending to any of these social amenities; all of them can be taken care of by strangers for a fee.          

Well, so what? According to neoclassical economic theory, markets maximize human welfare. They insure that what is produced or done is what is wanted, and that what is wanted is what is produced or done, in just the right proportions, or as nearly as any earthly institution can. But every theory rests on simplifying assumptions. Neoclassical economic theory rests on assumptions about behavior, institutions, and information - the motives of agents, the prerequisites of production, and the conditions of exchange - that once seemed like plausible simplifications, at least to those people who were happy with the policy implications of the theory: namely, that government action to increase employment, redistribute income, or protect workers and the environment was likely to be counterproductive.

It has become increasingly clear over the last couple of decades, however, that the assumptions of neoclassical economics are not in fact plausible, though because of academic inertia and the political power of those who oppose government action, market fundamentalism retains considerable prestige. What Money Can't Buy does not take on the theory directly. It asks, rather: what is the moral character of a society in which everything is for sale? Should everything have a price? Is there a difference between the price and the value of a thing?

Most of us undoubtedly believe that there are things that money can't, or shouldn't, buy - love, devotion, and trust, for example. (Though the famed neoclassical economist Gary Becker thinks otherwise:

a person decides to marry when the utility expected from marriage exceeds that expected from remaining single or from additional search for a more suitable mate. Similarly, a married person terminates his (or her) marriage when the utility anticipated from becoming single or marrying someone else exceeds the loss in utility from separation, including ... separation from one's children, division of joint assets, legal fees, and so forth. Since many persons are looking for mates, a market in marriages can be said to exist.

Perhaps, but few people would admit unblushingly to marrying chiefly for money.)

             Likewise, most of us would say (however deeply or shallowly we've thought about it) that everyone ought to have a fair chance in life, that those who are suffering most should be cared for first, that the best education should go to those who can make the best use of it; and in general, that need or desert should be taken into account in the distribution of scarce resources, not merely the ability to pay. Skillfully, Sandel parses this popular intuition into two distinct sources of unease about the commercialization of everything. "The fairness objection asks about the inequality that market choices may reflect; the corruption objection asks about the attitudes and norms that market relations may damage or dissolve." Without minimizing the first objection, Sandel concentrates on the second.

If we pay students to read books and mercenaries to fight the country's wars, then we risk forgetting (or not teaching the next generation) what it is to love learning or love one's country. If it became common to rent poor women's wombs because the legal mother is too busy or lazy or vain to carry the baby, we would risk diluting the intensity of maternal love. If we sell naming rights to academic and athletic buildings, we risk forgetting that it is intellectual excellence and community spirit that we should want to foster among the people who frequent those buildings, not merely reverence for wealth. It's not inevitable, perhaps, that thoroughgoing commercialization will crowd out nonmarket values. But it's a grave risk. Bad currency drives out good; weeds smother more delicate growths; and in general, coarse, grasping, self-regarding behavior, when unchecked, undermines civic virtue.

Most practices beyond straightforward commercial transactions have social meanings and moral purposes, Sandel reminds us. Financial incentives alone cannot sustain a society of any complexity or richness. Shared values are indispensable; deliberation must supplement - indeed, must structure - markets. "Such deliberations," he writes

touch, unavoidably, on competing conceptions of the good life. This is terrain on which we sometimes fear to tread. For fear of disagreement, we hesitate to bring our moral and spiritual convictions into the public square. But shrinking from these questions does not leave them undecided. It simply means that markets will decide them for us. This is the lesson of the last three decades. The era of market triumphalism has coincided with a time when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance. Our only hope of keeping markets in their place is to deliberate openly and publicly about the meaning of the goods and social practices we prize.[1]

Secular liberals have been criticized, with some justice, for their reluctance to discuss abortion, divorce, pornography, promiscuity, and other sexual and family matters on their merits rather than strictly in terms of privacy rights. Privacy is not the only value worth taking account of in social and cultural debates, any more than efficiency is the only value worth taking account of in political and economic debates. Sandel is right: vigorous (though courteous) and continuing argument about the good life, however difficult to maintain, is essential to a healthy democracy.

Is it too much to ask that this season's presidential campaign debates include some such argument, at least occasionally? Yes, I'm afraid that was a rhetorical question.

                                                [END]

George Scialabba is associate editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.

I.

            Nietzsche taught us that our loftiest pronouncements on the most abstract, universal subjects are just as idiosyncratic, just as much the product of our individual temperament, metabolism, and earliest influences, as our most peculiar predilections, our most eccentric crotchets. So let me declare a prejudice.

Of my great-grandfather I know only that he was recruited from rural Sicily to work on constructing the Panama Canal, and died there of yellow fever. My grandfather was illiterate and worked as a laborer in a factory of the Hood Rubber Company. A few months before he was eligible to retire with a pension, he was fired for no reason; speaking no English, he had no recourse. My father had a high-school education, but because his childhood was shadowed by the Great Depression, he held on to a safe, undemanding civil service job for fifty years and saved every penny, much of it under his mattress. He lived on the same street throughout his adult life and never travelled outside New England. My mother's background, opportunities, and outlook were equally restricted, in some ways more so.

In Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot wrote: "The primary channel of culture is the family; no man wholly escapes from the kind, or surpasses the degree, of culture which he has acquired from his early environment." As far as I know, neither of my parents ever read a novel, saw a play, or heard a concert. Nevertheless, their son has two Ivy League degrees, has written books, and has seen the world, in person and at the movies. I spend hundreds of blissful hours each year listening, on splendid but inexpensive equipment, to splendid but inexpensive recordings of the complete works of Bach and Mozart. Durable, inexpensive paperbacks furnish my rooms and my life. Even across one generation, this seems like progress. When I imagine my great-grandfather's great-grandfather, sunk in the immemorial poverty, ignorance, and humiliation of the Sicilian peasantry, the conclusion feels irresistible: I, at least, am the lucky beneficiary of two or three centuries of progress. And since the carbon footprint of classical music, great novels, independent film, and most of my other chief pleasures is fairly low, it seems like sustainable, universalizable progress.

Do I embody moral progress as well? That's a harder case to make, but not impossible. Some astute and astringent judgments have been passed on the traditional morality of southern Italians. In The Golden Bowl, Prince Amerigo implores Fanny Assingham, who has brought him together with his rich but inexperienced fiancée Maggie Verver, to "keep him straight." She replies:   

"Oh, you deep old Italians!"

"There you are," he returned. ... "That's the responsible note."

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"Of my real, honest fear of being 'off' some day, of being wrong, without knowing it. That's what I shall always trust you for - to tell me when I am. No - with you people it's a sense. We haven't got it - not as you have."

"I should be interested," she presently remarked, "to see some sense you don't possess."

Well, he produced one on the spot. "The moral, dear Mrs. Assingham. I mean, always, as you others consider it. I've of course something that in our poor dear backward old Rome sufficiently passes for it. But it's no more like yours than the tortuous stone staircase - half-ruined into the bargain! - in some castle of our quattrocento is like the 'lightning elevator' in one of Mr. Verver's fifteen-storey buildings. Your moral sense works by steam - it sends you up like a rocket. Ours is slow and steep and unlighted, with so many of the steps missing that - well, that it's as short, in almost any case, to turn around and come down again."

"Trusting," Mrs. Assingham smiled, "to get up some other way?"

"Yes - or not to have to get up at all."

Later in the twentieth century, in the sociological classic The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Edward Banfield theorized the southern Italian ethos as "amoral familism." This unhappy moral culture was defined by a narrow dedication to the interests of oneself and one's immediate family and a thoroughgoing absence of intellectual or political integrity, disinterestedness, trust, solidarity, generosity, civic virtue, or professional pride, along with equal measures of cynicism about and servility toward all forms of authority. Robert Putnam also found amoral familism flourishing - if that's the word - among southern Italians in his seminal Making Democracy Work.

Amoral familism was certainly the prevailing ethos in my largely second-generation inner-city neighborhood. At college, ivied brick walls, timbered dining halls, and portraits of Puritan college fathers prepared me for a change; and in my sophomore year enlightenment arrived, full blast and double-barrelled: On Liberty and Middlemarch, between them a complete moral education. Mill's noble purity and Eliot's wise magnanimity had their inevitable effect. I will never be, like them, incapable of a pettiness, but I am a little less of an amoral familist than I would otherwise have been. Hardly perfection, but for one whose not very distant ancestor was very likely, in the words of another Henry James character, "a squalid, savage-looking peasant, a tattered ruffian of orthodox Italian aspect," undoubtedly progress. And again, in principle at least (notwithstanding the ivied walls), universally achievable.

This two-century trajectory, from squalor to modest comfort, from ruffian to harmless schlub, doubtless predisposes me to see the slope of history tending upward. So does another accident of biography: deliverance from l'infame. I grew up devout and was recruited as a high-school student into Opus Dei, a Catholic lay order of the strictest Counter-Reformation traditionalism and authoritarianism. Majoring in modern European intellectual history was awkward, since much of modern European literature and philosophy was on the Index of Forbidden Books and therefore proscribed. Unwisely, however, the Church failed to forbid everything. Even more unwisely, the order tried to teach its members the elements of Scholastic philosophy, which I found extremely unconvincing. I suppressed my doubts for a long while, out of conscience and natural timidity. I confided them to my confessor, of course, who at first urged prayer and mortification of the flesh. Eventually, after consulting his superiors, he ordered a sacrificium intellectus: I must leave intellectual history alone, on peril of sin and perhaps damnation. This was a serious matter: I was terrified of Hell, and moreover, my confessor very much resembled my mental image of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. But it was too late: I felt the Enlightenment at my back. Emulating the philosophes' great refusal, I lodged my little one, enrolling timorously but proudly in what I had learned from Peter Gay to call the Party of Humanity - of freedom, science, and progress. Because this mini-heroic auto-emancipation has been the supreme drama - to tell the truth, the only drama - in my life, I am perhaps understandably inclined to see all of history as this drama writ large: "humankind's emergence from its self-imposed minority," as Kant defined "enlightenment." Certainly I am reluctant to consider that my tiny but arduous affirmation has no resonance beyond my own life, no part in furthering a grander scheme of liberation and collective advance. But that's just a prejudice, I know.

II.

            Some part of our perplexity about human progress is surely a result of the size of our sample. If we knew the histories of even a few more intelligent species, it would be much easier to extrapolate our future. All we have are imagined histories; that is, science fiction. Some of its guesses seem truly inspired, though; none more so than Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. The fundamental intuition underlying all visions of perfection through cosmic evolution may be summed up as "matter into mind." It is an ubiquitous trope in intellectual history, from the Middle Ages through Teilhard de Chardin, and in futuristic fiction since Wells and Stapledon, if not before. Matter is limitation, disorganization, inertia. Mind gradually, inexorably rationalizes not only our material and social relations, but eventually even our organismic form, our species being. We become gods.

In Clarke's version, the path to godhead is not exactly rationalization. A race of super-intelligent, super-powerful beings arrives on earth to midwife humankind's passage across a cosmic evolutionary barrier. The midwives, or Overlords, have reached a cul de sac of scientific rationality. Their civilization is immeasurably superior, but humans have something they lack: imagination. Most races with this psychic endowment have destroyed themselves, and sometimes others, the Overlords explain. The few that have flourished have fused into an entity that its servants, the Overlords, call the Overmind: a being in which (or whom) beauty, truth, power, and love are indistinguishable and are present in a degree that is, for practical purposes, infinite. Like the Christian God (Clarke must have known some theology), the Overmind seeks to draw up into itself those species capable of sharing in - participating, as Thomistic theologians would say - its beatitude. The Overlords and other apostles are sent to harvest them.

This is not exactly what Condorcet or Spencer or Teilhard, or Joachim da Fiore for that matter, had in mind. Some critics (and some characters in Childhood's End), find Clarke's vision objectionable, because humankind does not decide its own fate. Of course this objection only has force if humankind is grown-up enough to comprehend its choices and discipline its lethal (potentially on an interstellar scale, the Overlords warn) energies. Clarke's answer, implicit in his title and indicated, though not fully developed, in the novel, is persuasive to me. More important, Childhood's End is at once the most extreme and the most plausible futuristic fantasy I know of. It answers to my (admittedly crude) intuition that fourteen billion years is enough time, and trillions of light years enough space, for a great many things to have happened that have so far eluded most terrestrial imaginations; and also to my (equally crude) sense that at least a few of humankind's innumerable mystics have glimpsed something ineffable. Those are two very disparate intuitions; I don't know of any other story that accommodates both.

III.      

Other stories or (what amounts to the same thing) historical interpretations answer to different, sometimes opposite intuitions. "Matter into mind" is a formula for limitless transcendence. Intuitions of immanence, of the necessity and wisdom of limits, produce visions of stasis or decline and hopes for, at best, a steady state.

The two most persuasive 20^th-century anti-progressives I've encountered could hardly be more different: D. H. Lawrence and Christopher Lasch. Lawrence championed matter against mind. He despised "thin-minded" rationalists like Shaw and Wells; he scoffed at labor-saving technology; and he believed in natural hierarchies and charismatic leaders. Yet he was hardly a friend of any status quo, past or present. From an unpublished manuscript:

I know that we could, if we would, establish little by little a true democracy in England: we could nationalize the land and industries and means of transport, and make the whole thing work infinitely better than at present, if we would. It all depends on the spirit in which the thing is done.

I know we are on the brink of a class war.

I know we had all better hang ourselves at once, than enter on a struggle which shall be a fight for the ownership or non-ownership of property, pure and simple, and nothing beyond.

I know the ownership of property is a problem that may have to be fought out. But beyond the fight must lie a new hope, a new beginning. ...

I know we must take up the responsibility for the future, now. A great change is coming, and must come. What we need is some glimmer of a vision of a world that shall be, beyond the change. Otherwise we shall be in for a great debacle.

Lawrence's "glimmer of a vision" flickers throughout the two volumes of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, especially in the "Study of Thomas Hardy," "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine," and "Education of the People." It involves a far more direct connection with the sun and the solar plexus, with cosmic mysteries and instinctual rhythms, than he observed in his contemporaries. Against the prevailing rationalism, he defined reason as "the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters" and conceived "man's body as a kind of flame ... and the intellect is just the light that is shed on the things around."

What kind of future follows from that image of humanity? Lawrence never explained in detail. His vision found its strangest and most lyrical expression in another unpublished fragment, a utopian fantasy in the form (and something like the spirit) of William Morris's News from Nowhere. The speaker has woken up in his native place after sleeping a thousand years. The new humans are "flower-like" and "comely as berries" - not at all disembodied Mind. He watches them at sunset:

When the ball of fire touched the tree-tops, there was a queer squeal of bagpipes, and the square suddenly started into life. The men were stamping softly, like bulls, the women were softly swaying, and softly clapping their hands, with a strange noise, like leaves. And under the vaulted porticoes, at opposite ends of the egg-shaped oval, came the soft booming and trilling of women and men singing against one another in the strangest pattern of sound.

It was all kept very soft, soft-breathing. Yet the dance swept into swifter and swifter rhythm, with the most extraordinary incalculable unison. I do not believe there was any outside control of the dance. The thing happened by instinct, like the wheeling and flashing of a shoal of fish or of a flock of birds dipping and spreading in the sky. Suddenly, in one amazing wing-movement, the arms of all the men would flash up into the air, naked and glowing, and with the soft rushing sound of pigeons alighting the men ebbed in a spiral, grey and sparkled with scarlet, bright arms slowly leaning, upon the women, who rustled all crocus-blue, rustled like an aspen, then in one movement scattered like sparks, in every direction from under the enclosing, sinking arms of the men, and suddenly formed slender rays of lilac branching out from the red and grey knot of the men.

All the time the sun was slowly sinking, shadow was falling, and the dance was moving slower, the women wheeling blue around the obliterated sun. They were dancing the sun down, and dancing as birds wheel and dance, and fishes in shoals, controlled by some strange unanimous instinct. It was at once terrifying and magnificent, I wanted to die, so as not to see it, and I wanted to rush down, to be one of them. To be a drop in that wave of life.

This was Lawrence's answer to Wells's Men Like Gods and Shaw's Back to Methuselah. a vision of human perfection achieved by going not onward and upward but inward and downward. Whether it means going forward or backward depends on whether one believes - and is glad - that organic, embodied human nature has unalterable limits.

Christopher Lasch believed that and preached it eloquently in The True and Only Heaven, his masterpiece of social criticism and intellectual history. That book, like Lasch's entire career, is an extended quarrel with modernity, defined as the advance of an overlapping, mutually reinforcing phalanx of political centralization, mass production, expanded consumption, automation, geographical mobility, the bureaucratization of education, medicine, and family life, moral cosmopolitanism, and legal universalism. Against this march of abstractions, Lasch insisted on the fact of human scale. The human creature has a specific evolutionary endowment and gestational history; as a result it has a specific infantile fantasy life, which it can only outgrow gradually, through a range of close-up interactions, involving both authority and love, with the same caregivers over many years. The bureaucratic rationalization of work and intimate life plays havoc with this scheme of development, producing a weak self, stripped of traditional skills, tools, and autonomy, entirely dependent on large forces beyond its comprehension, much less control, and crippled by ambivalence toward remote, impersonal authority. What sustained the strong pre-modern self was the virtue of hope; what sustains the weak modern self is the ideology of progress.

I have learned, with some reluctance, from Lawrence and Lasch how readily things go wrong, how ingeniously progress can be faked. The division of labor, advances in industrial and information technology, the growth of medical knowledge, even the emancipation of women: every liberation can be captured and exploited. We had better stay inside our own skins - and even, perhaps, within traditional social forms - until we are sure that it's safe to discard them. And as long as modernization is involuntary - imposed within a class system, for profit or social control - it's difficult to know that.

Two other, minor masterpieces teach similar lessons about false promises. Whether or not (as Nicholas Carr argues in The Shallows) the Internet makes us stupid, it undeniably makes us different, especially as readers. In The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts masterfully elaborates a phenomenology of "deep reading": the heightened focus, the inner stillness, the imaginative motility, the immersion in a linguistic matrix. It is a habitus that, like the attention of a meditator, strengthens gradually, as a muscle does. It requires verticality and temporary isolation. The capacity for such concentration must erode and eventually dissipate in a horizontal, hyperlinked, continuously connected world. The alteration in our psychic metabolism that Birkerts foresees seems to me no less probable and fateful because his is a qualitative, literary description, without benefit of neurobiology or social science.

The alteration Bill McKibben discusses in Enough (and, not quite so sensitively and eloquently, Francis Fukuyama in Our Posthuman Future) is even more radical. Not all scientists agree that germ-line genetic engineering will be feasible within the next hundred years, but most do. The elimination of genetic diseases will be a blessing, of course, but a market in "designer children," programmed for outstanding cognitive, athletic, and other abilities, may transform present economic inequalities into irreversible caste distinctions - eventually even species distinctions. Surely the free market knows best, and if it decrees that the master class should become a master race, who is wise enough to interfere? "There is no alternative," Mrs. Thatcher instructed us; in which case, Jefferson's ringing declaration that "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God," is only sentimental egalitarian rhetoric.

IV.

Perhaps the problem of progress is a pseudo-problem. Coleridge observed that every great and original poet creates the taste by which he is judged. But tastes, criteria, perspectives can also be destroyed or wither away. Print-based civilization, for example, has not answered the earliest objections to the eclipse of oral literacy; it has merely ignored them. No doubt the inhabitants of the Electronic Hive that Birkerts foresees will miss deep reading about as much as most of us miss having vast quantities of verse committed to memory, as many educated people did in the age of oral literacy. And a population that has exchanged its skills, tools, and independence for SUVs and consumer electronics may be perfectly happy, or at least comfortable, with saddles on their backs. To measure progress, one needs a standard; and if standards alter drastically, what are measurements worth?

George Orwell had a view of the question. Though best known for his dystopias, he did write one - characteristically skeptical and downbeat - piece about Utopia, a Christmas 1943 Tribune essay entitled "Can Socialists Be Happy?" "All efforts to describe permanent happiness ... have been failures, from earliest history onwards," he began cheerfully. Utopias "seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness." Even News from Nowhere induced in him "only a sort of watery melancholy." Orwell was never a blithe spirit, and in London in December 1943 it was probably hard to conceive even temporary happiness.

Anyway, he continues, happiness is not the point.

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue. ...

            Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks that happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wiser course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business.

This seems reasonable to me, and I suspect it would have seemed reasonable to Condorcet, who ended the penultimate section of his Sketch with a passage of near-Orwellian sobriety:

The labours of recent ages have done much for the progress of the human mind, but little for the perfection of the human race; much for the honour of man, something for his liberty, but so far almost nothing for his happiness. At a few points our eyes are dazzled with a brilliant light; but thick darkness still covers an immense stretch of the horizon. There are a few circumstances from which the philosopher can take consolation; but he is still afflicted by the spectacle of the stupidity, slavery, barbarism, and extravagance of mankind; and the friend of humanity can find unmixed pleasure only in tasting the sweet delights of hope.

That sounds as much like 2012 as 1794 (except that recent ages haven't done as much for "the honour of man"). "Thick darkness" accurately describes the American economic and political outlook; and toothache is the only possible response to either Democratic or Republican politicians or pundits. Occupy and Wikileaks and 350.org, Krugman and Greenwald and Chomsky, seem to me a "few points" of "brilliant light," from which I "take consolation." Are they, along with the last three centuries or so, enough to furnish the "sweet delights of hope"? I suppose so - but that's just a prejudice, I know.

                                                [END]

George Scialabba is the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.

            Pantheon, 419 pages, $28.95.

Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation by Richard Sennett. Yale University

            Press, 324 pages, $28.

The last three decades have been bitter medicine for the left. In the late 1970s, the achievements of the New Deal seemed secure, embraced even by Richard Nixon, the most conservative president since Herbert Hoover. Labor unions were an accepted feature of economic and political life. In the wake of Medicare and Medicaid, inaugurated in the 1960s, the path to universal health care seemed open. Nixon himself had created the Environmental Protection Agency, an important victory for the cause of governmental regulation. Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the corporate-loophole-ridden tax code was a "disgrace" and promised to make human rights the "soul" of American foreign policy. Despite much unhappiness over busing and Roe v. Wade, the feminist and civil-rights movements appeared triumphant.

Thirty-something years later ... well, there's no need to call the dreary roll of reverses. In policy and opinion, the country's political center of gravity has shifted far to the right. How has it happened?

Jonathan Haidt's fascinating, important, and exasperating new book offers one set of answers. A social psychologist at the University of Virginia and a professed liberal Democrat, Haidt was dismayed by liberalism's eclipse. Seeking to understand it, he proposes a new, or at any rate newly formulated, theory of our moral and political judgments, called Moral Foundations Theory.

As we all know and often forget, humans are not purely rational. Or, to put it another way, there's more to rationality than is dreamed of in our everyday philosophies. We have a long, complex evolutionary history, which has left us with a tangled, multilayered psyche and many more motives than we are usually conscious of. With the help of research by a couple of generations of psychologists, anthropologists, and behavioral economists, Haidt has excavated these psychic structures. But before entering on a detailed description, Haidt pauses to emphasize the First Principle of any adequate moral psychology: "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second."

Experiments repeatedly show that - to oversimplify only a little - we all believe what we want, regardless of reasons. This certainly tallies with my, and many other liberals', experience of political debate. Changing one's views in response to an opponent's arguments is about as rare as an honest Congressman. (Cases of both are known, but only a few.) Arguments are largely instrumental; they are meant for attack or defense. Most of the time, we argue like lawyers rather than philosophers.  Hume was right: "Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Where, then, do our moral judgments come from? According to Moral Foundations Theory, morality begins as a set of evolution-derived intuitions, which each child then learns to apply within his or her culture. Haidt suggests six dimensions or categories or foundations, into which nearly all our intuitions fall: 1) Help those in need and minimize suffering everywhere (the Care/Harm foundation); 2) Reward people according to what they contribute (Fairness/Cheating); 3) Advance the fortunes of your group (Loyalty/Betrayal); 4) Defer to legitimate superiors and protect subordinates (Authority/Subversion); 5) Resist domination by illegitimate authority (Liberty/Oppression); 6) Respect your group's totems and taboos (Sanctity/Degradation).

By Haidt's reckoning, liberals focus too narrowly on the first and a special version of the second foundation. Compassion is the supreme liberal virtue, supplemented by egalitarianism, which relies on a view of contributing that emphasizes effort rather than output. Because it is individuals who suffer and need, liberalism is individualistic.

Conservatives, by contrast, have a more balanced moral matrix, resting more equally on the six foundations. The details of that argument rest to a considerable extent on questionnaires and psychology-lab experiments, but Haidt's main conclusion is overwhelmingly plausible: conservatives are less attuned to individual freedom and fulfillment, more sensitive to and concerned about the cohesiveness and stability of groups. They are instinctive Durkheimians, agreeing with the great French sociologist that every society is unified by sacred, unchallengeable beliefs, and that "to free man from all social pressures is to abandon and demoralize him." Even before "social capital" became a social-scientific buzzword, conservatives understood that communities are fragile and require continual shoring up, sometimes at the expense of individual welfare. "If you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you're asking for trouble. This," Haidt affirms, "is the fundamental blind spot of the left." Where liberals see individuals in need, conservatives see social structures at risk.

"Republicans understand moral psychology; Democrats don't," Haidt announces in italics.

Republicans trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. Like Democrats, they can talk about innocent victims (of harmful Democratic policies) and about fairness (particularly the unfairness of taking tax money from hardworking and prudent people to support cheaters, slackers, and irresponsible fools). But Republicans since Nixon have had a near-monopoly on appeals to loyalty (particularly patriotism and the military virtues) and authority (including respect for parents, teachers, elders, and the police, as well as for traditions). And after they embraced Christian conservatives during Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign and became the party of "family values," Republicans inherited a powerful network of Christian ideas about sanctity and sexuality that allowed them to portray Democrats as the party of Sodom and Gomorrah. Set against the rising crime and chaos of the 1960s and 1970s, this five-foundation morality [he hadn't yet gotten around to introducing the sixth one - GS] had wide appeal, even to many Democrats.

Some of this has been said before (eg, by George Lakoff), though not so systematically or with so large a background of experimental data and evolutionary theory. What should we make of it? What is true and valuable, in the first place, is the reminder that every utterance is the tip of an iceberg, merely the surface layer of a deep linguistic (Wittgenstein) or psychic (Freud) substrate. To understand someone, even for conversational purposes - much less persuade him or her - takes a lot of patient, skillful work. Of course every non-autistic adult recognizes this to some degree; but most of us, most of the time, to an inadequate degree.

So, for example, an opinion about immigration or the Affordable Care Act may have little to do with that issue or that law and much more to do with the speaker's feeling about his/her interlocutor, or about which group or tribe the opinion associates one with. In that case, facts and reasoning about policy will only get the discussants so far. They must either go deeper, baring their fundamental commitments and identifications to each other, or else save their breath.

How, then, do minds ever change? They rarely do, it appears. "Whether you end up on the right or the left of the political spectrum turns out to be just as heritable as most other traits: genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes. Being raised in a liberal or conservative household accounts for much less." Presumably political campaigns, discussions with friends and co-workers, television programs, books and articles, and even one's education, account for still less.

Are society-wide misunderstanding and mistrust inevitable? Haidt's practical recommendations for avoiding them are not robust. "I believe that psychologists must work with political scientists to identify changes that will undermine Manichaeism." That should at least attract some foundation funding for psychologists and political scientists. Beyond that, he can only suggest that perhaps if Congressional families all lived in Washington DC and their children played sports together, Congressional Republicans and Democrats might be less polarized.

For secular rationalists (i.e., most politically active liberals and leftists), all this is discouraging. But we get no sympathy from Haidt, who scourges the "rationalist delusion": the idea that "reasoning is our most noble attribute," which usually goes along with "a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power" as well as "a utopian program for raising more rational children." We had better reconcile ourselves to religion, Haidt advises - he deplores the New Atheism - and if possible, even join one. Lack of belief is no problem: "it is religious belongingness that matters for [social capital]," he approvingly quotes from a scholarly study, "not religious believing."

Truth or falsity is beside the point for Haidt; the social benefits of religion are too great to allow for quibbling on that score. Religions "help groups to cohere, solve free rider problems, and win the competition for group-level survival"; and they make individuals "less selfish and more loving." Gods and religions are "tools that let people bind themselves together," or in the language of evolutionary psychology, "group-level adaptations for producing cohesiveness and trust." The data strongly suggest, Haidt claims, that religious people are happier, more generous, more productive, and better behaved than the non-religious.

At the very least, unbelievers should keep their skepticism to themselves. "Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely 'rational' beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery." Like the serpent in Eden, reason promises a brave new world but can only bring homelessness and exile.

The Righteous Mind is an easy book for a defensive liberal rationalist to ridicule. Haidt clearly knows a thing or two about moral psychology and political rhetoric, but apparently very little about current affairs or political economy. For one thing, the recent political polarization he laments is of a peculiar sort: there is only one pole. Since the Republican capture of Congress in 1994, and even before, the Republican side has been characterized by relentless, take-no-prisoners partisanship; the Democratic side by disunity, vacillation, surrender. This is the fundamental fact of recent American political history, and Haidt shows no awareness of it.

For another thing, though some of their electoral success may well result from the fact that "Republicans understand moral psychology; Democrats don't," it's also true - a regrettably partisan point, but it must be made - that Republicans cheat a lot. The Nixon campaign attempted to forestall a peace agreement in October 1968 that might have elected Hubert Humphrey. The Reagan campaign attempted to delay the release of the hostages until Jimmy Carter had left office. A Republican Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. The Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry in 2004, financed by Republican donors, was based on lies, while the CBS "60 Minutes" report alleging George Bush's evasion of National Guard duty was substantially true, despite a firestorm of successful Republican denial. Lee Atwater's and Karl Rove's dirty tricks are too numerous to catalogue. Currently Republicans across the country are busy with voter-suppression efforts, under the deceitful pretense of combating vote fraud. No doubt the Democrats are hardly political innocents; but compared with the Republicans, they are hapless pikers. Yet oddly, the Republicans' godly supporters do not object to this ungodly behavior.

There are also deeper, less obvious objections to Haidt's critique of liberal hyper-rationalism. Minds sometimes change; the voice of reason, though small and quiet, as Freud pointed out, does eventually get a hearing. Mightn't it be fruitful to ask how this can happen rather than assuming, as Haidt does, that it hardly ever will? Mightn't there be some material conditions in which rationality is not invincibly more difficult than unthinking allegiance, and in which cooperative inquiry seems as natural as strategic reasoning?

Strategic reasoning is, as Haidt emphasizes, a mechanism of inter-group competition; and competition is premised on insecurity. Universal radical insecurity - the inevitable and intended result of "flexible labor markets" and "minimal government" - is not conducive to imaginative receptivity or disinterested reflection. Veblen famously observed that it is all but impossible to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. The same goes for his tax breaks, regulatory exemptions, government contracts, and other matters on which a man's survival, or his accustomed lifestyle, may depend. When the middle class is shrinking and one person in four or five is below, at, or not far from poverty level, most people will hunker down, not open up. Some degree of competition, insecurity, and inequality will probably always be necessary. But the price of our present degree of those things is a lessened ability to reason together about difficult matters.

Another, equally pervasive condition of contemporary life also handicaps collective rationality. Tellingly, nearly all the data Haidt refers to seems to be derived from brief interactions: lab experiments, interviews, questionnaires. There is rarely any occasion for prolonged reflection and relaxed discursiveness in these circumstances, any more than there is on radio and TV talk shows, where the average response is only seconds long and thoughtful pauses are disparaged by the producers as "dead air." Newspaper opinion pieces rarely exceed 700 words. Naturally readers and listeners fall back on preset attitudes and received opinions.

Moreover, we are all increasingly hyperstimulated. The sheer volume of commercial messages, entertainment, and social media makes some inner compensation necessary, so we double down on our inner stabilizers, otherwise known as prejudices. Deep experiences of any kind - grappling with art or philosophy, having one's mind changed about politics, or simply possessing one's soul - require a modicum of silence, slowness, and solitude. For most Americans, that modicum is vanishing.

Liberals (or anyone) challenged by Haidt's pessimism about social rationality will want to look into a new book by the maverick sociologist and cultural historian Richard Sennett. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation is less ambitious than The Righteous Mind, but also less breezily in-the-reader's-face and more elegantly written. Throughout his career Sennett has chosen ample subjects - craftsmanship, respect, public space, built environments - and addressed them essayistically, with a varying mix of field work, social theory, literary/historical erudition, and idiosyncratic reflection. Together is part of a trilogy on "the skills of everyday experience," this volume on "responsiveness to others, such as listening skills in conversation, and [collaboration] at work and in the community."

Sennett is a non-doctrinaire left-liberal, not much interested in electoral politics or ideology. But he has a keen eye and ear for the textures and timbres of contemporary life and a historically informed sense of how they came to be that way. In Together, he traces the forms of working-class sociality from the 19^th century to the present, including labor parties, workshops, settlement houses, and the Catholic Worker movement. At the center of labor history is the problem of what Haidt called "group cohesiveness": viz, what experiences, demands, or relationships might turn a class into a community? Sympathetically but critically, Sennett canvasses the attempts by Robert Owen, the German Social Democrats, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, Saul Alinsky, and others to answer that question.

Nowadays the achievement of working-class community seems to him even less possible than formerly. "The new forms of capitalism emphasize short-term labor and institutional fragmentation; the effect of this economic system has been that workers cannot sustain supportive relations with one another." Activists who would base protest and resistance on group values, as Haidt counsels, are stymied, Sennett points out, by the difficulty of "strengthening communities whose economic heart is weak." Community, like rationality, has its material prerequisites, which are currently being eroded on a large scale.

For secular liberals, the message of these two books, especially Haidt's, is a sobering one: achieving large-scale trust, comity, and mutual aid is hard, very hard. Though it has sometimes been done in the past, secular liberals are barred from using the old methods. We want bonds, we want limits, we want authority; but we don't want illusions. The will of God, the infallibility of Scripture, and the divine right of husbands and fathers seem to us illusions. Even "my country right or wrong" is an illusion if it means, as it frequently does in the mouths of false patriots, "my country can do no wrong." We can't accept these illusions, and we can't ask others to accept them - even if it will make them better behaved - though of course we must live with, and compromise with, people who think otherwise.

 But we also owe it to conservatives - and to ourselves - to devise ways of promoting stability and solidarity that don't rely on illusions. Here liberals have indeed failed, though the three centuries since the Enlightenment are hardly a great deal of time in which to resolve the immemorial tensions between reason and instinct or individual and group. Perhaps the best we can do for now is to point out, patiently, persistently, and with as much love for our equally stubborn fellow citizens as we can muster, that some social arrangements make it harder to hear one another.

                                                [END]

George Scialabba is associate editor of The  Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge. Translated by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis. Foreword by Adam Hochschild. 521 pages, $17.95.

A stanza from Bertolt Brecht's poem "To Those Born Later" might have served as an epigraph for Victor Serge's memoir:

I came to the cities in a time of disorder

When hunger reigned there.

I came among men in a time of revolt

And I rebelled with them.

So passed my time

Which had been given me on earth.

Victor Kibalchich ("Serge" was a nom de guerre) was born in 1890 to Russian revolutionary exiles, in Brussels because "my parents, in quest of their daily bread and of good libraries, were commuting between London (the British Museum), Paris, Switzerland, and Belgium." His upbringing insured that he would be a rebel and outsider from early youth: "On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged. The conversations of grown-ups dealt with trials, executions, escapes, and Siberian highways, with great ideas incessantly argued over, and with the latest books about those ideas." It was a hard life; his eight-year-old brother starved to death.

Like other young rebels (I.F. Stone and Seymour Hersh, for example), Serge left school early and hung about on the fringes of journalism. At 20 he began editing an anarchist newspaper in Paris. When a group of anarchist acquaintances staged a robbery and were caught, Serge was arrested, framed, and sentenced to five years of solitary confinement. On his release he traveled to Barcelona, where an unsuccessful anarchist uprising was in preparation, after which he was again arrested. Serge's early chapters on the pre-World War I European ultra-left milieu and French and Spanish prison camps are, like the rest of the book, wonderfully vivid, but also have a charm and occasional lightness that the later ones, more sublime and tragic but shadowed by the darkness and taut with the unbearable tensions of the Russian years, lack.

At the end of the war Serge was transferred to France and, along with some other political prisoners, sent to newly revolutionary Russia in exchange for captured French military officers. He arrived in 1919, during the Civil War. With the monarchist and aristocratic officer corps, supplied and reinforced by the British, French, and American governments, attacking on several fronts, and the peasantry torn between promises of land and residual loyalties to the old regime and the Church, the Bolsheviks' survival was in grave doubt. Serge threw himself into the battle for Petrograd, for several months on the verge of being conquered by White (ie, counter-revolutionary) forces. Besides helping organize the defense of the city (an experience depicted in one of his several superb novels, Conquered City), he acted as a liaison to European parties and publications and also took charge of the archives of the Tsarist secret police, which lent extra authority and keenness of perception to his subsequent analysis of the role of police repression in the decay of Bolshevism.

After the Reds' narrow victory, Serge worked under Zinoviev in the Communist International. The Bolsheviks knew that their hold on power was precarious and believed that the survival of the Revolution depended on successful workers' uprisings in Central and Western Europe. There was plenty of working-class discontent in those countries, and the Russians brought the leadership to Moscow for encouragement and advice. Serge was squarely in the middle of this intense activity, both in Moscow and in Berlin, where he worked in the Communist underground. His magnanimous but unsparing portraits of the European revolutionary leadership and intelligentsia, including Gramsci, Lukacs, Souvarine, and Andres Nin, as well as such old Bolsheviks as Trotsky and Radek and Russian writers like Gorky and Yesenin, are a large and unforgettable part of the Memoirs.

Revolution failed everywhere, most crucially and disappointingly in Germany. The Soviet Union was isolated - encircled - and the results were catastrophic: a desperate obsession among the leadership with Party unity, internal security, and rapid military and economic (in practice, heavy-industrial) development. And by the late 1920s, ten years after the Revolution, the leadership was ... Stalin.

The descent of the Stalinist darkness on the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement has been described many times, but rarely, perhaps never, with such intimate knowledge and moral discrimination as in Serge's memoirs and novels. Serge the novelist is as lyrical as Pasternak, as shrewd as Koestler, as humane as Silone. The Case of Comrade Tulayev - written, like most of Serge's novels, at odd moments, with only remote prospects of publication - is one of the best novels about Stalinism, and indeed one of the best political novels of the 20^th century. The murder of a Party official, in reality a random act of street violence, metastasizes in the imagination of the secret police into an elaborate treasonous conspiracy. Figures of every stature, lofty, middling, and insignificant, all innocent and most of them fervently loyal, are swept into the investigation's maw, while the investigators and their bureaucratic superiors are, without exception, of a chilling mediocrity and cynicism. There is even a scene with Stalin himself, which manages the extraordinary - but for Serge, characteristic - feat of rendering the dictator's ordinary, even impressive, qualities without lessening our horror.

Progressively disillusioned, Serge leads for several years the twilight existence of an Oppositionist: still inside the Party, but mistrusted and mistrustful. His wife's family is persecuted, partly on his account; she goes mad, and he is left to care for their young son. He is expelled from the Party. Finally, inevitably, comes his arrest. As usual in such cases, he is presented with fantastic allegations and pressured to confess to at least some of them, for his own good and the good of the Party. Unlike most people in his position, he categorically refuses. He is exiled anyway, to a town in the Urals.

His fellow exiles (portrayed in Serge's novel Midnight in the Century, as well as in the Memoirs) are a lively bunch, though there are no jobs and hunger is incessant. Here and elsewhere in the book, Serge frequently ends a paragraph with a terse resumé of the subject's eventual fate: "Stetsky disappeared into jail in 1938." "Lominadze will kill himself around 1935; Yan Sten, classed as a 'terrorist,' will be shot around 1937." Very effectively, these individual death knells toll the death of the Revolution as well.

In the mid-1930s, Stalin was courting French intellectuals as part of his Popular Front strategy. Some of Serge's novels and essays had been published in France, so André Gide, Romain Rolland, and others succeeded in winning his release, or rather expulsion. Throughout the late '30s, first in Belgium, then in France, closely watched by the government, slandered by the Communists, admired by a few free spirits like Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, he tried simultaneously to defend what the Revolution had started out to be and to criticize what it had become. When France fell to the Nazis, his life was in danger. So dangerous a radical naturally could not be admitted to the United States, so he spent his last years in Mexico, impoverished and isolated, writing his marvelous final novel, Unforgiving Years, and this imperishable memoir.

Two passages, one early in the Memoirs and one late, give one a sense of the man. In 1917, just released from a French prison, he arrives in Barcelona.

The treadmill that crushed human beings still revolved inside me. I found no happiness in awakening to life, free and privileged alone among my conscript generation, in this contented city. I felt a vague compunction at it all. Why was I there, in these cafés, on these golden sands, while so many others were bleeding in the trenches of a whole continent? Why was I excluded from the common fate? I came across deserters who were happy to be beyond the frontier, safe at last. I admitted their right to safety, but inwardly I was horrified at the idea that people could fight so fiercely for their own lives when what was at stake was the life of everyone: a limitless suffering to be endured commonly, shared and drunk to the last drop. ... I worked in print shops, went to bullfights, resumed my reading, clambered up mountains, dallied in cafés to watch Castilian, Sevillan, Andalusian, or Catalan girls at their dancing, and I felt that it would be impossible for me to live like this. All I could think of was the men at war, who kept calling to me.

Twenty-five years later, he looks back over a life of exhilarating struggle and betrayed hopes.

The only meaning of life lies in conscious participation in the making of history. One must range oneself actively against everything that diminishes man, and involve oneself in all struggles that tend to liberate and enlarge him. This categorical imperative is in no way lessened by the fact that such an involvement is inevitably soiled by error; it is a worse error merely to live for oneself, caught within traditions which are soiled by inhumanity. This conviction has brought me, as it has brought others, to a somewhat unusual destiny. But we were, and still are, in line with the development of history, and it is now obvious that, during an entire epoch, millions of individual destinies will follow the paths along which we were the first to travel. In Europe, in Asia, in America, whole generations are in upheaval, are ... [learning] that the egoism of "every man for himself" is finished, that private enrichment is no fit aim for life, that yesterday's conservatisms lead to nothing but catastrophe, and sensing the necessity for a fresh outlook tending towards the reorganization of the world.

It was never "obvious"; and seventy years later, with plutocracy triumphant nearly everywhere, it is less obvious than ever. Still, this testimony from someone who, like few others in the twentieth century, never sacrificed either liberty or solidarity deserves profound respect.

Brecht's great poem concludes:

But you, when the time comes at last

And man is a helper to man,

Think of us

With forbearance.

            When - if - that time comes at last, few of those born earlier will be remembered with more forbearance, even love, than Victor Serge.

The crash of 2007-8 hit Harvard University especially hard. Thanks to the overweeningly brilliant, unflappably self-confident financial guidance of ex-president Lawrence Summers ("As a former Secretary of the Treasury, I assure you that interest rates will not fall below X," he is rumored to have told the governing board, who were anxious about a particularly daring credit-default swap he was proposing), Harvard lost nearly a third of its $36 billion endowment in one year. Every department's belt was tightened several notches, and widespread layoffs were anticipated (though eventually averted by offering early retirement to older employees, hundreds of whom accepted).

The talk was grim around my office, the building-services center of a large research complex at Harvard. Contractors came by frequently for keys and instructions, and the more gregarious ones often stayed to schmooze. Sports and celebrities, our usual topics, were replaced that year by political griping. As the details of the bank bailout emerged, imprecations were fervently heaped on both bankers and politicians; a respectful hearing was even accorded the office radical (me), usually humored or ignored. But these conversations always ended the same way. One or another of those tough, no-bullshit, can-do guys would shrug: "Hey, what can we do about it? Nothin'." And the rest would chorus: "Yeah, what can ya do?" It was an epitome of 21^st-century American democracy: people used to coping with dauntingly complex mechanical systems simply took their political impotence for granted.

Their fatalism was entirely appropriate. As we sat around the office grumbling, Congress began responding to nationwide calls for financial reform. The two-year process that resulted in the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, known as "Dodd-Frank," bestowed on the still-battered nation what the (as ever) smilingly earnest President Obama called "the strongest consumer financial protections in history." He paused for emphasis and repeated to his enthusiastic audience, "in history."

Another two years on, the invaluable investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has written a lengthy obsequy for Dodd-Frank.

Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway's Old Man - no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law ... a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank. With the covert assistance of quisling Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes. ...

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government's inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms. ... From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while - but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians, and above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. "It's like a scorched-earth policy," says a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. "It requires constant combat. And it never ends."

The final words of Taibbi's article toll the death knell of contemporary American democracy:

You can't buy votes in a democracy, at least not directly. But our democracy is run through a bureaucracy. Human beings can cast a vote, or rally together during protests and elections, but real people - even committed professionals - get tired of running through mazes of motions and countermotions, or reading thousands of pages about swaps-execution facilities and NRSROs. They will fight through it for five days, or maybe even six, but on the seventh they will watch a baseball game, or Tanked, instead of diving into that morass of hellish acronyms one more time.

But money never gets tired. It never gets frustrated. And it thinks that drilling holes in Dodd-Frank is every bit as interesting as The Book of Mormon or Kate Upton naked. The system has become too complex for flesh-and-blood people, who make the mistake of thinking that passing a new law means the end of the discussion, when it's really just the beginning of a war.

It goes without saying that in this regard, the financial industry is no worse than the energy, defense, chemical, pharmaceutical, insurance, entertainment, food-processing, or any other large industry. America is a plutocracy. Freedom House has long published a comprehensive international index of formal democracy, which the US State Department found extremely convenient during the Cold War. If anyone today published a similarly careful and thorough index of effective democracy - a measure of the degree to which governments solicited and responded to public sentiment rather than money in the formation of law and policy - the United States would surely rank as low as many Communist tyrannies ranked on the Freedom House index.

In truth, American democracy has been a long time dying. Equality (1897), Edward Bellamy's sequel to the fabulously popular Looking Backward (1888), opens with a conversation between the reawakened 19^th-century hero Julian West and his generously indignant, increasingly incredulous 20^th-going-on-21^st-century fiancée Edith Leete:

"If the people all had an equal voice in the government ... why did they not without a moment's delay put an end to the inequalities from which they suffered?" ...

"The capitalists advanced the money necessary to procure the election of the office-seekers on the understanding that when elected the latter should do what the capitalists wanted. But I ought not to give you the impression that the bulk of the votes were bought outright. That would have been too open a confession of the sham of popular government as well as too expensive. The money contributed by the capitalists to procure the election of the office seekers-was mainly expended to influence the people by indirect means. Immense sums under the name of campaign funds were raised for this purpose and used in innumerable devices ... the object of which was to galvanize the people to a sufficient degree of interest in the election to go through the motion of voting." ...

"But why did not the people elect officials and representatives of their own class, who would look out for the interests of the masses?" ...

"The people who voted had little choice for whom they should vote. That question was determined by the political party organizations, which were beggars to the capitalists for pecuniary support. No man who was opposed to capitalist interests was permitted the opportunity as a candidate to appeal to the people. For a public official to support the people's interest as against that of the capitalists would be a sure way of sacrificing his career. ... His public position he held only from election to election, and rarely long. His permanent, lifelong, and all-controlling interest, like that of us all, was his livelihood, and that was dependent not on the applause of the people but on the favor and patronage of capital, and this he could not afford to imperil in the pursuit of the bubbles of popularity. These circumstances, even if there had been no instances of direct bribery, sufficiently explained why our politicians and officeholders with few exceptions were vassals and tools of the capitalists."

This was not merely a reaction to Gilded Age excess. Twenty years earlier, in Democratic Vistas (1867), before canvassing the magnificent possibilities of American democracy, Walt Whitman paused to acknowledge the ghastly actuality:

An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. ... The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining today sole master of the field.

Ten years before that, Emerson growled in his journal:

Is there no check to this class of privileged thieves that infest our politics? We mark & lock up the petty thief or we raise the hue & cry in the street, and do not hesitate to draw our revolvers out of the box, when one is in the house. But here are certain well dressed well-bred fellows, infinitely more mischievous, who get into the government & rob without stint, & without disgrace. They do it with a high hand, & by the device of having a party to whitewash them, to abet the act, & lie, & vote for them. And often each of the larger rogues has his newspaper, called "his organ," to say that it was not stealing, this which he did; that if there was stealing, it was you who stole, & not he ...

(It should be noted that there are two sides to this question. Tocqueville, with his usual quasi-Martian apriorism, confidently declared that plutocracy in America was an impossibility:

As the great majority of those who create the laws have no taxable property, all the money that is spent for the community appears to be spent to their advantage, at no cost of their own, and those who have some little property readily find means of so regulating the taxes that they weigh upon the wealthy and profit the poor, although the rich cannot take the same advantage when they are in possession of the government. ...

Again, it may be objected that the poor never have the sole power of making the laws; but I reply that wherever universal suffrage has been established, the majority unquestionably exercises the legislative authority; and if it be proved that the poor always constitute the majority, may it not be added with perfect truth that in the countries in which they possess the elective franchise they possess the sole power of making the laws? It is certain that in all the nations of the world the greater number has always consisted of those persons who hold no property, or of those whose property is insufficient to exempt them from the necessity of working in order to procure a comfortable subsistence. Universal suffrage, therefore, in point of fact does invest the poor with the government of society.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, speaking for the Supreme Court majority in Citizens United, displayed a similarly breezy indifference to fact, though with two centuries' less excuse than Tocqueville: "We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.")

Is it otiose, in the absence of democracy, to reflect on what democracy might and should be, or at any rate might have been? Possibly, but one must pass the time. In any case, the money power may be overthrown someday - Marx's theory, never yet put to the test, may well be true. Marx predicted that globalization, financialization, the concentration of ownership, and the proletarianization of nearly everyone would result in either socialism or barbarism. Stable barbarism - the unsleeping plutocracy Taibbi describes - seems most likely in the near and medium term. But the world revolves, et omnia mutantur. The citizens of a post-capitalist world, if it arrives, will need to maintain a society-wide conversation, consisting of millions of smaller local ones, about how to govern themselves. Perhaps we can help by keeping the subject alive even in the dark times.

The first illusion to kill on the way to self-government is professionalism. Currently, the profession of legislators is getting re-elected. Estimates I have seen of the amount of time legislators spend raising money seem to average around 50 percent. I don't know what percentage of time they spend traveling to and from the district, giving boilerplate speeches, and frequenting prostitutes or otherwise cavorting, but it can hardly be less than 10 or 20 percent. The time they spend studying legislative questions - reading through policy proposals and discussing them with colleagues, staff, and constituents, and acquiring sufficient background knowledge to make those discussions fruitful - must be minimal. (Though plenty of time doubtless goes to taking instructions from lobbyists.) Even an intelligent and conscientious legislator - not likely, in any case, to have survived either major party's candidate-selection process - would scarcely be able to acquire anything resembling expertise, much less wisdom, under these conditions, which may well be inescapable in any system of electoral competition.

Shouldn't I have said "in any system of privately financed electoral competition"? Wouldn't public financing of campaigns change everything? No, it would not. Thanks to the ingenuity of the public-relations industry and the complaisance of the Supreme Court's conservative majority, most of the expenses of political competition are or soon will be incurred not by candidates but by supporters - usually very rich - operating, often anonymously, through ad hoc committees. Political money, it has been often and wisely observed, is a hydraulic system; if you stop a leak in one place, it breaks out somewhere else.

Perhaps we should replace competition with sortition, i.e., drawing lots. What is the purpose of political competition, anyway? According to the founders of the republic, it is to produce a legislative body that represents - i.e., speaks with the same mind as - the populace. According to Madison: "The government ought to possess not only, first, the force, but secondly, the mind or sense of the people at large. The legislature ought to be the most exact transcript of the whole society." John Adams seconded this: the legislature "should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large, as it should think, feel, reason, and act like them." Even that arch-plutocrat William F. Buckley Jr, posing as a democrat, famously proclaimed that he would rather be governed by the first two hundred people listed in any big-city telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty. (Though his antipathy to Harvard was undoubtedly genuine, whether he would have countenanced the rule of ordinary citizens who had not bent the knee to wealthy donors is highly doubtful. After all, he strongly supported his brother's baneful lawsuit, Buckley v. Valeo, aimed at preventing precisely that.)

Is the present American national legislature an "exact transcript of the whole society"? The question invites ridicule. Racially, sexually, economically, and ideologically, the members of Congress more closely resemble the executive ranks of most large corporations, or the membership of most large country clubs, than they do the society as a whole. Polls consistently reveal a sharp variance between the views of the citizenry and those of the political class, which it is the job of political consultants and communications specialists to finesse during election season. Popular approval of Congress, never robust in recent years, has lately been plunging toward the single digits - one of the few hopeful signs in contemporary American political culture.

We can scarcely do worse than what we have; on this the country seems agreed. How would sortition work? Fortunately, there is a blueprint to hand: a short book called A Citizen Legislature by Ernest Callenbach (author of Ecotopia, one of the finest utopian novels ever written) and Michael Phillips.[1] The process is not complicated. Every county in America maintains a list of prospective jurors. Combine these lists in one national master list, and a computer may easily be programmed to choose a random sample of 435 (the size of the present House of Representatives). The same categories of people would be excluded from the selection pool: felons, non-citizens, the institutionalized. The resulting Representative House would (unlike the House of Representatives) be an exact, or near-exact, transcript of the society: roughly the same proportion of women, minorities, academics, professionals, blue-and-white-collar workers, homemakers, millionaires, and unemployed persons as in the general population. The representatives would train intensively for three months, would serve three years, and would then return to their communities (or stay in Washington as lobbyists, though perhaps less as a matter of course than at present). One-third of the House would be replaced each year. The Senate and the Executive Branch would, for the time being, remain unchanged.

Would sortition rule out government by the "best"? This question, too, can scarcely be considered with a straight face. We all know what Mark Twain said about Congressmen, and matters have not notably improved since. Besides, as Callenbach and Phillips write, "pure intelligence - if there is such a thing - is certainly not directly related to political wisdom. The only reasonable assumption is that both are broadly distributed through the population."

This was apparently the Athenians' assumption as well. The Assembly, the city's governing body, was chosen by lot. And Athens was not, as the popular conception has it, a "democracy of orators," of citizens speaking and listening by turns, and then, having said their piece, voting. It was much more like Callenbach and Phillips's Representative House of ordinary shlubs. Political theorist Daniela Cammack has carefully analyzed virtually all uses of the three Greek terms for "to deliberate." Two of them involve speaking; the other - the only one nearly always applied to the membership of the Assembly as a whole - means "reflection" and has an exclusively internal reference. There were orators and advocates, of course, but their function was advisory. There was, Cammack writes,

a greater cleavage between speakers and listeners in the assembly than is usually imagined. ... The [language] suggests that a small number of citizens were conceived as "advisors" to the group, who by the very act of speaking cast themselves outside of the deliberating unit. ... Speakers did not cease to be voters, of course, when they came forward to speak; in that sense, they remained part of the decision-making unit. ... [But] the key tasks of ordinary citizens did not include speaking. Listening, thinking, judging, voting, and finally holding speakers to account were all far more important.[2]

The Athenians, that is, entrusted their civic destiny not to experts or professionals (though they made use of them) but to ordinary citizens, selected at random in order to produce a faithful representation of the society as a whole. There is no reason why the United States should not do the same. The only alternative is elections, and the American electoral process is fundamentally, irredeemably corrupt. Elections cost money, vast and increasing amounts. As long as economic resources are distributed as unequally as they are at present, elections cannot be fair.

Would random selection of legislators produce a less lively political culture? This is yet another question that answers itself. Contemporary American political culture is comatose, kept alive only by such artificial life supports as televised debates between candidates, radio and TV talk shows, and the protracted electoral news cycle, reporting on polls, trends, gaffes, and gossip for 18-24 months before each presidential election and 9-12 months before each Congressional election. The degree to which this panoply of triviality is initiated or controlled by ordinary Americans is zero. Political messaging in our society is, like commercial messaging, wholly unidirectional. Voters, like consumers, exercise only an unavoidable and irreducible minimum of choice at the very end of a process from which their self-organized and unmanipulated input is entirely absent.

What might a live political culture look like? It would no doubt feature some version of the "committees of correspondence" that flourished in the American colonial period, only more permanent and less ad hoc. There would be continuous discussion, in small groups, in living rooms, church halls, school buildings, workplace lounges, libraries, municipal buildings, and other venues of political issues, organized by ordinary citizens, employees, neighbors, etc. These groups would make use of information about these issues collected by public agencies and made available on the Web, information equal in quality and depth to the information available to policymakers and industry lobbyists. The meetings of these groups would be regularly attended by public officials, who would have plenty to time to do so once they were released from the time-consuming obligations of fund-raising and electioneering.

The local discussion groups would communicate regularly with one another, sharing information and conclusions, and would join in formulating questions and instructions for local officials and legislators. They would also send delegates to state and regional citizens' groups, which would conduct discussions with other such groups and then, jointly or separately, with state and national legislators and policymakers. (Unions would have a parallel structure of member involvement, unlike today.) These delegates would be in continual contact with the smaller bodies that sent them, and would be readily recallable.

Such groups at all levels, particularly the higher-level ones, would also monitor and criticize media coverage of issues that interest them, exactly as industry and other (e.g., religious) interest groups do today. They would commission, and in some cases, write articles for the media - articles which, unlike the continuous stream of corporate propaganda that largely constitutes present-day "reporting" in many local and regional newspapers, would be openly acknowledged - and would propose guests on radio and television discussions of contentious issues. And just as advertisers boycott publications of media programs considered ideologically unsound, the citizen/worker groups would orchestrate pressure, including boycotts, of chronically biased outlets. This is not a complete remedy for the extreme concentration of ownership in newspapers, radio, and television at present, with all the possibilities - fully realized - for censorship and ideological homogenization that implies. But it's a step.

Something like this scheme might help restore some substance to this society's hollow democratic pretensions. Of course, genuine democracy in any form depends on broad economic equality. The preconditions of democracy are that: 1) minimum economic security is universal, so that no one's economic welfare can be jeopardized by political activism that may be anathema to his/her economic or political superiors; 2) gross inequality of resources does not give some political opinions vastly greater possibilities of publicity or promotion (ie, lobbying) than others, as at present; and 3) the material prerequisites of political activity - leisure, education, at least modest disposable income - are universally available. Even this bare preliminary statement suggests how many light-years the United States is from anything worthy to be called democracy, and also makes clear how rapidly we're traveling away from, rather than toward, the ideal.

Granted, no one can be forced to be free or self-governing. Those who are addicted to television, or allergic to meetings, or simply don't give a damn about other people, are perfectly free to blow the whole democracy thing off, though their neighbors will be equally free to call them what the Greeks did: idiotes.

Will all - or any - of the above happen? Over Money's dead body. Far more likely is a continued bread-and-circuses electoral oligarchy, with increased surveillance and repression as the allotment of grub and gadgets to the lower orders has to be parceled out among a growing global army of proletarians. Technology without democracy: a Blade Runner  world.

The American empire has already found its Gibbon, at least in rough draft. The medieval intellectual historian turned social critic Morris Berman has produced a trilogy of works - The Twilight of American Culture (2000); Dark Ages America (2006); Why America Failed (2011) - that diagnose and forecast the country's decline in real time with an imaginative freedom and an unyielding pessimism that no conventional academic historian would permit him- or herself. He has naturally been ignored when not (as, for example, by that bellwether of middlebrow, Michiko Kakutani, in the New York Times) ridiculed.

Unfortunately for his trilogy's commercial and critical prospects, Berman has no last-minute proposals to save us from the long descent he foresees into soft authoritarianism and cultural debasement. Possessive individualism has thoroughly routed civic republicanism; hucksterism has vanquished virtue; a mindless commitment to economic growth has rendered the ideals of simplicity, balance, and voluntary renunciation all but unintelligible as guides to public policy rather than merely to individual salvation. It is too late for a happy ending.

It is indeed late, as anyone who reads Berman without extraordinary mental inertness will find herself forced to acknowledge. And yet, omnia mutantur. The Dark Ages, if they arrive, will - may - eventually be followed by another Enlightenment, which our present efforts may assist, even though we go under. We may as well give Money a good fight. What else can ya do?

A future historian comparing America in 1945 with America in the second decade of the twenty-first century might well conclude that the intervening epoch - the "American Century," in period-speak - had been a real bender. From globe-bestriding colossus, producing 50 percent of world output, fully employed, militarily unrivalled, financially prepotent, culturally vibrant, internationally admired, even beloved, to a banana republic, indebted up to the eyeballs, with an obscenely rich upper class, a corrupt and mediocre political class, an unorganized and insecure workforce, one in six adults un- or underemployed, one in six citizens uninsured, one in four children living at or near the poverty line, plummeting rates of scholastic achievement, and, among developed nations, the lowest rate of social mobility, the lowest life expectancy, the highest rates of infant mortality, obesity, and mental illness, the highest homicide rate, and the highest incarceration rate. Among non-Americans, love for the United States- as distinguished from a desperate desire to escape even worse circumstances by emigrating here - is scarce indeed

How did we blow it? The best explanation I know of is Robert Kuttner's The Squandering of America (2007), a sure-handed, many-faceted account of the political economy of our decline. Morris Berman's Dark Ages America (2006) and Why America Failed (2011) set the story in the larger, quasi-Spenglerian context of a narrative about instrumental rationality and possessive individualism. It will soon, no doubt, be a crowded genre. An early and, one may hope, influential entry is The Short American Century, a rich and various collection by eight leading historians and political scientists, assembled and introduced by the prominent analyst and critic Andrew Bacevich.

In February 1941 Henry Luce, the master huckster of mid-century America, published an instantly famous essay in his shiny new magazine, Life, entitled "The American Century." His immediate purpose was to enlist the United States in World War II. More generally, he exhorted his countrymen to stop minding their own business and assume the burdens and glories of world leadership. Because of its surpassing power and virtue, the United States was the indispensable nation, Luce proclaimed, many decades before the hapless Madeleine Albright actually coined that unfortunate phrase. As the "inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization - above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity," Americans had a duty and an obligation to exert our influence "for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." We must create a "vital international economy" and an "international moral order." There was no need to obtain the consent of the rest of the world, since "what we want will be okay with them."

In retrospect it is easy to mock this compendium of breezy fatuities (faithfully echoed, with far less excuse than one can find for Luce, in the 1997 founding manifesto of the Project for a New American Century). But the contributors to The Short American Century take Luce's essay with proper seriousness, as a template for post-World War II planning and policy. What Luce provided policymakers and pundits was a splendid lesson in how to cloak selfish and partisan goals in moralizing and universalistic rhetoric. Though hypocrisy of this sort was already a specialty of American diplomacy, Luce's background as the child of Protestant missionaries in China lent his exhortations an extra evangelical fervor.  And as impresario-in-chief of the Good Life, bringing Americans monthly bulletins from the brave new worlds of automobiles, home furnishings, movies, cosmetics, and fashion, Luce saw that American consumer culture and mass entertainment could win friends and influence people abroad.

As Emily Rosenberg's essay, "Consuming the American Century," points out, exporting consumerism was an essential part of Cold War strategy. "Export expansion meshed neatly with the new global battle against Communism." The State Department arranged global distribution for "Advertising: A New Weapon in the World Wide Fight for Freedom," helpfully produced by the Advertising Council. It was not merely a matter of competing for prestige against Soviet-style societies or of luring Third World populations with capitalism's kitchen appliances and TV shows away from the less glamorous progress in mass literacy, public health, and heavy industry promised by state-led development. It was even more important to create markets in the developed countries for the vastly expanded productive capacity with which America emerged from World War II. Without such new markets, a return to prewar economic stagnation was widely feared in government and business circles.

The strategy worked all too well. The "globalized culture of consumption" took root above all in the United States. "From being the world's principal producers, Americans became its central consumers. An open-trading world and global advertising expertise that had once provided American producers with an antidote to fears about inadequate markets now presented American consumers with access to cheap, attractively promoted goods made beyond their shores." The once-mighty American "empire of production," hungry for export markets, became an "empire of consumption," hungry for inexpensive goods produced abroad, frequently by American manufacturers using low-wage Third World labor. The result was a catastrophic growth in Americans' indebtedness, along with robust profits for American multinational corporations. As Bacevich observes, it is long past time for a national debate about "whether the hedonistic, consumer-oriented definition of freedom" that America has preached and practiced is "sustainable or even desirable."

The ambitions and illusions that motivated the American Century had deep roots in American history, and Eugene McCarraher's witty essay, "The Heavenly City of Business," sets out to excavate them. The "eschatology of corporate business," he writes, has "long been central to American identity." From the Puritans to the early-19^th-century "prophets of prosperity" to the Social Darwinists and their Christian counterparts to the Progressive imperialists from Theodore Roosevelt to Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce's predecessors in every generation had urged Americans to make use of their "pecuniary and moral power to evangelize the world." Tocqueville's Democracy in America is full of astonished remarks about Americans' distinctive combination of cupidity and self-righteousness; Melville's The Confidence-Man was a Heart of Darkness of America's merciless expansion. A brief, savage reprise of the writings and doings of Thomas Friedman, Newt Gingrich, Alvin Toffler, and others brings McCarraher's "imperial trajectory of techno-eschatology" full circle. The short American Century was, it seems, at least three centuries in the making.

There are other essays in this collection with a primarily domestic focus: Nikhil Pal Singh on the "unfinished dialectic of color and democracy" that "continues to distort and undermine the development of an ethical relationship to the wider world" and Akira Iriye on "transnationalism," or the evolution of "non-state, non-national" identities, communities, and organizations in the US and other developed nations. But the main purpose of The Short American Century is to revise common - largely triumphal - understandings of the Cold War and American hegemony.

Walter LaFeber has done a great deal to challenge this received wisdom, and his "Illusions of an American Century" is a blisteringly alternative reading of postwar history. The American Century was born in anxiety rather than overweening confidence, LaFeber claims. "Fear, not Henry Luce's optimism, forged the ... Cold War consensus": fear of renewed economic collapse; fear of Communist political victories in Europe; fear of ideological pollution at home. And especially at first, disaster followed disaster: the Communist victory in China, the unpopular war in Korea, the French defeat in Indochina, and unrest in Latin America, culminating in the Cuban Revolution. The disasters continued in the sixties and seventies, though they were easier to ignore in the blaze of American prosperity. By now, however, on the other side of prosperity, they have become more difficult to ignore.

Andrew Bacevich's eloquent concluding essay takes aim squarely at American exceptionalism, the conviction that "the United States as a great power differs from every other great power in history. It stands apart: unique, singular, sans pareil. ... Seeking neither dominion nor empire, the United States uses its power to advance the cause of all humanity. ... Its purposes are by definition beyond reproach." That this belief is alive and well is obvious from the storm of partisan criticism that greeted President Obama's avowal that of course he was an American exceptionalist, just as "Brits are British exceptionalists, and Greeks are Greek exceptionalists" - a deplorable lack of patriotism, his critics charged. More subtle (or equally crude) expressions of the true faith may be found every day, on every op/ed page and talk show.

What this assumption of America's exceptional nobility ignores, Bacevich points out, are the many ignoble exceptions: the savage suppression of popular uprisings in the Philippines, Haiti, and elsewhere; the blatant hypocrisy of enforcing an Open Door policy in one hemisphere and a Monroe Doctrine in the other; the unleashing of the CIA on Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, and any number of other unfortunate countries; the long history of "assassination plots, dirty tricks gone awry [or worse, successful], cozy relations with corrupt dictators"; and more recently, torture, rendition, and domestic surveillance. America has neither the ability nor the right to stamp its image on any century's history. Instead Bacevich issues a ringing call to humility, based on a chastening catalogue of our current incapacities and a sage reminder of the inescapable limits of any nation's wisdom and power.

With all its considerable merits, The Short American Century also displays a mildly troubling defect. I mean euphemism. Several of the essays employ language that betrays a residual belief in good intentions somewhere behind American foreign policy, an unwillingness to judge American actions and motives as harshly as those of other nation-states, a reluctance to reckon with the fact that America is - like every other nation in modern history - a class society.

The worst offender is David Kennedy, whose "The Origins and Uses of American Hyperpower" in truth sits a little uneasily in this collection. Kennedy believes that until the second Bush administration spoiled everything, the American Century was "on the whole, a laudably successful affair," which "made the world safer, healthier, and happier." After World War II,

a notable cohort of American leaders now at last gave its answer to a pointed question that Woodrow Wilson had posed some three decades earlier. "What are we going to do with the influence and power of this great nation? ... Are we going to play the old role of using that power to our aggrandizement and material benefit only?" In the wake of World War II, American leaders set out to use US power in ways that finally set in motion the transformation Wilson had sought in vain.  ...On the occasion of the first gathering of the UN ... President Harry Truman used words that could have been Wilson's - or Thomas Jefferson's or Tom Paine's: "The responsibility of great states is to serve, and not dominate the peoples of the world." And while it is undeniable that the United States continued to pursue what Wilson hade scorned as its own "aggrandizement and material benefit" (considerations never absent from American foreign policy, nor should they be), what is most remarkable is the way that Washington exerted itself to build what [one] Norwegian scholar has called an "empire by invitation."

Though Henry Luce would probably nod in approval, this is a seriously flawed picture. Much post-World War II policy planning documentation is available from the State Department, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other elite groups. It is perfectly clear that the overriding goal of American policy was to integrate the postwar world economy under US leadership, severely restricting, if necessary, the ability of foreign governments to control US business activities within their borders or to set economic objectives incompatible with US priorities. The US needed export markets in Europe, and the US, Europe, and Japan needed raw materials from the less developed world. And we needed docile, business-friendly governments everywhere. These, overwhelmingly, were the preoccupations of postwar American planners, not "to serve ... the peoples of the world."

Kennedy rebukes the Bush administration for trying to spread democracy forcibly, reminding us magisterially that Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman "asked only that the world be made safe for democracy." That is nonsense. A democratic façade was always welcome, but what US policymakers asked - demanded - was that the world be made safe for foreign direct investment.

Jeffry Frieden's "From the American Century to Globalization," a brisk survey of the international economy from Bretton Woods until today, is similarly plagued by euphemism. For example, explaining the success of postwar economic integration, he writes: "World War II and the Cold War had effectively lopped off the political extremes: the Far Right discredited by its fascist connections, the Far Left tainted by its association with the Soviet Union. As a consequence, neither the extreme right-wing nationalism of interwar business and agricultural groups nor the extreme left-wing redistributionism of interwar labor could get a hearing." I suppose that's one way of describing the situation in postwar Europe. A less reflexively conventional formulation might have emphasized that the left (including the Communists, who were frequently prominent in the anti-fascist resistance) was quite popular in France, Italy, Japan, and Korea. There was a very real prospect in these countries of left-wing governments with trade-union and Communist participation or even leadership. The US mobilized all its resources - including the newly-created CIA - to thwart this possibility and barely managed, with bribes - both legal (the Marshall Plan) and illegal (CIA payments to politicians and journalists) - threats, and repression, to beat it back and install pro-business governments (often including fascist collaborators) in power. There was no "discrediting," and the only "consensus" was among US policymakers and their foreign clients.

Likewise, Frieden characterizes Reaganism/Thatcherism with fine academic blandness: "The Bretton Woods order gave way to a more unqualified belief in the desirability of removing barriers to international economic exchange and to a generalized skepticism about heavy-handed government intervention in national economies." What the Bretton Woods order actually gave way to was unbridled rapacity on the part of the international investor class, riding roughshod, with the help of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund and multilateral free trade agreements, over the policymaking autonomy of developing nations with respect to labor markets, resource ownership, capital flows, taxes, social welfare, and the environment, and at home launching an ideologically-driven assault on labor unions, regulation, and progressive taxation. Surely Frieden knows all this; couldn't he hint at even a fraction of it?

Even the sterling essay by Jackson Lears, perhaps the best in the collection, is at fault in this regard. Lears's "Pragmatic Realism and the American Century" expertly traces an undervalued tradition of American thought: the tough-minded, pragmatic anti-interventionism of William James, Randolph Bourne, and, in their later phases, Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, George Kennan, and William Fulbright. In opposition to the first phase of American imperialism - McKinley's, Theodore Roosevelt's, and Wilson's - which chronically conflated manliness and militarism, James and Bourne rejected the "mindless cult of national vitality" and wisely countered that "heroism might come in many forms - some of them having nothing to do with military adventure." While others - TR, the young Lippmann, Dewey, and the New Republic - were losing their heads, James and Bourne, and their successors in similar circumstances, stubbornly insisted that "war is the least predictable of human enterprises and the least subject to management and control." Pragmatic realists "counseled war only as a last resort - the least desirable alternative in the policymaker's arsenal." Lears's skillful rehabilitation of pragmatic realism, and of the misunderstood isolationist tradition of Charles Beard and Robert Taft, is just what is needed to help drive a stake through the heart of contemporary neoconservative (and liberal) interventionism.

Still, I wish Lears were a little less prone to see in American foreign policy a history of "intrusive moralism" or "virtue unleashed" or "messianic dreams" or (quoting William Fulbright) "the crusades of high-minded men bent on the regeneration of the human race." Likewise, I wish he had not written that the United States was "mistakenly fighting indigenous nationalism" in Vietnam. America's shameful history of military intervention in the Third World has not been based on hubris or moralism, nor was there any mistake about what we were fighting in Vietnam or elsewhere. Business-friendly states in societies thoroughly integrated into a US-dominated global economic system - this has been the consistent goal of US foreign policy. It has regularly entailed subverting democracy, popular sovereignty, and indigenous nationalism. US policymakers - certainly including Kennan, who was a wise and decent man only when compared with monsters like Kissinger - knew exactly what they were doing. Whatever they may have said (usually for public consumption) about their depredations, they were not high-minded men bent on the regeneration of the human race.

Bacevich himself, in his very fine concluding essay, pulls a punch. About the last decade's interventions in the Middle East he writes: "The prospects of the United States 'ending tyranny' anytime soon, as George Bush promised, appear less than promising. ... Whatever democracy's prospects in the Islamic world, they depend not on what Washington prescribes and attempts to enforce but on what Arabs, Iranians, Afghans, and Pakistanis demand and struggle for." Does Bacevich actually believe that the Bush/Cheney administration sincerely desired to end tyranny or enforce democracy in the Middle East, rather than merely to impose dependable clients, if possible with a democratic façade, though without genuinely empowering Middle Eastern populations, with their unpredictable priorities? I hope not.

Declining empires are dangerous. Popular enlightenment is urgent, and this book, whatever its flaws, will help. That the United States is a rogue state, recklessly militaristic, grossly hypocritical and self-serving in its professions of devotion to democracy and human rights, and the chief promoter and beneficiary of investor-friendly and worker-unfriendly forms of economic development - this is the lesson of the American Century. It is well understood in the rest of the world, even among America's allies. Only in the United States is it unmentionable, indeed unthinkable, at least in the academic mainstream and the major media. This, alas, is the true American exceptionalism. Because The Short American Century takes exception, even if less forcefully than one might wish, to this exceptionalism, it is a valuable step toward the self-knowledge Americans will need if we and the rest of the world are to survive the long centuries ahead.

Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, seventy percent believed that the US government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the US fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only six percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American's day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, thirty seconds attending a play or concert, twenty-five seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.

Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, fifty percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century the Civil War occurred. Sixty percent could name each of the Three Stooges but not the three branches of the US government. Sixty percent could not comprehend an editorial in a national or local newspaper.

Intellectual distinction isn't everything, it's true. But things are amiss in other areas as well: sociability and trust, for example. "During the last third of the twentieth century," according to Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, "all forms of social capital fell off precipitously." Tens of thousands of community groups - church social and charitable groups, union halls, civic clubs, bridge clubs, and yes, bowling leagues - disappeared; by Putnam's estimate, one-third of our social infrastructure vanished in these years. Frequency of having friends to dinner dropped by 45 percent; card parties declined 50 percent; Americans' declared readiness to make new friends declined by 30 percent. Belief that most other people could be trusted dropped from 77 percent to 37 percent. Over a five-year period in the 1990s, reported incidents of aggressive driving rose by 50 percent - admittedly an odd, but probably not an insignificant, indicator of declining social capital.

Still, even if American education is spotty and the social fabric is fraying, the fact that the US is the world's richest nation must surely make a great difference to our quality of life? Alas, no. As every literate person knows, economic inequality in the United States is off the charts - at Third World levels. The results were recently summarized by James Speth in Orion magazine. Of the twenty advanced democracies in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the US has the highest poverty rate, for both adults and children; the lowest rate of social mobility; the lowest score on UN indexes of child welfare and gender inequality; the highest ratio of health care expenditure to GDP, combined with the lowest life expectancy and the highest rates of infant mortality, mental illness, obesity, inability to afford health care, and personal bankruptcy resulting from medical expenses; the highest homicide rate; and the highest incarceration rate. Nor are the baneful effects of America's social and economic order confined within our borders; among OECD nations the US also has the highest carbon dioxide emissions, the highest per capita water consumption, the next-to-largest ecological footprint, the next-to-lowest score on the Yale Environmental Performance Index, the highest (by a colossal margin) per capita rate of military spending and arms sales, and the next-to-lowest rate of per capita spending on international development and humanitarian assistance.

Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is, to a distressing extent, a nation of violent, intolerant, ignorant, superstitious, apathetic, shallow, boorish, selfish, unhealthy, unhappy people, addicted to flickering screens, incurious about other societies and cultures, unwilling or unable to assert or even comprehend their nominal political sovereignty. Or, more simply, that America is a failure. That is indeed what Morris Berman concludes in his three-volume survey of America's decline: The Twilight of American Culture (2000), Dark Ages America (2006), and Why America Failed (2011), from which much of the preceding information is taken. Berman is a cultural and intellectual historian, not a social scientist, so his portrait of American civilization, or barbarism, is anecdotal and atmospheric as well as statistical. He is eloquent about harder-to-quantify trends: the transformation of higher (even primary/secondary) education into marketing arenas for predatory corporations; the new form of educational merchandising known as "distance learning"; the colonization of civic and cultural spaces by corporate logos; the centrality of malls and shopping to our social life; the "systematic suppression of silence" and the fact that "there is barely an empty space in our culture not already carrying commercial messages." Idiot deans, rancid rappers, endlessly chattering sports commentators, an avalanche of half-inch-deep self-help manuals; a plague of gadgets, a deluge of stimuli, an epidemic of rudeness, a desert of mutual indifference: the upshot is our daily immersion in a suffocating stream of kitsch, blather, stress, and sentimental banality. Berman colorfully and convincingly renders the relentless coarsening and dumbing down of everyday life in late (dare we hope?) American capitalism.

In Spenglerian fashion, Berman seeks the source of our civilization's decline in its innermost principle, its animating Geist. What he finds at the bottom of our culture's soul is ... hustling; or, to use its respectable academic sobriquet, possessive individualism. Expansion, accumulation, economic growth: this is the ground bass of American history, like the hum of a dynamo in the basement beneath the polite twitterings on the upper stories about "liberty" and "a light unto the nations." Berman scarcely mentions Marx or historical materialism; instead he offers a non-specialist and accessible but deeply informed and amply documented review of American history, period by period, war by war, arguing persuasively that whatever the ideological superstructure, the driving energy behind policy and popular aspiration has been a ceaseless, soulless acquisitiveness.

The Colonial period, the seedbed of American democracy, certainly featured a good deal of God-talk and virtue-talk, but Mammon more than held its own. Berman sides emphatically with Louis Hartz, who famously argued in The Liberal Tradition in America that American society was essentially Lockean from the beginning: individualistic, ambitious, protocapitalist, with a weak and subordinate communitarian ethic. He finds plenty of support elsewhere as well; for example in Perry Miller, the foremost historian of Puritanism, according to whom the American mind has always "positively lusted for the chance to yield itself to the gratification of technology." Even Tocqueville, who made many similar observations, "could not comprehend," wrote Miller, "the passion with which [early Americans] flung themselves into the technological torrent, how they ... cried to each other as they went headlong down the chute that here was their destiny, here was the tide that would sweep them toward the unending vistas of prosperity." Even Emerson and Whitman went through a phase of infatuation with industrial progress, though Hawthorne and Thoreau apparently always looked on the juggernaut with clearer (or more jaundiced) eyes.

Berman also sides, for the most part, with Charles Beard, who drew attention to the economic conflicts underlying the American Revolution and the Civil War. Beard may have undervalued the genuine intellectual ferment that accompanied the Revolution, but he was not wrong in perceiving the motivating force of the pervasive commercial ethic of the age. Joyce Appleby, another eminent historian, poses this question to those who idealize America's founding: "If the Revolution was fought in a frenzy over corruption, out of fear of tyranny, and with hopes for redemption through civic virtue, where and when are scholars to find the sources for the aggressive individualism, the optimistic materialism, and the pragmatic interest-group politics that became so salient so early in the life of the nation?"

By the mid-nineteenth century, the predominance of commercial interests in American politics was unmistakable. Berman's lengthy discussion of the Civil War as the pivot of American history takes for granted the inadequacy of triumphalist views of the Civil War. It was not a "battle cry of freedom." Slavery was central, but for economic rather than moral reasons. The North represented economic modernity and the ethos of material progress; the economy and ethos of the South, based on slavery, was premodern and static. The West - and with it the shape of America's economic future - was up for grabs, and the North grabbed it away from an equally determined South. Except for the abolitionists, no whites, North or South, gave a damn about blacks. How the West (like the North and South before it) was grabbed, in an orgy of greed, violence, and deceit against the original inhabitants, is a familiar story.

Even more than in Beard, Berman finds his inspiration in William Appleman Williams, the most influential proponent of the view that American domestic and foreign policy are expressions of the same expansionist impulse. When McKinley's secretary of state John Hay advocated "an open door through which America's preponderant economic strength would enter and dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world" and his successor William Jennings Bryan (the celebrated populist and anti-imperialist!) told a gathering of businessmen in 1915 that "my Department is your department; the ambassadors, the ministers, the consuls are all yours; it is their business to look after your interests and to guard your rights," they were enunciating the soul of American foreign policy, as was the much-lauded Wise Man George Kennan when he wrote in a post-World War II State Department policy planning document: "We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. ... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. ... To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. ... We should cease to talk about vague and ... unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

As a former medievalist, Berman finds contemporary parallels to the fall of Rome compelling. By the end of the Empire, he points out, economic inequality was drastic and increasing, the legitimacy and efficacy of the state was waning, popular culture was debased, civic virtue among elites was practically non-existent, and imperial military commitments were hopelessly unsustainable. As these volumes abundantly illustrate, this is 21^st-century America in a nutshell. The capstone of Berman's demonstration is a sequence of three long, brilliant chapters in Dark Ages America on the Cold War, the Pax Americana, CIA and military interventions in the Third World, and in particular US policy in the Middle East, where racism and rapacity have combined to produce a stunning debacle. Our hysterical national response to 9/11 - our inability even to make an effort to comprehend the long-festering consequences of our imperial predations - portended, as clearly as anything could, the demise of American global supremacy.

What will become of us? After Rome's fall, wolves wandered through the cities and Europe largely went to sleep for six centuries. That will not happen again; too many transitions - demographic, ecological, technological, cybernetic - have intervened. The planet's metabolism has altered. The new Dark Ages will be socially, politically, and spiritually dark, but the economic Moloch - mass production and consumption, destructive growth, instrumental rationality - will not disappear. Few Americans want it to. We are hollow, Berman concludes. It is a devastatingly plausible conclusion.

An interval - long or short, only the gods can say - of oligarchic, intensely surveilled, bread-and-circuses authoritarianism, Blade Runner- or Fahrenheit 451-style, seems the most likely outlook for the 21^st and 22^nd centuries. Still, if most humans are shallow and conformist, some are not. There is reason to hope that the ever-fragile but somehow perennial traditions and virtues of solidarity, curiosity, self-reliance, courtesy, voluntary simplicity, and an instinct for beauty will survive, even if underground for long periods. And cultural rebirths do occur, or at any rate have occurred.

Berman offers little comfort, but he does note a possible role for those who perceive the inevitability of our civilization's decline. He calls it the "monastic option." Our eclipse may, after all, not be permanent; and meanwhile individuals and small groups may preserve the best of our culture by living against the grain, within the interstices, by "creating 'zones of intelligence' in a private, local way, and then deliberately keeping them out of the public eye." Even if one's ideals ultimately perish, this may be the best way to live while they are dying.

There is something immensely refreshing, even cathartic, about Berman's refusal to hold out any hope of avoiding our civilization's demise. And our reaction goes some way toward proving his point: we are so sick of hucksters, of authors trying - like everyone else on all sides at all times in this pervasively hustling culture - to sell us something, that it is a relief to encounter someone who isn't, who has no designs on our money or votes or hopes, who simply has looked into the depths, into our bleak future, and is compelled to describe it, as Cassandra was. No doubt his efforts will meet with equal success.

[END]

George Scialabba is associate editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.

Puya Gerami: I'm hoping we might begin our discussion by briefly talking about the literary and political tradition, particularly that of the New York Intellectuals, that has influenced your work. Your first collection of essays and reviews, What Are Intellectuals Good For?, seems, in part, a salute to the vibrant literary culture that thrived during the mid-twentieth century. Can you describe the major features of style and content that characterize the writings of the New York Intellectuals? Although the corpus of these thinkers is anything but a homogenous collection, it does seem to provide a coherent model of progressive social criticism, rooted in political engagement and cultural authority.

George Scialabba: Irving Howe has limned the lineaments of this intellectual culture in a marvelous essay called "The New York Intellectuals". [L1] He emphasizes above all that they were amateurs, non-specialists, non-professionals, generalists - "luftmenschen of the mind," as he puts it. It was perhaps the last time in modern cultural history that one could aspire to be a generalist--well, of course one can always aspire to be a generalist, and sometimes one can achieve a great deal in that line--but still, they managed to be authoritative about virtually everything. Admittedly, part of their success may have been their extraordinary gift for sounding authoritative, whether or not they actually knew what they were talking about; but in truth they had an enormous range and versatility. I'm sure it had something to do with New York being the throbbing heart of a great world power, and also something to do with their being newly emancipated Jews, and therefore bringing the passion and resources of that long-suppressed and hedged-in culture and ethnicity to bear freely on their environment for the first time, being able to speak to and about their society as full members, as they rarely had in any previous society. So I'm sure there were things about them that made their extraordinary range and universality possible. But it was also the fact that it was still possible to marshal the resources of the canonical Western literary and philosophical tradition and bring it to bear on politics and society more or less directly.

            But that capacity couldn't last forever. As the US evolved from a yeoman republic in the mid-nineteenth century to a mass society, as industrial production in particular became the dominant form of economic relations, the new society needed a workforce that was trained up in new skills. So mass education was inaugurated. Now, one of the dangers of mass education, or education of any kind, is that it empowers the educated. It suggests potentially subversive questions about their relation to authority. From the point of view of the owners of society, inquiry of that sort had to be cut off at the knees, or at least, had to be carefully managed. And so new ideologies and techniques of social control, popular management, and the manufacture of consent were developed in the form of the advertising industry, the science of marketing, and public relations as a new aspect of politics and public management.

One of the tools of the manufacture of consent was expertise. Public relations involved finding engineers, scientists, and social scientists who could make the ruling class's case persuasively. Formerly, all you needed to criticize American foreign policy and corporate policy effectively was a good ear for bullshit. Because government and business propagandists were basically amateurs, their critics could be amateurs. But the new techniques of social control called into being a whole new cohort of intellectuals - one might call them anti-public intellectuals: intellectuals in the service of power rather than in the service of the public. They deployed expertise, which in turn required that they be countered with expertise. But expertise takes time and effort to acquire; and it proved difficult to combine this time and effort with what had formerly been the chief activity of public intellectuals, that is, the cultivation of the humanities. Literary intellectuals like Randolph Bourne or Mark Twain, or philosophers like William James, could muster perfectly adequate critiques of American foreign policy in the early industrial age. But when the ruling class got smarter and better at hiring its apologists, the public needed experts of its own. And these tended to be investigative journalists--I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald--or maverick scholars, like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, John Kenneth Galbraith, Christopher Lasch, or William Appleman Williams.

PG: So it was, in fact, these changing material and ideological conditions that rendered the generalist intellectual obsolete.

GS: Exactly.

PG: So What Are Intellectuals Good For? isn't necessarily a lament for the demise of the generalist intellectual. Rather, the growing complexity of propaganda today requires the public intellectual to practice a form of social criticism quite different from that which had been developed by the New York Intellectuals.

GS: Well, I'm basically a literary and philosophical humanist myself, not a journalist or scholar or expert of any kind, so I do personally regret that people like me don't have and never again will have the cultural authority that the New York intellectuals had. But history has moved on, and there's still a place, after all, for us humanists to practice the honorable activity of applying the really matchless moral resources of literature and the philosophical tradition to criticizing society and culture. Still, the work on the front lines now needs to be done by others, the investigative journalists and maverick scholars, people who can do deep reporting or­­­­­­­­ work in the archives. Those are activities that classical public intellectuals--Bourne, Russell, Camus, Sartre, Silone, Nicola Chiaromonte--didn't have the time or the temperament for. So even though I personally will never be a Glenn Greenwald or a Noam Chomsky, I'm supremely grateful to them. They're doing what I think needs above all to be done. Cultivating and expounding the humanities will always be essential to the moral health of society. But politically speaking, the literary intellectual is now a kind of auxiliary.

PG: What I find most difficult to grapple with in understanding this transition from the generalist to the specialist intellectual is the sudden absence of the literary imagination. You quote Chomsky, who remarks: "I've always been resistant to consciously allowing literature to influence my beliefs and attitudes with regard to society and history." This conscious resistance to the influence of literature seems to me to result in a tragic loss.

GS: Yes, I see what you mean. I guess I'd say that once the chief apologists for policy were no longer younger sons of aristocratic families but instead people like McGeorge Bundy, Robert MacNamara, and Henry Kissinger, i.e., people with credentials, it was easier for them to shrug off or dismiss criticisms by literary intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, or Robert Lowell, even though those criticisms were cogent and true, because the literary intellectuals didn't have credentials themselves. They weren't experts. And this impressed the media, who reported the controversy in a way that privileged expertise. But the counter-expertise of people like Chomsky and Zinn couldn't be shrugged off in quite the same way. These counter-experts refuted, in detail and on its own terms, what pretended to be an authoritative expert case for government and corporate policy, in a way that literary people - even those who were perfectly right, like Mailer, Sontag, and Lowell - couldn't do. Obviously, the literary intellectuals had learned a certain amount about American foreign policy and about Vietnamese or Latin American history - their criticisms were largely true, after all. But to sway  public opinion, the appearance of expertise backed by a large bureaucracy had to be countered not merely by lone individuals who mostly produced works of fiction, poetry, or literary criticism, and occasionally dabbled in politics. What was needed were people who deployed the same scholarly or investigative expertise and skills as did the anti-public intellectuals.

PG: You write that these new public intellectuals, in effect, sacrificed literary timelessness for the exigencies of real politics.

GS: Well, yes, putting it like that was a little bit of a literary flourish on my part. But it's true in this sense: people will read Orwell and Camus forever because their political rhetoric is itself a kind of art, a form of literature. People won't read Chomsky or even I.F. Stone forever. I hope they'll read them for a good long time, for as long as this is a class society. But even after this is no longer a class society, people will read Orwell for the beauties of his prose and the windings of his sensibility; while they'll be able to put aside I.F. Stone, gratefully, and say: "All right, God bless him for his beautiful life, but now we've learned what he had to teach; may he rest in peace."

PG: How does academic specialization fit into this transition from the generalist to the specialist intellectual? At the same time that you laud the rise of the specialist as a sign of genuine cultural progress, you have eloquently attacked a culture of academic specialization whose abstruse language guarantees public irrelevance and political impotence. "A critic with public purposes," you write, "has rhetorical obligations, above all, transparency." It seems like the jargon-laden vocabulary of academic specialization resists transparency, and therefore, political relevance.

GS: I do think that. Of course, where specialization is a necessary part of the practice, as in the sciences, I have nothing but approval and praise. It was possible in the early twentieth century for a powerful mind to take in very nearly the whole of science and mathematics: to have a strong sense of how they developed, where they were going, what the frontier problems were, and so on. Now, you can't even do that for molecular biology or the cognitive sciences: even individual disciplines are simply too much for any one person to get his or her mind around. That's painful to adjust to, but you can't regret it: it really is genuine progress.

            On the other hand, I don't think specialization or expertise in the humanities or the social/ideological sciences is entitled to the same prima facie legitimacy. In a market society, competition is inescapable, and competition means product differentiation. Translated into academic terms, that means one has to carve out a niche, or revise old understandings, or invent a new vocabulary. But it's not inconceivable that in some cases - literary criticism, for example, or political theory -  the old vocabulary is perfectly adequate. Alas, you can't tell that to a university administrator. They need to justify budget allocations to higher-ups, and they're used to justifying them in the "new and improved" language of corporate administration and marketing. Universities have become more like businesses--perhaps that's inevitable in a market society, but the cost is that they are run internally more like businesses. That involves hiring people with business backgrounds as university presidents and deans, and such people will ask: "Well, how can I justify raising salaries in this department? Are they offering something new, something that the competition isn't doing, something that will bring in more customers, something that I can sell to the President or the Board?" Where innovation is spontaneous and auto-generated, we rightly honor it. But where it's artificial and generated largely or purely by the pressures of competition, it often leads to spurious innovation.

            I'm not an academic myself, so my acquaintance with the jargon of political science, sociology, economics, or literary criticism and theory, is a little rusty. But I certainly read complaints about them - you can hardly avoid doing so. Policymakers leaving office - most famously, Robert McNamara - sometimes look back and say, "My God! What a lot of absurdities I subscribed to!" Likewise, once academics are sufficiently eminent, they sometimes say, "My God! The profession really is getting to be a crock!" Of course it's not for me, an outsider, to dismiss all of contemporary scholarship in the social sciences and humanities as a crock. But a lot of it does seem like innovation for the sake of innovation.

PG: It seems even pernicious.

GS: Well, yes it does, insofar as the resources that go to support critics, teachers, practitioners in the arts and humanities are necessarily finite, and so the more that goes to hucksters, to those who have only a factitiously novel but highly marketable jargon, the less can go to people doing enduringly valuable work. In that sense, it's pernicious. It doesn't oppress or exploit anybody, I suppose. But material support for the humanities is limited, and if available resources go to less valuable work, it can't go to more valuable work.

            Another thought about specialization. I myself have never been professionally attached to an academic or journalistic institution. I've had a clerical job (in a university, as it happens) for more than thirty years now, which has paid the bills. It's relatively undemanding, but it's also rather dull. It's thirty hours a week, and I'm awfully sorry that I've have to spend so much of my life at that damned desk. But I'm also awfully glad that I've never had to write looking over my shoulder. It has never crossed my mind - as it must inevitably cross the mind of even the most independent-minded and brave young academic - to wonder what a dean or department chairman or tenure committee is going to think about what I have to say, or where I write, or what I've chosen to write about. Even a staff writer at a relatively independent magazine or newspaper has to make compromises, has to work out a beat and a style with an editor, a boss. You can learn from a boss sometimes, when the enterprise is a healthy and an honorable one, but it's also constraining. Some people have told me, perhaps too generously, that I've achieved a gratifyingly direct voice, a common style. I'm glad--it's certainly what I've hoped to do. But to the extent that I have, I'm pretty sure that I couldn't have done it if I had been subject to the ordinary pressures that most young academics and journalists are subject to today. So there's that to be said against specialization.

PG: And yet, increasingly for students of the humanities, the only route after undergraduate education is the pursuit of an advanced degree. Not that this is a bad thing at all; it's simply the only option. It's nearly impossible for a young intellectual to do what you do, in the society we live in today.

GS: I think the best explanation I've come across for their plight is Russell Jacoby's The Last Intellectuals. He highlights not just developments internal to the world of ideas and culture but also the material conditions of culture. It's hard to have public intellectuals when urban real estate is out of sight. Rent control arguably underwrote New York intellectual life for a long time. How do you live in New York today without an income of sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year? You can do it in your twenties, maybe, you can share or scrimp, but pretty soon, you're going to start being obsessed by the thought: "My God, how can I persuade somebody to give me sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year?" Well, perhaps you can go to the Maine woods or the Nebraska prairie, now that those places are wired up to the Net. But yes, the choices and constraints facing young intellectuals now are stark. They certainly would have stymied me.

PG: You just mentioned the Internet. In the last essay of What Are Intellectuals Good For?, you write: "At this stage of our political and cultural development, electronic collectivization would produce not new, marvelously complex and efficient forms of cognition and communication, but historical amnesia and mass manipulation." In recent years, numerous commentators have suggested that cyberspace can offer an unprecedented, globalized forum for social and cultural debate. Do you find this plausible, or will electronic collectivization erode civic virtues and our linguistic tradition?

GS: This line of argument was put best, at least by my lights, in Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies. Though the book is now twenty years old, developments since then have only confirmed that changes in the physical form of reading gradually, on a molecular level and scale and pace, do indeed alter our psychic metabolism. One of the great virtues of Birkerts' book is its evocation of the spiritual and imaginative possibilities of deep reading. The book is a phenomenology of deep reading, of the way that immersion in a great and demanding text, piece of music, or piece of visual art can activate deep and previously untouched capacities and allow connections to be made among our cultural neurons, which can only happen in relative stillness and isolation.

PG: In solitude.

GS: In solitude. That's his argument; and I'm persuaded. The second part of the argument is that stillness and solitude are just what life online makes increasingly difficult. Since The Gutenberg Elegies was published, Nicholas Carr has written The Shallows, which makes something of the same case, without Birkerts' literary flair but with a certain amount of reporting on recent developments in cognitive science.

            The book in its physical form probably can't last forever. It's not part of my or Birkerts' hope or brief that it should. But deep reading, imaginative immersion: those things do need to last forever. The printed book can be lost and left behind, but the spiritual habitus Birkerts is describing can't, or mustn't, be left behind - it's the royal road to the very best that any individual can achieve. And it's at risk in our current mental ecology. Here, as elsewhere, how to preserve the best of the old in the course of vast changes is a perennial problem.

PG: I suppose we're talking about the modern predicament.

GS: (Smiles) "The modern predicament" - an excellent phrase!

PG: I want to explore this term mental ecology. In your 1999 review of Ellen Willis's Don't Think, Smile you write: "As the global economy and mass culture lay siege to inwardness, plow up our psychic root system, and alter the very grain and contour of our being, conservation increasingly becomes a radical imperative." You express a skeptical, if not fearful, judgment of certain cultural developments that threaten human inwardness, rootedness, and our psychic or mental ecology. More specifically, what exactly--what institutions, perhaps--ought leftists or social critics seek to conserve in the face of these vast changes associated with modernity, and in response to the claims made by cultural radicals like Ellen Willis?

GS: The terms in which I see and approach the problem were formulated largely by left-wing anti-modernists like Christopher Lasch and Jackson Lears. I spoke before about the social and political consequences of mass production, that great watershed in American history - another way to look at the consequences of that shift is to trace, as Lasch does, the effects of mass production and the growth of medical, psychological, educational expertise and bureaucracies on individual character structure. We humans have an evolutionary history. We have a specific, somewhat plastic but not infinitely plastic biological endowment. We have a specific gestational history and an early developmental history. It matters to creatures who have this, or any, kind of body and biology, what scale they live and grow on. From time immemorial, children grew up with two main, and a great many other auxiliary, authority figures, who corresponded to figures in their infantile fantasy life--initially overwhelming, terrifying figures. Gradually, as children became more familiar with those figures, as they watched their parents and other adults cope with daily life, their fantasies gradually shrank down to manageable proportions. That, to simplify quite a bit, is a description of human psychological maturation.

PG: And this is according to Lasch's psychoanalytic critique of modernity.

GS: Yes--I think Lasch is a matchless interpreter of Freud.

PG: His work has endured as a key subject of fascination for you.

GS: He's an indispensable social critic and cultural historian. As he tells the story, what happens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that, first, the father is taken out of the home, out of the child's immediate environment and off to the factory. He doesn't go to work next door in the field, shop, or forge. The child can't just come and watch and play nearby and see his father make mistakes on the job and win or lose arguments with customers - all of which tended to humanize him. Now the father's activity is all beyond the horizon. It's mysterious, obscure. The child gathers that his father is not in charge of his own life, that he is a subordinate. An abstract force called the company, corporation, agency, or state is what controls his father. As for the mother, instead of its being the individual woman, making use of whatever traditions she absorbed from her own mother and the older women in her circle, it's again the distant state, in the form of the school system, medical system, and social welfare bureaucracy, that wields ultimate authority.

As authority becomes more remote and abstract in real life, there's no way for it to be whittled down to human scale and manageable proportions the child's fantasy life. But fantasy life--this is Lasch and Freud's crucial premise--is fundamental to how our character develops. Because primitive fantasies cannot be reduced to human scale, as they used to be - since authority is now distant, obscure, remote, mysterious, and omnipotent - the individual grows up fatally ambivalent - either enraged or passive - toward authority. That is the classical definition of narcissism. Parents, as it used to become clear to the child from firsthand observation, are fallible and limited. As the child grew, she eventually became as strong and as smart as her parents, and finally more so. That was individuation and maturation. But you can't measure yourself against an abstract entity like the state or the corporation.

PG: So Lasch's suggested preservation of local, formative authority would foster the individual's ability to challenge and overcome authority in general.

GS: Yes, exactly. Just as the infant does in fantasy life, and the growing adolescent does in real life. You can't grow up without the experience of overcoming prejudice and arbitrary authority; you have to live through them and live them down. In any case, some arbitrary authority is simply necessary for every child's safety and every pupil's formation. But of course, arbitrary authority has a checkered record historically, as cultural radicals are quite right to point out. And those who feel that oppressive history especially keenly are women and minorities, which is why a large proportion of leading cultural radicals are women and minorities.

PG: It seems like, in order to avoid what you deem "the twin specters of antimodernist fundamentalism and postmodernist nihilism," we must proceed gradually through modernity, or in other words: we can't skip steps, out of respect for our evolutionary history and psychic ecology. While Lasch's critique of modernity and skepticism of so-called "progress" is indeed persuasive and compelling, his idea of an alternative model for social organization is conspicuously lacking. This might go some way in explaining the frequent charge that he is somehow conservative or regressive, or that he would prefer to revert back to premodern insitutions like craft labor, traditional concepts like the intrinsic value of individual work. His brilliant analysis of modernity notwithstanding, it doesn't seem like he offers an alternative to replace what is undoubtedly a problematic state of affairs.

GS: I think it's a pity that both Lasch and Ellen Willis died too young to thrash out some of these issues between them. I know Lasch had a brief but warm correspondence with Barbara Ehrenreich, who certainly was not likely to blink at any anti-feminist implications of this critique of modernity. Yes, it's true that the hegemony of mass society is virtually complete nowadays. You mentioned craft, the value of work, as a premodern tradition ...

PG: Or even the most general communitarian ideals...

GS: Yes. Well, I know that by "premodern" you didn't mean that there was something necessarily archaic about them. There isn't. The point is to preserve under modern conditions the essence of those ideals: craftsmanship, autonomy at work, individual responsibility. The responsibility of the shopkeeper, the craftsman, the proprietor, the farmer to stand behind his work - this was identical, in pre-industrial America, with being a full citizen.

PG: In your writings, you repeatedly emphasize the value of self-discipline.

GS: Which is something there's almost no scope for, or motivation for, in the contemporary workplace. In the sciences, yes; or among autonomous professionals or other people who are the privileged elite of the modern economy, yes. But even among those who are lucky enough to have regular employment, most no longer have any autonomy at work. Everyone knows that responsibility at work simply means thinking "How can I meet the company's goals better (or successfully pretend that I am)?" rather than thinking vain thoughts like "Should I even be doing this at all? Should the company be doing this at all?" The job's goals, techniques, and materials are defined by management; the history and internal requirements of the practice count for nothing.

PG: Lasch's critique seems to have gained relevance and urgency with the rise of neoliberal individualism and the unprecedented flexibility of labor and capital.

GS: Nowadays, of course, "flexible labor" means the complete freedom of management to deploy labor as it sees fit, when it seems fit. Any flexibility on the part of the worker to define his own pace or purpose or approach is simply inconceivable. Try discussing the question with an economist - blank stares.

            Even the Left has largely abandoned all concern over the degradation of work. Lasch traces the course of two different kinds of working-class resistance to 19^th-century industrialization. One, organized labor under the guidance of socialists in the European tradition, focused almost entirely on compensation and benefits and job security - which, it goes without saying, are valuable in and of themselves. But he distinguished this approach from that of the Populists, who were protesting against their loss of autonomy, the loss of work which they valued for its own sake.

PG: He lionizes the Populist movement in America, isn't that so?

GS: He does. Perhaps "lionize" might suggest that he idealizes or overvalues it, but I think he's responding to a tradition of undervaluing the Populists, which was given special force by Richard Hofstadter and other mid-century historians.

            Nowadays, when subsistence for fifteen or twenty percent of the population is an issue, and two to three million people in the past few years have lost their homes, how do you raise demands for work that has value again, or for craftsmanship, or the autonomy of the worker? It sounds absurd, almost fantastic. Bare subsistence and minimum economic security are and must be the issues of the day. But once we get past austerity-- and unfortunately, it looks like we're in for a very long spell, which apparently suits the financial elites just fine--these aspirations, these values, have to be reasserted.

            The only vision I've encountered of how to organize a modern society from the ground up in a way that values the ideals of craftmanship, of sexual equality, of sustainability, and of citizenship, is Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia. It was published in 1975 and was a sort of underground classic in the seventies and eighties. It's rarely referred to now, but it's awfully good, and I hope the ideas in it will resurface on the Left in the future.

PG: My impression of your larger argument is that we must stall or perhaps prolong modernity. We're going at far too past a pace, and we must universalize what we have already. You quote Matthew Arnold, who says, "The secret of the life of the future is civilization made pervasive and general." We shouldn't move forward toward a postmodern future--whatever that might look like--on a planet with such staggering inequality.

GS: Amen. I couldn't put it better than that. By all means, let's move forward someday, toward postmodernity or wherever. But together.

PG: A final question: in your writings you have argued that the overabundance of information and staggering breadth of the cultural and political conversation today has made it increasingly difficult for anyone to develop "a position on everything." Because there are far more texts than one will ever have the time or ability to read, many students struggle, even, to find a place to begin. What do you think students of literature and politics should be reading today? Alternatively, what shouldn't they be reading?

GS: For native English speakers, the single greatest moral resource in the language is the nineteenth-century novel. I taught for a few semesters at a writing program and would always ask my students how many of them had read Middlemarch or Bleak House or Portrait of a Lady. It was a top-tier writing program, all highly competitive, excellent students, but a distressing number hadn't read some or even any of these books. Austen, Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, Trollope, James, Hardy, Conrad are, together with Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, a matchlessly deep and precious trove of wisdom.

            Every language's poetic tradition is rich, but ours in English is very rich. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English verse is a source of many, many exquisite pleasures. You do have to work a little--the language is not colloquial twentieth-century English--but it's the root of our English. And then, the King James Version of the Bible. My favorite twentieth-century writer, D.H. Lawrence, wrote a lovely essay on growing up with the Bible called "Hymns in a Man's Life." The KJV Bible is even richer than Shakespeare, both psychologically and linguistically. (I don't mention Shakespeare only because I don't think your readers will need my recommendation.)

Well, that's a bare minimum. As for other writers besides novelists or poets, I would recommend Nietzsche, my favorite philosopher, as well as John Stuart Mill. Appreciating those two simultaneously is the challenge of a lifetime.

            As for what not to read, I would say don't read your e-mail, or most of it. Don't read text messages, or tweets, or ads. Stay off Facebook. We all waste so much of our lives chatting, shopping, being assaulted by ads. And don't watch television. Television is an enormous realm, and there's a lot that's good--but it's very hard, almost impossible, not to find oneself relaxing into flabby, promiscuous spectatorship, just as it's very hard to eat only one or two potato chips.

PG: An assault on inwardness, perhaps? What would you recommend with respect to socialist thought? It seems like your intellectual heroes include the most prominent Victorian socialists: Ruskin, Morris, Wilde...

GS: Mill, Morris, Ruskin, and Wilde, yes. I'm an ethical socialist. Marx is also a great moral philosopher, rhetorician, and social critic. But frankly, though I've studied Capital with some excellent teachers, I still don't understand it. I just don't get the labor theory of value. I guess you have to have a mind that adapts well to German philosophy.

PG: Or perhaps Capital isn't quite relevant to the direct political struggles we're facing today. In other words, ethical socialism might be a far more viable project for one to commit to.

GS: I don't mean that I've seen through Marx or that I'm satisfied that there's nothing there. It does seem to me that he had some remarkable predictions about the periodicity of crises in capitalism and the financialization of the global economy. I think his description of the future course of capitalism was strikingly accurate. I just don't know whether those predictions came rigorously out of his theory, or simply from his almost unparalleled knowledge of economic history. There does seem to be something to the notion of surplus value as an explanation of the vicissitudes of the business cycle. But I have to confess I can't come to terms, finally, with Marxist theory. I'm not sure that Occupy - or the American citizenry as a whole, if it ever rouses itself to reassert its sovereignty - will really need Marx. But it will need Mill, Ruskin, Wilde, Morris, Randolph Bourne, and Ernest Callenbach. 

What, in brief, is the modern predicament? Which authors, and what lived experience in history, most shaped your understanding of it?

Modernity is the ensemble of changes - intellectual, political, economic, social, cultural, technological, aesthetic - that have altered the world drastically since roughly the 17th century, until which time the world was, in the above respects, far less different from the world of any previous epoch of recorded history than it is from the world of today.  The modern predicament is the set of problems these changes have bequeathed us.

One problem is our loss of ontological, social, and psychological embeddedness. Formerly, the meaning and purposes of life were, to a far greater extent, simply given for most people by the religious, family, and societal structures in which they were born and grew up.  Very few people, and even those people to a limited extent, were expected or encouraged to become individuals, free to make fundamental choices about love, religion, occupation, political allegiance, even location.  Only a tiny elite could aspire to an individual identity and an individual history.

Nowadays everyone, or at least most people in the rich countries - I realize that this still leaves out most of humankind - can be an individual. But that turns out to be difficult. Over millions of years, we evolved characters and psyches that needed to be held in and held up by intense bonds, usually provided by strong families and local communities. For many reasons - economic development,  geographical mobility, religious tolerance, the rise of nation-states, the emancipation of women -  those bonds have weakened over the last few centuries.  The resulting freedom obviously has enormous benefits for the previously unindividuated. But for many people it also has costs: isolation, loneliness, purposelessness, powerlessness, and hyperstimulation.

The modern predicament, then, is the difficulty of finding a sane, harmonious balance among all the vast and various consequences of science, technology, democracy, mass literacy, feminism, and the other forms of modern progress.

My own involvement with these questions began in college, when the devout Catholicism in which I was brought up - I was actually a member of the traditionalist religious order Opus Dei - met and was vanquished by the 18th- and 19th-century secular critique of religion.  For some years after that I was not only a passionate anti-clericalist and philosophical materialist (as I still am), but also a fervent believer in progress as a fairly linear process, a smooth upward slope in which all that was necessary was to complete the long march through all the orthodoxies, religious, political, and sexual, which the Enlightenment had begun.

Then, in my thirties, I encountered the two most important (for me) critics of modernity, D.H. Lawrence and Christopher Lasch. Lawrence was a kind of Hebrew prophet, not of righteousness but of the body, and against what he perceived (at least in early-20^th-century-England) as a disastrous over-valuing of the mental, the conceptual, the explicit - what used to be called, roughly from Kant to G.E. Moore, the Ideal. He was a pagan, reasserting the importance of all the wisdom that had been forgotten in the course of the (necessary) rejection of traditional religion and metaphysics. He was also the finest prose stylist I had ever encountered, so I was (and still am) blown away.  His essays, collected in the two volumes of Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers are one of the great neglected resources of European culture. I try to say why in the essay "Shipwrecked" in The Modern Predicament.

Lawrence was a bit archaic and exotic; Christopher Lasch was as American as apple pie or Walt Whitman. With different materials and a completely different intellectual and verbal style from Lawrence, he made a subtly parallel argument about the forgotten wisdom of pre-modernity, in particular of the producerist, or yeoman, or civic republican tradition. I've written about him at length in both What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament, but I'm still coming to terms with him.

What is Pressed Wafer? Why is your relationship to them special? And what's special about this collection?

Pressed Wafer is a one-man publishing venture in Boston, the work of poet and critic  William Corbett. What's special about it is that it's a labor of love and not of commerce, part of what Lewis Hyde in The Gift described as the "gift economy," rather than the market economy. Bill knew and admired a great many writers - chiefly poets, art critics, and essayists - who weren't getting published, or published well, and he put his energy and resources into serving them and their art. Pressed Wafer hasn't changed the world, and won't, but a lot of us are intensely grateful for it.

I don't know what, if anything, is special about the Modern Predicament. Certainly it wouldn't have seemed special fifty or sixty years ago, when essay collections were a staple of literary publishing. But they don't sell very well now, so commercial publishers have lost interest.

What future have book reviews as a format? Do they serve the same function as they did when you started reviewing?

The future looks a bit dim, doesn't it, at least in print venues? I hope your generation can reverse that. Books matter less now, with flickering screens everywhere, and so, inevitably, book reviews do too. Life is faster, and the cultural surround is much denser with signals, a great many of which are commercially-motivated noise. Whether or not books and book reviews survive in their traditional physical form, it's essential to slow down and deepen the pace of life, or the culture will continue verging toward aimless, endless chatter.

What has it been like having an extensive web archive, and has it changed your intellectual community, your network of correspondence, and so on?

A little, yes. People will see something I've written, google me, and up comes the website, where they can read more, and then sometimes they'll write me, which is very satisfying. (I should mention that the real treasure on the site is not anything I've written but the collection of my favorite quotes.) Of course, the real payoff will come when The New Yorker or The New Inquiry or some other big, glamorous venue does a profile of me, which will bring me and the site to the attention of millions.

In a recent issue of Dissent, you wrote "No doubt most epochs seem like emergencies to their beleaguered contemporaries. But compared with the decades in which [Christopher] Lasch wrote, the ugliness of American politics in the early 21st century seems almost to justify a neglect of long-term perspectives and wide-ranging theories." What should today's politically-engaged intellectual culture look like? What still matters from the intellectual history of postwar USA, and what doesn't?

A lot matters, too much to note here. Nader, Chomsky, I.F. Stone, Seymour Hersh, Glenn Greenwald - the tradition of citizen-critics and investigative journalists is indispensable as a counterweight to what I called, in What Are Intellectuals Good For?, the "anti-public intellectuals" of the right, who have been leveraged by their moneyed patrons into prominence and influence. Critically-minded historians like Lasch, Jackson Lears, Walter Karp, Howard Zinn, and William Appleman Williams matter. Cultural critics like Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Ellen Willis, and Thomas Frank matter.

Perhaps most of all, that flippant slogan from the Sixties matters: "Question Authority." A generalized, baseline level of skepticism toward established authority - private as much as public authority - is a prerequisite of robust democracy.  This isn't reflexive right-wing libertarian skepticism, that doubts government can do anything right. Right-wing libertarianism - more accurately called "propertarianism" - is philosophically incoherent and comes down, whatever the intentions of its adherents, to a defense of privilege. Left-wing libertarianism is another name for popular sovereignty or self-determination. The New Left's opposition to the Indochina War got a lot of ordinary people thinking skeptically about America's role in the world as well as about the fundamental fairness of American society - a very promising development.  Unfortunately, Reaganism becalmed this popular restiveness, and the grim, hard-faced operatives of the New Right who came to power under Reagan and Gingrich - what Thomas Frank calls "the wrecking crew" - were fierce in their determination to roll back the Sixties. They've mostly succeeded, though not altogether. You can fool most of the people most of the time, but only if the people don't think much, or read much, or talk to one another much. The left's job is to get them thinking, reading, and talking.

In your review of Bill McKibben's book on genetic engineering, you write that "we may find an increasing disproportion between our power and our depth."  Does it seem to you that technology merely contributes to the distractions of the modern, or do you see ways in which new technologies--of communication, information, even science--are deepening intellectual thought and intellectual life?

Technology clearly helps get better science done. Whether it helps get better art and criticism done, at least directly, is not at all clear. The best thing technology can do for art and culture has nothing to do with its being employed in making art and culture. Rather, it would be for technology to be used - as it certainly might be - to increase leisure and economic security very widely, which would immediately and enormously increase the time, the energy, and the audience available to creative people, not to mention allowing many more people to find and follow their creative impulses.

Needless to say, that's not what technology is generally used for now. It's used for weapons, for marketing, for surveillance, for mass entertainment, for food processing, for agribusiness, for cosmetics, for superfluous pharmaceuticals, for finance, for luxury goods - the list goes on and on. In a class society, dominated by the pursuit of profit, the waste of technical skill is as egregious as the waste of natural resources. As long as that fundamentally irrational system persists, it hardly matters whether a few ingenious people manage to find ways to put technology to good uses within its interstices.

What is the "philosophy of limits" and what do we have to learn from it? Where do liberals/radicals err in their disdain of conservativism? Conversely, where is there still too much piety among liberals? Any chance of concrete right-left alliances, or just fertile intellectual possibilities?

When the modern world was being born, the supposedly inescapable limitations of human nature was a conservative theme. Inherited traditional beliefs and forms of authority were held to be all that most people could understand or live by. To convince a wide public to reject these a priori limits and trust themselves morally and politically was the first, heroic task of Enlightenment intellectuals. Faith in progress was once a precondition of progress. It still is, to the extent that contemporary right-wing libertarianism insists that democratically controlled enterprises must always be less efficient than hierarchical ones like corporations.

But entwined with democratic self-confidence, there grew up a less reflective faith in unlimited material progress, based partly on a belief that human wants and needs would grow to match increases in productive capacity. This may have seemed plausible before the environmental limits to growth became obvious in the mid-twentieth century; but more important, it was also convenient for those who wished to deflect attention from the gradual and many-sided loss of autonomy that industrial mass production and bureaucratically organized medical/educational/psychotherapeutic expertise imposed on nearly everyone. As the state, the economy, and the institutions regulating everyday life all grew in scale, the only sphere of autonomy left to ordinary people was consumption. And so an entire ideology and technology of consumption arose, on the premise that happiness consisted primarily in consumption, which could apparently be increased without limit. And if that's true, then our powerlessness doesn't matter.

But it's not true. Powerlessness and lack of autonomy do matter to our psychic health: they produce weak, immature selves and a culture of narcissism - the latter a psychoanalytic concept that has little to do with the popular notion of "narcissism" as mere self-absorption or self-importance. We can't grow to psychic maturity through social relations on just any scale - they have to be on a scale that allows us at least a modest sense of mastery in work and community life and imposes personal, not purely impersonal, obligations. That scale may not be achievable in a mass society.

The people who understand this best at the moment seem to be conservatives of the "paleo" or religious variety, like those around The American Conservative, a very interesting (and quirky) magazine for which I've been writing occasionally in the last couple of years. But paleoconservatives often seem to think that the state is the primary agent of massification. Radicals know better (as Lasch did): the modern state is a creature of corporate capitalism, which can only be controlled through what Lasch called "completing the democratic revolution of the eighteenth century."

I don't have any clear idea (and neither did Lasch) how to combine modern technology, sexual equality, and democratic nationhood with a sense of limits, rootedness, and human scale. The most successful attempt I've seen to imagine such a society is Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia.  But it's only the beginning of a beginning.

About possible alliances: with the Tea Party and the paleoconservatives, yes. My experience with both is limited, but by and large, they seem to be groping and grieving honestly. The Republican Party, however, is wholly and irredeemably corrupt, demagogic, and malevolent. The Democratic Party, somewhat less so, though it's still profoundly rotten. The left must formulate a strategy, and find the resources, either to conquer the Democratic Party from the ground up (as the New Right did with the Republican Party) or to construct an alternative party or a network of popular organizations, which can negotiate with the parties from a position of strength, as the Business Roundtable, Chamber of Commerce, and major industry associations do.

In this Dark Age of right-wing hegemony, I'm reluctant to hector liberals, but there is one liberal piety that urgently requires criticism: belief in American exceptionalism, especially regarding foreign policy. Reluctance to apply the same unsparing critical standards to American foreign policy that one would employ in judging any other country's is sadly prevalent among liberals and even democratic socialists as well as neoconservatives. In particular, the notion that a main purpose of American foreign policy is or has ever been to foster democracy, human rights, and material welfare in the rest of the world is utter nonsense. Like virtually every other nation-state that has ever existed, the US has a ruling class. And as always, the main goals of domestic and foreign policy are dictated by the broadly-shared interests and beliefs of that class. In our case, those goals include maintaining a favorable international investment climate, access to resources and markets, and military-strategic advantage. As always, there are potential constraints on state policies: ie, the interests and beliefs of domestic and foreign populations, to the extent these have power to make their wishes felt. Ruling classes always seek to maximize legitimacy: ie, the consent of the ruled; which is why, as US policymakers have frequently observed off the record, a democratic façade is always preferable in client states. But democracy has its dangers, and the US has regularly been willing to sacrifice it - at home and abroad - in order to achieve more fundamental goals.

It's not surprising that this view of American foreign policy is unmentionable in the house organs of the American ruling class: Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, the Washington Post. And neoliberal journals like the Atlantic and the New Republic are now virtually indistinguishable from neoconservative ones with respect to foreign policy. But it's disappointing that more intellectually and morally serious journals like Dissent, The American Prospect, Democracy, and the New York Review can rarely bring themselves to characterize American foreign policy candidly.

Occupy...?

I bless it and am grateful for it. But as they know perfectly well, it's only a beginning. And occupations, like demonstrations, are an inherently limited tactic. It seems to me that any successful long-range strategy for fundamental democratic change, in America or anywhere, must be built around activities that take place in homes, workplaces, municipal buildings, public libraries, church halls, colleges, and similar places, outside of working hours, with child care provided. In other words, they have to be activities everybody can take part in, every week, for years on end, without bending their lives out of shape. Most people's lives are already too insecure and overstressed for them to do much politically, which is how the ruling class likes it.

You write about the "transparent society" in your essay on Foucault.  Can you talk about what that means, and how you might consider the term in light of modern transparency via social media / constant communication?  What do some of the writers you review have to tell us about laying claim to our privacy, to solitude?

"Transparency" is a word, like "freedom," whose valence is entirely dependent on its context. The freedom to say what one thinks or marry whom one loves is good. The freedom to dump PCB's in Lake Erie or create huge toxic swamps in Ecuador while drilling for oil or evade taxes by parking money in offshore tax havens is bad. Transparency in the deliberations of corporate boards and democratic policymakers is good; transparency in the doctor's office or the bedroom is bad. 

Can we make any general statements about freedom and transparency? Yes. In general, the more powerful a person or institution, the more his or its freedom should be circumscribed by laws and regulations. The less powerful, the less circumscribed. The more powerful a person or institution is, the more transparent - open to public inspection or oversight - its activities should be. The less powerful, the less transparent.

In a recent essay on the subject, Sarah Leonard quotes her hero and mine, Julian Assange, making this point cogently: "Transparency should be proportional to the power that one has.  The more power one has, the greater the dangers generated by that power, and the more need for transparency.  Conversely, the weaker one is, the more danger there is in being transparent." That nails it, I think.

As for data mining and other commercial uses of information, I'm wary of it, less for civil liberties reasons than for reasons of mental hygiene. Marketing is a plague. We need to restrict it stringently, both in order to lessen our overall level of consumption and also to turn the economy back to producing for basic needs.

To the question about social media and solitude, my short answer is that I think Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies is still the wisest diagnosis of the consequences of consumer electronics for culture. Inwardness, deep reading, imaginative immersion - these inevitably become less frequent experiences for those who live increasingly in front of screens. Electronic media change our psychic metabolism. I know that well-designed social-scientific studies haven't yet established this to everyone's satisfaction. But really, wouldn't it be astonishing if they didn't have that effect?

Tell us about your future plans--are you working on anything special?  What has it been like editing the Baffler, and will that continue?

I have an essay on progress coming out in Salmagundi this spring that I hope some of your readers and listeners will look for. (The magazine isn't online, unfortunately, so they'll have to journey into the print world.) I'll be writing a review for New Inquiry of the final volume of Morris Berman's splendid trilogy on America's decline. And I have another essay collection, a little more explicitly political than The Modern Predicament, coming out next year.

Editing the Baffler has been exhausting, and all I've been doing is occasionally giving John Summers moral support. What it's been like for him I truly can't imagine. It's lucky that he's young, 6'3", and a former athlete. Putting out even a well-funded print magazine is a lot of work, but doing it while raising the money from scratch is ... well, as I said, I can barely imagine; I only know he's been working 10-12 hours a day for most of a year. Yes, I'll keep helping, and more important, Tom Frank and Chris Lehmann will keep helping. But it's his baby.

As for what I've learned in the process: well, when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail; and when you're a left-wing sorehead, everything is an occasion to damn the rich. When I think of all the hoops John has had to jump through to get just enough money to revive the best journal of cultural criticism America has ever seen, and then reflect that several times as much money is squandered on a single ad page - or maybe two or three pages, I don't really know - of Vanity Fair or the New Yorker ... Or that he, with two young children, has been working for considerably less than the minimum wage, while there are young twits on Wall Street who've been out of college for three years and whine that their bonuses are less than a million dollars ...

But it's worth it, of course. The rich twit will never be more than a rich twit, while John will have the satisfaction of publishing some glorious prose, and maybe even nudging the world towards sanity. There's really no contest, is there?

When a genuine intellectual becomes a celebrity, there is usually some misunderstanding somewhere. The arbiters of celebrity - magazine and network executives, top editors and columnists, producers and talk show hosts, major grant-makers and prize-givers - are, by and large, as incapable of sponsoring difficulty and depth as they are of resisting glibness and facility. They may themselves appreciate intellectual distinction, but audiences must be reliably sold to advertisers, or investors will go elsewhere. Difficulty is, by definition, a hard sell.

Christopher Hitchens must often have reflected sardonically on his celebrity. Its main channels - Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times - were so comfortably middlebrow, so immured in the conventional Beltway/Manhattan wisdom, that he must occasionally have felt the impulse to spit, rhetorically, in their faces. Not in the trivial way he sometimes did, with throwaway columns about blowjobs or whether women can be funny, but in ways that would bring a pained smile to the lips of Sam Tanenhaus or David Bradley. Not because those two or their counterparts are exceptionally smug or stupid, but just because they're on top, and the responsibility of intellectuals is to keep those on top off balance.

What sort of thing would have brought a wince to the faces of Hitchens's patrons? In search of trademark provocations from the early Hitch, I took down two vintage collections, Prepared for the Worst and For the Sake of Argument. Pay dirt, immediately. The latter book fell open to a 1991 discussion of the Middle East on the eve of the first Gulf War:

Today, the tilt is toward Saudi Arabia. A huge net of bases and garrisons has been thrown over the Kingdom of Saud, with a bonanza in military sales and a windfall (for some) to accompany  it. This tilt, too, has its destabilizing potential. But the tilt also has its compensations, not the least being that the Realpoliticians might still get to call the global shots from Washington. Having taken the diplomatic lead, engineered the UN Security Council resolutions, pressured the Saudis to let in foreign troops, committed the bulk of these troops, and established itself as the only credible source of Intelligence and interpretation of Iraqi plans and mood, the Bush administration publicly hailed a new multilateralism. Privately, Washington's Realpols gloated: We were the superpower - Deutschmarks and yen be damned.

            Generally, it must be said that Realpolitik has been better at dividing than at ruling. Take it as a whole since Kissinger called on the Shah in 1972, and see what the harvest has been. ... [T]he forces of secularism, democracy and reform have been dealt appalling blows. And all these crimes and blunders will necessitate future wars. That is what US policy has done, or helped to do, to the region. What has the same policy done to America? A review of the Pike Commission, the Iran-Contra hearings, even the Tower Report and September's perfunctory House inquiry into the Baker-Kelly-Glaspie fiasco, will disclose the damage done by official lying, by hostage-trading, by covert arms sales, by the culture of secrecy, and by the habit of including foreign despots in meetings and decisions that are kept secret from American citizens. By Election Day the Gulf build-up had brought about the renewal of a moribund consensus on national security, the disappearance of the bruited "peace dividend" ("If you're looking for it," one Pentagon official told a reporter this past fall, "it just left for Saudi Arabia"), and the re-establishment of the red alert as the preferred device for communicating between Washington and the people.

            Implicit in these remarks is a view of American foreign policy as deeply, characteristically arrogant, callous, and deceitful. (And this only since 1972 - before that, in Indochina, it was genocidal.) Hitchens never repudiated this view, though he appeared to have forgotten that he'd once espoused it. Mightn't he have remembered one day, leafing though his old volumes, and felt a mischievous impulse to twit his new friends at the State Department and the Council on Foreign Relations with a reminder that their adopted darling still despised them?

            A second pass at the same collection. Again, immediate success. Savaging the Perot campaign, he asks:

            And where did anyone get the brainless opinion that the super-rich are too wealthy to steal? Such naivete! This is an illusion even more silly than its more attractive opposite - that the abolition of poverty would diminish crime. Since nobody in this abundant plutocracy has ever really tried to abolish poverty, we have no empirical test of the idealist proposition. But from Ford to Hughes to Iacocca and Trump and the other tycoon redeemers, we have an exact demonstration that nobody is more covetous and greedy than those who have far too much.

            Surely a contrarian who remembered once writing this, while now enjoying the lavish hospitality of Vanity Fair and the Hoover Institution, would feel irresistibly tempted to remind the latter that the society they are dedicated to protecting from radical criticism is a crass plutocracy, and the former that nobody is more covetous and greedy than the rich rabble whom they celebrate from month to month?

            Much deeper than any principles was Hitchens's romantic temperament. He was an average reasoner, not very rigorous or original. But he felt intensely and vividly, and he had a keen, even if erratic, moral imagination. Most to the point, he was a stubborn fucker, who liked to contradict people. It's possible that, if he'd lived to a ripe old age, he would have gone to his grave without having disturbed the self-satisfaction of his admirers among the Very Serious People. I would have bet against it. But we'll never know.

It has always been with me a test of the sense and candor of anyone belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Christopher Hitchens to be an ornament of Anglo-American literary journalism. Hundreds of novelists, historians, memoirists, and politicians have undergone Hitchens' critical attentions, to the frequent edification and unfailing entertainment of his readers. Few present-day journalists have a detectable, much less unmistakable, prose style; the suavity and piquancy of Hitchens' prose are unmatched among his critical peers.

Equally admirable is his breadth of reading; he has made an art of casual allusion. "Erudition" is not quite right; it suggests labor, and what is most impressive about the way Hitchens liberally sprinkles unfailingly apposite quotes from Auden and Larkin, Waugh and Wodehouse, Jefferson and Churchill throughout his essays is his apparent effortlessness. He always seems to have been reading just the right book at just the right moment - though at a certain point it dawns on you that it can't be an accident; he really must be intimate with an extraordinary expanse of modern European history and literature.

The essays collected in Prepared for the Worst (1988), For the Sake of Argument (1991), Unacknowledged Legislation (2000), Love, Poverty, and War (2004), and now Arguably, range almost inconceivably widely. A short gallery of personal favorites would begin with his portrait of Thomas Paine, whom he praises in terms that strikingly parallel Lionel Trilling on Orwell:

Everything he wrote was plain, obvious, and within the mental compass of the average. In that lay his genius. And, harnessed to his courage (which was exceptional) and his pen (which was at any rate out of the common), this faculty of the ordinary made him outstanding.

It would include his portrait of Conor Cruise O'Brien, to whose variegated political and intellectual career Hitchens renders difficult and delicate justice. His first embattled defense of Orwell (several others would follow) remarks penetratingly that "the essence of Orwell's work is a sustained criticism of servility. It is not what you think but how you think that matters." There are blistering takedowns of English politicians Reginald Maudling and Michael Foot and American neoconservatives Norman Podhoretz and Charles Krauthammer, which, brief though they are, deserve to outlive their subjects. There is a harrowing report from El Salvador under the death squads, with a muted and diffident (but all the more affecting) tribute to the Catholic resistance.

A brief, tossed-off column from 25 years ago is virtually Hitchens' sole effort to formulate a political philosophy. It is so good that one is furious with him for never returning to the subject:

I bought an armful of socialist magazines in London recently, and was impressed by their dogged iteration of the new rage for free-market, individualist formulae. ... Once the intoxication of this "new thinking" has worn off, it will again become boringly clear that all macro questions are questions that confront society rather than the individual. ... This is true of the imperiled web of nature and climate, which when messed around with can lead to dustbowls in one province and floods in the neighboring one. It is true of the water that can bring lead into the blood and bone of children. There is no "minimal government" solution to any of these pressing matters.

One doesn't want or need to argue this with any relish. The idea of the individual should not be glibly counterposed to the idea of society. After all, what is society made up of, if not individuals? But there are two ways of facing collective responsibilities. One is to ignore them until it is too late, at which point things like rationing, conscription, and regimentation become the options, irrespective of whether the system is capitalist or socialist. The other is to recognize them in time and take the necessary measures freely and by consent. But there is no evading these responsibilities altogether, or of dismissing them as "One World sentimentality."

... The family, so often piously invoked by Tories, is in fact an elementary form of socialism. It operates, without undue repression, on the principle of "from each according to his/her ability and to each according to his/her need." ... The family core is the recognition that an injury to one is an injury to all - a precept that many people can recognize only when it is put to them in a self-interested way.

... there is an amazing persistence to the notion that everybody can, by his or her own efforts, become an autonomous proprietor. Surely this, rather than the socialist vision, is the real utopianism? At the moment, Wall Street is operating on the false promise, not of the usual well-worn casino metaphor, but of a casino where nobody loses. ... Increasingly, it is the partisans of the unfettered enterprise culture who have to answer that old trick question - who's going to do the hard work?

... So certain truisms are beginning to resound again. If we don't hang together, we will hang separately. The bell does toll for us all. It will not do to listen to the cheerleader business-politicians whose motto is "Only disconnect." The values of solidarity, collectivism, and internationalism are not so much desirable as they are actually mandated by nature and reality itself.

Alas, these examples have only gotten us through Hitchens's first collection, Prepared for the Worst. There is no space left to mention his authoritative pieces on the New York intellectuals and Noel Annan's portrait of the British Establishment, or "Booze and Fags," a jolly paean to alcohol and tobacco, or an illuminating essay on Daniel Deronda (all in For the Sake of Argument); the pair of exquisite tributes to Oscar Wilde, the discerning essays on Conan Doyle, Kipling, and Anthony Powell, or the full-on considerations of Isaiah Berlin and Whittaker Chambers, Gore Vidal and Andy Warhol (in Unacknowledged Legislation); the magisterial assessments of Trotsky and Churchill, the wonderfully perceptive, V.S. Pritchett-like essays on Byron, Huxley, Waugh, Joyce, Proust, Borges, and Bellow, or the simultaneously rollicking and haunting record of a trip the length of Route 66 in a rented red Corvette (in Love, Poverty, and War).

And even this leaves out his books: No One Left to Lie To, a definitive account (or as near as possible) of Bill Clinton's mendacity; The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which has convinced hundreds of thousands of readers (some of them sitting magistrates in foreign countries) that President Obama's fellow Nobel laureate should be behind bars; and God Is Not Great, the first New York Times number one bestseller to advance that claim. It's clear, I'm afraid, that within the confines of a mere book review, any short gallery of personal favorites will be frustratingly incomplete. There's simply too much very good Hitchens.

Of course, not all of Hitchens was very good, even before 9/11 drove him mad. He was always too ready with abuse ("stupid" and "tenth-rate" were particular weaknesses). He is a compulsive name-dropper: in his very short Letters to a Young Contrarian, for example, the words "my friend," followed by a distinguished name, appear dozens of times, giving the reader's eyebrows a considerable workout. Some of the aforementioned allusions flow a little too readily: there is a subtle difference between relishing a fine phrase and relishing hearing oneself quote a fine phrase. And in recent years, he has occasionally fallen into what might be called the knightly style, where mellifluousness modulates into orotundity. "The disagreeable and surreptitious element of this story cannot indefinitely remain unexamined." "The masochistic British attitude to inevitable decline seems to have reversed itself, at least to some extent." All too many occurrences of "I think I may venture to say," "if I may make so bold as to observe," "I hope I may be forgiven for pointing out," and the like. Fortunately, Hitchens the staunch republican has so frequently and zestfully insulted the British monarchy that he is in no danger of becoming Sir Christopher.

More damagingly, his politics have always been a little too first-person. Some memorable portraits and descriptions have resulted from his many extensively reported trips to the world's trouble spots, but not much valuable insight. The tendency of one's first-hand experience - the testimony one has heard, the suffering one has witnessed, the bonds one has formed - to crowd other people's arguments to the margins of judgment is hard to resist. To hope for drama and analysis, passion and wisdom, from the same writer, at any rate on the same occasion, is usually vain. Hitchens' genuine, generous, longstanding hatred of oppression - a rare quantity among proponents of America's wars on Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq - has nevertheless had disastrous results over the last dozen years.

I began this review by paraphrasing Hazlitt on Burke. When he passed from praising Burke to chastising him, Hazlitt observed sternly that "the poison of high example has by far the widest range of destruction." Hitchens' single-minded advocacy of unilateral American military intervention has been as destructive as any mere scribbler's efforts could be. "The very subtlety of his reasoning," Hazlitt wrote of Burke, "became a dangerous engine in the hands of power, which is always eager to make use of the most plausible pretexts to cover the most fatal designs." Hitchens' reasoning has been anything but subtle, but he has more than made up for the poverty of his arguments with rich stores of invective, anecdote, and - as a last refuge - rhetorical patriotism.

What changed Hitchens' mind about American foreign policy? Three things, it seems. The first was a growing identification, the longer he resided here, with American society and culture, a romance affectingly described in his autobiography, Hitch-22. The second was his increasingly militant anticlericalism, fed especially by the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa against Hitchens' friend Salman Rushdie. The third was a long-gathering disaffection with the Anglo-American left, which he saw as frozen in postures of multiculturalism and anti-Americanism. He refers in the introduction to Arguably to an "ongoing polemic ... between the anti-imperialist left and the anti-totalitarian left"; announcing his accession to the latter in Hitch-22, he described the former as those who "in the final instance believe that if the United States is doing something, then that thing cannot by definition be a moral or ethical action." Perhaps because of chronic deadline pressure, Hitchens has never plumbed this important question any deeper than that facile opposition and glib taunt.

Rumbling around inside Hitchens, these ingredients produced dyspepsia in the 1990s, when he eventually accepted NATO's rationale for its "humanitarian" bombing of Serbia and berated his comrades for insufficient hostility to the repellent Clinton (though not because Clinton had destroyed American manufacturing with his "free trade" agreements and accelerated the financialization of the economy, matters about which Hitchens had nothing to say). 9/11 churned his feelings to the point of nausea, and he vomited (or as he would say, spewed). This reaction did his insides much good - he proclaimed the relief "unbelievable." But as with most such eructations, the results were indiscriminate.

His reports from Kurdistan, southern Iraq, and Afghanistan were vivid and moving. His account in Hitch-22 of his ideological evolution was admirably honest, even if a little long on anecdote and short on analysis. But his arguments - collected in A Long Short War (2003) - were as feeble as they were smug. A convenient, though very partial, catalogue of Hitchens' sophistries was assembled by Norman Finkelstein:

To prove that, after supporting dictatorial regimes in the Middle East for 70 years, the US has abruptly reversed itself and now wants to bring democracy there, he cites "conversations I have had on this subject in Washington." To demonstrate the "glaringly apparent" fact that Saddam "infiltrated, or suborned, or both" the UN inspection teams in Iraq, he adduces the "incontrovertible case" of an inspector offered a bribe by an Iraqi official: "the man in question refused the money, but perhaps not everybody did." . . .

Hitchens maintains that that "there is a close . . . fit between the democratically minded and the pro-American" in the Middle East -- like "President for Life" Hosni Mubarak. . ; that the US's rejoining of UNESCO during the Iraq debate proved its commitment to the UN; that "empirical proofs have been unearthed" showing that Iraq didn't comply with UN resolutions to disarm; that since the UN solicits US support for multilateral missions, it's "idle chatter" to accuse the US of acting unilaterally in Iraq; that the likely killing of innocent civilians in "hospitals, schools, mosques and private homes" shouldn't deter the US from attacking Iraq because it is proof of Saddam's iniquity that he put civilians in harm's way; that those questioning billions of dollars in postwar contracts going to Bush administration cronies must prefer them going to "some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein."

            Hitchens' response to these and all other criticisms - including the fundamental one, that preventive war is a step toward international anarchy - has been sheer bluster, an entirely unconvincing insistence that he has been right all along, in every particular, with 20/20 foresight. Everything that has happened since the invasion - half a million deaths and several million refugees, not to mention the half-million deaths from sanctions that preceded it, and the wholesale and unnecessary aerial devastation of Iraqi infrastructure both in 1991 and 2003; in addition to deep inroads on civil liberties and constitutional government at home - is not our fault. But everything good that has happened is our doing - notably the Arab Spring, whose participants in fact repeatedly tell pollsters of their fear and mistrust of the United States, stemming largely from past and present American military interventions in the region. Although this is not a grown-up position, Hitchens has maintained it unflappably, and his reputation has not suffered. But then, no one has ever suffered much for flattering the prejudices of the American foreign policy elite. Willingness to affirm the unique moral status and prerogatives of the United States has always been the chief prerequisite of political or journalistic Very Serious Personhood.

            Arguably is much the longest of Hitchens' collections (and perhaps his last - he has advanced esophageal cancer). It is very rewarding, with book-length (or very nearly) sections on American writers, English writers, writers under totalitarian regimes, and "Offshore Accounts" - reports/profiles/capsule histories of two dozen countries or international episodes. The choicest delicacies on this groaning board are a dozen or so exquisite appreciations: of Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Powell, John Buchan, Saki, Philip Larkin, Victor Serge, Victor Klemperer, W.G. Sebald, the novels of Fleet Street, the Flashman novels, and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. Two charming throwaways, one on "like," the other on the (soon-to-be-obsolete?) problem of not enough bookshelves, make one wish Hitchens had not given up to mankind what was meant for a few discriminating readers. But there is fine, mellow writing in each of the book's 107 pieces.

            Arguably is low on provocations: most of Hitchens' worst writing appears in his Slate column, "Fighting Words," which is mercifully underrepresented here. But slender threads of belligerence and chauvinism run through the book. Some are comparatively inconsequential. An essay on "Jefferson and the Muslim Pirates" offers these reflections:

[T]he Barbary Wars gave Americans an inkling of the fact that they were, and always would be, bound up with global affairs. Providence might have seemed to grant them a haven guarded by two oceans, but if they wanted to be anything more than the Chile of North America - a long littoral ribbon caught between the mountains and the sea - they would have to prepare for a maritime struggle as well as a campaign to redeem the unexplored landmass to their west. The US Navy's Mediterranean squadron has, in one form of another, been on patrol ever since.

            Besides managing to suggest that an American global military presence, particularly in the Middle East, is simply an expression of our national destiny, this passage also nicely elides a century of hideous cruelty and greed. In the phrase, "redeem the unexplored landmass to their west," it is hard to decide which word is more offensive: "redeem" or "unexplored." "Conquer the rest of the continent," though perhaps less sonorous, would have been infinitely less objectionable. It is difficult to imagine the pre-9/11 Hitchens forgetting himself to such an extent; and, to be fair, even Hitchens post-9/11 rarely sounds so Blimpish.

            But other, more characteristic remarks are less forgivable. In "The Anglosphere Future," Hitchens again employs ideologically polarized lenses. This time he looks ahead, toward a worldwide commonwealth of English-speaking nations, based on America's indestructible prosperity (the essay was published a few months before the Great Recession began), on the solidarity of America's English-speaking allies against Islamic radicalism ("a barbarism that is no less menacing than its predecessors ... the Nazi-Fascist Axis ... and international Communism"), and on the English language itself ("uniquely hostile to euphemisms for tyranny").

The shape of the world since September 11 has, in fact, shown the outline of such an alliance in practice. Everybody knows of Tony Blair's solidarity with the United States, but when the chips were down, Australian forces also went to Iraq. Attacked domestically for being "all the way with the USA," Australian prime minister John Howard made the imperishable observation that in times of crisis, there wasn't much point in being 75 percent a friend.

            Leaving aside whether an Anglosphere is feasible or desirable, Hitchens here falls into the propagandist's habit of saying "the United States" when he means "the government of the United States." In this case, actually, even "the government of the United States" would have been misleading. The rush to war with Iraq was led, in the words of the appalled chief of staff to the Secretary of State, by "a cabal between the Vice President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense on critical issues, which made decisions that the bureaucracy did not even know were being made." This cabal was the object of Tony Blair's solidarity, not "the United States." Blair might, moreover, have shown a little more solidarity with the British public, which opposed the intervention even in the teeth of drumbeating by the Murdoch press, and indeed with his own government, whose attorney general warned him that the invasion was illegal and whose intelligence service warned him that the American cabal's arguments were dishonest. As for Australia's doughty prime minister, who also disdained solidarity with his own public, he might have been a better friend to the United States by admonishing its government (or governing cabal) to obey international law and cease lying to the American people and the rest of the world. The United States badly needed such admonitions from its foreign friends, since the American media and most intellectuals, with Hitchens in the vanguard, shirked that responsibility.

            In his great essay, Hazlitt summed up:

Burke was an acute and accomplished man of letters - an ingenious political essayist ... He had the power of throwing true or false weights into the scales of political casuistry, but not firmness of mind enough (or shall we say, honesty enough) to hold the balance. When he took a side, his vanity or his spleen more frequently gave the casting vote than his judgment; and the fieriness of his zeal was in exact proportion to the levity of his understanding, and the want of conscious sincerity.

Whether or not one finds this true of Burke, it is Hitchens to the life.

            From time immemorial - or at least since Spike Lee's 1989 movie Do the Right Thing - men and women have asked, like the subtitle of Michael Sandel's new book, "What's the right thing to do?"[1] Every year a thousand or so Harvard undergraduates seeking an answer to this question sign up for "Moral Reasoning 22: Justice," Professor Sandel's renowned introductory course and the most popular offering in that university's history. What they learn there is of some consequence for the rest of us. After all, the next most popular course at Harvard is "Social Analysis 10: Principles of Economics," from which legions of students annually emerge, like former Harvard president (and economics professor) Lawrence Summers, utterly sure of themselves, contemptuous of moral reasoning, and primed to lead their country into the financial abyss. Unless "Justice" manages to infiltrate "Principles of Economics" - and not only at Harvard - America is likely to languish in moral and financial bankruptcy for a long time.

            The three most common ways of philosophizing about justice emphasize, respectively, happiness, freedom, and morality. Utilitarians think politics should maximize the population's overall welfare, however that is measured. Libertarians counter that the best way to do that is for politics to leave markets alone; that justice is whatever state of affairs results from the sum of all voluntary transactions among free individuals. Communitarians believe that "free individuals" is an incomplete description of human beings; rather, every person, group, institution, and activity has a distinctive purpose (what the Greeks called a telos), which politics exists to help them fulfill. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill were the founding fathers of utilitarianism. Milton Friedman and Robert Nozick are the best-known exponents of libertarianism. Aristotle was the first important communitarian theorist of justice, while Sandel himself is the most recent.

            Straddling these categories are the forbidding grey eminences of moral philosophy, Immanuel Kant and John Rawls. Kant claimed that justice has nothing to do with happiness; that freedom consists solely in doing one's duty; and that to discover our duty we must resolutely disregard consequences, circumstances, sentiments, and attachments - everything contingent, in fact - and instead consider only ideal reason and logical consistency. Rawls, attempting a grand synthesis, allows that we may consider happiness and freedom, but only after we have forgotten, so to speak, who we are. We must choose our society's ground rules as though we were no one in particular, mindful that everything particular about us - our talents and virtues no less than our trust funds - is a lucky (or unlucky) accident. For Rawls justice is, above all, fairness.

            Sandel pilots readers skillfully through these philosophical rapids, giving each perspective its due with admirable judiciousness and perspicacity. He is quite right to highlight the moral limits of reliance on the market, since the superior wisdom of minimally regulated markets has been our main civic shibboleth for several decades now. Also illuminating is his argument, following Aristotle, that moral judgments about one or another policy should take into account the way of life and the type of character that the community in question aspires to produce.

            Nevertheless, to one who subscribes, as I do, to the James/Dewey/Quine/Rorty tradition of philosophical pragmatism, it is a little difficult to take Aristotle or Kant seriously. (It is, I should think, impossible for anyone at all to take Friedman and Nozick seriously.) Aristotle's impersonal telos-es and Kant's transcendental idealism are simply dead in the water, like St. Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God. They are philosophical relics, as phlogiston and the ether are scientific relics.

            And besides, justice isn't solely, or even primarily, a philosophical affair. Correct reasoning can help us define and discriminate among our obligations. But without humane feeling on our part, no obligation will have much force. Solidarity and generosity are the root of the matter, not Socratic dialectics, however stimulating. On this the greatest moral teachers agree, including the poet Shelley ("The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensively and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own") and the Jewish reformer Jesus of Nazareth ("Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice ... Whatever you do or don't do for the least of your fellow creatures, you are doing or not doing to God Himself").

            Perhaps Sandel or a colleague should offer a parallel course: "Moral Imagination 22: Injustice." Rather than nimble reasoning from first principles about intriguing but sometimes far-fetched dilemmas, the new course would emphasize imaginative apprehension of actual, intolerable moral horrors. For example: rather than ask (as Sandel and numerous other moral philosophers do) whether one should push a stout person in front of a runaway train in order to save five children playing a little farther down the track, one might ask why the top executives of tobacco companies that bribe Congressmen (legally, of course) in order to avoid restrictions, invest in pseudo-scientific research in order to cast doubt on smoking's lethal effects, and aggressively market their product in Asian and African countries where public-health regulation is weak should not be disemboweled on television by terminal lung-cancer patients. Or why the Forbes 400 should not be politely but firmly relieved of the few percent of their colossal net worth required to drastically reduce river blindness, mosquito-borne malaria, fatal diarrhea, cleft palate, vaginal fistulas, severe chronic malnutrition, and quite a few other principal causes of human suffering.

            Undoubtedly the world would be a better place if everyone took Michael Sandel's course or read his book. Still, it is not our theoretical confusion that renders us passive and condemns billions of our fellow humans to needless agony; it is our indifference. Where there's a moral will, there's a political way. But we'd have to give up several hours a week of television, perhaps permanently. Deciding collectively where our taxes and charitable donations should go, and making sure they get there, would be pretty time-consuming. Is justice - or democracy, for that matter - really worth it?

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George Scialabba is the author of Divided Mind and What Are Intellectuals Good    For?

            According to Kinsley's Law, first promulgated by New Republic editor and columnist Michael Kinsley: "The real scandal is what's legal." The Watergate scandal - a bungled espionage attempt against the Democratic Party - unseated an otherwise popular President whose bombing of Indochinese civilians was one of the 20^th century's great barbarities. The Iran-Contra scandal, in which a not-yet-impotent Congress's prerogatives were flouted, embarrassed an even more popular President whose foreign policy had turned Central America into a graveyard. Occasional vote-buying or procurement scandals pale in comparison with the everyday inequities of campaign finance and the revolving door from Congress, the military, and the regulatory agencies into lucrative corporate sinecures. In the contest for public attention, individual misbehavior nearly always trumps structural injustice.

            The wiretapping, bribery, and other criminal activities of News Corporation employees and their political patrons certainly deserve all the attention they're receiving. It's equally important, though, to take this opportunity to consider what Rupert Murdoch's vast power and influence reveal about the civic health of the societies in which he operates.

            Already by 1998, as Robert McChesney notes in Rich Media, Poor Democracy, "Murdoch claimed to have TV networks and systems that reached more than 75 percent of the world's population," including twenty-two networks in the United States (reaching 40 percent of the nation's viewers), eight networks in India (reaching 45 percent of viewers), six networks in China, and large holdings in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Indonesia. News Corporation owns hundreds of newspapers and film companies in the  English-speaking world. Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Tony Blair have personally intervened on Murdoch's behalf in legislative and trade negotiations. The Wall Street Journal (pre-Murdoch) called the commercial broadcasting lobby, including GE, Disney, Time Warner, and News Corporation, "the most powerful lobby in Washington." They get what they want, and what they want is exemption from rules limiting concentration of media ownership.

            Is concentrated ownership compatible with editorial independence? The question needs reformulating. Except at Fox News (see "The Memo" in Kristina Borjesson's anthology Into the Buzzsaw), editors are not given explicit guidelines from corporate headquarters. But editors and publishers who are properly vetted by the home office before being hired will not need intrusive supervision, just as university presidents chosen by business-dominated boards of trustees can be relied on to appoint deans who will in turn make "responsible" appointments to the economics, political science, and other ideologically sensitive departments. Ownership invariably translates into editorial constraint, a process well described by McChesney and by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent.

            Rupert Murdoch may be exceptionally greedy and unscrupulous. But if it weren't him corrupting American democracy, it would be someone else. The incentives are too great, the laws and their enforcement too feeble, the ideological climate too favorable. The longstanding right-wing campaign against all things public has had exactly this purpose: to turn journalism, as well as education, health care, the criminal justice system, and national security, into mere profit centers. Murdoch's current misfortunes may slow this Great Degradation, but not by much.

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George Scialabba is an editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament.

Reviewed by George Scialabba

            History, observed Gibbon, is a record of the crimes and follies of humankind. The historiography of the twentieth century's two global wars is, accordingly, extremely rich. Adam Hochschild's vivid and poignant To End All Wars does not add any new crimes or follies to the already crowded annals of the First World War, but it is a welcome addition to the literature all the same.

            Words like "watershed" or "turning point" are easy to deploy but hard to justify - except in the case of World War I. Like few other episodes - the fall of Rome, the Black Death, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution - it really did leave a different world in its wake. The technology of mass destruction was perhaps the most obvious respect. Barbed wire, trench warfare, the machine gun, the tank, poison gas, artillery barrages, and aerial bombardment all meant that war would no longer evoke enthusiastic reactions like that of one characteristically brainless young aristocrat in the first weeks of the war: "It is all the best fun. I have never felt so well, or so happy, or enjoyed anything so much." Such upper-class twits were killed off even more rapidly than the plowboys and factory workers who followed them into the maw of the new industrial killing machines. War would no longer be noble sport; it was professionalized.

            And so, more subtly but no less fatefully, was government. The technology of mass persuasion (otherwise known as propaganda or indoctrination) was first introduced not by the totalitarian regimes of the interwar period but by the democracies during World War I. As John Buchan, the British Empire's tireless propagandist-in-chief, put it: "So far as Britain is concerned, the war could not have been fought for one month without its newspapers." The same was true of Germany and France. The first total war imposed unprecedented burdens on the population and therefore required unprecedented lying and coercion on the part of governments to preempt or suppress dissent. They rose to this challenge brilliantly, cajoling newspaper owners, cultivating friendly journalists, subsidizing "patriotic" writers, speakers, and film-makers, prohibiting or sabotaging antiwar meetings and publications, and harassing or, when necessary, imprisoning critics. Government was no longer largely a hobby for the more earnest, non-fox-hunting members of the aristocracy. It became public administration, one of the social sciences.

            Hochschild does not harp on these epochal changes, but his dense, beautifully integrated narrative illustrates them very effectively. He has embedded his themes - the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of propaganda, the transformation of war-making, the heroism of resistance - so skillfully in a dozen or so major characters and another dozen minor ones that To End All Wars reads like a lively group biography.

            At the center of the story are three relationships and one rivalry. Sir John French was a genial cavalry officer who rose to become the first commander-in-chief of England's forces in World War I. His older sister, Charlotte Despard, was a socialist, feminist, and pacifist who was nevertheless unquenchably fond of her pleasure-loving, free-spending brother, whom she often rescued from debt and just as often embarrassed by going to prison for her antiwar activities. Alfred Milner was a wealthy and talented civil servant who rose rapidly to Lloyd George's right hand in the War Cabinet and, after the war, to colonial secretary. Violet Cecil, the dazzling wife of a colorless scion of one of England's great families, fell in love with Milner in South Africa and carried on a concealed affair with him for two decades, until they could marry. Keir Hardie worked in the coal mines as a boy, was fired for attempting to organize a union, and became one of Britain's greatest labor agitators and a member of Parliament. Hardie and Sylvia Pankhurst, one of England's leading feminists, also carried on a long secret (Hardie was married) love affair. The rivalry was between Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig, a puritanical and pigheaded Scotsman who was nonetheless just as besotted with obsolete cavalry maneuvers as French. Haig was a ruthless bureaucratic infighter who managed to supplant the hapless French as commander-in-chief, whereupon he performed equally disastrously.

            The blood-curdling callousness and incompetence of military commanders on both sides has always been a leading theme of World War I historiography.  A few historians have recently disagreed, as historians inevitably will whenever there is a longstanding consensus to disagree with. But Haig's place in the military hall of infamy seems secure. Dining on foie gras and Chateau Lafitte supplied by his friend the banker Lord Rothschild, arranging favorable publicity for himself with his friend the newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, endlessly lobbying the King to keep his job over the objections of Lloyd George and Milner, Haig apparently had little concern left to spare for his troops, whom he regularly sent to their death by the thousands to gain a few hundred yards of shell-pocked, barbed-wire-strewn terrain. After the war, in grateful recognition of Haig's murderous bungling, Parliament awarded him a peerage and ten million dollars.

            Many of the nearly 25 million soldiers and civilians who died in the course of the war died anonymously. But a few deaths gained a very high profile. Violet Cecil's son was missing in action, as was her good friend Rudyard Kipling's. The War Office spared no effort to find them, without success. Hochschild's extended portrayal of Violet's and Kipling's grief is affecting, even if their favored treatment was infuriating.

            Just as infuriating was the harsh treatment meted out to conscientious objectors and antiwar activists, which frequently broke their health after only a few months in prison. But then, at least in wartime, the actions of nearly all governments are nearly always infuriating, as Hochschild liberally illustrates. For example, he reproduces a scathing letter to an English newspaper from a corporal, describing the outlandish numbers of men assigned as officers' servants and grooms - a colossal waste of manpower. Naturally, the writer was court-martialed. Class privileges were beyond discussion, even if they hampered the war effort.

            Hochschild's dramatis personae are mainly English, but the focus becomes more international late in the book, as the specter of socialist revolution began to haunt the warring governments. In the weeks before the war, left-wing parties throughout Europe had vowed to refuse their support. They gave in to government pressure and the martial enthusiasm of their members, who believed, like everyone else, that the war would be short and glorious. But as the slaughter at the front and deprivation at home dragged on, talk of revolution began to be heard. When the Russian army disintegrated and the Bolsheviks took power in late 1917, the ruling classes of England, France, and Germany began to panic. The English formulated plans to send troops to fight in the Russian civil war. The French sent cavalry divisions home from the front for use against strikers. As soon as the Armistice was signed, the English and French allowed Germany to send thousands of soldiers and machine guns home to use against rebellious workers. Notwithstanding their wartime slogans, all governments recognized their paramount interest in preventing genuine democracy. In that, they succeeded, however abysmally they failed at everything else connected with the war (including the peace treaty that concluded it, which even Milner called "a Peace to end Peace").

            The balance sheet of "this glorious delicious war," as that bloody-minded fool Winston Churchill pronounced it at its outset, was fantastically, incalculably negative, leading directly or indirectly to totalitarianism, genocide, and an even more insanely destructive war. From its bitterly ironic title to its somberly elegiac ending, To End All Wars tells this story powerfully and sensitively, forcing us to swallow its bitterness, as we all must do again and again if we are ever to learn wisdom.

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George Scialabba is an editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament, both from Pressed Wafer (Boston MA).