RE-CENTERING THE WORLD ALONG THE SILK ROADS

Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Knopf, 2016) ("Today much attention is devoted to assessing the likely impact of rapid economic growth in China, where demand for luxury goods is forecast to quadruple in the next decade, or to considering social change in India, where more people have access to a mobile phone than to a flushing toilet. But neither offers the best vantage point to view the world's past and present. In fact, for millennia, it was the region lying between east and west, linking Europe with the Pacific Ocean, that was the axis on which the globe spun." "The halfway point between east and west, running broadly from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to the Himalayas, might seem an unpromising position from which to assess the world. This is a region that is now home to states that evoke the exotic and peripheral, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and the countries of the Caucasus; it is a region associated with regimes that are unstable, violent and a threat to international security, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, or ill versed in he best practices of democracy, like Russia and Azerbaijan. Overall, it appears to be a region that is home to a series of failed or failing states, led by dictators who win impossibly large majorities in national elections and whose families and friends control sprawling business interests, own vast assets and wield political power. They are places with poor records on human rights, where freedom of expression in matters of faith, conscience and secularity is limited, and where control of the media dictates what does and what does not appear in the press." "While such countries may seem wild to us, these are no backwaters, no obscure wastelands. In fact the bridge between east and west is the very crossroads of civilization. Far form being on the fringe of global affairs, these countries lie at its very centre--as they have done since the beginning of history. It was here that Civilization was born, and where many believed Mankind had been created--in the Garden of Eden, 'planted by the Lord God' with 'every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,' which was widely thought to be located in the rich fields between the Tigris and Euphrates. . . ."  "This region is where the world's great religions burst into life . . . It is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great empress rose  and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. . . . " Id. at xiv-xvi. Two major takeaway points: First, the West (or the United States) is not the center of the world. Second, those wanting to understand the global dynamics (or just the West) have to know the history of the Silk Roads.).

WOLFGANG KOEPPEN

Wolfgang Koeppen, Death in Rome: A Novel, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (New York & London: Norton, 2001).

Wolfgang Koeppen, The Hothouse: A Novel, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (New York & London: Norton, 2002).

Wolfgang Koeppen, Pigeons On the Grass, translated from the German by David Ward (New York & London: Portico/Holmes & Meier, 1991).

Wolfgang Koeppen, A Sad Affair: A Novel, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann (New York & London: Norton, 2003).

"EVERYONE HAS A PLAN UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE MOUTH."--MIKE TYSON

Mohamed A. El-Erian, The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse (New York: Random House, 2016) ("The global financial crisis that shook virtually every country, government, and household in the world in 2008-09 gave way to a frustrating 'new normal' of low growth, social tensions--all despite massive policy interventions on the part of central banks and transformational technological innovations. "Now this new normal is getting increasingly exhausted. For those caring to look, signs of stress are multiplying--so much so that the path the goal economy is on is likely to end soon, and potentially quite suddenly. "As we approach this historic inflection point, unthinkable all become more common and insecurities will rise, especially as it becomes clearer that, rather than transition smoothy and automatically, the current path could give way to one of two very different new roads. The first premises higher inclusive growth and genuine financial stability. But, in stark contrast, the second would see us mired in even lower growth periodic recessions and the return of financial instability." Id. at xv-xvi. "Well, I would suggest that the global economy is approaching a three-way junction or, to be more exact, what the British call a T junction. The road that the economy is currently traveling will effectively come to an end soon. In doing so, it will yield to one of two quite different, truly contrasting alternatives: a materially better state of the world or a materially worse one. As you can imagine, the consequences for you are quite different. It really does matter, for both current and future generations, how this T junction turns out. And there is simply not enough information today to predict the outcome with sufficient confidence (that is the required mix of both high conviction and high foundation)." Id. at 176.).

ANTONIO GRAMSCI, January 22, 1891-April 27, 1937

Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1977) ("I cannot claim that Gramsci--any more than the Yugoslavs--has the answer to these problems. What I do claim is that the Factory Council movement in Italy was concerned with many of the issues that are still relevant today, and that Gramsci was one of the few Socialist thinkers to worry about the very presuppositions of Socialism. He thought 'workers' self-management' was essential, both on moral grounds--it rescues men from serfdom--and on economic grounds--it alone can produce a sober disciplines, industrious skilled labour force. He has not been proved wrong yet. However, the questions whether 'self-management' might not depend on 'workers' power', whether 'workers' power' is compatible with the discipline of the market place, and whether a market system is compatible with 'social solidarity', will no doubt prove as troublesome in the future as they did for Gramsci in the 1920s. So, too, will the appeal of authoritarianism, and perhaps above all the tenacity of old institutions and old bureaucracies. With all their failings, regimes collapse much less often than one would expect." Id. at 11-12.).

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume I, edited and translated from the Italian by Joseph A Buttugieg (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1992, 2011).

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume II, edited and translated from the Italian by Joseph A Buttugieg (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1996, 2011).

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Volume III, edited and translated from the Italian by Joseph A Buttugieg (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2007, 2011).

WE ARE OUR OBJECTS; OBJECTS ARE US!

Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in 100 Objects (New York: Viking, 2010) (From the book jacket: "This bike takes a dramatically original approach to the telling of history, using objects that previous civilizations have left behind, often accidentally, as a prism through which to explore the lives of men and women.").

THE EXPOSITORY SOCIETY -- THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2015) (In a chapter titled "The Eclipse of Humanism," Harcourt write, "The birth of the expository society has gone hand in hand with a gradual erosion of the analog values we once prized--privacy, autonomy, some anonymity, secrecy, dignity, a room of one's own, the right to be let alone. Commenting on a survey of British consumers--which found that most respondents 'were happy to have companies use their personal data, on the condition that they receive something in return'--Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericsson note that 'privacy is now less a line in the sand beyond which transgression is not permitted, than a shifting space of negotiation where privacy is traded for products, better service or special deals.' Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg infamously remarked in 2010 that privacy is no longer really the social norm. Truth is, most Americans have reacted little to the Snowdon revelations and the stories of social media and corporate surveillance. [] Many of us have become complacent today--that is, when we are not actively craving publicity, or learning to love what we can't do without. We have gotten accustomed to the commodification of what D.A. Miller refers to as that 'integral autonomous, "secret" self'. Whereas we once viewed privacy and dignity as necessary ingredients for a fulfilling life, as basic human needs, as the psychic equivalent of air and water, today we tend to view them as market goods, as commodities that are to be brought or sold in a marketplace, This has coincided with a larger shift toward a neoliberal worldview, in which market rationalities dominate every sphere of life, including the social and the personal. We have begun to think of ourselves, more and more, as calculating, rational actors pushing our self-interest by means of cost-benefit analyses that covert practically every good into commoditized form. This way of thinking and behaving has had tangible effects, not least on our valuation of privacy, autonomy, and anonymity." Id. at 166-167.  From the book jacket: "Social media compile data on users, retailers mine information on consumers. Internet giants create dossiers of who we know and what we do, and intelligence agencies collect all this plus billions of communications daily. Exploiting our boundless desire to access everything all the time, digital technology is breaking down whatever boundaries still exist between the state, the market, and the private realm. Exposed offers a powerful critique of our new virtual transparence, revealing just how unfree we are becoming and how little we seem to care."  Bernard Harcourt guides us through our new digital landscape, one that makes if so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society--a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual." "We are not scandalized by this. To the contrary, we crave exposure and knowingly surrender our privacy and anonymity in order to tap into social networks and consumer convenience--or we give in ambivalently, despite our reservations. But we have arrived at a moment of reckoning. If we do not wish to be trapped in a steel mesh of wireless digits, we have a responsibility to do whatever we can to resist. Disobedience to a regime that relies on massive data mining can take many forms, from aggressively encrypting personal information to leaking government secrets, but all will require conviction and courage." It is too late. Don't you think?).

Charlie Savage, Power Wars: Inside Obama's Post-9/11 Presidency (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("Even as Congress was struggling mightily to deal with the bulk phone records program, a sneaking suspicion arose that the fight might be the proverbial bright shiny object, distracting attention away from far more significant surveillance programs. One person voicing that warning was John Napier Tye, a former head of the State Department's Internet Freedom section. [] Tye became intently focused on what he believed was a major issue being overlooked in the debate. Despite all the attention to the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act, most of the content and metadata the agency was sucking in took place under the looser rules of Executive Order 12333. That framework--in which the agency is relatively heavily regulated when operating on domestic soil but has a free hand when operating abroad--was designed in and for an era when domestic communications stayed on the domestic network. That era is over. Among other things, Silicon Valley firms like Google and Yahoo now routinely store redundant backup copies of their customers' e-mail accounts in data centers abroad. [] The important thing to remember is that the NSA already had legal, front-door access to foreigners' Yahoo and Google accounts without a warrant under the FISA Amendments Act and the court-approved rules of the Prism system. But FISA, even the warrantless variety, required targeted collection of specific users' data. The NSA's clandestine overseas ingestion of user data from the same companies, especially at the volumes the documents indicated, strongly suggested that it was exploiting the looser rules of Executive Order 12333 to use bulk content collection techniques FISA generally forbids on domestic soil. It's not clear how much of that involved the accounts of foreigners versus Americans; the NSA likely had no idea either." Id. at 620-621.).

AMERICA: AN IDEA [OR IDEAL] STILL ON THE DRAFTING TABLE

Robert A. Caro: The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("The inefficiency of Congress was nothing new, of course--the only period since the Civil War that the pattern had been broken in the Senate, the principal logjam, was the six years of Lyndon Johnson's leadership--but now, in both houses of Congress, it was escalating to a new level, a level at which some analysts were questioning the efficiency of the governmental framework of which Congress was so pivotal a part. In a book, The Deadlock of Democracy, published earlier in the year [1963], the distinguished historian--and an abashed Kennedy admirer--James McGregor Burns said that 'we are at the critical stage of a somber and inexorable cycle that seems to have gripped the public affairs of the nation, . . . mired in governmental deadlock, as Congress blocks or kills not only' Kennedy's programs but Republican programs as well. Concluding that 'We . . . underestimate the extent to which our system was designed for deadlock and inaction,' he said perhaps the system would have to be changed." Id. at 346-347. Sound familiar?).

Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and The Limits of American Politics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("My argument can be stated boldly and succinctly: the political era between the 1930s and the 1970s marks what might be called a 'great exception'--a sustain deviation, an extended detour--from some of the main contours of American political practice, economic structure, and cultural outlook. During this period, the central government used its considerable resources in a systematic, if hardly consistent, fashion on behalf of the economic interest of nonelite Americans in ways that it had not done before or since. The depth of the Depression and the crisis of World War II forced clear realignments of American politics and class relations, but those changes were less the linear triumph of the welfare state, than the product of very specific, and short-lived, historical circumstances. American liberalism has had many 'protean' forms, but the version generated by the trauma of the Depression and World War II proved extraordinary because it was not about morality or individual rights or regulation alone, but about collective economic rights." Id. at 9. "I argue that the New Deal can more accurately be understood as a positive but unstable experiment. The New Deal was a triumph of redistributive policy, not the failure that the New Left would have it. It was hardly the unnecessary intervention that the conservative right claims, since fostered what many still still see as a model of our own time. Yet the New Deal was also far from being a revolution that permanently vanquished the savageries of the labor market, as old-school liberals would have it. The New Deal reforms played a transformative role in working people's lives, fostering what many call the 'golden  age' of American capitalism for the white, male industrial working class." Id. at 15 (italics added). That is, those who have abandoned the Democratic Party to embrace Nixon's, than Reagan's, etc., Republican Party. "The sixth and final theme is the ideology, through hardly the reality, of an American individuals that served as a key foil to the entire New Deal story. For centuries, Americans embraced a reflexive, complicated, and ongoing commitment to various incarnations of Jeffersonian individualism even in the face of a bureaucratized, corporate world, This preindustrial ideology has proven  as archaic as it has enduring. The collective dimensions of the New Deal, however limited they hay have been to begin with, were never able to take root in the uniquely challenging ideological soils of the United States where 'individualism for the masses' remained one its most powerful contradictions." Id. at 26. It is truly amazing that, in a nation of compulsive conformists, we delude (or brand) ourselves as individualists. We are all, in some form or another, 'The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit'. "In the long arc of the twentieth century, the 1970s stand as a sort of 'anti-1930s' bookend tot he New Deal order. Labor declined, the ideology of individualism became central to all things, race divided politics, tensions over immigration returned, and the state flipped back to being hostile to workers; rights. Inequality of the type many believed long since vanquished returned with a vengeance. After 1978, economic gains became concentrated at the top in a sustained way, limited benefits and raises accrued to the nonrich incline flat-lined for working people, and the promise of upward mobility stagnated. Workers turned to two-income households, then borrowing on credit, to fill the void. The efforts of New Deal liberal descended into defensive battles, trying to shield and protect Social Security from attack, while the National Labor Relations Act withered further in relevance. Democrats have since surrendered issues of collective economic justice in order to focus on their commitment to progressive pushes for social issues and the expansion and democratization of individual rights. The dual movement of the 1970s-the rise of the new social movements and the decline of lobar--meant that those lift out of the original New Deal package, women and moonrise, south their citizenship outside of the realm of collective economic rights." Id. at 27-28. "By my values, the thesis of this book is an American tragedy. [] The themes of this this book connect with a roach tradition of American letters that struggles with the distance between the promise and the disappointments of American democracy. [] The Unites States is a complex and conservative place. As much as I would wish to lighten the load of the American past for those looking tom ways toward a better future, it cannot be easily done. There is no 'magic door,' leading to a 'lost Kingdom of peace' as [Eugene] O'Neill told us. We can only struggle forth, feeling or way, charting anew, with a clearer map of where we have been." Id. at 32-33.).

Robert Dallek, Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (New York: Harper, 2013).

Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "American governance is burdened by a paradox. On the one hand, Americans don't want 'big government' meddling in their lives; on the other hand, they have repeatedly enlisted government help to impose their views regarding marriage, abortion, religion, and schooling on their neighbors. These contradictory stances on the role of public power have paralyzed policymaking and generated rancorous disputes about government's legitimate scope. How did we reach this political impasse? Historian Gary Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history, argues that the roots of this current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution." "One Theory shaped the federal government, setting limits on its power in order to protect personal liberty. Another they molded the states, authorizing them to go to extraordinary lengths, even to the point of violating individual rights, to advance the 'good  and welfare of the commonwealth.' The Framers believed these theories could coexist comfortably, but conflict between the two has largely defined American history. Gestle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go--but at the cost of giving private interests and state governments too much sway over public policy. The state could be innovative, too. More impressive was their staying power. Onny in the 1960s did the federal government, impelled by the Cold War and the civil rights movement, definitively assert its primacy. But as the power of the central state expanded, its constitutional authority did not keep pace. Conservatives rebelled, making the battle over government's power dominion the defining issue of our time." "From the Revolution to today's Tea Party, and the Bill of Right to the national security state, Liberty and Coercion is a revelatory account of the making and unmaking of government in America." Gerstle ends his book with a cautious note: "Fixing the system does not mean that the paradoxes that have long shaped America's structure of public power will be resolved. The competing claims within the US state---indeed, within all liberal democratic states--to police populations, on the one hand, and create circumstances of liberty, on the other hand, run too deep. But fixing the system does mean giving Americans the tools and flexibility to fashion a government that works, and one that as members of a polity in which the people are meant to be sovereign, they deserve." Id. at 351.).

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore & Thomas J. Sugrue, These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to the Present (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("In late 1993, Clinton pushed through NAFTA, lending his support to the trade treaty that President [G. H. W.] Bush had negotiated with Mexico and Canada. Free trade had been a top priority of the DLC. Many major corporations including Wal-Mart (whose board members included Clinton's wife Hillary until she resigned before the 1992 campaign), wanted to lower trade barriers so they could import cheaply produced goods and expand their markets abroad. The Business Roundtable, a major lobbying group, mobilized 2,400 member corporations to lobby for NAFTA. Major manufacturers and retailers also joined the effort." "Most Republicans supported NAFTA, but it faced stiff opposition among Democrats, who argued that it would accelerate 'runaway jobs' to Mexico, where companies would have easy access to cheap labor without the burdens of environmental and safety regulations. Clinton countered that NAFTA would encourage American 'competitiveness' and, over time, expand American firms' market share. NAFTA passed with only 27 Democrats votes in the Senate and 102 in the House. As NAFTA's critics had feared, the treaty fueled the dramatic expansion of American firms south of the border." Id. at 577-578.).

Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: Portrait of a Great American Journalist  (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks,1974, 2004) ("Richard Croker, Tammany chieftain and virtual ruler of New York City, sketched in the same connection for Steffens. 'Wall Street has its bosses just like Tammany and just like the Republican machine,' he said. Government was not a matter of statecraft at all, it was a business, like any other for when it came down to the real issues a politician might as well ask, What's the Constitution among friends? Walking through Union Square with the young reporter, Croker said, 'Everything is business.' (As he was to tell an investigating committee, 'Every man in New York is working for his pocket.') The former gangleader, who looked like Ulysses Grant and shared Grant's passion for quality horse flesh, had filled his own pocket well; he owned racing stables at home and in England, and these, like the rest of his fortune, were the rewards of what George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany philosophy, called 'honest graft.' It was all matter of seeing opportunities and taking them, Plunkitt said. 'With all the grand opportunities all around for the man with political pull, there's no excuse for stealin' a cent.'" Id. at 64.).

Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton & Oxford; Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("The Progressive Paradox[:] The economic progressives fashioned the new scenes of society, founded the modern American university, invented the tank tank, and blueprinted and framed the American administrative state. Progressives built these vital institutions of American life to carry out the twinned principles at Progressivism's core: first, modern government should be guided by science and not politics; and second, an industrialized economy should be supervised  investigated, and regulated by the visible hand of a modern administrative state, In so doing, they reconstructed American liberalism." "There was a price to be paid, however . . . . Part II of Illiberal Reformers also has several acts, but each tell the same dark story--the campaign of labor reformers to exclude the disabled, immigrants, African Americans, and women from the American work force, all in the name of progress . . . ." "The progressive combined their extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise as a reliable, even necessary, guide to the public good. They were so sure of their own expertise as a necessary guide to the public good, so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America, that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms.  Even, more so, they failed to confront the reality that the experts--no less than the partisans, bosses, and industrialists they aimed to unseat--could have interest and biases of their own." Id. at xi. This book should cause some caution on the part of those who would brand themselves "progressive". There is a deep dark side to history of American progressivism. There are moments in reading this book that one might conclude that the only difference between many "Progressive Era" progressives and twenty-first century Tea Party members is that the former believed in the federal government (they wanted to expand and reform it), while the latter are pretty much nonbelievers in the federal government (they would limit, if not completely dismantle, it). Both disliked immigrants, African Americans, and women (or at least women's rights). And each had a very narrow view of who were, to borrow Sarah Palin's terminology, the "real Americans". It is more complicated than that, of course, but at times . . .  And each failed to appreciate their self-serving interests and biases.).

Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (New York: Penguin Press, 2015) ("The question of which way progressives would lean on banking reform was complicated. Progressives applauded using the tools of social science to prescribe solutions to the problems of the day. Warburg's meticulous dissection of the banking system was consistent with that approach. On the other hand, progressives were skeptical of Big Business and of Wall Street. People in the movement did not trust banks--bid banks especially--and they did not trust Senator Aldrich." Id. at 45. "Aldrich was unprepared to deal with the progressives. He did not fully appreciate that the movement was about more than just a series of laws regulating food safety and railroads fares. Progressivism embodied an attitudinal shift toward a more benevolent and representative society; it was concerned with elevating the condition of the poor and giving a greater say, and a greater role, to the swelling ranks of the middle class. Its guiding ethos was that education and empirical research could foster scientific, nonpartisan reform--although very little that progressivism achieved was actually nonpartisan. Its effects were seen over a wide range of topics: settlement houses, worker pensions, primary elections, corporate regulations, and the growth of public schools." Id. at 100.).

Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("The generation of historian writing soon after the New Deal and World War II did not entirely ignore Prohibition but they overwhelmingly emphasized its failings. The majority shared liberal New Deal reform sensibilities, and they drew a sharp separation between the New Deal and the war on alcohol that preceded it. They found the origins of the New Deal coalition not in debates between wets and drys but in the material dislocations of the Great Depression. They linked New Deal policy makers to earlier economic regulatory efforts from the income tax to the Federal Trade Commission. . . . A later generation of historian . . . continued to marginalize [prohibition] in other ways. Convinced that the amendment was essentially dead on arrival, most scholars have focused on the struggle to pass such an impractical project, neglecting as predetermined its flawed implementation and eventual failure. . . . Filing the vacuum, there developed an entire genre of sensationalist books and movies set in the Prohibition years. . . . Taken together, they have obscured one of America's greatest experiments in state building and its lasting institutional and ideological effects. The selective focus of the chronicles on elite groups and the national level, moreover, buries the highly differential impact of the law in distinct social groups, many of which face parallel challenges to this day." Id. at xv-xvi. "This book tells a more consequential story--one closely attuned to the ways in which social class, ethnicity, race, gender, and religiosity powerfully shaped to just the passage of the Eigthteenth Amendment but also it more than decade-long unfolding across the nation. The War on Alcohol charts the battles waged over Prohibition between different social groups from its unfolding to its demise. . . . As the story unfolds, it will become clear that the war on alcohol was no mere distraction with few lasting consequences: Prohibition remade national party politics and imprinted the path of American state development into distinctive and permanent molds." Id. at xvi-xvii. One of the interesting aspects of this history is a showing of how many so-callled "progressives" were very much "anti-democratic;" not to mention Prohibitions role in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. "Nothing, however, helped the Klan to turn itself into a dynamic social movement more than the new opportunity provided by the war on alcohol. The Klan leveraged the broad scope of the law to pursue its anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, and white-supremacist agenda, winning two to five million American to its ranks by 1925. Already in 1920 Klan organizers broadcast a mission to 'clean up' communities by putting bootleggers, moonshiners, and 'vice operators' out of business. The Klan frequently gained a foothold in communities, and new recruits, by waving the flag or 'unearthing the bootlegger.'" Id. at 133.).

Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (New York: Doubleday, 2016) (Money may not buy you love, but it can buy you the government of your liking. Too bad most of us don't have real money.).

Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin harcourt, 2016).

Edward H. Miller, Nut Country: Right-Wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) ("The story shows how the central religious tenets of Dallas ultraconservative Republicans advanced their secular political ideology. The Republican Party's original Southern Strategy was partly grounded in a spiritual defense of segregation, which held that the Bible prohibited the integration of blacks and whites. Biblical literalism and premillennial dispensationalism fostered ultraconservative Republicans' preoccupation with eschatology and spiritual cabals, which they then projected onto the secular world of politics. Many employed apocalyptic rhetoric purporting that America was always in its death throes. Their embrace of fundamentalism undergirded an absolutist understanding of secular matters, reinforcing their devout belief in the correctness of their opinions and perception of the world as black and white. Their conviction that Satan's war against Christianity was history's biggest and longest-standing cabal also likely fed into their preoccupation with conspiracies. For ultraconservative Republicans, history was a grand plot, and conspirators were ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent, random events, when closely scrutinized, were found to fit preconceived patterns that confirmed their conspiratorial worldview." Id. at 6-7.).

Kathryn S. Olmsted, Right Out of California: The 1930s and The Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (New York: The New Press, 2015) ("In this book, I argue that modern conservatism first emerged in its fullest form in the 1930s, in reaction to the New Deal. This movement began in California, and not in the suburbs but in its fields, where racial conflict shaped political attitudes. California agribusiness leaders consciously manipulated fears of cultural change--particularly disruptions to racial segregation and traditional gender roles--to mobilize grassroots opposition to Roosevelt's labor policies." Id. at 7. "By focusing on Western agribusiness, we can see that the New Right was no neoliberal revolt against the dead hand of government intervention. Instead, twentieth-century conservatism was a reaction to the changes in the ways that government was intervening in the economy--in short, a shift form helping big business to creating a level playing field for workers. Even Ronald Reagan, despite his mythical image as a cowboy identified with the frontier, was not really a small-government conservative but a corporate conservative. Reagan's revolution did not end government intervention in the economy: it only made the government more responsive to the Americans with the most wealth and power." Id. at 243-244. Thus, one should note, Citizens United is a direct consequence of the Reagan revolution's reenergizing corporate conservatism.).

Kiran Klaus Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Pres, 2016) ("With regard to welfare statism, the United States seemed to do little more than catch up with other industrialized countries. [] The New Dealers' attempt to beef up the American welfare state was of global significance. While many societies had a long-standing tradition of welfare provisions, authoritarian regimes and dictatorships were frequently at the forefront of the surge to install social policies at a national level. The tendency to associate welfare statism with democracy or European-style socialism is ahistorical. Bismarck's social insurance programs in the German Kaiserreich of the 1880s with their reactionary motive exemplify the problematic roots of national social policies since the nineteenth century, as do the provisions of the Soviet Union and Italian Fascism for the interwar years. Some democracies certainly had also pursued welfare statism, but in general, they were slower to recognize the nexus between welfare and political legitimacy than authoritarian and outright dictatorial regimes. Now America was demonstrating that democracies, too, were willing and able to take care of their citizens." Id. at 117. From the book jacket: "By avoiding the distortions of American exceptionalism, Kiran Klaus Patel shows how America's reaction to the Great Depression connected it to the wider world.").

Cass R. Sunstein, Constitutional Personae (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2015) (From the bookjacket: "Since America's founding, hundreds of U.S. Supreme Court Justices have issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. Yet as . . . Cass R. Sunstein shows in Constitutional Personae, constitutional law is dominated by a mere quartet of character types, regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute. . . . Many of the most important constitutional debates turn out to be contests among the four Personae. Whether the issue involves slavery, same-sex marriage, executive power, or freedom of speech, our largest debates have turned on choices made among the four Personae--choices that derive as much from psychology as constitutional theory. Sunstein himself defends a form of minimalism, arguing that it is the best approach in a self-governing society of free people.").

Melvin I Urofsky, Dissent and the Supreme Court: Its Role in the Court's History and the Nation's Constitutional Dialogue  (New York: Pantheon, 2015).

CULTIVATING THE INNER DEMOCRACY

Elif Shafak, Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood, and the Harem Within, translated from the Turkish by Hande Zapsu (New York: Viking, 2007) ("The Sufis believe that every human being is a mirror that reflect the universe at large. They say each of us is a walking microcosm. To be human, therefore, means to live with an orchestra of conflicting voices and mixed emotions. This could be rewarding and enriching experience were we not inclined to praise some members of that inner orchestra at the expense of others. We suppress many aspects of our personalities in order to conform to the perfect image we try to live up to. In this way, there is rarely--if ever-- a democracy inside of us but instead a solid oligarchy where some voices reign over the rest. [] While it would be naive to assume that a democratic regime is a bed of roses, it is still preferable to any kind of despotism. Only when we harmonize and synchronize the voices within can we become better mothers, better fathers and yes, probably better writer." Id. at xii-xiii. Perhaps this harmonizing and synchronize the inner voices can make us better lawyers? Food for thought for those living in the age of branding and marketing. That is, in an age where we have made products of ourselves. I do not think one can be both a product and a truly well-developed human being.).

RELIGION IN SIXTEENTH- AND SEVENTEENTH-CENURTY ENGLAND

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, introduction by Hilary Mantel (London: The Folio Society, 2012) ("We do not know enough about the religious beliefs and practice of our remote ancestors to be certain of the extent to which religious faith and practice have actually declined. Not enough justice has been done to the volume of apathy, heterodoxy and agnosticism which existed long before the onset of industrialism. Even the most primitive societies have their religious skeptics. It may be that social changes increased the volume of scepticism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. What is clear is that the hold of organized religion upon the people was never so complete as to leave no room for rival systems of beliefs." Id. at 168.).

"ATHEISTS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD"

Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Knopf, 2015) (I think this relatively short book is an very worthwhile read, with implications on the matter of religious tolerance in contemporary American society. Tolerance of those of "other" religious beliefs, but especially those who are nonbelievers. "This book is about atheists in the ancient world, primarily in Greece: their ideas, there innovations, their battles, their persecution. It is a work of history, not of proselytism. It is not my aim to prove the truth (or indeed falsehood) of atheism as a philosophical position. I do, however, have a strong conviction--a conviction that has hardened in the course of the researching and writing of this book--that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life." Id. at ix (emphasis added). "Since the early twentieth century . . . classical awareness has shrunk with alarming rapidity. Much of the blame for our collective blindness the long history of atheism lies with an educational system that fails to acknowledge the crucial role of Greco-Roman thought in shaping of Western secular modernity. This loss of consciousness of the classical heritage is what has allowed the 'modernist mythology' to take root. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that eighteenth-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods." Id. at 11-12. "The god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam holds power in the absolute. The power of Greek gods, by contrast, is relative to others: it consists in the ability to beat down rivals (whether mortal or immortal), to quell dissent, to emerge victorious in battle. . . . There is a reason for this difference. Greece was, fundamentally, an honor-based society, and honor was generated--for humans and gods alike--through success in competition with others." Id. at 43-44. "As a rule, Greek religion had very little to say about morality and the nature of the world. . . . When Greeks pondered the nature of the world, they did so through the medium of philosophy, nor organized religion." Id. at 52. "Big events demand big explanations. Athens of the late fifth century BC, however, brimming with intellectual inventiveness and thrumming with a sense of its own modernity, could no longer straightforwardly accept divine causality in this way." "Blaming the gods for human action had begun to look like evasion of responsibility." Id. at 74. The conclusion seems inevitable that the violent 'bothering' as atheists of those who hold different religious views was overwhelmingly a Judeo-Christian creation, which was then projected back onto the polytheists." Id. at 240. Cosmological and philosophical debate remained intense, of course, but it was unthinkable outside of the framework of Christian monotheism.Individuals surely experienced doubt and disbelief, just as they always have in all cultures, but they were invisible to dominant society and so have left no trace in the historical record. It is this blind spot that has sustained the illusion that disbelief outside of the post-Enlightenment West is unthinkable. The apparent rise of theism in the past two centuries, however, is not a historical anomaly; view from eh longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic regions and the resultant inhabit to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers." Id. at 242.).

WHAT IS ISLAM AS A HISTORICAL FACT?

Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?: The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) ("I am seeking to say the word 'Islam' in a manner that expresses the historical and human phenomenon that is Islam in its plenitude and complexity of meaning. In conceptualizing Islam as a human and historical phenomenon, I am precisely not seeking to tell the reader what Islam is as a matter of Divine Command, and thus am not seeking to prescribe how Islam should be followed as the means of existential salvation. Rather, I seek to tell the reader what Islam has actually been as a matter of human fact in history, and thus am suggesting how Islam should be conceptualized as a means to a more meaningful understanding both of Islam int he human experience and thus of the human experience at large.If I old out a salvific prospect, it is the altogether more modest but, perhaps, no less elusive one, of analytical clarity." Id. at 5-6. "[The] analytically unhelpful privileging of the very distant (Arabic) past as the necessary and default conceptual model of Islam is one of the things I am seeking here to undo." Id. at 81-82, fn. 205. "Implicit in my project is the conviction that it is important to have an accurate and meaningful conceptualization of Islam as a human and historical phenomenon because it matters how we us the word 'Islamic' to identify, designate, characterize and constitute given phenomena. How and when we us the word 'Islamic' is important because the act of naming is a meaningful act: the act of naming is an act of identification, designation, characterization, constitution, and valorization. In saying that something is Islamic we are necessary identifying, designating, constituting and valorizing that thing in terms of a norm that we believe we 'know' to be Islam, or as a value that we assay on the basis of what we regard as sound method and criteria to be Islam. To constitute something as 'Islamic' is thus necessarily an act of authorization, legitimation and inclusion: we are authorizing and legitimating that Islamic thing as being constituted by the normative value 'Islam,' and are including it with outer things that we are similarly authorizing and legitimating in the normative terms." Id. at 106-107. "In using the term 'Islamic' we modern Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are engaging in an act of ordering the world and making it meaningful for ourselves in terms of what we believe we know Islam to be." Id. at 108. "My goal in this book is to provide a new language for the conceptualization of Islam that serves as a means to a more accurate and meaningful understanding of Islam in the human experience--and, thus, of the human experience at age." Id.).

HOMEGROWN TERRORISTS

Peter Bergen, United States of Jihad: Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists (New York: Crown, 2016) ("Assertions that Islamist terrorism has nothing to do with Islam are as nonsensical as claims that the Crusades had nothing to do with Christian belies about the sanctity of Jerusalem, or that the exponential growth of Israel settlements on Palestinian lands is not rooted in the beliefs of certain Jewish fundamentalists about the God-given rights of Jews olive in their God-given homeland." "Of course, only a tiny minority of Muslims are willing to do violence in the name of Allah, and Muslims as a group are certainly no more violent than the adherents of any other religion. Christians, for example, have invoked Christ's name to justify any number of crusades, pogroms, wars, and imperial adventures. Nor is this to make the claim that religion itself causes violence, but rather that ideologies of any form, including those that are avowedly secular, that claim to have discovered 'the truth' often end up leaving a great trail of dead bodies I'm their wake. The monstrous political religions of Nazism and Stalinism, in their relatives brief tenancies, created more human misery than any of the creeds hat preceded them." Id. at 28. "Americans often suffer from historical amnesia. [T]he golden age of terrorism in the States was in the 1970s, not in post-9/11 America. During the '70s the Weather Underground targeted the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and banks and was responsible for some 45 bombings. Other antiwar activists carried out major bombings at Fresno State College, the University of Wisconsin and City Hall in Portland. The Black Panthers, who were active for only three years during the 1970s, mounted 24 bombing, assaults, and hijackings, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberation Nacional Puertorriquena, a Puerto Rican separatists group, mounted 82 bombings, mostly in New York and Chicago, There we an astonishing 112 hijackings in the States during the 1970s, and terrorist l=killed 184 people and injured more than 600 others.In the decade and a half since 9/11, jihadists and far-right terrorists have, by contrast, killed 93." Id. at 271.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF LAW AS A PROFESSION

Michael Pye, The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe (New York & London: Pegasus Books, 2015) ("The lawyers were ready. Around 1150 there were scholars of law teaching classes in a few laces, and some of them worked the church courts, but there was nothing you could cal a legal profession in most of Europe. There were men called advocati, but it was a slippery word, sometimes meaning just a witness, sometimes the patron of a church or the champion in a jousting duel, sometimes an adviser to a judge and just occasionally what we would mean: the one who argues someone's case in court." "That had all changed by 1230: a profession had formed. Lawyers were trained formally at the newly found universities, which started with clusters of canon lawyers at Paris and at Oxford, a town one scholar monk said was filled with lawyers. They were making a living and quite often they were claiming the same kind of professio, the solemn statement of intention, that a monk or a priest would make. Judges would hear only proper, qualified lawyers, which meant that lawyers could close off their profession. They were reviving a Roman tradition, but carefully; they refused the tradition mocked by the poets Martial and Juvenal, which was the underpaying of advocates with say, a sack of beans, a mouldy ham, old onions, ordinary wine or just a handful of spices." "Sometimes these men were true scholar of the law; sometimes 'after having heard barely half of one lawbook they arrogate to themselves the task of pleading publicly', as a thirteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury complained. The awful standards of the worst ones made it even more important to restrict the courts to men who had studied seriously, three years at least. They were the aristocracy, they thought, of a business in which proctors did property deals, pulled strings and found things out, while notaries acted though they were much more than simple scribes and charged accordingly. In the church courts lawyers reckoned they were much like priest. They also wanted at least the social standing of knights, although they much preferred to be consider noble."  "This was not everyone's opinion. The woman-hating poet Matthieu of Boulogne very rarely put women above men, but he said lawyers were even worse than whores, because whores sold only their arses while lawyers sold a nobler organ, the tongue. . . .  Priests in England had a list of questions to ask lawyers in the confessional, just in case they had forgotten any sins such as helping a client perjure himself, or using abusive language to cover ignorance, or overcharging a client;  an they include a sin they considered just as grave: 'were you ever content with a paltry salary, say four or six pence, which acting . .  in a large case . . . ?'" "Being professional proved a most powerful idea. It depended on the schools and the teachers that banded together in the newly founded universities, in Oxford and in Paris in the North, and the idea of a qualification: a degree. Judges would hear only the qualified. That invented a class of lawyers who were licensed to talk in court as well as read the books, which invented the very idea of a professional class, which in turn became the basis of the idea of a middle class--people with power based on their expertise, neither knight nor peasant but able from the middle to tell both what to do." "Doctors of medicine watched the lawyers devise all this: the university training, the special knowledge, the honorific degree, the social climbing and the income. Doctors wanted to be professionals, too." Id. at 152-154. Over the last few decades much attention has been focused on law as a profession. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the focus was on professional responsibility; that is, the ethics of the professions, concerns about sexual misconduct, drug and alcohol abuse. In the 2000s and 2010s, focuses in on practice preparedness (i.e., being practice ready) and marketing (i.e., branding). However, as one can glean from the passages quoted above, those concerns are not new, just renamed. Are lawyers professional or not?; knight, gladiators, or hired guns?; advocates or mere mouth pieces?, learned or not?; noble or shysters? And, of course, there are the questions surround the aims of law schools.).

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 2

Abu Bakr al-Suli, The Life and Times of Abu Tamman (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated from the Arabic by Beatrice Gruendler (New York & London: New York U. Press, 2015).

WHAT THE FRUMP . . . I AM WITH YOUR PARENTS

Came across this on the web.

When you thought your parents were joking about moving countries if Trump wins but then you see these when you get home

HUMBOLDT, NATURE, SCIENCE, LIBERTY

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World (New York: Knopf, 2015) ("In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt's insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary. . . . As scientists are trying to understand and predict the global consequences of climate change, Humboldt's interdisciplinary approach to science and nature is more relevant than ever. His beliefs in the free exchange of information, in uniting scientists and in fostering communication across disciplines, are the pillars of science today. His concept of nature as one of global patterns underpins our thinking." Id. at 336. "The institution of slavery was unnatural, Humboldt said, because 'what is against nature, is unjust, bad and without validity.' Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race 'inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind', Humboldt insisted that there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, color or religion, all human came hormone root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climate conditions but nonetheless displayed the traits of 'a common type', so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because 'all are alike deigned for freedom'." Id. at 108.).

NAZI GERMANY'S EFFORT TO CO-OPT ISLAM

David Motadel, Islam and Nazi Germany's War (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("The reasons for Germany's efforts to promote an alliance with the Muslim world were closely connected to the course of the war, which reached Muslim territories in 1941-1942 and brought about a shift of German policy toward short-term planning and the mobilization of all available resources. Islam was,  in the context, seen as a political force that could be employed against the Allies.  Ideological consideration played only a marginal role. Although some Nazi ideologues, regime officials, and even members of the Nazi elite shared a positive view of Islam, it was the military situation that led to Germany's campaign for Islamic mobilization." "Overall, these attempts failed. . .  A major obstacle to German efforts to employ Islam in its policies aimed at Muslims, be they under German rule, behind the front lines, or in German military units, was their lack of authenticity. It was all too obvious that the Germans wanted to instrumentalize Muslims for their interests and and war necessities rather than for a truly religious cause. . ." Id. at 315-316.).

LAW SOMETIMES HIDES REALITY

Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, with an introduction by Peter Hayes (Chicago: Ivan R. Dees, 1944, 2009) ("Constitutions written at the great turning points of history always embody decisions about the future structure of society. Furthermore, a constitution is more than its legal text; it is also a myth demanding loyalty to an eternally valid value system." Id. at 8. "In the center of the counter-revolution stood the judiciary. Unlike administrative acts, which rest on considerations of convenience and expediency, judicial decisions rest on law, that is on right and wrong, and they always enjoy the limelight of publicity. Law is perhaps the most pernicious of all weapons in political struggles, precisely because of the halo that surrounds the concepts of right and justice. 'Right,' Hocking has said, 'is psychologically a claim whose infringement is met with a resentment deeper than the injury would satisfy, a resentment that may amount to passion for which men will risk life and property as they would never do for an expediency.' When it becomes 'political,' justice breeds hatred and despair among those it singles out for attack. Those who it favors, on the other hand, develop a profound contempt for the very value of justice; they know that it can be purchased by the powerful. As a device for strengthening one political group at the expense of others, for eliminating enemies and assisting political allies, law then threatens the fundamental convictions upon which the tradition of out civilization rests." Id. at 20-21 (citing William Ernest Hocking, 'Ways of Thinking about Rights: A New Theory of the Relation between Law and Morals,' in Law: A Century of Progress (New York, 1937), Vol. II, p. 261). "In theory, the state has unlimited power. It could legally do almost anything; it could expropriate anybody. If we take such legal pronouncements at their face value we shall indeed gain the impression that Germany is a state-capitalist country, in spite of the fact that we have not yet even mentioned the control of labor, of investments, and of the currency. But law, like language, does not always express reality; it often hides it. The more obvious the contradictions in a society, the more the productivity of labor increases, the more the monopolization of society progresses--the more it is the function of law to veil and hide the antagonisms until it becomes almost impossible to pierce through the mass of words. Yet this is exactly what must be done." Id. at 254. From the "Introduction": "Franz Neumann's Behemoth is one of the classics of modern political analysis. Recognized upon publication during World War II as the first thoroughly researched unmasking of what the subtitle promised--the structure and practice of Nazism--the book has remained a stimulus to inquiry and debate to this day. The provocative and controversial central argument, telegraphed by the choice of title, is that the Third Reich neither expressed a consistent ideology nor possessed a coherent structure. Like the Behemoth in Jewish mythology and the writings of Thomas Hobbes, Hitler's regime was a chaotic, lawless, and amorphous monster. Its policies expressed the sometimes overlapping and sometimes contending drives of the four symbiotic but separate power centers (the Nazi party, the German state bureaucracy, the armed forces, and big business) that composed it. But the enormous might and the inherent vulnerability of Nazi Germany stemmed, according to Neumann, from its very nature as a conspiracy among these four self-interested groups, each of which sought to expand German power and territory without ceding authority or status to any of the other parties." Id. at vii.).

GERMANY'S MEMORIES?

Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2014) (From the book jacket: "Neil MacGregor argues that, uniquely for any European country, no coherent, overarching narrative of Germany's history can be constructed, for in Germany both geography and history have always been unstable. . . . German history may be inherently fragmented, but it contains a large number of widely shared memories, awarenesses, and experiences; examine some of these is the purpose of this book.").

HEINRICH AUGUST WINKLER: A HISTORY OF THE WEST

Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 1: 1789-1933, translated from the German by Alexander J. Sager  (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("The question of whether the peculiarities of German history justify speaking of a 'unique German path'--or perhaps of several 'unique German paths'--is the starting point of this two-volume study. . . . I present here not a 'total history', but a 'problem history'. At the centre of this history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stands the relationship between democracy and nation. On the one hand, I enquire how it happened that Germany was politically so far behind England and France, developing a nation state only after 1866 and a democracy later still, in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War and the revolution of 1918-19. On the other hand, I investigate the consequences of this twofold historical belatedness, consequences which are still with us today." Id. at 1. "Only the United States of America could lay claim to a small chronological edge when it came to determining the birthright to the new ideology of human community. By no means, however, did the North American subjects of the British break with their traditional religious understanding of the just order when they rebelled against the crown. On the contrary, their revolt and declaration of independence were informed and sustained by religious ideals. The American Revolution was a conservative revolution, something that cannot in any way be said of he events in France. American nationalism, in contrast to the French, was both modern and traditional." Id. at 42. "If the collapse of the first German Republic can be traced back to a single root cause, it lies in the long historical deferment of the question of liberty in the nineteenth century--or, to put it another way, in the non-simultaneity of Germany's political modernization: the early democratization of suffrage and the later democratization of the system of government. Hitler was, after 1930, the main beneficiary of this contradiction and built the foundation of his success on it." "In his plan to destroy Weimar democracy, Hitler availed himself of all the possibilities the Weimar constitution had to offer. The tactics of legality he imposed on his party were far more successful than the revolutionary violence he had professed ten years earlier. . . . At the same time, Hitler could himself threaten the rulers of the country with revolutionary violence and civil war if they broke the law or changed it to the detriment of the National Socialists, as in the case of the emergency measure against political terror of 9 August 1932." "Hitler's conditional promise of legality, which contained an implicit threat, fulfilled its purpose. . . . " Id. at 489-490.).

Heinrich August Winkler, Germany: The Long Road West, Volume 2: 1933-1990, translated from the German by Alexander J. Sager  (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000) ("The strongest argument against the existence of a unique German path has always been that there is no such thing as a 'normal' western path of historical development. The British, French, and American paths were all unique. Still, the concept of 'western democracy' does point to one particular characteristic shared by all these states, a characteristic Germany lacked until 1945. Human and civil rights--in the tradition of the British habeas corpus act of 1679, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the declaration of human and civil rights by the French National Assembly on 26 August 1789--were anchored deeply enough in the political culture of the western democracies to make violations a public scandal and to drive forward the struggle for their further development. This tradition was not completely lacking in Germany, but it was weaker than that of the long-lived authoritarian state. To put it another way: the deferment of the question of liberty in the nineteenth century is one of the main chapters in the prehistory of the 'German catastrophe', the years 1933-45." "Before 1945, for German philosophers, historians, and writers to speak of a separate German path  meant to contrast German 'culture' with western 'civilization', to historically justify the German authoritarian state, and to reject western democracy as irreconcilable with Germanness. After 1945 the concept of a German Sonderweg underwent a radical transformation, prepared by German emigrants and catalyzed by the experience of Nazi rule. Now the idea stood for the historical deviation from the west that led to the 'German catastrophe'." Id. at 580.).

Heinrich August Winkler, The Age of Catastrophe: A History of the West, 1914-1945, translated from the German by Stewart Spencer (New Haven & London: Yale U.Press, 2015) ("The present examination of the course of German history between 1914 and 1945 should be seen as an attempt to explain how a country that is culturally a part of the West could so obstinately refuse to respect the West's normative project and the idea of inalienable human rights that it plunged not only itself but the rest of the world into a state that can be described only as catastrophic." Id. at xii. "In the final vote on 31 July 1919 a broad majority spoke out in favour of of the new constitution . . .  Germany was now 'the most democratic democracy in the world'. Nowhere had democracy been as comprehensively and rigorously introduced as in this constitution. When the Social Democrat minister of the interior, Eduard David, hailed the adoption the Weimar constitution with these words on 31 July 1919, he was thinking about all of those provisions for direct democracy contained in the Republic's basic laws. The public at large reacted by noting the existence of the new constitution rather than by welcoming it with open arms, and it became a symbol of the Republic only in the wake of the  campaign of hatred and violence waged by the extreme right. The gain in political freedom that the Weimar constitution brought the Germans was great, but the constitution contained no guarantee that that freedom would not be taken away again when things became difficult. The 'most democratic democracy in the world' was threatened not only by the forces that rejected and opposed it but also and above all by the fact that it was drafted in such a way that it could effectively abolish itself." Id. at 203-204. "Anti-Semitism was almost always synonymous with anti-modernism, anti-urbanism and anti-intellectualism. It was this that made Weimar culture an elite project that was endangered from the outset, a culture that could vanish at a moment's notice." Id. at 238. "The Nuremberg Laws brought an end to Jewish emancipation and reduced the question of German identity to one of biology. It was clear declaration of war on culture in general and it not infrequently encountered support in Germany. Limiting Jewish influence by legal means found greater acceptance among Germans than unofficial demonstrations and acts of violence." Id. at 558. [Clearly the 'rule of law' can be a morally bankrupt as the 'rule of men.'] "The Holocaust had a prehistory that went beyond the history of anti-Semitism and racism and that cannot be separated from German history in general, the history of a largely western country whose traditional elites had until 1945 obstinately refused to open themselves up to the political culture of the West and which now had to suffer the consequences of this catastrophic policy." Id. at 888. "The holocaust made it clear to the world what ideological blindness could accomplish when harnessed to modern technology and when a country like Germany abandoned the rule of law, as it did in 1933. If the murder of European Jewry has left deeper scars on the collective conscience of the West than the millions of murders carried out by Stalin, then this is not only because the Shoah was unique in its chilling and mechanical efficiency by for another reason, too: this crime against humanity was committed by a nation that was part f western culture and that was judged, therefore, by western standards, This was at the heart of the 'German catastrophe' of which the historian Friedrich Meinecke spoke . . . " Id. at 916.).

Note: I often think, sadly and fearfully, that many Americans--perhaps even a majority--are naturally inclined and drawn toward an authoritarian state of the fascist mode.

Fascism in North America
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Fascism in North America was composed of a set of related political movements in Canada, the United States, Mexico and elsewhere that were variants of fascism. Fascist movements in North America never realized power, unlike their counterparts in Europe. Although the geopolitical definition of North America varies, for the sake of convenience it can be assumed to include Central America and the Caribbean, where fascist variants also flourished."

"United States
In the so-called Business Plot in 1933 Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified to the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Congressional committee (the "McCormack- Committee") on these claims. In the opinion of the committee, these allegations were credible.

"During the 1930s Virgil Effinger led the paramilitary Black Legion, a violent offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan that sought a revolution to establish fascism in the USA.[2] Although responsible for a number of attacks, the Black Legion was very much a peripheral band of militants. More important were the Silver Legion of America, founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley, and the German American Bund, which emerged the same year from a number of older groups, including the Friends of New Germany and the Free Society of Teutonia. Both of these groups looked to Nazism for their inspiration.

"While these groups enjoyed some support, they were largely peripheral. Two other leaders, Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, sparked concern among some on the left at the time. However, Huey Long did not take on any such role because he was not a fascist. Father Charles Coughlin, who publicly endorsed fascism to an extent that Long never did, was unable to become involved in active politics because of his status as a priest.[3] Other fascists active in the US included the publisher Seward Collins, the broadcaster Robert Henry Best, the inventor Joe McWilliams and the writer Ezra Pound.

"In the modern United States, fascism is politically 'toxic'. It is understood that calling someone a fascist is an insult, and mainstream politicians will strongly dispute such a description as applied to themselves. Many politicians or movements have been accused of fascism, generally but not exclusively by those to the left of them. For example in 1966 Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel said of the Conservative movement, "A fanatical neo-fascist political cult in the GOP, driven by a strange mixture of corrosive hatred and sickening fear, who are recklessly determined to either control our party, or destroy it."

"Similarly, Donald Trump has been accused of fascism for proposals such as requiring Muslims to carry identification cards, creating a national registry of Muslims, and barring further Muslims from entering the country, as well as for his descriptions of Mexicans as "drug dealers" and "rapists," and his calls to deport approximately 25 Million Mexican-Americans, including full American citizens of Mexican descent whose families did not emigrate legally."

TACITUS

Publius (?) Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola and Germania (Penguin Classics), translated by Harold Mattingly, revised with an introduction and notes by J. B. Rives (New York: Penguin Books, 1948, 2009) (From Agricola: "In time, the discretion that grows with age restrained him; he came away from philosophy with its hardest lesson learned--a sense of proportion." Id. at 5. "It is a distinctive feature of human nature to hate those whom you have harmed . . . ." Id. at 28. From the backcover: "Agricola is both a portrait of Julius Agricola--the most famous governor of Roman Britain and Tacitus' well-loved and respected father-in-law--and the first detailed account of Britain that has come down to us. If offers fascinating descriptions of the geography, climate and peoples of the country, and a succinct report of the early stages of the Roman occupation. The warlike Germanic tribes are the focus of Tacitus' attention in Germania, which, like Agricola, often compares the behavior of 'barbarian' peoples favorably with the decadence and corruption of imperial Rome.").

LIBRARY OF ARABIC LITERATURE 1

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume One (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies, with a foreword by Rebecca C.Johnson (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013) (From the bookjaclet: "Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of 'the Fariyaq,' alter ego of Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, a pivotal figure in the intellectual and literary history of the modern Arab world. The always edifying and often hilarious adventures of the Fariyaq, as he moves form his native Lebanon to Egypt, Malta, Tunis, England and France, provide the author with grist for wide-ranging discussions of the intellectual and social issues of his time, including the ignorance and corruption of the Lebanese religious and secular establishments, freedom of conscience, women's rights, sexual relations between men and women, the manners and customs of Europeans and Middle Easterners, and the differences between contemporary European and Arabic literatures. Al-Shidyaq also explores and celebrates the genius and beauty of the classical Arabic language." "Akin to Sterne and Rabelais in his satirical outlook and technical inventiveness, al-Shidyaq produced in Leg over Leg a work that is unique and unclassifiable. It was initially widely condemned for its attacks on authority, its religious skepticism, and its 'obscenity,'' and later editions were often abridged. This is the first English translation of the work and reproduces the original Arabic text, published under the author's supervision in 1855.).

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume Two (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013).

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume Three (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013).

Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Leg over Leg, Volume Four (Library of Arabic Literature), edited and translated by Humphrey Davies (New York & London: New York University  Press, 2013).

INEQUALITY: FOOD FOR THOUGHT FOR LAW STUDENTS

Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1996) ("Each year millions of children die from easy to beat disease, from malnutrition, and fomo bad drinking water. Among these children, about 3 million die from dehydrating diarrhea. As UNICEF has made clear to millions of us well-off American adults at one time or another, with a packet of oral rehydration salts that costs about 15 cents, a child can be saved form dying soon. [] So, as is reasonable to believe, you can easily mean a big difference for vulnerable children. [] If you'd contributed $100 to one of the UNICEF's most efficient lifesaving programs a couple of months ago, this month there'd be over thirty fewer children who, instead of painfully dying soon, would live reasonably long lives. Nothing here's special to the months just mentioned; similar thoughts hold for most of what's been your adult life, and most of mine, too. And, more important, unless we change our behavior [that is, stop simply tossing the UNICEF letter, unanswered, into the trash], similar thoughts will hold for our future. That moral fact moved me to do the work in moral philosophy filling this volume." Id. at 3-4.).

Kathryn J. Edin & H. Luke Shaefer, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) (Two dollars is less than the cost of a gallon of gas, roughly equivalent to that of a half gallon of milk. Many Americans have spent more than that before they get to work or school in the morning. Yet in 2011, more than 4 percent of all households with children in the world's wealthiest nation were living in a poverty so deep that most Americans don't believe it even exists in this country." Id. at xiii. "The results of Shaefer's analysis were staggering. In early 2011, 1.5 million household with roughly 3 million children were surviving on cash incomes of no more than $2 per person, per day in any given month. That's about one out of every twenty-five families with a child in America. What's more, not only were these figures astoundingly high, but the phenomenon of $2-a-day poverty among households with children had been on the rise since the nation's landmark welfare reform legislation was passed in 1996--and at a distressingly fast pace. As of 2011, the number of families in $2-a-day poverty had more than doubled in just a decade and a half. " "It further appeared that the experience of living below the $2-a-day threshold didn't discriminate by family type or race. While single-mother families were most at risk of falling into a spell of extreme destitution, more than a third of the households in $2-a-day poverty were headed by a married couple. And although the rate of growth was highest among African Americans and Hispanics, nearly half of the $2-a-day poor were white." Id. at xvii.).

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Inequality (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("The first part of this book is devoted to a critique of economics egalitarianism. Its conclusion is that, from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough. In the second part of the book I will recover one way in which economic equality may indeed be of some moral significant." Id. at xi. It should be noted that Frankfurt does not flesh out the various meanings one might attach to the notion "economic equality" (for example, income equality, wealth equality, wage equality, opportunity equality). It may not matter much for Frankfurt's limited focus, but, then again, it may. That said, I think Frankfurt is pretty much correct though incomplete. Interested readers should take note of the articles and books referenced by Frankfurt. Also see Timothy Shenk, "Shelf Life," The Nation, 12/14/2015).)

Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 2011) ("This book is organized around three types of inequalities. In the first part, I deal with inequality among individuals within a single community--typically, a nation. . . . In the second part, I deal with inequalities in income among countries or nations. . . . In some countries most people appear poor to us, while in others most people seem very affluent. These 'between-country' inequalities find their expression also immigration when workers from poor countries to the rich world in order to earn more and enjoy a higher standard of living. In the third part, I move to the topic whose relevance and importance are of much more recent vintage: global inequality, or inequality among all citizens of the world. This inequality is the sum of the previous two inequalities: that of individuals within nations and that among nations. But it is a new topic because only with globalization have we become used to contrasting and comparing our fortunes with the fortunes of individual people around the globe. Yet it is probably a type of inequality whose importance will, as the process of globalization unfolds, increase the most." Id. at ix-x.).

Thomas Piketty, The Economics of Inequality, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2015).

George Sher, Equality for Inegalitarians (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2014) ("I have long been attracted to the ideal of equal opportunity, and like many others, I had come to regard the view know as luck egalitarianism-- very roughly, that inequalities are just if and only if they are due to the parties' choices rather than luck--as as attractive elaboration of that ideal. However, at the same time, it seemed to me that luck egalitarianism raised deep analytical and normative problems that has not been recognized, much less resolved, by its proponents. . . . " "Here is the short version of the view at which I arrived. I now believe that the reason people should be allowed to enjoy or suffer the consequences of their choice is not that they are responsible for those outcomes (although they often are), but rather that no one can genuinely live a life of his own unless his decisions have a real impact on his fortunes. I believe, as well, that given our unique relation to our own lives, the non-comparative facts about a person's life are morally more important than whether he fares better or worse than others. For this reason, I take the distributive implications of the moral equality of persons to be considerably more complex than is generally supposed. An,d finally, given what is involved in living a characteristically human life, I view the innumerable contingencies that differentiate each person's situation from those of others not as so may sources of unjust inequality to be neutralized by society, but rather as the backdrop in whose absence we could not live recognizably human lives at all." Id. at vii-viii. "I have argued that a society's primary distributive obligation is to render each of its members sufficiently able to live his own life effectively; and I have suggested . . . that for each person that ability has some upper limits. Like any sufficiency view, one needs to be backed by an explanation of where on the relevant continuum we should set the threshold. However, because the ability to live one's life effectively depends in a number of factors that come in degrees, some internal to the agent and some not, I will not be able to identify or defend the threshold until I have specified which continuum is the relevant one." Id. at 132.).

William Watson, The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty (Toronto, Buffalo, & London: University of Toronto Press, 2015) ("My argument in this book is that this preoccupation with inequality is an error and a trap. It is an error because inequality, unlike poverty, is not the problem it is so widely presumed to be. Inequality can be good, it can be bad, and it can be neither good nor bad but benign. We may wish to have ways of thinking about and perhaps even public policies for each kind of inequality, but we do not need, and it would be a mistake to adopt a single perspective or policy for inequality writ large. Evaluating the different types to inequality require moral judgments that it is would be wrong to try to finesse. A one-size-fits-all perspective or policy would involve us in meaningful and costly injustice, even, in the now ubiquitous but not always illuminating term, social justice." "Inequality is also a trap--not a trap anyone has set for us but one of our making--because concern with it leads us to focus on the top end of the income distribution when our preoccupation should instead be on the bottom, where the bulk of human misery almost certainly resides. Not everyone miserable is poor and not everyone poor is miserable. Some currently poor people are med students, law clerks, and other varieties of the future rich working through their apprenticeship. But other poor people are stuck in poverty for the duration--for their duration, which may be shorter as a result of their poverty--and miss out on many advantages the rest of us take for granted. Their relative or absolute deprivation may not prevent them from leading good lives, nor even the good life that has preoccupied philosophers since philosophy began. But it drastically limits their opportunities and in particular their chance to enjoy the fascinating and alluring gadgets, entertainments, and experiences, notably travel, that define modern affluence." Id. at xi-xii. "[I]f ever poverty is finally eradicated from this earth, it is hard to believe some variant of free, private enterprise will not be involved. Capitalism does generate inequality--that is how it works--but by unrelentingly expanding what is possible in terms of living standards, it also enables people to pull themselves up from poverty. And by reducing the necessary sacrifice, it makes the non-poor more willing to help: the richer I am the less [percentage?] of my income I need give up in order to help you. But it we respond to growing inequality by increasingly fighting capitalism, our false enemy, rather than poverty, our true enemy, we may end up with more of both inequality and poverty and risk at least partly undoing the good accrued during these past, truly remarkable two and a half centuries." Id. at xiii.).

Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (New York & London: Norton, 2015) ("During the past decade, four of the central issues facing our society have been [1] the great divide--the huge inequality that is emerging in the United States and many other advanced countries-- [2] economic mismanagement, [3] globalization, and [4] the role of the state and the market. As this book shows, those four themes are interrelated. The growing inequality has been both cause and consequence of our macroeconomic travails, the 2008 crisis and the long malaise that followed. Globalization, whatever its virtues in spurring growth, has almost surely increased inequality--especially so, given the way we have been mismanaging globalization. The mismanagement of our economy and the mismanagement of globalization are, in turn, related to the role of special interests in our politics--a politics that increasingly represents the interests of the 1 percent. But while politics has been part of the cause of our current troubles, it will only be through politics that we will find solutions: the market by itself won't do it. Unfettered markets will lead to more monopoly power, more abuses of the financial sector, more unbalanced trade relations. It will only be through reform of our democracy--making our government more accountable to all of the people, more reflective of their interests--that we will be able to heal the great divide and restore the country to shared prosperity." Id. at xix. From "Eliminating Extreme Inequality: A Sustainable Development Goal, 2015-2030," with Michael Doyle: "Gaps between the rich and the poor are partly the result of economic forces, but equally, or even more, they are the result of public policy choices, such as taxation, the level of the minimum wage, and the amount invested in health care and education. This is why countries whose economic circumstances are otherwise similar can have markedly different levels of inequality. These inequalities in turn affect policy making because even democratically elected officials respond more attentively to the views of affluent constituents than they do to the views of poor people. The more that wealth is allowed unrestricted roles in funding elections, the more likely it is that economic inequality will get translated into political inequality." "[E]xtreme inequalities undermine not only economic stability but also social and political stability. But there is no simple causal relation between economic inequality and social stability,as measured by crime or civil violence. . . . There are, however, substantial links between violence and 'horizontal inequalities' that combine economic stratification with rice, ethnicity, religion, or region. When the poor are from one race, ethnicity, religion, or region, and the rich are from another, a lethal, destabilizing dynamic often emerges." Id. at 288-289.).

Simon Reid-Henry, The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World Is Better for Us All (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2015) ("At the very heart of this book, then, is the claim that we need a new politics to sustain us into the twenty-first century. We need a new strategy of equality to get us there too. Inequality may be felt most strongly within any one national community, but the challenge of inequality is a global one. Meeting it must begin, as the French political historian Pierre Rosanvallon says, with 'rethink[ing] the whole idea of equality itself.' But it must also involve, in the twenty-first century, rethinking the scale at which equality needs to be made. As we shall see, this implies a series of rather more practical concerns. Not least, it serves as a timely reminder for Europe and America, in particular, to practice a little humility, to look outside their own treasured histories for solutions to the problems that they, as much as any other, now face. We rail today at the injustice of paying off the debt incurred by banks that were bailed out during the credit crisis, but this is what the Third World debt burden has always been about--common people paying off debs incurred by corrupt elites. There are plenty more connections too, if we care to look." "The second challenge arises to the extent that we are able to make progress toward the first. It concerns the fact that the more general crisis of the Western welfare state that we have been experiencing of late is not itself unrelated to the ongoing injustice of uneven global development. The runaway increase in wealth today accrues to the richest of this world is what prices something like health care out of reach for even the moderately well-to-do; but these inequalities of wealth that are undermining the Western welfare state are produced through an international economy that itself comes to rest on the backs of the global poor, denying them their due of global public goods as well. The situation, as it confronts us today, is therefore simple: either we push forward with social protection globally, or we will see it continue to fall apart in the global North as much as in the global South. On one level, it might be said that these connections are too indirect, the causality too diffuse. Inequality is natural, we are told time and again. Of course, we should expect to see it everywhere we look. But such claims, which are usually made by those with a vested interest in the status quo, confuse non-equality with inequality. Non-equality is desirable. It means difference, diversity, plurality, variety. Inequality is a product of structural forms of justice. It means marginalization, discrimination, neglect. And a system which serves some more than others." Id. at 9-10.).

NOTE: Few, if any, of the writings above address the notion equality that most interest me. That notion is the one both identified and, then, quietly and quickly breached in the American Declaration of Independence, and completely ignored in the U.S. Constitution. It is this: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that tall men are created equal . . . ." I short, no man (or woman, or child) is naturally better than any other man (or woman, or child). Equality here does not mean identical, for no two people are identical and, as just, may and do possess different abilities, traits, preferences, etc. Still, no man is naturally better  than another man. This I believe. Moreover, I believe that were people to get themselves or their heads around this self-evident truth . . . and act consistently with it, then many of the gross social injustices in society would be eliminated. Yes, there would still be economic inequality, but not of the extent and form we experience it today. Unfortunately, too many people think--and for no good reason--that they as individuals, or they as members of a tribe, race, nation, religion, or whatever, are naturally (and self-evident to themselves) better than others. The result is an undermining of democracy and social injustice, if not genocide.