ARE WE CONNECTED YET?

Parag Khanna, Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization (New York: Random House, 2016) (Trump has not read this book.).

SUGGESTED FICTION

Russell Banks, Continental Drift (New York: Perennial Classics/HarperCollins, 2000).

Muriel Barbery, The Life of Elves, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (New York: Europa Editions, 2016).

Eileen Chang, Naked Earth, introduction by Perry Link (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 1996, 2015).

Chen Jo-hsi, The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories form the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, translated from the Chinese by Nancy Ing & Howard Goldblatt, introduction by Simon Leys (Bloomington & London: U. of Indiana Press, 1978).

Frank Conroy, Body and Soul (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1993).

Marguerite Duras, Emily L., translated from the French by Barbara Bray (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).

Marguerite Duras, Summer Rain: A Novel, translated from the French by Barbara Bray (New York: Collier, 1990, 1991) ("Teacher: So what we have here is a boy who only wants to learn what he knows already. Father: That's it. Mother: No, he's never said that. He's quite willing to learn anything, anything, but what he doesn't know--no, he doesn't want to learn that." Id. at 76.).

Abby Geni, The Last Animal: Stories (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2013).

Jane Hamilton, The Excellent Lombards: A N0vel (New York & Boston, Grand Central Publishing, 2016).

John Hawkes, The Lime Twig; Second Skin, Travesty, preface by Robert Coover, introduction by Patrick McGrath (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).

Rabee Jaber, Confessions, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (New York: New Directions Books, 2013).

Rabee Jaber, The Mehlis Report, translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (New York: New Directions Books, 2013).

Yashar Kemal, Salman the Solitary, translated fro the Turkish by Thilda Kemal (London: The Harvill Press, 1987).

Yashar Kemal, They Burn the Thistles, translated from the Turkish by Margaret E. Platon, introduction by Bill McKibben (New York: Classics/New York Review Books, 2007).

Wally Lamb, I Know This Much Is True (New York: Regan Books, 1998).

Jonathan Lee, High Dive: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2016).

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, introduction by David Mitchell, illustrated by David Lupton (LondonL The Folio Society, 2015).

Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2016) (See Fiona Maazel, "Road to Detonation," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/20/2016.).

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, introduced by Michael Dirda, illustrated by Federico Infante (London: The Folio Society, 2015).

Joyce Carol Oates, The Man Without a Shadow: A Novel (New York: Ecco, 2016).

Helen Oyeyemi, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours: Stories (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016)  (See Laura Van Den Berg, "Cabinet of Wonders," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 3/20/2016.).

Darryl Pinckney, Black Deutschland: A Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016).

Elke Schnitter, Mrs. Sartoris, translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway (New York: Knopf, 2003).

Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi (New York: Penguin Books, 2010).

Elif Shafak, Honor: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2012).

Lionel Shriver, So Much For That: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2010).

Jane Smiley, Ten Days in the Hills: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2007).

Vladimir Sorokin, The Blizzard: A Novel, translated from the Russian by James Gambrell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015).

Vladimir Sorokin, Day of the Oprichnik: A Novel, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).

Vladimir Sorokin, Ice Trilogy: Bro, Ice, 23,000, translated from the Russian by James Gambrell (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2011).

Vladimir Sorokin, The Queue, with a new afterword by the author, translated from the Russian with a preface by Sally Laird,  and Afterword: Farewell to the Queue by the author (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2008).

Abdellah Taia, Infidels: A Novel, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer (New York & Oakland: Seven Stories Press, 2016).

Peter Taylor, The Collected Stories of Peter Taylor (Contemporary American Fiction) (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).

Franz Werbel, Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand: A Novella, translated from the German by James Reidel (Boston: A Verba Mundi Book/David R. Godine, 2010).

ROGER SCRUTON'S POLEMIC AGAINST NEW LEFT THINKERS

Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2016) (From the book jacket: "In this book Roger Scruton takes apart some of the fashionable and not so fashionable thinkers who are currently taken as authorities on the humanities course, and who have given credence to the view  that there are no respectable positions which are not on the left. . . . In all of them, Roger Scruton argue, empty rhetoric abounds over careful analysis, and blatant nonsense over respectable logic. There is no way in which their influence can be attributed to their arguments, since by and large they have none." Scruton has much worth considering in this polemic against the New Left. However, oftentimes he very much overstates his case, or lets his own empty rhetoric get in the way of careful analysis. For instance, I do not know how anyone interested in late twentieth-century, or early twenty-first-century, American jurisprudence can avoid reading and coming to terms with Ronald Dworkin's body of work. This is so even if one concludes, in one final critical analysis, that he is dead wrong. Moreover, since liberal arts education is systematically being cut and underfunded, and with its enrollments shrinking, it is doubtful that that more than a tiny percentage of undergraduates are exposed to the works of the New Left theorists Scruton skewers as being empty-headed. If anything, the concern should not be their overexposure to New Left thinkers. Rather, the concern should be the limited exposure to critical thinkers of any stripe, and their failure to learn to think and read critically on their on and for themselves. Also, there is a touch of anti-intellectual (which is different from anti-intellectualism) in Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. Scruton writes, "Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it." Id. at 12 (italics added). Is not the classical liberal legal scholar Richard A. Epstein an" intellectual"?  Is not the conservative legal scholar and federal judge Richard A. Posner an "intellectual?" Neither one, as far as I can discern, is attracted by the idea of planned society. Moreover, intellectuals though they be, neither "tend[s] to lose sight of the fact that real social discourse is part of day-to-day problem solving and the minute search for agreement." Id. at 12. Scruton must be using the term "intellectual" as a dismissive characterization of New Left thinkers, when the term should apply equally (and, I hope, non-dismissively) to thinkers all along the political spectrum. Again, let me emphasize that Scruton has some interesting and worthwhile points to make. So, read the book, but be careful of potholes of the empty rhetoric.).

REFLECTIONS ON THE CENTRALITY OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR ON AMERICAN CHARACTER

Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1980) ("History teaches few easy lessons, but it should assist us to think creatively about ourselves. By looking again at the age of the Civil War, we may gain insights into the choices facing our own time and enable history to become, in place of a collection of assorted facts, once again a mode of collective self-evaluation." Id. at 12. From "Politics, Ideology, and the Origins of the American Civil War": "It has been an axiom of political science that political parties help to hold together diverse, heterogeneous societies like our own. Since most major parties in American history have tried, in Seymour Lipset's phrase, to 'appear as plausible representatives of the whole society,' they have been broad coalitions cutting across lines of class, race, religion, and section. And though party competition requires that there be differences between the major parties, these differences usually have not been along sharp ideological lines. In fact, the very diversity of American society has inhibited the formation of a ideological parties, for such parties assume the existence of a single line of social division along which a majority of the electorate can be mobilized. In a large, heterogeneous society, such a line rarely exists. There are, therefore, strong reasons why, in a two-party system, a major party--or a party aspiring to become 'major'--will eschew ideology, for the statement of a coherent ideology will set limits to the groups in the electorate to which the party can hope to appeal. Under most circumstances, in other words, the party's role as a carrier of a coherent ideology will conflict with its role as an electoral machine bent on wining the largest possible number of votes. Id. at 34, 34-35. This "axiom" broke down in the period leading up to the Civil War, and the existing and emerging parties were increasingly defined by various competing ideologies. Whether these ideologies were coherent is a separate question. Query: Over the last fifty years, are the two major parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, defined by competing ideologies, that is to say, by a failure to eschew ideology? If so, are we on the brink of (or in the midst of) another American civil war? In short, are the two major parties each appealing to two quite different Americas, rather than both attempting to appeal--by developing "broad coalitions cutting across lines of class, race, religion, and section"--to one large, heterogeneous society as a whole?).

JOHN MILLAR

John Millar, An Historical View of the English Government: From the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution of 1688 (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), edited by Mark Salber Phillips & Dale R. Smith, Introduction by Mark Salber Phillips (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006).

John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks: Or, An Inquiry into the Circumstances Which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members of Society (Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics), edited with an Introduction by Aaron Garrett (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006) (From the book jacket: "First published in 1771, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks is John Millar's examination of the nature of authority and how and why it changes. Drawing on Adam Smith's four-stages theory of history and the natural law's's traditional division of domestic duties into those toward servants, children and women, Millar provides a rich historical analysis of he ways in which progressive economic change transforms the nature of authority. In particular he argues that, with the progress of arts and manufacture, authority tends to become less violent and concentrated and ranks tend to diversify. Millar's analysis of this historical process is nuanced and sophisticated, and his discussion of servitude is possibly the most well developed of the 'economic' arguments against slavery. Editor Aaron Garrett notes that this work is 'perhaps the most precise and compact development of the abiding themes of the liberal wing of the Scottish Enlightenment." Query: What would Millar have to say about authority in societies where (a) manufacturing is shrinking as a percentage of the economy, (b) where finance and/or corporate capitalism are on the rise, and where the top one percent possess most of the wealth? Note: Editor Garrett is using "liberal" in its classical sense, not in the vulgar contemporary American sense.).

THE IMPORTANCE OF CALVINISM TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN STATE

Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2003) (The surveillance-state has a long and deep connection to religion. One of the bogus argument about surveillance takes the form "don't worry if you have nothing to hide." This argument wants you to think that surveillance will have limited, if any, adverse impact on the lives of good, law-abiding citizens like yourselves. What it fails to note is how being observed itself changes behavior. Surveillance is a means of controlling and dominating all of us. And, now with the photo/video capacity at our fingertips via our cellphones, we have all become agents of the surveillance state: "self-observation, mutual observation, hierarchical observation." Food for thought?
"By 'disciplinary revolution,' I mean a revolutionary struggle, whether from below or above, which has, as one of its chief ends, the creation of a more disciplined polity. The state, from this perspective, may be defined as a 'pastoral' organization that claims clear priority (if not complete monopoly) over the legitimate means of socialization within a given territory." Id. at xvi. "My argument is that the relationship between the disciplinary revolution and the modern state was quite similar [to the relationship between the industrial revolution and modern capitalism]. Like the industrial revolution, the disciplinary revolution transformed the material and technological bases of production; it created new mechanisms for the production of social and political order. And, like the industrial revolution, the disciplinary revolution was driven by a key technology: the technology of observation--self-observation, mutual observation, hierarchical observation. For it was observation--surveillance--that made it possible to unleash the emerges of the human soul--another well-known by little-used resource--and harness them for the purposes of political power and domination. What steam did for the modern economy, I claim, discipline did for the modern polity by creating more obedient and industrious subjects with less coercion and violence, discipline dramatically increased, not only regulatory power of the state, but it extractive and coercive capacity as well." Id. at xvi. "Following Esping-Andersen, it has become customary for sociologist to distinguish among three different welfare-regimes: liberal, social-democratic, and corporate-conservative. Esping-Andersen himself concludes that corporate-conservative welfare states were most likely to emerge in predominantly Catholic societies, such as France and Italy. What he does not mention is that liberal welfare states emerged only in areas heavy influenced by Reformed Protestantism (that is, England and its settler colonies) or that social-democratic welfare states emerged only the homogeneously Lutheran countries of Scandinavia. This is not to deny the importance of class conflict in welfare-state development; rather it is to suggest that these conflicts may have been mediated or influenced by religious factors (for example, the stance of the church(es) towards the social problems and the relative strength of confessionally based political parties) and that the policies which various countries adopted in response to the social problem may have been influenced by the solutions to pauperism and vagrancy adopted three centuries earlier. For there are remarkable continuities between early modern and modern systems of social provision. Like their Calvinist predecessors, liberal welfare states tend to take a more punitive stance towards the poor and place a higher value on work as a cure for all ills. Similarly, the highly centralized and secular character of social-democratic welfare states was anticipated in their Lutheran forebears, while the more decentralized and less secular character of Christian Democratic welfare states also has premodern roots. It seems unlikely that these continuities are the result of confidence." Id. at 163-164.).

AMERICA'S PARANOID STYLE: THE 1692 VERSION

Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692 (New York: Little, Brown, 2015) ("As dogma, the crusade against evil, and the ecstatic embrace of justice combined in Salem, they do too in what has been termed the paranoid style in American politics. When Richard Hofstadter described 'the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,' the national distempers that occasionally descend upon us, he could have been describing Essex County in 1692. That apocalyptic, absolutist strain still bleeds into our thinking. . . . We are regularly being scarified to our heathen adversaries; in troubled time, we naturally look for traitors, terrorists, secret agents. Though in our imaginations, the business is indeed sometimes not imaginary. A little paranoia may even be salutary, though sometimes when you anticipate a hailstorm, one eerily comes crashing down on your head.  Id. at 314. This blogger has little doubt that early twenty-first-century America is in the embrace of paranoia, both right and left, some justified (e.g., Ferguson, Missouri; Black Lives Matter)), much not (e.g., the Obama administration allegedly commandeering closed Walmart stores as detention camps). "In its permanence, a witchcraft accusation resembled an Internet rumor. The majority of women who were hanged had faced earlier accusations or were daughters of women who had. Indelible stains did not attach themselves to accuser in 1692." Id. at 360, fn.).

PERRY MILLER AND THE NEW ENGLAND MINDSET

Perry Miller, Errand into The Wilderness (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 1956, 1984).

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 1953, 1982).

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 1939, 1982) ("Regardless of the repute in which it may be held today, Puritanism is of immense historical importance: it was not only the most coherent and most powerful single factor in the early history of America, it was a vital expression of a crucial period in European development, and those who would understand the modern world must know something of what it was and of what heritages it has bequeathed to the present." Id. at viii.).

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD AS WHITE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York: Liveright, 2016) (From the book jacket: "Fitz investigates the period between 1776 and 1826 anew, tracing shifting U.S. attitudes toward anticolonial revolts south of the border. At first, U.S. onlookers were elated by the exhilarating spread of republicanism in Latin America. . . . But as slavery became a bitterly divisive issue in the United States, so goodwill toward these revolutionaries--whose battles were often anticolonial and antislavery--waned. By the nation's fiftieth anniversary, Latin American independence efforts became a platform upon which many in the United Sates erected new ideological borders that would come to haunt the geopolitical landscape for generations." From the text: "Ironically, what finally ignited the nationwide soul-searching about North American slavery and South American abolition was a group of legislators--the southern wing of the rising Democratic Party--who proudly asserted that the United States was the lone success story in a hemisphere of radicals, the white republic in an America endangered by black and mulatto ones. What made the United States special and superior, southern opposition members suggested, was that it enslaved its black people rather than enfranchising them." Id. at 198. "[T]he move toward radicalized exceptionalism remained gradual and partial, a subtle shift rather than an immediate transformation . . . .  Id. at 233. Yet, that assertion of White American Exceptionalism, accompanied by attempts to disenfranchise people(s) of color (mainly African Americans and Latino Americans, remains strong today embodied in the Republican Party, Donald Trump (e.g., "make America great again!', 'build a wall to keep out those rapists and criminals', 'deport Muslims,' etc.) Evangelical Christians, White Supremacists, White Nationalists, White Separatists., etc.).

COLONIZING NEW ENGLAND . . . AND A BIT OF SLAVErY TO BOOT

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, rendered into Modern English and with an Introduction by Harold Paget (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2006).

Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Liveright, 2016) ("The work of colonization had proceeded thus: Indians and Africans had replaced each other in ways orchestrated by settler colonists, for the purposes of profit and expansion. The Atlantic slave trade was a process, consisting of a series of moments in which people of diverse nations and cultures (African elites, European merchants, Indian adversaries) all agreed, at various times in different places, to capture and commodify other people. If enough had said no, the system might have faltered. But people predictably, tragically, said yes, in Europe, in Africa, in the West Indies, and in New England, and their individual moments of agreement helped facilitate, in the seventeenth century, a global trade. The eventual decision made by other people to say no, more than a century and half later, would create a continental rupture." Id. at 113. Also see Christopher L. Brown, "Puritan Guilt," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 7/3/2016.).

GREAT COMMENT REGARDING RUTH BADER GINSBURG'S TRUMP REMARK

From the NYT:

Gail Stern, Old Orchard Beach, Maine

"Thank you to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Citizenship first! The horror of the idea of a Trump presidency calls for all Americans to stand up, speak out, or do anything possible to protect our nation from electing someone who would inevitably make us ask in retrospect, "How could we have done this; how could we have brought such harm and destruction upon ourselves?" Justice Ginsburg has done exactly what should be done to help shake us into the reality that Americans don't need any more things to regret or ways to suffer."

CLAUDIUS: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY ALL IN ONE

Robert Graves, Claudius the God and his wife Messalina: The Troublesome Reign of Tiberius Claudius Caesar, Emperor of the Romans (Born 10 B.C., Died A.D. 54), as Described by Himself; Also his Murder at the Hands of the Notorious Agrippa (Mother of the Emperor Nero) and His Subsequent Deification, as Described by Others (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1989).

Robert Graves, I, Claudius: From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 (New York: Vintage International/Vintage Books, 1989).

IS 'CIVIC CONSCIOUSNESS' WHAT MAKES US MODERN? IF SO, WHAT OF ITS ABSENCE?

Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Commonwealth: The Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Harvard Political Studies)(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 1970) ("This books deals with political ideas and practices in late medieval and early modern England. Its major preoccupation is an effort to discern and evaluate the lines of continuity and change in the relation between medieval and early modern political perspectives and styles, especially as these bear on the development of constitutional politics. Its offers a political interpretation of a body of evidence which has been treated primarily in legalistic terms. The stress therefore is on the world 'political.' This springs from two convictions which the reader is entitled to know about: that legal ideas are not and cannot be radically removed from political ideas and interests, and that political behavior embodies and is affected by political and legal ideas, as well as affecting them. In short, conviction and act are much too closely related to be dealt with fruitfully in isolation. But it is a fact that the political side of medieval and early modern thought has too often been frozen and interred in the abstract and timeless categories of legal historicism" Id. at vi. "All would agree that the difference between the modern world and the medieval are may and profound, but there is little enough agreement on the content of the contrast or when it may be said to have appeared. The main argument of this book is that in the realm of politics the most meaningful line of division lies in the seventeenth century, and that the essential mark of the transition to modern political perspectives was the appearance of what maybe called civic consciousness and loyalty. The essence of that alternative is simplicity itself: the development, or better, perhaps, the recovery of consciousness of a uniquely public dimension in social life--public in the sense of general or common to the social order as a whole. The idea of civic consciousness refers to the elementary perception that there is a public order, that the social order is in part a network of shared problems and purposes, and to the installation of that recognition at the center of political ideas and conduct. [T]he achievement of this civic focus constituted a radical alteration in political vision. It involved not only the recognition of a novel framework, but a fundamental restructuring of assumptions concerning the nature and purpose of political authority, a wholesale redefinition of the rights and duties of citizens, and a critical shift in the primary focus of loyalties and interests. Moreover, once the centrality of civic consciousness and loyalty is appreciated, it is clear that it was the necessary precondition to the achievement of constitutional government. For constitutionalized politics rests in the last resort on self-conscious and sustain purpose at the public level. " Id. at 1-2. "In the seventeen century the medieval subject became a citizen. His relationship to political authority was no longer that of an individual occupying a rank somewhere in the universal hierarchy and a role preordained by his parentage. This hierarchical idea of an order, graded universe, in which the really vital levels of authority are personal and immediate, while the government of the kingdom is the remote apex of an ascending scale, was overturned by the widespread adoption of alternative approaches to the problems raised by reflection on politics. Id. at 27. "Constitutional government made its first appearance on the stage of European history in seventeenth century England. The essential precondition of that achievement was the development of public consciousness and civic loyalty, as contrasted with the fragmented and local preoccupations and personal loyalties of the traditional political order of the Middle Ages. The formation of a civic focus in politics was accompanied by a drastic alteration in the fundamental assumptions of political thought. For the consciously nontraditional values of contract theory--individual liberty and equality--were employed to combat the ideas of status, hierarchy, and degree which ha satisfied and justified the medieval social order, and thus they provided a systematic and permanent alternative to the status values of a landed aristocracy. It is this dramatic transformation of the premises of political thought which has attracted the attention of modern observers, and there is obviously good reason for this. On the other hand, it is less important to appreciate these doctrinal changes, significant as they are, than to recognize that both old and new ideas were revolutionized by the perception of the public scope of politics. This meant that the focus of both practice and idea came to be channeled to the public level rather than deflected to questions of proper local and personal apportionment of governmental rights and duties." Id. at 336. Query: In the context of policies of policing African Americans and other peoples of color, and the essence of the saying, "Black Lives Matter," perhaps the point is that peoples of color are treated as "subject" rather than as "citizens." That is, they are politically perceived and treated as being outside modernity (and citizenship) and relegated to the medieval (subject-ship). Or, to put it another way, the civic consciousness of the majority does not extend to certain minorities, namely, the poor and peoples of color. If 'civic consciousness' is what makes one 'modern,' perhaps there is telling evidence that twenty-first-century America is something less than completely, or truly, modern.).

THE CHOICE OF PURITANISM, PERHAPS NOT SO DISTURBING AND STRANGE

Michael Walzer, The Revolution of The Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard U. Press, 1965) ("I began this book hoping to write sympathetically about a human choice which I thought strange and disturbing: the decision to be a Puritan, to repress oneself and others, to act out a conception of holiness at once abstract and urgent. Calvinist saintliness, after all, has scarred us all, leaving its mark if not on our conscious then on our clandestine minds, and it is always worthwhile to go back and puzzle over the wounds. But in the course of my work, I decided that the choice of Puritanism is not really so different from other, later choices which I find neither strange nor disturbing. The Calvinist saint seems to me now the first of those self-disciplined agents of social and political reconstruction who have eared so frequently in modern history. He is the destroyer of an old order for which there is no need to feel nostalgic. He is the builder of a repressive system which may well have to be endured before it can be escaped or transcended. He is, above all, an extraordinarily bold, inventive, and ruthless politician, as a man should be who has 'great works' to perform, as a man, perhaps, must be for 'great works have great enemies." Id at vii. "The revival of Stoicism among the Catholic nobility at the same time that Protestantism was spreading rapidly through France suggests that the need for some new ideological brace was widely felt. Both Stoicism and Calvinism, it may be argued, were world views admirably suited to educated young aristocrats in the process becoming local officeholders, lawyers, and administrators." Id. at 61. "The myth of the good-days-gone-by is probably the most naive form of social criticism . . ." Id. at 205. This book is, I think, a lost gem.).

LET"S NOT FORGET DATES AND EVENTS SUCH AS JEDWABNE, POLAND, JULY 10, 1941

Anna Bikont, The Crime and the Silence: Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jednabne (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015) (From the bookjacket: July 10, 1941: "On that summer day in 1941, residents of the Polish town of Jedwabne herded local Jews in to a barn and set it on fire. According to the historian Jan Gross, author of Neighbors, sixteen hundred men, women, and children perished in the blaze. But the massacre was a secret that was suppressed for so long that many of the details remained obscure and others were vehemently denied. Determined to excavate the truth of what happened in Jedwabne, the acclaimed Polish journalist Anna Bikont began reporting on the town. Despite warnings and threats from residents who insisted what she stay away, she combed sensitive archives and interviewed townspeople who lived through the turbulent period when the Nazis took control of Jedwabne. She discovered a community steeped in fear, residual guilt, and lies.").

ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006) ("Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no-one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognised that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common--and enough that separated them from everyone else--that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity. A Martian landing on our planet might find linguistic or geographical factors more useful than ethnic ones when it comes to analysing the different groups of earthlings; the countries whose history this book covers are those where  the majority of people speak English as their first language." Id. 1-2. "The English-speaking peoples . . . today know no rival in might, wealth or prestige. The most likely future challenger on the far horizon is China--not a contender in 1900--which still has very far to go before she can threaten to supplant them. A few fanatical malcontents from the former Ottoman Empire have proven their ability to strike a painful blow to the heart of the greatest city of the English-speaking peoples, it is true, but their fury is a mark of their enemies' primacy rather than a serious threat to it. Even were terrorists to strike a further, perhaps chemical, biological or nuclear blow against one of the English-speaking peoples' principal cities, it would not destroy that primacy. As George Will has observed, 'Al-Queda has no rival model about how to run a modern society. Al-Queda has a howl of rage against the idea of modernity." Id. at 647 (citation omitted). "The English-speaking peoples . . . today . . . are the last, best hope for Mankind. It is an the nature of human affairs that in the words of the hymn, 'Earth's proud empires pass away'. and so too one day will the long hegemony of the English-speaking peoples. When they finally come to render up the report of their global stewardship to History, there will be much of which to boast. Only when another power--such as China--holds global sway will the human race come to mourn the passing of this most decent, honest, generous, fair-minded and self-sacrificing imperium." Id. at 647-648.). 

WINSTON CHURCHILL'S PERSPECTIVE ON THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume I, The Birth of Britain, with an introduction by Roy Jenkins (London: The Folio Society, 1956, 2003) ("The British thought themselves as good as Roman as any. Indeed, it may be said that of all the provinces few assimilated the Roman system with more aptitude than the Islanders. [] There was a sense o pride in sharing in so noble and widespread a system. To be a citizen of Rome was to be a citizen of the world, raised upon a pedestal of unquestioned superiority about barbarians and slaves." Id. at 31. In the twenty-first century, where is "Rome," "who are the citizens of Rome"?).

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume II, The New World (London: The Folio Society, 1956, 2003)("Liberty of conscience as conceived by Cromwell did not extend to the  public profession of Roman Catholicism, Prelacy, or Quakerism. He banned open celebration of the Mass and threw hundreds of Quakers into prison. But such limitations to freedom of worship were caused less by religious prejudice than by fear of civil disturbance. Religious toleration challenged all the beliefs of Cromwell's day and found its best friend in the Lord Protector himself. Believing the Jews to be a useful element in the civil community, he opened again to them the gates of England, which Edward I has closed nearly four hundred years before. There was in practice comparatively little persecution on purely religious grounds, and even Roman Catholics were not seriously molested. Cromwell's dramatic intervention on behalf of a blaspheming Quaker and Unitarian whom Parliament would have put to death as well as tortured proves he was himself the source of many mitigations. A man who in that bitter age could write, 'We look for no compulsion but that of light and reason,' and who could dream of a union and a right understanding embracing Jews and Gentiles, cannot be wholly barred from his place in the forward march of liberal ideas." Id. at 263.).

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume III, The Age of Revolution (London: The Folio Society, 1957, 2003) ("On the morning of January 8, 1815, Pakenham led a frontal assault against the American earthworks--one of the most unintelligent manoeuvres in the history of British warfare. Here he was slain and two thousand of his troops were killed or wounded. The only surviving general officer withdrew the army to its transports. The Americans lost seventy men, thirteen of them killed. The battle had lasted precisely half an hour." "Peace between England and America had meanwhile been signed on Christmas Eve, 1814. But the Battle of New Orleans is an important event in American history. It made the career of a future President, Jackson, it led to the belief that the Americans had decisively won the war, and it created an evil legend that the struggle had been a second War of Independence against British tyranny." Id. at 312.).

Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: Volume IV, The Great Democracies (London: The Folio Society, 1958, 2003).

KING ARTHUR, OR THE MATTER OF BRITAIN

T. H. White, The Once and Future King (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1958) (From the White's comments on the bookjacket: "In have had the Matter of Britain on my hands for twenty years. That is what it has been called since before the days of Malory, and it is a serious subject. I have tried to deal with every side of it--with the clash between Might and Right, man's place in nature, the problem of war, the racial background which is an important part of the story, and with King Arthur's personal doom: The Aristotelian tragedy which made Malory call his long book the Morte d'Arthur. I have tried to look at it through the innocent eyes of young people, because I don't very much believe in the modern theory that the whole object of life is gratified desire. Malory didn't either. I have tried to make the seriousness acceptable by getting as much fun as possible out of the comic characters. I have invented a love-affair for king Pellinore--the only addition to Malory, except that he did not say that Lancelot was ugly. Almost all the people in this book are in his wonderful one, and have the same characters in both. I hope the moral is not to heavy, but the story was always a deep one. After all, it the major British epic--more so than Milton's Italian excursion. English writers, including great ones like Tennyson, have been mulling it over for a thousand years, and for that matter Milton himself thought of doing it before he decided to deal with Adam.".).

Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D'Arthur (New York: The Modern Library, 1994).

FRANCE, DEATH AND The ENLIGHTENMENT

John McManners, Death and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death Among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 1981).

POLITICAL LOSS

Marguerite Duras, Green Eyes, translated from the French by Carol Barko (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1990) (From "Political Loss": "For many people the true loss of political meaning is to join a party unit, to submit to its rule, its law. For any people, too, when they talk about an apolitical stance, they are primarily talking about an ideological loss or shortcoming. I can't speak for you, for your thoughts. For me, political loss is primarily the loss of self, the loss of one's anger as much as of one's gentleness, the loss of one's hatred, of one's faculty for hatred as much as of one's faculty for loving, the loss of one's imprudence as much as one's moderation, the loss of excess as much as loss of measure, the loss of madness, of one's naivete, the loss of one's courage like one's cowardice, like that of one's horror in the face of everything as much as that of one's confidence, the loss of one's tears like the one's joy. That's what I think." Id. at 6, italics in original.).

GOT TO REVOLUTION

Lin-Manuel Miranda & Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton The Revolution, Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America (New York: Grand Central Publishing/Melcher Media, 2015) ("It tells the stories of two revolutions. There's the American Revolution of the 18th century, which flares to life in Lin's Libretto. . . .  There's also the revolution of the show itself: a musical that changes the way that Broadway sounds, that alters who gets to tell the story of our founding that lets us glimpse the new, more diverse America rushing our way." Id. at 10. It is ironic, at least to me, that a truly revolutionary musical should be a hit in a political climate where the presumptive nominees from the two major parties are, on one side, a complacent pragmatist and, on the other, a reactionary demagogue. The most important revolutions are the resolutions of the mind; that is, revolutions in how we think. I fear Americans are not prepared for a revolution in their thinking. And Hamilton The Revolution, I fear, will slowly but surely become mere entertainment, appropriate for high school musicals, Peoria, Illinois, and Main Street. Get the CD, and listen to its content and message, carefully and critically.).

ENLIGHTENMENT ANTICOLONIALISM?

Sunil M. Agnani, Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (New York: Fordham U. Press, 2013) (From the book jacket: "In Hating Empire Properly, Sunil Agnani produces a novel attempt to think the eighteenth-century imagination of the West and East Indies together, arguing that this is how contemporary thinkers Edmund Burke and Denis Diderot actually viewed them. This concern with multiple geographical spaces is revealed to be a largely unacknowledged part of the matrix of Enlightenment thought in which eighteenth-century European and American self-conceptions evolved. By focusing on colonial spaces of the Enlightenment, especially India end Haiti, he demonstrates how Burke's fearful view of the French Revolution--the defining event of modernity--was shaped by prior reflection on these other domains. Exploring with sympathy the angry outbursts against injustice in the writings of Diderot, he nonetheless challenges recent understands of him as a univocal critic of empire by showing the persistence of a fantasy of consensual colonialism in his thought. By looking at the impasses and limits in the thought of both radical and conservative writers, Agnani asks what it means to critique empire 'proper;y.' Drawing his method from Theodor W. Adorno's quip that 'one must have tradition in oneself, in order to hate it properly,' he proposes a critical inhabiting of dominant forms of reason as a way forward for the critique of both empire and Enlightenment." This is a challenging read. I don't think I absorbed it fully, and will have to revisit it in the not-so-distant future.).