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EUGENE O'NEILL AND HIS WOMEN

Arthur Gelb & Barbara Gelb, By Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill (New York: A Marian Wood Book/G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2016). 

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GEORGIO AGAMBEN: MAN AND HIS IMAGES

Georgio Agamben, Nymphs, translated from the Italian by Amanda Minervini (London & New York: Seagull Books, 2013) ("The history of the ambiguous relation between man and nymph is the history of the difficult relation between man and his images." Id. at 48.).

ON DAVID HUME

James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2015).

ON BEING COOL IN POSTWAR AMERICA

Joel Dinerstein, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2017) ("I offer here a final definition of cool--fully formed as of 1963--as it became part of the American self-concept: cool is a subconscious method for negotiating identity in modernity through popular culture." Id. at 441.).

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RETHINKING MACHIAVELLI?

Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli in His World (New York & London: Norton, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Since the publication of The Prince five centuries ago, Machiavelli has bean associated with political amorality. But that characterization is unfair. In Be Like the Fox, Erica Benner sets the record straight: far from the ruthless 'Machiavellian' puppet master that people think he was, Machiavelli emerges here as a profound ethical thinker who fought to uphold high moral standards and restore the democratic freedoms of his beloved Florence." Perhaps.).

HUMAN BEHAVIOR: IT'S COMPLICATED

Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).

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PAUL AUSTER

Paul Auster, 4 3 2 1 : A Novel (New York: Henry Holt, 2017).

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DEVELOPING A CULTURAL BACKGROUND VIA LEARNING SOME INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2003) ("Undergraduate students admitted to Harvard were generally very bright in the sense that they were quick learners. Their knowledge, however, was appallingly slight. When in 1985 I offered my first freshman seminar on Russian intellectual history, I had 127 applicants for 12 places, and so I administered quick personal tests. I did not expect that the students would know anything about Russia, but I did think that a someone interested in intellectual history would be familiar with the classics of world literature. I was sadly disappointed: apart from Crime and Punishment which, I believe, they read as a thriller and Madame Bovary (for those who studied advanced high school French), they knew nothing: Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Chekhov, Cervantes were to them names, if that. I was dismayed how culturally deracine America's young were, how they lacked any cultural background to fall back on when they faced life's inevitable problems. The situation was so bad that when a prospective student revealed familiarity with any major writer or thinker of the past, I admitted him or her on the spot." Id. at 93-94.).

Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017) ("Luther is a difficult hero. nonetheless. His writings can be full of hatred, and his predilection for scatological rhetoric and humor is not to modern taste. He could be authoritarian, bullying, overconfident; his domineering ways overshadowed his children's lives and alienated many of his followers. His intransigent capacity to demonize his opponents was more than a psychological flaw because it meant that Protestantism spit very early, weakening it permanently and leading to centuries of war. His anti-Semitism was more visceral than that of may of his contemporaries, and it was also intrinsic to his religiosity and his understating of the relation between the Old and the New Testament. It cannot just be excused as the prejudice of his day. His greatest intellectual gift was his ability to simplify, to cut to the heart of an issue--but this also made it difficult for him to compromise or see nuance. And yet only someone with an utter inability to see anyone else's point of view could have had the courage to take on the papacy to, to act like a 'blinkered horse' looking neither right nor left, but treading relentlessly onward regardless of the consequences. And only someone with a sense of humor, a stubborn realism, and a remarkable ability to engage the deepest loyalties of others could have avoided the martyrdom that threatened." Id at 410-411. Quite an interesting biography!).

MANIA, CHARACTER, AND BEING THE POET ROBERT LOWELL

Kay Redfield Jamison, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (New York: Knopf, 2017) ("This book is about fire in the blood and darkness; it is about mania and the precarious, deranging altitude to which mania ascends. It is about the poetic imagination and how mania and imagination come together to create great art. But it is as much and more about the vital role of discipline and character in making art from inborn gift." Id. at 4.).

SUSAN SONTAG

Susan Sontag, Essays of the 1960s and 1970s: Against Interpretation / Styles of Radical Will / On Photography / Illness as Metaphor / Uncollected Essays, edited by David Rieff (New York: Library of America, 2013).

Susan Sontag, Later Essays: Under the Sign of Saturn / Aids and Its Metaphors / Where the Stress Falls / Regarding the Pain of Others; At the Same Time, edited by David Rieff (New York: Library of America, 2017) (From "On Courage ad Resistance (The Oscar Romero Award Keynote Address): "Every violence in war has been justified as a retaliation. We are threatened. We are defending ourselves. The others, they want to kill us. We must stop them "And from there: we must stop them before they have a chance to carry out their plans. And since those who would attack us are sheltering behind noncombatants, no aspect of civil life can be immune to our depredations. "Never mind the disparity of forces, of wealth, of firepower--or simply of population. . . Not to support those who are coming under fire from the enemy seems like treason. "It may be that, in some cases, the threat is real.  In such circumstances, the bearer of the moral principle seems like someone running alongside a moving train, yelling 'Stop! Stop! "Can the train be stopped? No, it can't. At least, not now. "Will other people on the train be moved to jump off and join those on the ground? Maybe some will, but most won't (at least, not until they have a whole new canopy of fears). "The dramaturgy of 'acting on principle' tells us that we don't have to think about whether acting on principle is expedient, or whether we can count on the eventual success of the actions we have undertaken. "Acting on principle is, we're told, a good in itself. "But it is still a political act, in the sense that you're not doing it for yourself. You don't do it just to be in the right or to appease your own conscience; much less because you are confident your action will achieve its aim. You resist as acts of solidarity. With communities of the principled and the disobedient: here, elsewhere. In the present. In the future." Id. at 762, 768-769).

READING JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce, Dubliners, preface by Kevin Barry, contemporary photographs by Dr. J. J. Clarke (London: Folio Society, 2013, 2014).

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, edited by Danis Rose & John O'Hanlon, illustrated by John Vernon Lord, introduction by David Greetham (London: Folio Society, 2014).

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, illustrated by Dodie Masterman (London: Folio Society, 2016).

James Joyce, Ulysses, edited by Danis Rose & John O'Hanlon, illustrated and introduced by John Vernon Lord (London: Folio Society, 2017).

ROCK N' ROLL, MAINLY

Jonathan Lethem & Kevin Dettmar, eds., Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z (A Library of America Special Publication) (New York: Library of America, 2017).

PROCOPIUS of CAESAREA

Procopius, I: History of the Wars, Books 1-2, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, 48) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1914).

Procopius, II: History of the Wars, Books 3-4, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, 81) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1916).

Procopius, III: History of the Wars, Books 5-6.15, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, 107) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1919).

Procopius, IV: History of the Wars, Books 6.16-7.35, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, 173) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1924).

Procopius, V: History of the Wars, Books 7.36-8, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, 217) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1928).

Procopius, VI: The Anecdota or Secret History, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library, 290) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1935).

Procopius, VII: Buildings; General Index, with an English Translation by H. B. Dewing with the collaboration of Glanville Downey (Loeb Classical Library, 343) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 1954).

ON GOETHE

Rudiger Safranski, Goethe: Life as a Work of Art, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer (New York & London: Liveright, 2017) (From the book jacket: " Rudiger Safranski's Goethe: Life as a Work of Art is the first definitive biography in a generation to tell the larger-than-life story of the writer considered to be the Shakespeare of German literature." Also, see Michael Hofmann, "Personality Is Everything," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/18/2017.).

APPIAN ON ROMAN HISTORY

Appian, Roman History, Volume I, Books 1-8.1 (Loeb Classical Library, 2), with an English translation by Horace White (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard university Press, 1912).

Appian, Roman History, Volume II, Books 8.2-12 (Loeb Classical Library, 3), with an English translation by Horace White (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard university Press, 1912).

Appian, Roman History, Volume III: The Civil Wars, Books 1-3.26 (Loeb Classical Library, 4), with an English translation by Horace White (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard university Press, 1913).

Appian, Roman History, Volume IV: The Civil Wars, Books 3.27-5 (Loeb Classical Library, 5), with an English translation by Horace White (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard university Press, 1913).

READING NORMAN O. BROWN

"Brown's work will grow in importance as the  poverty of the Enlightenment

 comes to be more and more widely acknowledged."--Christopher Lasch

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 2d, ed., with an Introduction by Christopher Lasch (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U. Press, 1959, 1985) ("We must be prepared to analyze clinically as a neurosis not only the foreign culture we dislike, but also our own." Id. at 10.).

Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1967, 1990) ("Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of the origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story." Id. at 3. "Fraternity comes into being after the sons are expelled from the family; when they form their own club, in the wilderness, away from home, away for women. The brotherhood is a substitute family, a substitute woman--alma mater." Id. at 32.).

Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1991) (From "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind: "[M]ysteries are unpublishable because only some can see them, not all. Mysteries are intrinsically esoteric, and as such are an offense to democracy: is not publicity a democratic principle? Publication makes it republican--a thing of the people. The pristine academies were esoteric and aristocratic, self-consciously separate from the profanely vulgar. Democratic resentment denies that there can be anything that can't be seen by everyone; in the democratic academy truth is subject to public verification; truth is what any fool can see. This is what is meant by the so-called scientific method;: so-called science is the attempt to democratize knowledge--an attempt to substitute method for insight, mediocrity for genius, by getting a standard operating procedure. [Query: Is that not the heart of today's so-called "best practices"?] The great equalizers dispensed by the scientific methods are tools, those analytical tools. The miracle of genius is replaced by the standardized mechanism. But fools with tools are still fools, and don't let your Phi Beta Kappa key fool you. Tibetan prayer wheels are another way of arriving at the same result: the degeneration of mysticism into mechanism--so that any fool can do it. Perhaps the advantage is with Tibet: for there the mechanism is external while the mind is left vacant; and vacancy is not the worst condition of the mind. And the resultant prayers make no futile claim to originality or immortality; being nonexistent, they do not have to be catalogued or stored." Id. at 1, 3-4.).

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE and GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Hazel Barnes, Sartre and Flaubert (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1981).

Gustave Flaubert, Five Novels (Library of Essential Writers): Madame Bovary; Salammbo; Sentimental Education; The Temptation of Saint Anthony; Boulevard and Pecuchet, introduction by Brian Stableford (New York: Barnes & Nobel, 2007).

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 1, translated from the French by Carol Cosman (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1981) ("The Family Idiot is the sequel to Search for a Method. Its subject: what, at this point in time, can we know about a man? It seemed to me that this question could only be answered by studying a specific case. What do we know, for example, about Gustave Flaubert?" Id. at ix.).

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 2, translated from the French by Carol Cosman (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1987) (Julian Barnes, writing in the London Review of Books, sums of the book well. From the back cover: 'This book is mad, of course. Admirable but mad--to abduct Sartre's own phrase about Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. A work of elucidation couched in a lazily dense style; a biography seemingly concerned with eternals but in fact spun from inside the biographer like a spider's thread, a critical study which exceeds in wordage all the major works of its subject put together . . . 'On narrate pas Voltaire, de Gaulle said of Sartre in 1968; and perhaps those down at Gallimard imagined they heard a pun. One does not arrest Voltaire . . . and you can't stop him either.").

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 3, translated from the French by Carol Cosman (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1989).

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, Volume 4, translated from the French by Carol Cosman (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1991).

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821- 1857, Volume 5, translated from the French by Carol Cosman (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1993).

Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, translated from the French and with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Knopf, 1963) (From the book jacket: "How might a man cultivate his individual freedom and at the same time contribute usefully to the society in which he finds himself? How might a man of given temper orient himself with his world regardless of its character? How might a man find personal meaning in his social function, and draw from his environment an affirmation of his private values?" All good questions for twenty-first-century, digital-aged, men and women.).

Michel Winock, Flaubert, translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2016).

READING JAMES HOLLAND ON WAR

James Holland, Italy's Sorrow: A Year of War, 1944-1945 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "Although known as a land of beauty and for the richness of its culture, Italy's suffering in 1933-1945 is now largely forgotten. This is the first account of the conflict there to tell the story from all sides and to include the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. Offering extensive original research, it weaves together the drama and tragedy of that terrible year, in concluding new perspectives and material on some of the most debated episodes to have emerged from World War II.").

James Holland, The War in the West, Volume One: The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941 (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2015) ("In warfare, there are understood to be three important levels: the strategic, the operational and the tactical. Strategy refers to the big picture--the overall aims; the tactical level is the fighting on the front line and how that is conducted; and operational refers to the means of making both the strategic and the tactical happen--in other words, the nuts and bolts; the kit, the ammunition, logistics, resources--the economics of war--getting men and machines from A  to B. Sustaining the battle. [] It is this operational level that has been most neglected in the historiography of the Second World War. But don't be put off--it's also one of the most interesting, because when one starts to understand this more complex level, all kinds new perspectives appear, which cast our understanding of the war in a different light, And that is very exciting." Id. at 4.).

James Holland, The War in the West, A New History, Volume Two: The Allies Fight Back, 1941-1943 (London: Bantam Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "In the second volume of his . . . new history of the Second World War, James Holland examines the momentous turning points of 1941-1943: Hitler's invasion of Russia; America's entry into the conflict; the devastating Thousand Bomber Raids over Germany; the long struggle in the desert of North Africa; and the defeat of the U-boats in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic.")

SOME SUGGESTED READINGS ON BLACK HISTORY . . . AND BEYOND

Linda M. Heywood, Njinga of Angola: Africa's Warrior Queen (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017).

Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1977) (From the book jacket: Holt's "primary themes are these: that the power of black leaders, though significant, was complicated by other interrelationships, notably the governor's control of patronage; that schism by color, caste, and economics among black leaders reduced their effective exercise of that power; and that the defections, dissension, and fear of defeat which sent the South Carolina party into decline were primarily determined by local events and actors, not by the national administration.").

Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Cambridge, Massachusettss, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2016).

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (New York: Little, Brown, 2011).

Hollis Robbins & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers (New York: Penguin Classics/Penguin Books, 2017).

Lorraine Elena Roses, Black Bostonians and the Politics of Culture, 1920-1940 (Amherst & Boston: U. of Massachusetts Press, 2017) ("This study does not offer a comprehensive narrative of African American cultural production across the centuries, although one is sorely lacking. Instead, it highlights the cultural dynamics of the 1920s and 1930s, when the black population, not large enough to wield influence through electoral politics, forged alternative strategies to bridge racial and socioeconomic divides. An analysis of their strategies highlights the interplay of constraints and agency, and the drive to assert a black presence by all means possible." Id. at 5.).

SUGGESTED READING FOR LAW STUDENTS: EQUALITY

Jeremy Waldron, One Another's Equals: The Basis of Human Equality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2017) ("The principle of basic equality is opposed to any claim that there are moral distinctions and differentiations to be made among humans like unto or analogous in scale and content to the moral distinctions commonly made between humans and others animals. The principle of basic equality is opposed to this sour of differentiation among humans. We say, with Cicero in De Legibus, that there is 'no difference of ind between man and man." Id. at 30, citations omitted. "A separate principle--I shall call it the principle of distinctive equality--would add something to this. distinctive equality says that not only are humans one other's equals in the continuous sense, but also they are one another's equals on a basis that does actually differentiate them form animals. [] So the second position includes the first but takes us much further: it actually asserts the discontinuity with other animals and maintains that all humans therefore exist on a higher plane." Id. at 31. "The relevant sense of justice must mean something like a desire to apply and act on principles of justice, whatever these turn out to be. Of course, it is important that the sense of justice we all possess be oriented as far as possible toward the truth about justice: it must involve a determination to get at what is really just or really fair. Notoriously, people disagree about this. Even at the highest level of intellectual contemplation, there is Rawls, there is Nozick, there is Dworkin, there is Sen, there is Nussbaum, there is Walzer, and so on. There have been times when the disagreement seemed like fun, as people declared themselves members of Rawls's team or Nozick's team. But disagreement about justice is really a huge concern of a society. For it is not like religion; we don't lose by the presence of many different creeds in a multifaith society. But we do have to administer among us just one conception of justice, or at the very least, our answer to each particular problem of justice has to be given in terms of one such conception . . . Unfortunately, however,  the need for consensus on justice does not make the disagreement go away. So the variety of positions that people take up on the question of justice is a matter of concern, certainly not a matter of delight. Id. at 163-164, citations omitted.).

SUGGESTED READING FOR LAW STUDENTS

John M. Cooper, Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1999) (From the back cover: "The volume gives a systematic account of many of the most important issues and texts in ancient moral psychology and ethical theory, providing a unified and illuminating way of reflecting on the fields as they developed from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle to Epicurus and the Stoic philosophers Chrysippus and Posidonius, and beyond. "For the ancient philosophers, Cooper show here, morality was 'good character' and what that entailed: good judgment, sensitivity, opens, reflectiveness, and a secure and correct sense of who one was and how one stood in relation to others and the surrounding world. Ethical theory was about the best way to be rather than any principles for what to do in particular circumstances or in relation to recurrent temptations. Moral psychology was the study of the psychological conditions required for good character--the sorts of desires, the attitudes to self and others, the state of mind and feeling, the kinds of knowledge and insights. "Together these papers illustrate brilliantly how, by studying the arguments of the Greek philosophers in their diverse theories about he best human life and its psychological underpinnings, we can expand our own moral understanding and imagination and enrich our own moral thought.").

E. M. CIORAN

E. M. Cioran, All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast, translated from the French and introduced by Richard Howard (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1999, 2012) ("In the days when the Devil flourished, panics, terrors, troubles were evils profiting from supernatural protection: we know who provoked them, who presided over their efflorescence; abandoned to themselves now, they become 'internal dramas' or degenerate into 'psychoses,' a secularized pathology. Id. at 24.).

E. M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, translated from the French by Richard Howard, foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1991, 2012) ("One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland--and no other." Id. at 12. "to love one's neighbor is inconceivable. Does one ask a virus to love another virus?" Id. at 88. "The older one grows, the more clearly one realizes that though one believes oneself liberated from everything, in reality one is liberated from nothing." Id. at 194-195.).

E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, translated from the French by Richard Howard, foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1983, 2012) (From "Stabs at Bewilderment": "The only profound thinkers are the ones who do not suffer form a sense of the ridiculous." Id. at 131. "If we had an infallible perception of what we are, we might have just enough courage to go to bed, but certainly not enough to get up." Id. at 147.)

E. M. Cioran, History and Utopia (1969), translated from the French by Richard Howard, foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1987, 2015) (From the back cover: "In History and Utopia, Cioran the monster writes of politics in its broadest sense, of history, and of the utopian dream. His views are, to say the least, provocative. In one essay he casts a scathing look at democracy, that 'festival of mediocrity'; in another he turns his uncompromising gaze on Russia, its history, its evolution, and what calls 'the virtues of liberty.' In the dark shadow of Stalin and Hitler, he writes of tyrants and tyranny with rare lucidity and convincing logic. In "Odyssey of Rancor," he examines the deep-rooted dream in all of us to 'hate our neighbors,' to take immediate and irremediable revenge. And, in the final essay, he analyzes the notion of the 'golden age,' the biblical Eden, the utopia of so many poets and thinkers.").

E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949), translated from the French by Richard Howard, foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1975, 2012) ("True knowledge comes down to vigils in the darkness: the sum of our insomnias alone distinguishes us from the animals and from our kind. What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper? Is your sleep sound? Are your dreams sweet? You swell the anonymous crowd. Daylight is hostile to thoughts, the sun blocks them out; they flourish only in the middle of the night. . . . Conclusion of nocturnal knowledge: every man who arrives at a reassuring conclusion about anything at all gives evidence of imbecility or false charity. Who ever found a single joyous truth which was valid? Who saved the honor of the intellectual with daylight utterance? Happy the man who can say to himself: 'Knowledge turned sour on me.'" Id. at 147.).

E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, translated from the French and introduced by Richard Howard, introduction by Susan Sontag, forwarded by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1956, 2012).

E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born (1949), translated from the French by Richard Howard, foreword by Eugene Thacker (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1976, 2012) ("Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone." Id. at 27. "No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make." Id. at 51.)

RE-READING ERIC HOBSBAWM AND BEYOND

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) ("In that 'struggle for existence' which provided the basic metaphor of the economic, political, social and biological thought of the bourgeois world, only the 'fittest' would survive, their fitness certified not only by their survival but by their domination. The greater part of the world's population therefore became the victims of those whose superiority, economic, technological and therefore military, was unquestioned and seemed unchallengeable: the  economies and states of north-western and central Europe and the countries settled by its emigrants abroad, notably the United States. With the three major exceptions of India, Indonesia and parts of north Africa few of them became or were formal colonies in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. . . Admittedly these exceptions were not negligible: India alone accounted for 14 per cent of the world's population in 1871. Still, the political independence of the rest counted for little. Economically they were at the mercy of capitalism, insofar as they came within its reach.  From a military point of view their inferiority was blatant. The gun-boat and the expeditionary force appeared to be all-powerful." Id. at 125-126. "'[O]ne of the most extraordinary result of the wonderful discovery [of gold in California in 1848] is the impulse it has given to the enterprise of the Celestial Empire. Chinamen, hitherto the most impassive and domestic creatures of the universe, have started onto a new life at the tidings of the mines and have poured into California by the thousands.' In 1849 there were seventy-six of them, by the end of 1850 four thousand, in 1852 no fewer than twenty thousand landed, until 1876 there were about 111,000 or 25 per cent of all non-California-born inhabitants of the state. They brought with them their skill, intelligence and enterprise, and incidentally introduced western civilization to that most powerful cultural export of the East, the Chinese restaurant, which was already flourishing in 1850. Oppressed, hated, ridiculed and from time to time lynched--eighty-eight were murdered during the slump of 1862--they showed the usual capacity of this great people to survive and prosper, until the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882, climax of a long racialist agitation, brought to an end what was perhaps the first example in history of voluntary, economically induced, mass migration form an Oriental to an Occidental society." Id. at 66. QUERY: In twenty-first century America, still sluggishly recovering from the Great Recession and embroiled in its so-called war against terror, will Muslims also be excluded and deported as the result of racialist agitation? Perhaps it will be the Mexicans?  People of color generally? Food for thought.).

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) ("The impact of Marx on the social sciences illustrates the difficulty of comparing their development with that of the natural sciences in this period. For they [that is, the social sciences] dealt essentially with the behavior and problems of human beings, who are very far from neutral and dispassionate observers of their own affairs. [E]ven in the natural sciences ideology becomes more prominent as we move from the inanimate world to life, and especially to problems of biology which directly involve and concern human beings. The social and human sciences operate entirely, and by definition, in the explosive zone where all theories have direct political implications, and where the impact of ideology, politics and the situation in which thinkers find themselves is paramount. It was quite possible in our (or any) period to be both a distinguished astronomer and a revolutionary Marxist, like A. Pannekock (1873-1960), whose professional colleagues doubtless thought his politics as irrelevant to his astronomy as his comrades felt his astronomy to be to the class struggle. Had he been a sociologist nobody would have regarded his politics as irrelevant to his theories. The social sciences have zigzagged, dressed and recrossed the same territory or turned in a circle often enough for this reason. Unlike the natural sciences, they lacked a generally accepted central body of cumulative knowledge and theory, a structured field of research in which progress could be claimed to result from an adjustment of theory to new discoveries. And in the course of our period the divergence between the two branches of 'science' became accentuated." Id. at 290. NOTE: This is a good reminder that "law" as a subject for scholarly research is, at best, a social science (or uses the social science as a tool of analysis), and, therefore, the scholar's politics, ideology and situation are, or should be, deemed relevant to understanding the research and result.).

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, 1914-1991 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) ("The growth of brutalisation was due not so much to the release of the latent potential for cruelty and violence in the human being, which war naturally legitimizes, though this certainly emerged after the First Word War among a certain type of ex-servicemen (veterans), especially in the strong-arm or killer squads and 'free Corps' on the nationalist ultra-right. Why should men who had killed and seen their friends killed and mangled hesitate to kill and brutalize the enemies of a good cause?" Id. at 45. "Another reason, however, was the new impersonality of warfare, which turned killing and maiming into the remote consequence of pushing a button or moving a lever. Technology made its victims invisible, as people eviscerated by bayonets, or seen though the sights of fire-arms could not be. Opposite the permanently fixed guns of the Western Front were not men but statistics--not even real, but hypothetical statistics, as the 'bodycounts' of enemy causalities during the US Vietnam War showed. Far below the aerial bombers were not people about to be burned and eviscerated, but targets. Mild young men, who would certainly not have wished to plunge a bayonet in the belly of any pregnant village girl, could far more easily drop high explosive on London or Berlin, or nuclear bombs on Nagasaki. Hard-working German bureaucrats, who would certainly have found repugnant to drive starving Jews into abattoirs themselves, could work out the railway timetables for a regular supply of death-trains to Polish extermination camps with less sense of personal involvement. The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine, especially when they could be justified as regrettable operational necessities. Id. at 45-46. "Yet it had become increasingly clear over the last half of the Short Twentieth Century that the First World could win battles but not wars against the Third, or rather that winning wars, even if possible, could not guarantee control of such territories. The major asset of imperialism had disappeared, namely the readiness of colonial populations, once conquered, to let themselves be quietly administered by a handful of occupiers. Ruling Bosnia-Herzegovina had been no problem for the Habsburg Empire, but in the early 1990s all governments were advised by their military advisers that eh pacification of that unhappy war-torn country would require the presence, for an indefinite period, of several hundreds of thousands of troops, i.e., a moibilisation comparable to that of a major war. Somaliland had always been a difficult colony, and had once even briefly required the intervention of a British force headed by a major-general, and yet it had not crossed the minds of London or Rome that even Muhammed ben Abdallah, the celebrated 'Md Mullah', raised permanently unmanageable problems for the British and Italian colonial governments. Yet in the early 1990s the USA and the rest of the UN forces of occupation of several tens of thousands withdrew ignominiously when confronted with the option of an indefinite occupation without clear ends. Even the might of the great USA blenched when faced in neighboring Haiti--a traditional satellite and dependent of Washington--by a local general, heading the local, American-armed and -shaped army, who refused to allow an elected and (reluctantly) American-backed president to return, and challenged the USA to occupy Haiti. The USA refused to occupy Haiti once again, as it had done from 1915 until 1934, not because the one thousand or so uniformed thugs of the Haitian army constituted a serious military problem, but because it simply did not know any longer how to settle the Haitian problem by outside force." "In short, the [short twentieth] century ended in a global disorder whose nature was unclear, and without an obvious mechanism for with ending it or keeping it under control." Id. at 510-511. NOTE: Implicit in the just quoted passage is the "twentieth-century" lesson Americans, generally, and George W. Bush and his administration, specifically, had failed to learn before, in the early twenty-first century, wrong-headedly invading, first, Afghanistan, then, Iraq: What happens after one "wins" the war? How many, and for how long, troops are you willing to keep there to maintain the peace given that one is unlikely to have won the hearts and minds of the core local population. In short, How does this end? The "successful" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have resulted in the ongoing, seemingly unending and unwindable war on terror.).

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1790-1848 (London:The Folio Society, 2005) (From the "Preface to the First Edition": "This book traces the transformation of the world between 1789 and 1849 insofar as it was due to what is here called the 'dual revolution'--the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (British) Industrial Revolution." Id. at xvii. Among other things one might learn from reading this book is that the French Revolution of 1789 was more important, had greater long-term impact and repercussions, than the American Revolution of 1776. From the text: "[A]lone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so. The American Revolution has remained a crucial event in American history, but (except for the countries directly involved in it) it has left few major traces elsewhere. The French Revolution is a landmark in all countries. Its repercussions, rather than those of the American Revolution, occasioned the risings which led to the liberation of Latin America after 1808. Its direct influence mediated as far as Bengal, where Ram Mohan Roy was inspired by it to found the first Hindu reform movement, the ancestor of modern Indian nationalism . . . It was, as had been well said, 'the first great movement of idea in western Christendom that had any real effect on the world of Islam', and that almost immediately. By the middle of the nineteenth century the Turkish world vatan, hitherto merely describing a man's place of birth or residence, had begun to turn under its influence into something like patrie; the term 'liberty', before 1800 primarily a legal term denoting the opposite to 'slavery', had begun to acquire a new political content. Its indirect influence is universal, for it provided the pattern for all subsequent revolutionary movements, its lessons (interpreted according to taste) being incorporated into modern socialism and communism. *This is not to underestimate the influence of the American Revolution. It undoubtedly helped to stimulate the French, and in a narrower sense provided constitutional models--in competition and sometime alternation with the French--for various Latin American states, and inspiration for democratic-radical movements from time to time." Id at 60.).

Richard J. Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (The Penguin History of Europe) (New York: Viking, 2016).

SUGGESTED READINGS FOR LAW STUDENTS

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when

his salary* depends upon his not understanding it!"

--Upton Sinclair
* For "salary", Might one substitute the words "self-worth" and/or "identity" without loss of meaning?

The United States population is equivalent to 4.34% of the total world population. 

Andrew W. Lo, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency isn't wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo's new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought--a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation" From the text: "LAW IS A CODE[:] To regulate the financial system as a whole, we need to better understand the existing corpus of financial regulation as a whole. This might seem like a hopeless task. No single person--neither the most highly paid lawyer nor the most accomplished politician--is able to hold the whole of modern financial regulation in his or her head. And given the exponential growth of finance, which implies similar growth for financial rules and regulation, there's no reason we should expect this of anyone. But technology offers an interesting solution." "The U.S. legal system is a working example of adaptive regulation. Based on principles of common law that date back to the Middle Ages in Europe, it incrementally changes in response to societal needs and political pressure. However, it wasn't designed for period of rapid change. In fact, many of the Founders saw a slow, deliberate pace in legal change as a positive good, Codification of federal law began startlingly late in American history (1926), and federal statutes are still poorly organized." "What if we looked at the law as a piece of software, the operating system of the United States of America? After all, laws play the same role as software in providing instructions for a given system--if this, then that, and so on. If a team of software engineers was asked to analyze the entire body of federal law, they would see tens of thousands of pages of poorly documented code, with a multitude of complex, spaghetti-like interdependencies between the individual components. Could the principles of good software design be used to improve the way we write financial regulations?" Id. at 371-372. "[T]he Adaptive Market perspective suggests that the financial system needs a different gift: the gift of pain." Id. at 378.).

Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap? (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) (See Judith Shapiro, "China World," NYT Book Review, 6/18/2017).

Jagdish Bhagwati, Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade (New York: A Council of Foreign Relations Book/Oxford U. Press, 2008) (From the book jacket: "Numbering by now well over 300, and rapidly increasing, these preferential trade agreements, many taking the form of Free Trade Agreements, have re-created the unhappy situation of the 1930s, when world trade was undermined by discriminatory practices. Where this was the result of protectionism in those days, ironically it is a result of misdirected pursuit of free trade today. The world trading system is at risk again, the author argues, and the danger is palpable. [Bhagwati documents the growth of these PTAs [Preferential Trae Agreements], the reasons for their proliferation ad their deplorable consequences which include the near-destruction of the nondiscrimination which was at the heart of the postwar trade architecture and its replacement by what he called the 'spaghetti bowl' of a maze of preferences. Bhagwati also documents how PTAs have undermined the prospects for multilayer freeing of trade, serving as 'stumbling blocks,' instead of 'building blocks,' for the object of reaching multilateral free trade.")

Paul Blustein, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out): Wall Street, the IMF, and the Bankrupting of Argentina (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).

Paul Blustein, Misadventures of the Most Favored Nations: Clashing Egos, inflated Ambitions, and the Great Shambles of the World Trade System (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).

Heather Boushey, J. Bradford Delong, & Marshall Steinbaum, eds., After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Thomas Piety's Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers of from here in exploring the ideas Piety pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piety, in what is sure to be a much-dented book in its own right." Needless to say, one should read Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century before tackling this collection of essays.).

Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, & Steven E. Miller, eds., Debating the Democratic Peace (An International Security Reader) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England. The MIT Press, 1995) (From the "Preface": "Two centuries ago, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant predicted that republican states would enjoy a 'perpetual peace' with other republics. More recently, many observers have noted that democratic countries virtually never go to war with one another. Since the early 1980s, this apparent pattern has been regarded as one of the most important empirical features of international relations. Jack Levy claims that 'the absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.' Bruce Reset believes that 'this is one of the strongest nontrivial and non tautological generalization that can be made about international relations.' This absence of war between democracies has come to be known as the 'democratic peace'." "This volume collects important essays that have advanced and challenged the idea of a democracy peace." Id, at ix, citations omitted.).

David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Columbia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1993).

Justin du Rivage, Revolution Against Empire: Taxes, Politics, and the Origins of American Independence (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) ("For many of the Enlightenment's finest minds, the shot fired at Lexington and Concord, the storming of Bunker Hill, and the signing of the American Declaration of Independence signaled that the age of imperial exploitation was coming to an end. Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and the French minster and philosophe Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot were all convinced that the crisis that spilt the British Empire was a transformative moment in worlg history. . . [T]hey believed the battle over American independence was ultimately a fight about what kind of empire the British Empire would become. Colonists' resistance proved beyond a doubt that colonies and trade restrictions, which had long seemed the source of Europe's power and grandeur, were, in fact, its undoing. Britain's rebellious colonies had seen an unmistakable message to Europe's sovereigns and states. Power through conquest and violence, extraction and slavery, was no longer viable in a modern, enlightened world. Statesmen and thinkers would have to find new models for governance and growth, models that we more economically and morally sound than those that had guided European politics for the past three centuries." Id. a 1-2.   You can hear the "but" or "however" whistling in the wings of that paragraph. And here it comes: "Brian tough they were, Franklin, Pownall, Smith, and Turgot were wrong that American independence had sounded the death knell of imperial exploitation and the dawn of a more peaceful world. They were, however, right that the American Revolution was part of a transformation in politics every bit as significant as the system of European states that emerged from the Thirty Years' War. Although it fractured the British Empire and offered hope to independence movements all over the planet, it also marked the beginning of an age in which colonialism dominated much of the planer. Europe's empires would become more extensive, extractive, and authoritarian than they had ever been. Indeed, Britain, which seemed crippled by the loss of its North American colonies, became the greatest empire of them all. [] That transformation came with real economic consequence, allowing Europeans to grow increasingly wealthy, even as they consumed more than they produced. [] As diverse and ramshackle as the empire was, nineteenth-century Britain's industrial economy, dominance of international finance, and military might were sustained by its control of people, money, and resources all over the world. "The United States followed a different path form the dramatic transformation that painted the glob French blue and British red. . . That path reflects the fact that the American Revolution was a revolution not for or against monarchy, but against the authoritarian transformation of the British Empire." Id. at 3-4.).

Haley Sweetland Edwards, Shadow Courts: The Tribunals that Rule Global Trade (New York: Columbia Global Reports, 2016) (Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) allow foreign corporations to sue sovereign nations before supranational arbitration tribunals. Intended to protect (via compensation) foreign investors property rights, the impact has taken a new and broader course with an expanded notion of protecting, for example, "expected" profits though expropriated by government actions or policies.).

Michael J. Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket:"Soon after the American Revolution, certain of the founders began to recognize the strategic significance of Asia and the Pacific and the vast material and cultural resources at stake there. Over the coming generations the United States continued to ask how best to expand trade with the region and whether to partner with China, at the center of the continent, or Japan, looking toward the Pacific. Where should the United States draw its defensive line, and how should it export democratic principles? In a history that spans the eighteenth century to the present, Michael J. Green follows the development of U.S. strategic thinking toward East Asia, identifying recurring themes in American statecraft that reflect the nation's political philosophy and material realities. [] Green finds one overarching concern driving U.S. policy toward East Asia: a fear that a rival power might use the Pacific to isolate and threaten the United States and prevent the ocean from becoming a conduit for the westward free flow of trade, values, and forward defense. By More Than Providence works through these problems from the perspective of history's major strategists and statesmen, from Thomas Jefferson to Alfred Thayer Mahan and Henry Kissinger. It records the fate of their ideas as they collided with the realities of the Far East and adds clarity to America's stakes in the region, especially when compared with those of Europe ad the Middle East." From the text: "The losing battle for the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the Obama administration and the opposition of both presidential candidates to TPP in 2016 suggest that the tension between free trade and protectionism is becoming greater as time passes. Yet, in many respects, that close call on trade legislation reflects a failure of strategic vision and leadership as much as it does real divisions among the American people. In 2015, 70 percent of American supported free trade, while fewer than 20 percent of the member of the unions that opposed it were actually engaged in manufacturing that might be affected by foreign competition. American manufacturing, meanwhile, was on the rise in this period. Nevertheless, trade has become a proxy for other problems with the U.S. economy in terms of stagnating middle-class wages that are more related to globalization and automation than trade agreements. Had President Obama understood the centrality of trade to American internationalism and influence the way Reagan and Bill Clinton did--and made the case for it--then the trade arm of American engagement in Asia and the Pacific wold have had more credibility at home and abroad from the beginning." Id. at 547-548. Note: Trump is a nationalist, not an internationalist; he is a protectionist, not a free trader; and he and his base believe that everyone is cheating America. As a result, Trump is weakening America's role on the global stage generally, and in the Asia Pacific, especially. Needless to say, nuclear-capable North Korea is an 'interesting' conundrum for the United States. Food for thought?).

Jakub J. Grygiel & A. Wess Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier: Rising Rivals, Vulnerable Allies, and the Crisis of American Power (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2016) (This book was written before the authoritarian-strongmen-loving, isolationist-leaning, pro-Russia, and poorly-informed on international matters, Donald Trump entered the White House. He would be advised to have someone summarize the book for him. From the book jacket: "From the Baltic the South China Sea, newly assertive authoritarian states sense an opportunity to resurrect old empires or build new one at America's expense. Hoping that U.S. decline is real, nations such as Russia, Iran, and China [NOTE: Don't forget North Korea!] are testing Washington's resolve by targeting vulnerable allies at the frontiers of American power. The Unquiet Frontier explains why the United States needs a new grand strategy [Note: And not isolationism!] that uses strong frontier alliance networks to raise the cost of military aggression in the new century. [] Grygiel and Mitchell reveal how numerous would-be great powers use an arsenal of asymmetric techniques to probe and sift American strength across several regions simultaneously, and how reveals and allies alike are learning form America's management of increasingly interlinked global crises to hone effective strategies of their own.").

Douglas A. Irwin Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1996) (From the book jacket: "About two hundred yeas ago, largely as a result of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, free trade achieved a intellectual status unrivaled by any other doctrine in the field of economics. What accounts for the success of free trade against then prevailing mercantilist doctrines? And how well has free trade withstood various theoretical attacks that have challenged it since Adam Smith's time? In this . . . intellectual history, Douglas Irwin explains how the idea of free trade has endured against the tide of the abundant criticisms that have been leveled against it from the ancient world and Adam Smith's day through the present. . . . Irwin traces the origins of the free trade doctrine from premercantilist times up to Adam Smith and the classical economists. . . . [H]e shows how Smith's compelling arguments in favor of free trade overthrew mercantilist views that domestic industries should be protected from import competition. Once a presumption about the economic benefits of free trade was established, various objections to free trade arose in the form of major arguments for protectionism such as those relating to the terms of trade, infant industries, increasing returns, wage distortions, income distribution, unemployment, and strategic trade policy. Discussing the contentious historical controversies surrounding each of the arguments, Irwin reveals the serious analytical and practical weaknesses of each and in the process shows why free trade remains among the most durable and robust propositions that economic has to offer for the conduct of economic policy.").

Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Tracing the Mongol takeover of the eastern Islamic world, which began when Chinggis Khan and his warriors overran Central Asia and devastated much of Iran, Jackson offers a fresh and fascinating consideration of the years of infidel rule, demonstrating how Islam not only survived the savagery of the Mongol conquest, but in fact thrived and expanded throughout the empire.").

Dan Jones, Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2015) ("For the most part the Magna Carta is dry, technical, difficult to decipher, and constitutionally obsolete. Those parts that are still frequently quoted--clauses about the right to justice before one's peers, the freedom from being unlawfully imprisoned, and the freedom of the Church--did not mean in 1215 what we often wish they would mean today. They are part of a document drawn up not to defend in perpetuity the interests of national citizens but rather to pin down a king who had been greatly vexing a small number of his wealthy and violent subjects. The Magna Carta ought to be dead, defunct, and of interest only to serious scholars of the thirteenth century." Id. at 1. 'The Magna Carta's terms applied only to 'free men,' who were then at best 10 percent or 20 percent of England's adult population." Id. at 2.).

Stephen D. King, Grave New World: The End of Globalization, The Return of History (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Globalization, long considered the best route to economic prosperity, is not inevitable. An approach built on the principles of free trade and, since the 1980s, open capital markets is beginning to fracture. With disappointing growth rates across the western world, nations are no longer willing to sacrifice national interests for global growth; nor are their leaders able--or willing--to sell the idea of pursuing a global agenda of prosperity to their citizens. A 'them-and-us' political narratives re-emerge, isolationism and protectionism are making an unwelcome return." "Combining historical analysis with current affairs--including both Brexit an Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 US presidential election--economist Stephen D. King provide a provocative and engaging account of why globalization is being rejected, what a world ruled by rival states with conflicting aims might look like, and how the pursuit of nationalist agendas could result in a race to the bottom. King argues that a rejection of globalization and a return to 'autarky' will risk economic and political conflict, and uses lessons from history to gauge how best to avoid the worst possible outcomes." From the text: "I make six key claims: First, economic progress that reaches beyond borders is not, in any way, an inescapable truth. Globalization can all too easily go into reverse. Second, technology can both enable globalization and destroy it. Third, economic development that reduces inequality between nation states but appears to increase it within those states inevitably creates a tension between a desire for overall gains in global living standards and a yearning for economic and social stability at home.  Fourth, the desire for domestic stability may be undermined by huge twenty-first migration flows. Fifth, the international institutions that have helped govern globalization's advance are losing their credibility: rightly or wrongly, globalization is increasingly seen to work for the few, not for the many. Creating new twenty-first-century institutions to combat this perception will not be easy however, particularly given the potential clash in values between what might be described as Western democracies and Eastern autocracies. Sixth (and as the Western powers are belatedly beginning to recognize), there is more than one version of globalization. As US relative economic power declines, so other nascent superpowers will be looking to reshape the world around them in ways that serve their own interests and reflect their own histories. If the Cold War was ultimately a binary rival, the twenty-first century is likely to see multiple rivalries, closer in nature to the imperial disputes of the nineteenth century. Indeed, President Xi's speech in Davos in January 2017 only served to reinforce the sense that globalization is up for grabs." Id. at 6-7.).

Stephen D. King, Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2010) (From the book jacket: "As the economic giants of Asia and elsewhere have re-awakened, Western leaders have increasingly struggled to maintain economic stability. . . King . . . suggests that the decades ahead will see a major redistribution of wealth and power across the globe that will force consumers in the US and Europe to stop living beyond their means. . . [N]ew patterns of trade have left the West increasingly dependent on risky financial services. Unless things change drastically, King argues, the increasing power of emerging markets, when coupled with an increasingly anachronistic system of global governance, will result in greater instability and income equality, and the risk of a major dollar decline, And as Western populations age and emerging economies develop further, the social and political consequences may be alarming for citizens who have grown accustomed to living in prosperity." From the text: "China is now actively promoting the renminbi's role as an alternative reserve currency to the [US [dollar. Admittedly, it's still early days. However, China has seen a blossoming of bilateral currency swaps deals with, among others, Indonesia, Belarus and Argentina. . . China will increasingly be able to conduct trade with other nations--notably those in the emerging world--in its own currency and not in dollars. State capitalism isn't just a matter of the ownership of foreign assets; it can also be used to strike bilateral trade and financial deals between nations and avoid too much concern about market forces. By so doing, it threatens the multilateral arrangements that have increasingly governed the global economic system since the 1950s." Id. at at 209. Note: One should probably view many of the non-domestic actions (e.g., trade, climate change) taken by the Trump administration as accelerating, though willful ignorance, this process of diminishing US place as a global leader.).

Stephen D. King, When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Alliance (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("Yet even with all these reforms, the risk of financial collapse will remain. Systemic financial failures are no different from systemic medical failures . . . Systemic failures in any walk of life are precisely those that few individuals can rely be held responsible for. To deal with these kinds of failures, prevention is a much better option than any eventual cure." "We're given plenty of eduction regarding our physical health . . . " "In the financial world, however, there is no education whatsoever. It's a jungle out there and, in the jungle, the fat cats always seem to win. Leveling the playing field will hardly be easy but, at the very least, financial education should be stepped up. People able to understand what it means to save for a pension, and the risks that might be involved. They should understand how mortgages work, including the simple distinction between repayment and interest-only mortgages. They should know the fee structures charged by financial intermediaries and be able to shop around for the best deal. And they should have some idea of the safety of the financial institutions that are receiving their money: it wouldn't be difficult for regulators to provide 'health ratings' for banks based on, for for example, their loan to deposit ratios or their level of capital (in the same way that all restaurants in New York have to prove a visible hygiene rating). People might then this twice before leaving their lifetime savings with an internet bank that just happened to offer a higher deposit rate than rival institutions. It would be wrong to tell people what to do but there is no reason why they cannot be nudge in the right direction." Id. at 257-258.).

Krishan Kumar, Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (The Progeny of the Roman Empire: The Ottoman Empire; The Habsburg Empire; The Russian and Soviet Empires; The British Empire; The French Empire).

Lee Kuan Yew, The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World, Interviews and Selections by Graham Allison. Robert D. Blackmail, & Ali Wyne, Foreword by Henry A. Kissinger (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belfer Center for International Security/ The MIT Press, 2013) ("China is sucking the Southeast Asian countries into its economic system because of its vast market and growing purchasing power, Japan and South Korea will inevitability be sucked in as well. It just absorbs countries without having to use force. China's neighbors want the U.S. to stay engaged in the Asia-Pacific so that they are not hostages to China. The U.S. should have established a free-trade area with Southeast Asia 30 years ago, well before the Chinese magnet began to pull the region into its orbit.  If it had done so, its purchasing power would now be so much greater than it is, and all of the Southeast Asian countries would have been linked to the US, economy rather than depending on China's. Economics set underlying trends. China's growing economic sway will be very difficult to fight." "China's emphasis is on expanding their influence through the economy. In the geopolitical sense, they are more concerned now with using diplomacy in their foreign policy, not force." Id. at 6-7. However, note the administration of Donald Trump, rather foolishly, has pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), not to mention the Paris Climate Accord, essentially conceding international leadership and opening the door (further) for China.).

Justin Yifu Lin & Celestin Monga, Beating the Odds: Jump-Starting Developing Countries (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Contrary to conventional wisdom, countries that ignite a process of rapid economic growth almost always do so while lacking what experts say are the essential preconditions for development, such as good infrastructure and institutions. In Beating the Odds, two of the world's leading development economists begin with this paradox to explain what is wrong with mainstream developmental thinking--and to offer a practical blueprint for moving poor countries out of the low-income trap regardless of their circumstances.").

Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (London: Little, Brown, 2006) ("India and Chine both possess a third attribute that was lacking in Britain but was present to some extent in the United States--a large population. This can be both a strength and a weakness. The population density of China and India will lead to growing strains on their environments and on their scarce supplies of arable land. Unless they seriously qualify the nature of their economic growth, this could lead to large-scale environmental crises as the century progresses. But if the two Asian giants can sustain their economic growth rates, then sheer weight of numbers will ensure they overtake all other economies, including eventually the United States--although that will take several decades longer. [Note: China has already replaced the United States as the world largest economy.] However, the disadvantages of having a large population could check and even reverse this advantage if the two countries permit indefinite environmental degradation. This would also impose an unbearable cost on everyone else. Laos and Bolivia can degrade their resources as much as they wish. But if China and India fail to take environmental sustainability into account over the coming decades, they will export their suffering to the rest of the world. . . [I]t is worth mentioning in passing that America, China and India--the large nation states to which the twenty-first century is expected to belong--are today probably the three most important obstacles to an international consensus to tackle global warming." Id. at 263.).

Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) ("On, or about, January 2017, the global economy changed guard. The venue was Davos, the annual gathering of the world's wealthiest recyclers of conventional wisdom--and consistently one of the last places to anticipate what is going to happen next. This time was different. The assembled hedge-fund tycoons, Silicon Valley data executives, management gurus and government officials were treated to a preview of how rapidly the world is about to change. Xi Jinping, the president of China, had come to the Swiss Alpine resort to defend the global trade system against the attacks of the newly elected US president, Donald Trump. With minimal fanfare, the leader of the world's largest developing economy took over the role of defending the global trading system in the teeth of protectionist war cries from the word's most developed nation. It portended a new era in which China would aspire to be the responsible global citizens. The bad guys were swapping places with the good. 'Some people blame economic globalization for the chaos in our world.' Xi told Davos. 'We should not retreat into the harbour whenever we encounter a storm or we will never reach the other shore . . . No one will emerge as a winner from a trade war.'" Id. at 19-20. "[T]he most moral threat to the Western idea of progress comes from within. Donald Trump, and his counterparts in Europe, did not cause the crisis of democratic liberals. They are a symptom. [] Since the of the millennium, and particularly over the last decade, no fewer than twenty-five democracies have failed around the world, three of them in Europe (Russia, Turkey, and Hungary). [] Is the Western god of liberal democracy failing? The backlash of the West's middle classes, who are the bigger losers in a global economy that has been rapidly converging, but still has decades to go, has been brewing since the early 1990s. In Britain we call them the 'left-behinds'. In France, they are the 'couches moyennes'. In America, they are the 'squeezed middle'. A better term is the 'precariat'--those whose lives are dominated by economic insecurity. Their weight of numbers is growing. So, too, is their impatience. Barrington Moore, the American sociologist, famously said, 'No bourgeoisie, no democracy.' In the coming years we will find out f he was right." Id. at 11-12. ).

Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) ('The truth is that America's stock has been falling around the world for quite a white. At home, opinion polls register mounting disappointment. . . . Simply proclaiming the superiority of the American model is not helping anyone's credibility. . . . Were America's politicos to peer closer into American hearts, I imagine they would be more circumspect. They would find rising fear and anger. They would also come across a growing sense of boredom; Americans are increasingly turned off by politics And they would surely meet families . . . who know the difference between saying and doing but who fear their country has forgotten." Id. at 281.) )

Duff McDonald, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite (New York: Harper, 2017) (I think this passage sums up the most important takeaway from the book. Its essence applies not simply to elite MBAs, but also to elite JDs. And it does not simply apply to the elites, it applies to all of us in both our professional and personal lives, as if there is a difference. "'What I think HBS does, and does very well,' says [Casey] Gerald, 'is train people to in situations of ambiguity, to take imperfect information, uncertain outcomes, and tight deadlines and figure out what to do in the most effective, efficient, and powerful way. But the tragedy of the Business School is that you can use that ability to do two things at once, to build great companies and destroy the planet in the process. Or its people. Robert S. McNamara was an HBS alum. He helped turn around Ford Motor Company, and then went on to wreak destruction in Vietnam. We have to have a conversation about which one we're doing--and why we should be doing one and not the other. There's nothing ambiguous about it.'" Id. at 3-4.).

Gary Saul Morson & Morton Schapiro: Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities (Princeton & ford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (There are numerous passages in this book where one could readily substitute the word "law" for the word "economics" and the  authors' point would remain pertinent. Thus, one might take my including this book on this list as a suggestion that law students, and members of the law profession generally, can learn a lot from the humanities and from reading great works of literature. Seven-five years ago this would have been obvious, but legal education has lost it way, and what was once obvious is now obscure. Many lawyers today are, at best technicians, showing very little capacity for empathy. From the text: [R]eading great literature is unlike any other university-taught discipline, in that it involves constant practice in empathy. Theories of ethics may or may not recommend empathy, but learning those theories does not require practice in empathy, as reading great novels necessarily does. Of one has not identified with Anna Karenina, one has not really read Anna Karenina." "When you read a great novel and identify with its characters, you spend hundreds of hours engaging with them--feeling from within what it is like to be someone else. You see the world from the perspective of someone of a different social class, gender, religion, culture, sexuality, moral understanding, or countless other factors that differentiate people and human experience. And as characters interact, and you identify with each in turn, you see how each perspective may look to those with another. You even learn to understand misunderstanding. Tracing the heroine's thoughts as she thinks them, you get inside her head, which you cannot do with people in real life. If she makes a foolish decision you wince. You live her life vicariously, and in doing so you not only feel what she feels but also reflect on the feelings, consider the morality of the actions to which they lead, and, with practice, acquire the wisdom to appreciate real people in all their complexity." Id. 12-13. Perhaps the explanation for why so many of us today live in social, political, intellectual, or whatever, bubbles, with an inability or unwillingness to see things from there others' perspectives, is in part our having abandoned liberal education and the reading and studying great works of literature. So, I hope the law students and young lawyers, who are reading this, read or reread their Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Austen, Shakespeare,  etc. t is not to late to develop one capacity for empathy.)

Dorit Rabinyan, All the Rivers: A Novel, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen (New York: Random House, 2017) (From the book jacket: "Banned from classrooms by Israel's Ministry of Education, Dorit Rabinyan's remarkable novel contains multitudes. A bold portrayal of the strains--and delights--of a forbidden relationship, All the Rivers (published in Israel as Borderlife) is a love story and a war story, a New York story and a Middle East story, an unflinching foray into the forces that bind us and divide us. 'The land is the same land,' Hilmi reminds Liat. 'In the end all the rivers flow into the same sea.'" Also see  James B. Stewart, "Profit or Loss," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/30/2017.).

Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008) ("If war has been mankind's most powerful negative urge, then the universal agreements that limit the horrors of war and protect civilians have been the hallmark of progress and have reflected man's deeper instincts for civilization. The Geneva Conventions may not have halted the Jewish holocaust, Rwandan genocide, or terrorism but they have given us a code of conduct by which we can judge the actions of our leaders in the desperate times of war. That is why the decision by President Bush on February 7, 2002, to deny captured al Qaeda, Taliban, and other terrorist suspects prisoner of war (POW) status or any access to justice was a step backward for the United States and for mankind--one that has haunted the United States, its allies, and the international legal system ever since. Whereas in the West it created a furious debate about civil liberties, in the Muslim world it further entrenched dictatorship and abuse of civilians." "For the greatest power on earth to wage its 'war on terrorism' by rejecting the very rules of war it is a signatory to, denying justice at home, undermining the U.S. Constitution, and the pressuring its allies to do the same set in motion a devastating denial of civilized instincts." Id. at 293.).

Bruce Riedel, JFK's Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, The CIA, and the Sino-India War (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015).

Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2011) ("Replacing our economic world on a safer footing requires a better understanding of the fragile balance between markets and governance. I will offer an alternative narrative in this book based on two simple ideas. First, markets and governance are complements, not substitutes. If you want more and better markets, you have to have more (and better) governance. Markets work best not where states are weakest, but where they are strong. Second, capitalism does not come with a unique model. Economic prosperity and stability can be achieved through different combinations of institutional arrangements in labor markets, finance, corporate governance, social welfare, and other areas. Nations are likely to---and indeed are entitled to--make varying choices among these arrangements depending on their needs and values." ". . . Trite as the may sound as stated, these ideas have enormous implications for globalization and for democracy, and for how hard we can take each in the presence of the other. Once you understand that markets require public institutions of governance and regulation in order to function well, and further, you accept that nations may have different preferences over the shape that those institutions and regulations should take, you have started to tell a story that leads you to radically different endings." "In particular, you begin to understand what I call the fundamental political trilemma of the world economy: we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy , national determination, and economic globalization. If we want to push globalization further, we have to give up either the nation state or democratic politics. If we want to maintain and deepen democracy, we have to choose between the nation state and international economic integration, we have choose between deepening democracy and deepening globalization, Our troubles have their roots in our reluctance to face unto these ineluctable choices." Id. at xviii-xix.).

Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and The United States, 1939-1950 (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) ("On 21 February 1930, a few months after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain traveled to Munich in an attempt to appease Adolf Hitler, the royal Institute of International Affairs in London held a panel discussion about world order. The main speaker, Lionel Curtis, argued that interdependency was the main characteristic of the modern world; 'What one small country, a Serbia or a Czechoslovakia, does or leaves undone instantly affects the whole of human society'. He added that in spite of the fact that 'socially and economically human society is now one closely integrated unit', the political order reflected fragmentation rather than unity. His conclusion was clearly stated: 'I am now convinced that a world commonwealth embracing all nations and kindreds [sic] and tongues is the goal at which we must aim before we can hope to move to a higher plane of civilization. Indeed, I will now go so far as to say that unless we conceive that goal in time, and take steps to approach it, our present stage of civilisation is doomed to collapse'. Curtis's address was followed by a lively debate about the merits of is suggestions . . . " Id. at 1. "The Emergence of Globalism is an intellectual history of the complex and nonlinear genealogy of globalism in mid-century visions of he world order. Ever since the outbreak of the war, American, British, and emigre intellectuals had diagnosed the emergence of globalism as the defining condition of the post-war era. Their proposals for ordering the post-war world envisaged competing schemes of global orders motivated by concerns for the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty and diversity, and the decline of the imperial system. In this book, I explore the languages employed to outline the meaning of the 'global' as a political idea to shed light on the configurations of 'world order' as a normative foundation for geopolitical, economic, and legal structures." Id. at 2. "'Practical men in positions of power', Barbara Wooton wrote in her memoir, 'can always demonstrate the impracticability of idealistic proposals by the simple device of making sure that these are never tried.'." Id. at 272.).

Steven B. Smith, Political Philosophy (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("I have written this book as an introduction to political philosophy rather than the more conventional history of political thought. What I understand by political philosophy is . . . a rare and distinctive form of thinking and is not to be confused either with the study of political language in general or with the dry and desiccated form of 'concept analysis' so prominent in the 1950s and '60s. Political philosophy is the investigation of the permanent problems of political life--problems like 'Who ought to govern?' 'How ought conflict to be managed?' 'How should a citizen and a statesman be educated?'--that every society must confront." Id. at ix.  On "transpolitial cosmopolitanism": "The task of becoming a citizen of the world is no easy business. It requires a kind of abstraction form the comfort and security of the familiar." Id. at 246.).

James Stavridis, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans (New York: Penguin Press, 2017) ("The Trans-Pacific Partnership and the resulting economic interconnections will be helpful strategically. The big question over time will be whether or not to encourage China to participate. It is too soon to tell, frankly, whether or not China's intentions in this region will permit recognition of international norms, and maritime and littoral boundaries. If China truly intends to attempt to claim the South China Sea as its territorial waters, the prospects are slim for an accommodation." Id. at 196.).

Siep Stuurman, The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017) (From the book jacket: "For much of history, strangers were routinely classified as barbarians and inferiors, seldom as fellow human beings. The notion of a common humanity was counterintuitive and thus had to be invented. Siep Stuurman traces evolving ideas of human equality and difference across continents and civilizations from ancient times to the present. "Despite humans' deeply ingrained bias against strangers, migration and cultural blending have shaped human experience from the earliest times. As travelers crossed frontiers and came into contact with unfamiliar peoples and customs, frontiers experiences generated not only hostility but also empathy and understanding. Empires sought to civilize their 'barbarians,' but in all historical eras critics of empire were able to imagine how the subjected peoples made short shrift of imperial arrogance, "Drawing on the views of a global mix of thinkers--Homer, Confucius, Herodotus, the medieval Muslim scholar Ibn Khaldun, the Haitian writer Antenor Firmin, the Filipino nationalist Jose Rizal, and others--The Invention of Humanity surveys the great civilizations frontiers of history, from the interaction of nomadic and sedentary societies in ancient Eurasia and Africa to Europeans' first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the New World, to the Enlightenment invention of universal 'modern equality.' Against a backdrop of two millennia of thinking about common humanity and equality, Stuurman concludes with a discussion of present-day debates about human rights and the 'clash of civilizations.'").

Rachel L. Wellhausen, The Shield of Nationality: When Governments Break Contracts with Foreign Firms (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2015).

Hugh Wilford, America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2013) (From the book jacket: "Hugh Wilford reveals the surprising history of the CIA's pro-Arab operations in the 1940s and 50s by tracing the work of the agency's three most influential--and colorful--officers in the Middle East.  Kermit 'Kim' Roosevelt . . . Archie Roosevelt . . . Miles Copeland . . . With their deep knowledge of Middle Eastern affairs, the three men were heirs to an American missionary tradition that engaged Arabs and Muslims with respect and empathy. Yet there were fascinated by imperial intrigue, and were eager to play a modern rematch of the 'Great Game.' the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control over central Asia. Despite their good intentions, these 'Arabists' propped up authoritarian regimes, attempted secretly to sway public opinion  in America against support for the new state of Israel, and staged coups that irrevocably destabilized the nations with which they empathized. Their efforts, and ultimate failure, would shape the course of US-Middle Eastern relations for decades to come." From the text: "Evidently, the era of the CIA Arabists was foundational to the current American relationship with the Middle East. At a time of renewed and profound flux in the Arab world, it would serve all those concerned with US policy in that region to study the early moment carefully, to understand better the underlying historical forces, domestic as well as foreign, cultural and emotional as well as political, that have shaped the fraught American-Middle Eastern encounter ever since." Id. at 299.).

Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (New York: PublicAffiars, 2017) ("Wherever it is invoked, the idea of Britain's absolute sovereign control over anything, including just itself, conveys a sense of the country as an embattled and isolated, surrounded by chaotic forces it cannot deal with, imbued with the idea it can only service by building defensive walls to protect and defend itself. As in India, it is an idea based on delusion. In fact, Britain has never done anything alone. The history of Britain itself has been shaped by global trade, and by friendship and conflict beyond the places its empire dominated. Britain itself is made up of different interests, towns and countries and identities; it has been most successful when authority has be exercised far from Westminster, and then coordinated by an inclusive form of political leadership. In practice, the absolute sovereignty of the monarch and Parliament is not the same thing as effective power. There are better ways Britain can engage with itself and with the world." Id. at 4990500.) Perhaps this is a cautionary tale for the United States, which has suffered, and continues to suffer, from its own grand delusions.).

Thomas J. Wright, All Measures Short of War: The Contest for the Twenty-First Century and the Future of American Power (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2017) (From the book Jacket: "The two decades after the Cold War saw unprecedented cooperation between the major powers as the world converged on a model of liberal international order. Now, great power competition is back, and the liberal order is in jeopardy. Russia and China are increasingly seeking to establish and maintain spheres of influence. The Middle East appears to be unraveling. The European Union is on the brink of disintegration. President Trump has proclaimed an America First foreign policy and the end of U.S. global leaders. What will great power competition look like in the decades ahead? Will the liberal world order survive? What impact will nationalism and rising tensions have on globalization? In this book Thomas Wright explains how major powers will compete fiercely even as they try to avoid war with each other--responsible competition--to navigate these challenges and strengthen the liberal order." From the text: "The title of this book, All Measures Short of War, comes form U.S. strategy in the early years of World War II, when President Roosevelt sought to help Britain in every way he could without actually fighting Germany. Today's great powers will compete vigorously with each other in order to shape, transform, or undermine the world order, but they all hope and intend to avoid a major war. The risk and cost are simply too great and the potential benefit too small. Of course, war could still  occur inadvertently. Perhaps a leader will take a chance, thinking he or she can keep any war limited, but miscalculate. Or a leader may misunderstand the intentions of another and overreact. But as the United States, China, Russia, and several others engage in geopolitical competition with their rivals, they will do so with the intention of winning in peacetime. They will use their military to establish positions of strength; they will employ the tools of diplomatic coercion [Note, however, Trump has gutted and muted the State Department.]; they will seek to win the hearts and minds of other nations [Note, however, Trump has insulted several world leaders and embraced and sang the praises of some authoritarian leaders.]; they will ruthlessly exploit each other's weaknesses; they will use economic leverage for geopolitical ends; and they may countenance the use of force against third parties or even fight each other in proxy wars." Id. at 32-33. "Trump is the first president who campaigned against the liberal international order that the United States created after World War II and has led ever since. Every other president accepted the parameters of postwar U.S. strategy, but Trump argued that American leadership of the order was hurting the United States." Id. at 224. "Four years of American nationalism will weaken the liberal order. The crisis of American leadership is merely the most dramatic example of rising populism and nationalism in what West. The year 2016 was truly an annus horribilis for internationalists." Id. at 225. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that, if the U.S. is not going to lead the liberal order, it get out of the way.).

Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge, January--March 1961) (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961) ("Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rest. I look forward to a time when the historian and sociologists and political thinkers of the English-speaking world owl regain their courage for that task." "It is, however, not the waning faith in reason among the intellectuals and the political thinkers of the English-speaking world which perturbs me most, but the loss of the pervading sense of a world in perpetual motion. This seems at first paradoxical; for rarely has so much superficial talk been heard of changes going on around us. But the significant thing is that change is no longer thought of as achievement, as opportunity, a progress, but as an object of fear. When our political  and economic pundits prescribe, they have nothing to offer us but the warning to distrust radical and far-reaching ideas, to shun anything that savors of revolution, and to advance--if advance we must--as slowly and cautiously as we can. At a moment when the world is changing its shape more rapidly and more radically than at any time in the last 400 years, this seems to me a singular blindness, which gives ground for apprehension, not that the world-wide movement will be stayed, but that this country--and perhaps other English-speaking countries--may lag behind the general advance, and relapse helplessly and uncomplainingly into some nostalgic backwater."" Id. at 150-151.).