Dower, John W., Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (New York & London: Norton/The New Press, 2010) ("It is human nature to judge others by their deeds and ourselves by our words or professed ideals; or, at least, to sift through our deeds and romanticize them." Id. at 309. "Faith-based thinking excludes whole worlds from close examination. Truly critical appraisal of one's own assumptions and acts is beyond the pale. At the same time, the circumstances, attitudes, and capabilities of others are given short shrift. This seems counterintuitive where policy making affecting war and peace is concerned, since the essence of strategic planning presumably is to know the enemy while also knowing and acknowledging one's own flaws and vulnerabilities. In practice this is accomplished imperfectly." Id at 440."Fundamentally, terror is the state of mind both terrorists and high-tech strategic planner seek to create in the collective consciousness of their adversaries, demoralizing masses and prompting leaders to change their policies. 'Shock and awe' is not just the catchphrase for a lesson strategists in Washington drew from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and incorporated in the 'revolution in military affairs' that became the idee fixe of Rumsfeld's Pentagon. It is also a practical weapon of the weak. The Japanese played at this when they attempted to deter the U.S. advance in their homeland by adopting the suicidal policies of the kamikaze and no-surrender defense of island redoubts. The objective was to unnerve U.S. forces and shock the U.S. leadership into some form of negotiated peace settlement short of unconditional surrender. Although this ultimately backfired, the fear these tactics instilled among the fighting force that had to confront them was enormous." "September 11, by contrast, was a stunningly successful exercise in psychological warfare at an almost incomparably lower level of violence. Americans almost literally lived in terror through the remaining seven-plus years of the Bush presidency, and their government and way of life became altered for the worse. This objective of disorienting and unsettling the enemy through a signal act of destruction is the import of the disregarded pre-9-11 warnings that A Qaeda was planning a 'Hiroshima' in the United States. As it turned out, it was not the terrorists but rather the planners in Washington--who seized on the same examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to elevate 'shock and awe' to the level of doctrine, and predicted that this would shock Iraq and the Iraqi people into complaisant 'regime change'--who turned out to be dreaming." Id. at 300. On the lack of critical thinking: "Researchers accustomed to sifting through the old-fashioned typescript and carbon-copy documents of the World War II era encounter a conspicuous time warp when it comes to the fragmentary accessible documents of planning 'regime change' in Iraq. There are indeed cogent reports and papers. There is also an addiction to 'bullet point' list making that reflect both the technical advances of a PowerPoint age and the scattershot thinking that too often accompanies this, confusing inventories of discrete 'points' and queries with careful deliberation and clear conclusions. Lists, memos, working papers, and endless rounds of PowerPoint and slide presentations do not in themselves constitute coherent policy formulation. Nor do 'plans' approved at high levels that in practice are ambiguous and even internally contradictory . . . . While the planning for combat operations was meticulous, the attention devoted to operational preparation for post-combat stabilization and reconstruction rarely went beyond the bullet-point level." Id. at 344-345.).
Ferguson, Niall, High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (New York: The Penguin Group, 2010) ("A lifelong immersion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German literature is not likely to make a man an optimist. 'I have been inclined towards pessimism throughout most of my life and especially since 1930,' Warburg once admitted. 'My attitude towards my various activities has been and continue to be based on the assumption that - with extremely few exceptions - matters will not go in accordance with [the] programme and that an unfavourable or unreasonable outcome is more likely than the other way round . . . accompanied on a less conscious level by some irrational hope to the effect that things may not turn out quite as badly as my rational considerations anticipate.' But Warburg's pessimism was not so much a reflection of cultural despair as a hedge against disappointment. In times of crisis, he wrote in 1942, 'the pessimist comes into his own': 'Others varying from the normally confident to the criminally complacent, are shaken, gloomy, and depressed. We who are habitually apprehensive are only a little more so now and, in comparison both to the other now to ourselves in other times, seem almost optimistic. We haven't so far to fall and, therefore, do not get bruised.' Warburg's working assumption was always that Western civilization was doomed to be swept away. . . " Id. at 407. Also see the reviews, "Taking the Long View: Siegmund Warburg," The Economist, June 26th 2010, at 87; and Liaquat Ahamed, "Yesterday's Banker," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 8/1/2010.).
Friedman, Milton and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 (National Bureau of Economic Research) (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1965) ("True, also, it is often impossible and always difficult to identify accurately the effects of the actions of the monetary authorities. Their actions are taken amidst many other circumstances, and it may not be at all clear whether their actions or some other circumstances produced the results observed. This is equally true of the experiments of physical scientists. No experiment is completely controlled, and most experiments add little to tested and confirmed knowledge about the subject of experiment. It is the rare crucial experiment that throws a flood of light on its subject--a light that blinds us to many less important experiments that were necessary before the one crucial experiment could be made." Id. at 688.).
Hanson, Victor Davis, The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (New York, Berlin & London: Bloomsbury Press, 2010) ("Two themes resonate throughout the book: the unchanging face of war and the tragic nature of its persistence over the ages. Despite the purported novelty of today's so-called war on terror, and the public furor and controversies that arose over the wars of this new millennium, conflict in the resent age still remains understandable to us through careful study of the past." Id. at xi. "To sum up the Hellenic view of war and the lessons we may earn from the Greeks: Conflict is omnipresent. It is often irrational in nature and more a result of strong emotions than of material needs. Preparedness is more a deterrent than is empathy, understanding, or demonstrations of good intentions. War is sometimes won or lost as much by confidence in one's culture as by military assets themselves. It is often not a question of a choice between good or bad but between bad or worse. And war should be judged moral or immoral by the circumstances in which it breaks out and the conditions under which it is waged, rather than by the fact that violence is employed." Id. at 48-49. "The entrepreneurial genius of Silicon Valley and its epigones, coupled with the engineering and technological savvy of our universities, has ensured space-age weaponry far in advance of anything seen abroad. But the very temptation to constantly evolve and improve this technology has meant that we are now caught in the position of having ever fewer near-perfect arms rather than a plethora of very good weapons that will do. Given the horrors of 1941-43, when prewar disarmament ensured that thousands of American soldiers were killed in substandard tanks and planes, and given American chauvinism that we must be 'best' in the world in terms of our weaponry's performance, it is even harder for war planners to adopt a 'good enough' attitude that would accept munitions far better than those available to our enemies, but not as good as the United States in theory could design and produce, albeit in smaller numbers." "Americans apparently cannot fathom the idea that a ragtag bearded jihadist, without formal education and burdened by seventh-century cultural prejudices, is often in fact an adroit strategic thinker, with an uncanny understanding of American national character, both our strengths and fallibilities. He rightly senses that a roadside bomb and a propane tank can not only take out a four-million-dollar tank but also, more important, cause a level of frustration and demoralization even greater than the material loss. To resolve this paradox of cost and protection, planners will have to find a way to make more weapons more cheaply, while at the same time reducing the requirement for more manpower--and the concurrent rising risk of greater exposure to death and dismemberment. And yet, as we have seen in prior chapters, there is no substitute for manpower on the ground, despite the killing power of new high-tech weaponry." Id. at 151-152. A short, worthy read.).
Immerman, Richard H., Empires for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2010) ("In many respects America, highlighted by the centrality of liberty to its political culture, is exceptional. For that reason the role that Americans' sense of exceptionalism has played in subverting the concept of Empire for Liberty is all the more tragic. Both the architects and supporters of the growth of American empire held that by expanding U.S. territory, influence, and control Americans brought greater liberty to others even as they protected and increased their own. But therein lay an inherent contradiction. If Americans were exceptional, only they could fully appreciate liberty's blessings, constructively contribute to and participate in liberal institutions of government, and recognize that with liberty came responsibility. Non-Americans, whether because of race, religion, 'national character,' or similar attributes, could not. Hence American campaigns to spread liberty inexorably generated conflict with peoples who were insufficiently 'exceptional.' They had to be conquered, subjugated, or worse. An American Empire for liberty became something of an oxymoron." "Until the Global War on Terror, most Americans did not see this tension between America's empire and its commitment to liberty. Most Americans were inner-directed, and focused on pursuing their own lives, livelihoods, and liberties. Unless directly affected, they paid scant attention to external affairs, defined as external to their particular and often parochial circumstances and interest. . . ." Id. at 233.).
Johnson, Chalmers, Dismantling the Empire: America's Last Best Hope (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010) ("As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both." Id. at 34. "There is something absurd and inherently false about one country trying to impose its system of government or its economic institutions on another. Such an enterprise amounts to a dictionary definition of imperialism. When what's at issue is 'democracy,' you have the fallacy of using the end to justify the means (making war on those to be democratized), and in the process the leaders of the missionary country are invariably infected with the sins of hubris, racism, and arrogance." Id. at 52. "We Americans have never outgrown the narcissistic notion that the rest of the world wants (or should want) to emulate us." Id at 53. "The world's top military spenders and the approximate amounts each country currently budgets for its military establishment are:" United States (FY08 budget), $623 billion); China (2004), $65 billion; Russia, $50 billion; France (2005), $45 billion; United Kingdom, $42.8 billion; Japan (2007), $41.75 billion; Germany (2003), $35.1 billion; Italy (2003), $28.2 billion; South Korea (2003), $21.1 billion; and India (2005 est.), 19 billion. "World total military expenditures (2004 est.), $1,100 billion . . . . World total (minus the United States), $500 billion." Id. at 140-141.).
Kagan, Robert A., Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (Cambridge, Ma. & London, England, Harvard U. Press, 2001) (" '[A]dversarial legalism'--a method of policymaking and dispute resolution with two salient characteristics. The first is formal legal contestation--competing interests and disputants readily invoke legal rights, duties, and procedural requirements, back by recourse to formal law enforcement, strong legal penalties, litigation, and/or judicial review. The second is litigation activism--a style of legal contestation in which the assertion of claims, the search for controlling legal arguments, and the gathering and submission of evidence are dominated not by judges or government officials but by disputing parties or interests, acting primarily through lawyers. Organizationally, adversarial legalism typically is associated with and is embedded in decisonmaking institutions in which authority is fragmented and in which hierarchical control is relatively weak." Id. at 9.).
Manne, Henry G., The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne, Volume 1: The Economics of Corporations and Corporate Law with a general introduction by Fred S. McChesney, and edited with an introduction by Henry N. Butler (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) (I am critical of the the tendency in certain corners of the various 'law and economics' approaches to suggest that all (or most) problems in law may be completely understood and, eventually, resolved by appeal exclusively to economics and markets. Economics is certainly a very powerful and useful tool/language for helping clarifying and analyzing issues, and for eliminating suggested solutions which simply will not work. Yet, economics will provide the complete and satisfactory answers to only a very few of the questions and problems addressed by law. The shortcoming is the shortcoming of 'true believers': thinking a particular way is 'THE WAY.' That said, no one can seriously deny the importance of Henry Manne's body of work to legal analysis. Law students interested in corporate law (including mergers and acquisitions, corporate governance, securities regulations, etc.) should make themselves familiar with Manne's body of work. From the Manne's article, "Current Views on the 'Modern Corporation", reprinted in this volume: "It may be a gross exaggeration, but it would seem that the single weakest factor in the current intellectual development of a corporate philosophy is the lack of a coherent theory of how corporations should work when they have grown large. And to gain this understanding, it is necessary to learn something of the pressures and forces which have really molded the form as we know it today. . . . It is not enough to say, as Berle did, that the course of corporation legal history has been simply a steady decline in control over corporate powers and management prerogatives. We need to know why that decline took place and what felt need was being answered by each change in the rules. A 'bad man' theory of history is never very satisfying and most often misleading. The need is for a consistent theory of legal and economic history which can give a framework to such a study. Then we will be in a position at least to describe the modern institution, to see its weaknesses and correct them." Id. at 22, 58.).
Manne, Henry G., The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne, Volume 2: Insider Trading edited with an introduction by Stephen M. Bainbridge (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) ("The fundamental approach of lawyers to issues . . . is quite different from that of economists. The lawyers' approach to most questions reflects the centuries-old tradition of viewing problems in the context of a case or lawsuit, the arena for settling disputes between two live human beings. Indeed , much of the common law (which is most of American law prior to the twentieth century) is the formalization of rules governing individuals in their personal relationships. Perhaps the only important exceptions to this statement in the common law are the archaic rules of real property and the uniquely developed commercial law." "Thus when lawyers, judges, and law professors are faced with issues of broad social or economic consequences, their tendency is to approach the subject with relationships between specific individuals in mind. Their acceptance or rejection of a practice will reflect notion of the fairness of the transaction simply from the point of view of the two individuals involved. It is not difficult to see why lawyers have generally concluded that there is something unfair (primarily in the sense of 'unequal') about insiders with undisclosed good news buying shares from existing shareholders." "Economists think with a different tradition behind them. Theirs is perhaps most scientific of the social sciences. Here the word scientific must connote objectivity and moral detachment, as well as systematic verification of results. Economists tend to view any controversy as reflecting a platonic, ideal conflict. The question for an economist is rarely one of the mutual fairness of a transaction between individual parties, He is not a specialist in matters of individual morality. Fairness ordinarily connotes to economists the propriety of allocation of resources or income among large, distinguishable bodies or groups of individuals. The the economist individuals are a fungible commodity, each substitutable for another. The economist, viewing the issue of insider trading, will ask how all shareholders are affected financially by the practice whether it results in a desirable allocation of resources, and whether the return to insiders reflects a competitive or a monopoly gain." Id. at 10-11. That is, here, a telling, yet misleading characterization of how both lawyers and economists think. Yes, practicing lawyers (and, even here, mainly litigators) and judges think in terms of disputes between specific individuals because, guess what, there is a specific dispute between specific individuals to be resolved. Manne is implicitly referring to lawyers in their capacity as 'attorneys,' i.e., lawyers who are in specific representing representing clients, the courts, etc. In that capacity lawyers-as-attorneys are less engaged in the broader, and perhaps grander, questions of the nature and role of law in society. Yet, lawyers who seriously reflective on legal rules (e.g., the more intellectually inclined of judges, lawyers and law professors), rather than merely applying those rules mechanically, actively contemplate the consequences of actual, alternative, or proposed legal rules as such rules would apply to specific actual disputes, but also to merely hypothetical disputes. That is, any serious minded lawyer, judge, law professor, or law student, engages in an exploration of the contours of a legal rule. They are not being engaged in first-order legal analysis, but second- and third order meta-legal analysis, assessing the rules themselves and the nature of legal rules. Manne's assertion, "Thus when lawyers, judges, and law professors are faced with issues of broad social or economic consequences, their tendency is to approach the subject with relationships between specific individuals in mind," is misleading, if not simply false when generalized. Thinking critically about legal rules goes beyond thinking about how particular rules, statutes, judicial opinions, etc., impact the parties to a particular dispute (or assessing whether the outcome is fair as between those parties). Thinking critically about legal rules requires thinking about the broader implications of those rules, individually and collectively, on all potential disputants and on society as a whole. That is, does the rule tend to promote justice or not. As to "[e]conomists tend[ing] to view any controversy as reflecting a platonic, ideal conflict," is a practice more honored in its breach. Though it is true that economists tend to think of "individuals [as] a fungible commodity, each substitutable for another." Manne is correct on another point, however. From the essay, "Insider Trading and Law Professors": "If [law professors] have a single great responsibility beyond teaching it is to be loyal, competent, and objective critics of the establishment. Political partisanship is more destructive of honest academic endeavor than is everything else." Id. at 309, 311.).
Manne, Henry G., The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne, Volume 3: Liberty and Freedom in the Economic Ordering of Society edited with an introduction by Jonathan R. Macey (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009) (From the essay, "The Political Economy of Modern Universities": "There were significant educational effects that flowed directly from the introduction on a large scale of political forces into the world of higher education. Though the children of wealthier parents gained the advantage of this subsidized education, it was also true that there ceased to be any guiding purpose for these institutions. Especially with the constitutional inhibitions on religious training, the goal of state-operated universities became a matter of considerable uncertainty. We know, of course that the traditional liberal arts education survived in considerable measure. More important, as schools came to thought of as places where one learned a vocation, political pressures pushed schools toward the more 'practical' programs, ones designed to help students earn a living. Even today [that is, 1973], the tradition of humane letters and liberal arts is felt more strongly in the private universities than the public ones. . . . Id. at 185, 171-172. Manne is writing in 1973. Nearly forty years later, the survival of the liberal arts education even in private universities is in serious jeopardy. For a combined review of Empires in World History, The Rules of Empires (see Parson below), and Empires for Liberty (see Immerman below), see Charles S. Maier's review essay, "Empire Without End: Imperial Achievements and Ideologies," Foreign Affairs, Volume 89, no.4 (July/August 2010) at 153-159.).
McCarty, Thomas, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2009) ("Like Germany and so many other countries, the USA too has a past that is still present, that refuses to pass away. It is just this continuing presence of the past that the politics of public memory seeks to address. This type of cultural politics is, of course, not new. . . . I am attempting here only to delineate more sharply and underline more emphatically its irreplaceable role in US political life. Until legal, institutional, normal, everyday racism is publicly and widely understood to have been integral to US history and identity as a nation, Americans will likely continue to encounter major obstacles to developing the degree of transracial political solidarity required for democratic solutions to the forms of racial injustice that are its continuing legacy. Without a developed awareness of the sources and causes of US racialized practices and attitudes, Americans will likely continue to find it extremely difficult even to carry on reasonable public discussion of racially inflected problems, let alone arrive at just and feasible solutions to them". "The United States has, of course, historically been a land of immigration, and that complicates the politics of memory considerably. The diversity of subjects positions in US society is marked out not only by the differences of class, age, gender, and so forth found in any society, and by black/white racial differences and North/South sectional differences. It also includes positions connected with the conquest, settlement, and expansion of America, and with the policies and practices of US immigration. What does the politics of memory mean, for instance, to large numbers of recent immigrants from Asia and Latin America whose cultural memories take them back to other worlds? I cannot even begin to sort out these immense complications here; but I do want to argue that the responsibility to come to terms with the past of slavery and segregation is borne by the political community as a whole, regardless of ancestry. This is not only because the horrors perpetuated were generally state-sanctioned and frequently state-implemented, that is to say, were corporate evils for which there is corporate responsibility; nor only because naturalized citizens who expect to share in the inherited benefits of a continuing enterprise must also share in its inherited liabilities. It is also because immigrant groups, whatever their prior background, unavoidably become members of the same racialized polity to which all US citizens' futures are tied. More specifically, the black/white polarity as fixed the geography of the color-coded world to which successive waves of immigrants have had to adapt; there is no comprehending the bizarre ethnoracial categories into which they have been and still are forced apart from that polarization and its effective history. Thus is not at all to deny that Americans of diverse origins have heir own histories to relate and their own politics of memory to pursue. It is merely to suggest that the history of slavery and its aftermath has formed a template for those histories, that they have been shaped by it and that their fates have been inextricably entangled in the racialized politics that is its legacy." Id. at 114-115.).
Meltzer, Allan H., A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 1: 1912-1951 (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2003).
Meltzer, Allan H., A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 1: 1951-1969 (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009) (On the yin yang of regulation: "Despite its name, the voluntary credit restraint program required the Board to issue regulations specifying what is permitted. . . . " '[A]s is often the case, regulation created two incentives. One was for the regulated to invent arrangements that avoided the regulation without violating the law. The second was for the regulator to develop exceptions that suited some of its purposes. And of course, the two interacted. New exceptions created potential opportunities to avoid regulation. The Board was asked by Congress to report on or stop particular practices of this kind. One of many examples was the use of branches in Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands to attract corporate deposits by paying above regulation Q ceilings. This problem largely ended after June 1970, when some CDs of $100,000 or more became exempt from ceiling rates." Id. at 663.).
Meltzer, Allan H., A History of the Federal Reserve, Volume 2, Book 2: 1970-1986 (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009) ("Regulations are often written by lawyers who approach problems and crisis by introducing new prohibitions and restrictions. They have been slow to recognize that markets often respond to regulation by innovating to circumvent the regulation. Government securities funds and money market funds circumvented restrictions on rules that prohibited small buyers from purchasing Treasury bills and certificates of deposit that paid market interest rates. Protection of large banks as 'too big to fail' encouraged mergers and giantism. One justification for deposit rate regulation was protection of thrift institutions that lent on home mortgages. This was a costly error. Markets developed money market funds to circumvent ceiling rates at banks and thrift institutions. Inflation and regulation combined to eliminate most thrift institutions and to force removal of most interest rate restrictions. Taxpayers paid between $120 and $150 billion to cover the losses of failed thrift institutions." Id. at 1220. "Time will pass before lawyers recognize that they must rely more on incentives and less on regulation that prohibit or require action. Market discipline--which often means failures--is a costly way to teach prudent and effective risk management. The principal alternative is effective international agreed incentives. Experience with recent efforts to agree on common rules for risk management that create incentives for stabilizing behavior suggest two major impediments. Lawyers have a large role in regulation: they emphasize command and control. Devising incentives for stability in a global economy is a challenge that economists have not yet accepted." Id. at 1220-1221. I think Meltzer just called lawyers authoritarian control freaks, and harmful and incompetent authoritarian control freaks at that. And, they say that America is a nation of lawyers. Yikes! Who will save us from all them?).
Parsons, Timothy H., The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fall (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2010) ("While other scholars and public intellectuals were less bold or dogmatic in promoting an American imperial agenda, a surprising number shared the confidence that imperil methods could restore global stability if applied in conjunction with responsible international institutions. . . ." "This reading of history ignores the essential characteristic of empire: the permanent rule and exploitation of a defeated people by a conquering power. By their very nature, empires can never be--and never were--humane, liberal, or tolerant. Would-be Caesars throughout history sought glory, land, and most important, plunder. This true nature of empire was more obvious in premodern times when it was unnecessary to disguise such base motives. In recent centuries, however, imperial conquerors have tried to hide their naked self-interst by promising to rule for the good of their subjects. This was and always will be a cynical and hypocritical canard. Empire has never been more than naked self-interest masquerading as virtue." Id. at 3-4. "Modern debates over whether the United States was an empire or not overlooked the fact that successive administrations in the nineteenth century followed an inherently nonimperial assimilationist policy in gradually recognizing surviving Native Americans as citizens, albeit as inferior ones. Similarly, emancipation turned former Slaves into Americans of African descent rather than imperial subjects. Alaskans and Hawaians eventually won the same status, but these concessions were not particularly grand or magnanimous. Nevertheless, America's treatment of nonwestern peoples living within its borders was not, by strict definition, imperial. Although they suffered institutional racism and discrimination, by the twentieth century Native Americans, indigenous Hawaiians and Alaskans, and African American were citizens, not subjects. . . ." "The United States' assimilationist policies reinforced its egalitarian self-image, but the ingrained American antipathy toward empire did not prevent the nation from falling victim to the new imperial mania of the late nineteenth century. Although the United States did not take part in the scramble for Africa [WONDER WHY?], President William McKinley's administration could not resist the temptation to take over most of Spain's remaining empire after its victory in the 1898 Spanish-American War. An unabashedly proimperial lobby failed to secure the annexation of Cuba, but McKinley obligingly claimed Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines." Id. at 430.).
Reinhart, Carmen M. & Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("This book provides a quantitative history of financial crises in their various guises. Our basic message is simple: We have been here before. No matter how different the latest financial frenzy or crisis always appears, there are usually remarkable similarities with past experience from other countries and from history. Recognizing these analogies and precedents is an essential step toward improving our global financial system, both to reduce the risk of future crisis and to better handle catastrophes when they happen." Id. at xxv. "The essence of the this-time-is-different syndrome is simple. It is rooted in the firmly held belief that financial crises are things that happen to other people in other countries at other times; crises do not happen to us, here and now. We are doing things better, we are smarter, we have learned from past mistakes. The old rules of valuation no longer apply. Unfortunately, a highly leveraged economy can unwittingly be sitting with its back at the edge of a financial cliff for many years before chance and circumstances provoke a crisis of confidence that pushes it off." Id. at 1. "Technology has changed, the heights of humans has changed, and fashions have changed. Yet the ability of governments and investors to delude themselves, giving rise to periodic bouts of euphoria that usually ends in tears, seems to have remained a constant. No careful reader of Friedman and Schwartz [see above] will be surprised by this lesson about the ability of governments to mismanage financial markets, a key theme of their analysis. As for financial markets, Kindleberger wisely titled the first chapter of his classic book 'Financial Crisis: A Hardy Perennial.' " Id. at 292. ).
Roosevelt, Theodore, Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States: His Own Words, selected and arranged by Daniel Ruddy (New York: Smithsonian Books/Harper, 2010) ("The Texan struggle for independence stirred up the greatest sympathy and enthusiasm in the United States. The Jackson administration remained nominally neutral, but obviously sympathized with the Texans, permitting arms and men to be sent to their help, without hindrance, and indeed doing not a little discreditable bullying in the diplomatic dealings with Mexico. The victory of San Jacinto, in which Houston literally annihilated a Mexican force twice the strength of his own, virtually decided the contest, and the Senate at once passed a resolution recognizing the independence of Texas." "The Americans at last succeeded in wresting Texas from the Mexicans and making it an independent republic. This republic tried to conquer New Mexico but failed. Then we annexed it, made its quarrels our own, and did conquer both New Mexico and California. From the standpoint of technical right and wrong, it is impossible to justify the American action in these cases, and in the case of Texas there was the dark blot of slavery which rested upon the victors, for they turned Texas from a free province into a slave republic. Nevertheless, it was of course ultimately to the great advantage of civilization that the Anglo-American should supplant the Indo-Spaniard." Id. at the 148. "Hawaii is of more pressing and immediate importance than Cuba. If we don't take Hawaii it will pass into the hands of some strong nation, and the chance of our taking it will be gone forever. If we fail to take Cuba it will remain in the hands of a weak and decadent nation, and the chance to take it will be just as good as ever. If we do not take Hawaii now we may find to our bitter regret that we have let pass the golden moment forever. We did not create Hawaii. It is there. All we can do is to decide whether we shall make it an outpost of defense for the Pacific slope or allow it to be taken by the first hostile power with whom we are brought into contact, to be seized as the surest means of offense against the Pacific coast cities." Id. at 216. Ah, those self-serving rationalizations of conquest and empire.).
Stagg, J. C. A., Borderlines in Borderlines: James Madison and The Spanish-American Frontier, 1776-1821 (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) ("Yet in the case of the United States, these recent efforts to rewrite the history of the nation as merely one part of a larger Atlantic and transnational 'history without borders' should not be pushed too far. Nation-states, even those with 'rough edges' of contested borders, can exercise significant power both as independent agents in their own right and as interdependent actors in the larger international arena, and it was in the course of acting thus as 'a nation among nations' that the United States drew boundaries of its own choosing in the Spanish borderlands as these regions were incorporated into an expanding American republic." "It is with these perspective in mind that I have attempted to describe the developments that occurred in West Florida, East Florida, and Texas between 1810 and 1813. My goal has been to understand why the United States succeeded, somewhat inadvertently, in annexing most of West Florida during that period, why it failed to secure East Florida at all before 1819, and why in the process of settling its dispute with Spain it consented to abandon the claim to Texas in order to obtain a boundary line farther to the north that extended to the Pacific Ocean. In each of these three cases, the Madison administration dispatched executive agents to the Spanish province in question . . . on a series of errands to determine the future relationship of the region to the United States. The outcomes of these errands into the borderlands have yet to be properly understood by historian, in no small part because three of these agents . . . went into the borderlands on errands of their own, which ultimately came into conflict with those of the administration in Washington. In the course of describing how these conflicting errands affected administration policy, it has been my purpose to provide a clear sense of the linkages between policy making at the center of American government and the developments that unfolded a the peripheries of the American polity in the early nineteenth century. If the United States ultimately succeeded in expanding its boundaries through the processes thus described, it did so as much because of contingent developments over which it had little control as it did because of its intentions, first openly proclaimed in the Model Treaty of 1776, that its southern border be made to extend from the east coast of the Florida peninsula to the Mississippi River." Id. at 10-11.).
Thomas, Evan, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Heart, and The Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2010) ("On a bright afternoon in the fall of 1898 three philosophers stood in the airy library of a house on Quincy Street, at the edge of Harvard Yard. As the yellow leaves drifted down outside and autumn light streamed into the large, book-lined room, the owner of the house, Professor George Herbert Palmer, stood with his back to the window, 'evidently enjoying the pleasant rays of the setting sun,' recalled his Harvard colleague George Santayana. But the third philosopher, William James, was plunged into darkness. He was 'terribly distressed,' recalled Santayana. 'James said he had lost his country.' " "James told the others that he could understand intervention in Cuba; the island had suffered from the oppression of the Spaniards. But the annexation of the Philippines--what could excuse that? To James, McKinley's decision to demand ownership of the distant archipelago was somehow un-American. James had long sustained a faith in American exceptionalism. He believed, or wished to believe, that Americans were less prone to the corruption and greed of their European forebears. He could not excuse the president's imperialistic grab for territory in the name of freedom and Christian morality." "Palmer did not wish to have his pleasent afternoon spoiled, so he smiled and murmured academic banalities--yes, he saw James's point, but every thesis had its antithesis, and the synthesis would ultimately be for the public good. Santayana, fatalist from the Old World, mourned for his quixotic Spain but regarded James as an innocent. In his memoir Santayana wrote that he admired James's 'masculine directness,' his warmth and openness, and he joined in the general approbation of James's sensitivity and lively turn of mind. But he regarded him as naive for belieiving that individuals could control the path of history when clearly, greater forces did." "But James did believe in the individual. He did not place his faith in Great Men who guide the destiny of nations, but rather in ordinary individuals, whom he did not find ordinary at all. He refused to treat people as abstractions. To him, Emilio Aguinaldo was not a 'Little Brown Brother' but an actual person. The Filipino people should not be treated as a 'painted picture' on a giant canvas of the march of man's progress but as flesh-and-blood individuals. He abhorred sweeping theories of history that explained everything, big ideas that gave license to oppression of the human spirit. Highly suspicious of the civilizing mission of imperialism, he did not agree with Kipling, in his poem of the age, that the white man carried the burden of uplifting the 'lesser races' ('the sullen, silent peoples/Half devil and half child'). He was typical of his era and class in his dress and mores, conventional in many of his attitudes. And yet he was refreshingly farsighted in at least one essential way: at a time when notions of racial superiority and the vogue of social Darwinism legitimized colonial domination, James stood out as a lonely voice of pluralism (a word, it seemed, only he could coin), for respect for the dignity and worth of each individual, no matter how foreign or 'other.' In this he was ahead of his time, embracing notions that would become cliches in the late twentieth century but were far from popular in 1898. It was as if James could peer into the global abyss of the next century, when 'isms' would be used as an excuse to slaughter and oppress millions of people." Id. at 374-376. William James was ahead of his time; and, unfortunately, he is ahead of our time as well. Nation building? Democratization? War on Terror(ism)? Hyperpatriotism. Also see Ronald Steel, "Theodore Roosevelt, Empire Builder," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 4/25/2010.).
Torgovnick, Marianna, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1990) ("Throughout this study, I have given hints of more positive forms of Western primitivism lurking behind the forms I have criticized: the potential to reject hierarchies in the original Tarzan story; the possibility of using African aesthetics to rethink the West's systems of art production and circulation; a desire to acknowledge and accept the full range of human sexual possibilities and variations in belief; the intuition that social classes or gender relations have doomed us to structures of mastery rather than mutuality; a reaching out to the natural world as our home and mother, not the exploitation of that world for profit. Each of these possibilities exists within certain forms of primitivism I have examined, though they are, in each case, variously turned aside or undeveloped, often under the pressure of our culture's dominant ideas of selfhood or masculinity." "Western primitivism might have had a different history--a history in which primitive societies were allowed to exist in their own times and spaces, within their own conceptions of time and space, not transposed and filtered into Western terms; a history in which primitive societies were acknowledged as full and valid alternatives to Western cultures. It may no be too late to bring that history into being. . . ." "More concretely, alternative stories can help us rethink political attitudes toward third world nations and their aspirations, attitudes which have been shaped, in part, by confusing third world with primitive, or by bring to our relations with nations outside the West attitudes that are demeaningly neocolonial In a speech during the 1988 U. S. presidential campaign, the soon-to-be-victorious George Bush criticized his opponent Michael Dukakis for thinking that the United States was a country 'on the U. N. roll call somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.' When that kind of statement can make no political points, when the majority of Euro-Americans can accept that our nations--for all their present comforts and power--exists on the same plane with other social or political entities, we will have come a long way toward overcoming the heritage that the West's conceptions of the primitive have left us." Id. at 246-247.)
Vaisse, Justin, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2010) ("[I]t makes no sense to attribute all the failings of the Bush administration to the neocons. To the extent that they did have a voice, however, and a voice that counted, we can try to pinpoint their errors of judgment." "The most surprising of the neoconservatives' errors has to do with the condition under which American power is exercised, a subject that has been one of their central concerns. But perhaps it was precisely because neoconservatism stemmed from a patriotic reaction to the denigration of America and because it enjoyed a victory of sorts and therefore validation with the fall of the Berlin Wall that it was condemned to see the world of the twenty-first century through an overconfident and distorted prism. That prism left the neocons unable to see the limits of America's actual capacity to engineer positive change and its room for maneuver in the world. Or perhaps third-age neoconservatism was merely the intellectual expression of the considerable increase in the relative power of the United States, of the illusion, especially after the intoxicating victory of Afghanistan, that America could do anything. In that case, neoconservative hubris was largely the result of a rationalization of America's position in the international system. After all, the argument that the American empire is 'benevolent' does have merit, at least until it is invoked as a pretext to exempt the United States from rules of prudence and cooperation, or even to ignore the opinions and interests of the rest of the world." "There was no shortage of arrogance in the neocon approach. Intellectual arrogance to begin with, in spite of the movement's origins: whatever became of the law of unintended consequences? . . . It will come to no surprise that conservatives were driven to apoplexy by the insolence and rashness of the neocons, by their readiness to play the role of social engineers and sorcerer's apprentice. Political arrogance was also in abundant supply. 'Lead, and they will follow' was the slogan of the neoconservatives and then of the Bush administration for dealing with allies. But manly, confident assertion of objectives was not enough to persuade the other members of the international community that those objectives were justified, and there were limits to what America could do alone. Military arrogance was also involved: no army has every been better prepared that the American armed forces to destroy a conventional enemy, but it struggled with guerrilla warfare and the challenges of reconstruction. . . . Finally, the cliche that a show of force is enough to convince the enemy to give up or at least respect the superior force--a notion that many neoconservatives shared with other hawks--turned out to be quite naive." Id. at 261-262. Also see Barry Gewen, "Leave No War Behind," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 6/13/2010.).
Von Mises, Ludwig, Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow edited and with an Introduction by Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010).
Food For Thought: According to a Marist Poll, 25% of Americans, and 40% of 18- to 29-year-olds, do not know that Great Britain is the country from which the American colonies declared their independence.
