WE ARE THEM, THEY ARE US

Begley, Louis, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) (A French abuse of power at the end of the 19th century is relevant, and a warning, regarding an American abuse of power at the beginning of the 21st century. It is always easy to suspect, to blame, to convict, and to abuse ‘the other.’ The book hints at other issues. What is honor? At the national level? At the personal level? To the extent that America engages in acts of torture, is the nation compromising its honor? Compromising its right to be deemed worthy of respect by other nations and opther peoples? Compromising its ideals and self-respect?).

Bredin, Jean-Denis, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York; George Braziller, 1986) ("And yet it would be unduly reductive to restrict the Affair narrowly to its own time on the pretext of avoiding a caricature, to deny what was enduring or 'eternal,' in Mauriac's phrase: what continues to help us know ourselves and acknowledge what we are almost a century after Dreyfus's conviction. It is true that the Dreyfus Affair can only be understood within its own time, in terms of the economic, social, and cultural forces of the end of the nineteenth century. It is also true that dramatic opposition between two moralities, two mentalities, is not only of the past. For what were the anti-Dreyfusards fighting? What was at stake, said Barres, was the house of our fathers, our land, our dead. For Cavaignac, it was 'the Nation's greatness,' 'the heritage of the defenders of the country.' It was also, proclaimed Deroulede, 'the spirit of abnegation, the spirit of discipline, the spirit of solidarity.' And behind the exaltation of the nation, the ancestral heritage, and traditional virtues could be found the popular sentiments diversely formulated in the comments of the contributors to the 'Henry monument': love of order, respect for work, devotion to country, rejection of foreigners, demands for security, and anxiety in the face of a changing world." "With what did the Dreyfusards oppose this? They never called into question loyalty to the Nation.... [T]he Dreyfusards claimed that neither order, nor respect for authority, nor institutional might, nor even the national interest were to stand in the way of the higher principles of justice and freedom. There were ethical values higher than all interests, higher even then the law, expressed by Peguy as follows: 'The passion for Truth, the passion for Justice, the impatience with falsity, the intolerance of deception occupied all our hours, all our energies,' On one side, encapsulating the clash, we find the principle that every act is to be judged in relation to France. On the other, that the rights of man are placed above every institution and every conviction." Id. at 539-540. Do we not see a similar divide in early 21st-century America? Yet! "In point of fact, within the Affair itself, the divisions were neither so simple nor so clear cut. For men are not simply a function of their culture and morality, their convictions and prejudices. In the course of their lives, they are affected and occasionally transformed by their class, their social milieu, their friends, the social fabric within which they live and grow old." Id.).

Guttenplan, D. D., American Radical: The Life and Times of I. F. Stone (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) (See the review by David Carr, “Taking Down Big Game With a Crusading Pen,” NYT, July 9, 2009.).

Henry, Charles P., Ralph Bunche: Model Negro, or American Other? (New York: New York: U. Press, 1999) ("Although Bunche could accept the . . . view of slavery as a degrading experience, he could not totally embrace it. He rejected the 'grandparents as slaves,' 'extreme poverty' image because he rejected victim status. Victim status is a metaphor that describes an ideological discourse that mediates the conflict for mutual recognition that lies at the heart of the oppressed-oppressor interrelationship. If the victim succeeds in getting the victimizer to accept the condition or indeed the creation of the victimized as a product of the victimizer, then the victim has succeeded in being recognized and even in having his or her humanity conformed. It does not necessarily, however, challenge the superiority of the victimizer. In fact, by appealing to the morality and rationality of the victimizer, the victim confirms the humanity and goodness of the victimizer. Much of the discourse on race relations in this country from the abolitionists to Shelby Steele revolves around this concept." "Recognizing that the simple acknowledgment of the horrors created by the institution of slavery did nothing to resolve the dilemma of the 'other,' Bunche rejected any victim-status syndrome. Thus he could not fully accept the pathological character of the Black community that emerged from the work of E. Franklin Frazier." Id. at 214-215. "All of his life Bunche had worked to be treated equally. His thinking reflected the Aristotelian principle of equality as sameness. Those with the same attributes, status, or condition were treated equally. This reflected the liberal tendency to treat the 'other' as equal only after the 'other' had been redescribed as oneself. Only with the rise of Black Power did Bunche come to understand--as his grandmother must have instinctively understood--that the act of redescription is still an attempt to appropriate others. Race in the United States still rested on physical traits despite his best efforts at social reconstruction." "Bunche the human being and his legacy had been appropriate by the dominant ideology. He was redefined to make him an acceptable 'other.' When the larger society no longer needed his legacy for its purposes, he was forgotten. For the Black community, Bunche became invisible--his identity lost. That is why Ralph Johnson Bunche is unknown today and that is why his story must be told." Id. at 249-250.).

Lehman, David, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Jewish Encounters) (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2009) (“It may sound like the ultimate paradox, but one distinctively Jewish thing about the authors of the American songbook is the determination to escape from their Jewish origins and join the American Adventure. America represented freedom not only from persecution but also from the past, from outmoded rules and obscure regulations, esoteric doctrines and archaic habits of dress. America was an idea, a good idea, even a revolutionary one. You had the freedom to worship and the freedom not to worship, if you so chose. How important it was for Berlin to trumpet his patriotism or for Rodgers and Hammerstein to criticize racism at a time when world Jewry faced the specter of annihilation. The art they made was not an art of defiance—there is little anger or protest in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical or a Berlin ballad. But in their affirmations of American ideals as they understood them, the writers of were pressing back against the forces that aimed to extinguish them.” Id. at 20.).

Oney, Steve, And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and The Lynching of Leo Frank (New York: Pantheon, 2003) (See the following two book reviews: Warren Goldstein, “Who Killed Mary Phagan?,” NYT, Sunday, October 26, 2003); and Theodore Rosengarten, “The Haunting Questions of a Murder and a Lynching,” NYT, Friday, December 19, 2003.).

Podhoretz, Norman, Why Are Jews Liberals? (New York: Doubleday, 2009) (Read Leon Wieseltier, "Because They Believe," in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, September 13, 2009. "So liberals and conservatives, and socialists too, and even the Club for Growth, will all find a use for this text, which is to say that the text is useless, I mean, for establishing the liberalism or the conservatism of the Jewish tradition." Id. at 8.).

Pritchett, Wendell, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2002).

Pritchett, Wendell, Robert Clifton Weaver and the American City: The Life and Times of an Urban Reformer (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2008).

Smith, Steven B., Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 1997) (“Spinoza’s prudent or philosophical reader, then, is neither a Jew nor a Christian but a new kind of person who might be called the liberated individual. This type of individual, delineated in the pages of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Montaigne, was just beginning to make an appearance on the European scene. Such a person is liberated as far as possible from dependence on tradition and authority, is master of his passions and tolerant of others, and puts the highest premium on self-respect. Although this idea of the free individual had certain classical antecedents in the philosophy of Plato and the Stoics, it was based much more than before on the idea of personal autonomy. Where did such a reader come from? Where was such a one to be found? Id. at 43-44. “The one powerful, overriding command of both the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures is, then, love of neighbor, which Spinoza interprets to mean no persecution, no intolerance on the basis of religion. This is a teaching of highest political importance. It suggests that not only does the Bible forbid persecution but those who practice intolerance stand condemned of heresy. It suggests that intolerance not only is bad as policy but is at odds with the ‘universal foundation of religion. Toleration carries the weight of reason behind it (‘the [supreme] right of thinking freely, even concerning religion, is in the hands of each person’) and the weight of Scripture. Reason and religion converge on the same moral end.” Id. at 83. “The issue of identity and difference has recently dominated much of contemporary public discourse in the United States. We live in the age of the hyphenated American; many consider the older idea of a common citizenship to be neither possible nor desirable. Instead of focusing on what unities us as a people, we are increasingly told that authenticity, empowerment and self-esteem are bound up with our sense of ethnic, racial, or cultural identity. These issues were not unknown to Spinoza. He lived in an age of what might be called identity politics. [] One was defined by one’s religion, period. Exit, except on rare occasions, was not yet considered a viable option.” [] “In the Treatise Spinoza offers a strategy for dissolving group identities, and differences, not accommodating them. The problem of diversity–regarding religion and various conceptions of the human good–was for Spinoza the natural state of human affairs. The question that he posed was not how to enhance diversity but how to best control and contain it. He sought ways of increasing the power of the individual in order to better to resist the coercive power of group identities. Identity politics was not for him a source if empowerment but a means of imposing narrow orthodoxies and conformity. The threat to freedom was less likely to stem from the imposition of a common culture than from the tyranny of group differences, when, for example, clerical enthusiasts and other putative leaders arrogate to themselves power over the individual. Furthermore, Spinoza regarded a politics of group difference as more likely to produce lasting enmities and hatreds than a pleasing diversity and mutual respect. Did he not say with brutal candor that what leads one person to piety and religion leads another to laughter and contempt?” Id. at 201-202.).

Smith, Steven B., Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven: & London Yale U. Press, 2003) (“The problem with Weimar [Republic of Germany] was in the first instance its weakness and instability. The weakness of Weimar became most evident not with the economic crisis of 1929 --other democracies faced similar economic problems--but with its inability to protect the Jews. This dilemma was made all the more acute because the Jews of Germany, more that Jews of any other nation, had put their faith in liberal democracy to provide a solution to the ‘Jewish Question.’ Liberal democracy was understood as the regime devoted to ending persecution not only of Jews but of all religious and ethnic minorities. Liberal democracy was the first political regime to grant full citizenship and equal rights to Jews while recognizing their right to remain Jews. If for this reason only, the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the Jewish minister of foreign affairs, in 1922 proved a moment of profound crisis.” “The dilemma of modern Jewry has a long genealogy going back before Weimar to the time of Spinoza. Spinoza was to [Leo] Strauss and many of his generation the first example of the modern Jew. Spinoza championed not only a break with orthodoxy and the burdens of ceremonial law, but was the first Jewish thinker to endorse liberal democracy in something like its modern form [citation omitted]. Although Spinoza has been anathematized by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, he was subsequently canonized by generations of Jewish modernists, who celebrated him not only for showing the way out of the ghetto but for establishing a new kind of secular religion and culture based on the highest aspirations of the educated middle class…” “In particular Spinoza opened the door to liberal democracy. Society that was neither Christian nor Jewish but above or impervious to each, Central to the liberal solution to the theological-political predicament was the distinction between public and private and the belief that religion belonged exclusively to the private sphere of life. Henceforth religion would be deprived of the tools of force and coercion and turned into a matter of conscience and private belief, something quite different from the authoritative character of the law….” Id. at 191-1192. Given the increased intrusion of religion into the public sphere, is American society in decline as a liberal democracy? What will a post liberal-democracy look like? It certainly will not be liberal, but will it even be democratic?).

Urofsky, Melvin I., Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 2009) (“Brandeis never really questioned the basic rightness of the free enterprise system. He acknowledge that it had defects, and he spent many years trying to correct them. But the achievements of his immigrant father, and his own and his brother’s successful careers, imbued him with a sense of the opportunities awaiting the diligent worker. He differed from many of his fellow reformers in Boston when he insisted that risk capital deserved greater returns than money invested in safe measures, although he condemned outright speculation. Despite his involvement in labor matters, Brandeis did not overly concern himself with the weak. It is not that he did not care for people victimized by industrialization, or that he opposed measures to prevent the strong from taking advantage of others. Rather, he approached reform neither as a social worker nor as a leveler to give a leg up to those on the bottom. Life involved risks, and those who competed had to bear the losses as well as enjoy the gains. He always accepted and indeed rejoiced in the competition of life and of the economy, with both the harshness and the rewards. He once told his daughter Susan, when she complained of some difficulty, ‘My dear, if you will just start with the idea that this is a hard world, it will all be much simpler.’” Id. at 304-305. See the following two review essays. Adam Liptak, “How Brandeis, Revered or Hated, Became a Giant of the Supreme Court,” NYT, September 20, 2009; Alan M. Dershowitz, “The Practice,” The NYT Sunday Book Review, September 27, 2009. Also see, "Let's Look at the Facts," in The Economist, September 26, 2009: "Much of the legal conflict of the past few years in the United States has resulted from the efforts of a new generation of conservatives to reverse the work of Brandeis and his companions and disciplines on the court.").

PROMOTING VISUAL LITERACY IN THE LAW

Feigenson, Neal & Christina Speisel, Law on Display: The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment (New York: NYU Press, 2009) (“As we contemplate the arc of the book, we cannot help but ask whether digital pictures and multimedia are in general good or bad for law. There is no simple answer. Since it’s clear, though, that digital pictures are here to stay, the question becomes how the law can best accommodate them, along with words spoken and written. Unless the legal system makes the effort to embrace and understand the new media, it’s going to encounter even more trouble as lawyers routinely deploy their digital tools. If, on the contrary, the law takes up the challenge to be alert, wise, and full of inquiry about the uses of new media, judgment and justice many be enhanced. This book is a first effort to suggest what should be done—not because we have all the answers but because , we hope, we have some of the right question.” Id. at xii. This is a very worthwhile read.).

CONNECT THE DOTS

Atwood, Margaret, The Year of the Flood: A Novel (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009) ("What is it about our own Species that leaves us so vulnerable to the impulse to violence? Why are we so addicted to the shedding of blood? Whenever we are tempted to become puffed up, and to see ourselves as superior to all other Animals, we should reflect on our own brutal history." Id. at 312. "Is that what pigs want her to do? Go outside her defensive walls, into the open, so they can jump her, knock her down, then rip her open? Have a pig-style outdoor picnic. A pig-out. She has a fair idea of what that would look like. The Gardeners weren't squeamish about describing the eating habits of God's various Creatures: to flinch at these would be hypocritical. No one comes into the world clutching a knife and fork and a frying pan, Zeb was fond of saying. Or a table napkin. And if we eat pigs, why shouldn't pigs eat us? If they find us lying around." Id. at 320.).

Kidder, Tracy, Mountains Beyond Mountains (New York: Random House, 2003) (“The quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a man who would cure the world”).

Kristof, Nicholas D., & Sheryl WuDunn, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (New York: Knopf, 2009) (See Irshad Manji, “Changed Lives”, in The NYT Sunday Book Review, September 20, 2009. “’Half the Sky’ tackles atrocities and indignities from sex trafficking to maternal mortality, from obstetric fistulas to acid attacks, and absorbing the fusillade of horrors can feel like an assault of its own. But the poignant portraits of survivors humanize the issues, divulging facts that moral outrage might otherwise eclipse.” Id.).

Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (“Will our children be outspoken in online equivalents of school newspapers if they fear their blunt words might hurt their future careers? Will we protest against corporate greed or environmental destruction if we worry that these corporations may in some distant future refuse doing business with us? In democracies, individuals are both citizens and consumers. They engage in economic transactions, and take sides on public issues. At times, they may find themselves opposing what their transaction partners advocate. In the analog world, if a person wasn’t particularly outspoken, one could easily do both: engage and oppose a transactional partner. Take automobile companies. One can easily buy a car and still advocate for higher emission standards opposed by car manufacturers. Suppose transactional partners knew our views much more precisely. Would they still transact with us, offer us the best price, perhaps even employ us? Just the thought that they might not, may constrain our willingness to act as consumers, let alone as citizens.” Id. at 111. READ THIS BOOK! ).

Sandel, Michael J., Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009) (“When moral reflection turns political, when it asks what laws should govern our collective life, it needs some engagement with the tumult of the city, with the arguments and incidents that roil the public mind. Debates over bailouts and price gouging, income inequality and affirmative action, military service and same-sex marriage, are the stuff of political philosophy. They prompt us to articulate and justify our moral and political convictions, not only among family and friends but also in the demanding company of our fellow citizens.” Id. at 29. A worthwhile introductory read for anyone tired of the void of critical thinking in much of American political discourse. Also, see the review"Rights and Wrongs: First Principles of Justice," in The Economist, September 26, 2009.)

Twenge, Jean M. & W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (New York: The Free Press, 2009) (“Narcissists are also not popular bosses. Employees rate narcissistic managers as average in problem-solving skills but below average in interpersonal skills and integrity, two qualities considered very important for management. Another study found that while narcissists saw themselves as excelling at leadership, their peers thought they were below average.” Id. at 45. “The findings presented in The Millionaire Next Door are counterintuitive. Americans see people with fancy cars and clothes and assume they must be rich. In reality, it is often safer to assume that they are in debt.” The credit crunch that paralyzed the economy in the late 2000s is, at base, the conflict between the pleasure principle—it looks great and get what it wants, but it hurts other people and even the self in the long run. In contrast, the reality principle isn’t flashy or self-promoting, but it does lead to actual wealth. At least until 2008, most Americans were living on the narcissistic pleasure principle. Easier and easier credit allowed them to live out grandiose, materialistic fantasies—until the bill came due.” Id. at 137-138. “Cheating is also rampant, and growing, among students. In 2002, 74% of high school students admitted to cheating, up from 61% in 1992. In 1969, only 34% of high school students admitted to cheating, less than half of the 2002 number. A large 2008 survey of teens found that two-thirds admitted to cheating and nearly one-third had stolen something from a store. Nevertheless, 93% said they were satisfied with their personal ethics—a classically narcissistic disconnect between reality and self-concept. [] A 2004 study of 25,000 high school students found that 67% of the boys and 52% of girls agreed that ‘in the real world, successful people do what they have to do to win, even if others consider it cheating.’” Id. at 206.).

FINDING OUT SOME OF THE THINGS WE DON’T KNOW

Hubbard, Douglas W., The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009) (“The answer to the second question (whether anyone would know that the risk management system has failed) is also no; most managers would not know what they need to look for to evaluate a risk management method and, more likely than not, can be fooled by a kind of “placebo effect” and groupthink about the method. Even under the best circumstances, where the effectiveness of the risk management method itself was tracked closely and measured objectively, adequate evidence may not be available for some time. A more typical circumstance, however, is that the risk management method itself has no performance measures at all, even in the most diligent, metrics-oriented organizations. This widespread inability to make the sometimes-subtle differentiation between methods that work and methods that don’t work means that ineffectual methods are likely to spread. Ineffectual methods may even be touted as “best practices” and, like a dangerous virus with a long incubation period, are passed from company to company with no early indicators of ill effects until it’s too late.” Id. at 4. I often mention to students, taking my commercial and corporate law courses, that lawyers are involved in a form of risk management. The contracts drafted, the compliance procedures recommended, the check lists used, et., are all about doing, ex ante, the best they can to manage certain legal risks for their clients. That as transactional lawyers they not only seeking to increase the likelihood of good things happening for their clients and decreasing the likelihood that bad things happening. They are trying to make sure that, if the bad things happen, they will not be a complete catastrophe for the client. That even the bad is not worse, let alone the worst. For instance, how much, and what sort of, due diligence is due, not to avoid lawyer malpractice liability but to adequately management the client’s risks. In short, how do lawyers identify risk, manage risk, and, as is the subject of this book, assess their methods for identifying, assessing, and managing risks? They too may be taken in by a placebo effect.) .

Hubbard, Douglas W., How To Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2007) (My coming to read this book (as well as the book above) had three unrelated sources. First, while sitting in a meeting one of the participants stated that he is ‘a good judge of character.’ Placing aside the self-congratulatory aspects of the statement, I wondered how the person knew, or could substantiate, what he claimed to know about himself. (Or, for that matter, if someone had challenged him on that point, how would they have backed up their challenge.) Perhaps his self-assessment is correct, perhaps it is wrong, and perhaps it is simply meaningless. There are studies reporting that 65% of us think we are of above-average intelligence, the same percentage thinks it of better-than-average looks. I would not be surprised in that same over optimism is found in our assessment of our ability to judge character. The larger issue, however, concerned the fact that some people might defer to this person’s judgment about another person’s character without first establishing (measuring) independently whether the former is (or is not) a good judge of character. That is, other people would be making decisions based on a factor, one’s person’s judgment of another person’s character, without having measured whether the former is a good judge of character or not. Where it may be reasonable to defer to someone judgment when we think that person is a better informed decision maker then we are, we still have a responsible to ascertain whether that person is worthy of such deference in the first place. We cannot just take the person’s word for it that he is a good judge of character. Second, I had the opportunity to listen to a woman who earns her living measuring opinions and ideas (e.g., doing market research). For some reason I came away with the fear that she probably knows/suspects that much of what legal academics (and lawyers) assert as being factually true about the world is not true, or at least not grounded in strong empirical evidence. I was humbled. And, third, I had to prepare to teach my course in Analytical Methods (this is a course developed by Professor Howell Jackson and other at The Harvard Law School), a course which includes components on decision theory, game theory, and statistics. More important, it is a course that underscores the need for lawyers to know more than the law, and to have analytical skills beyond that of mere legal analysis. Reading this book and applying its lessons is useful in better articulating why law students need to be better informed of matters outside the law (e.g., how would they actually ascertain whether law A is more efficient, or less costly, than an alternative law B or no law at all), and for me to better engage in more informed decision-making. Anyway, this is a worthwhile, and nontechnical, read. “Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.” Gilb’s Law).

DIGNITY?

Nussbaum, Martha C., Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values) (Cambridge London: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2006) (Four comments: (1) This is an interesting and provocative read. Yet, (2) I am unconvinced by ‘capabilities-approach’ arguments. (3), though I am presently not a dog owner, I know that were my dog to have a serious disability, including simply getting too old, I would not hesitate to put my dog down. And, (4) it is my hope that I have enough sense and the ability to put myself down should I ever find myself in a similar situation. Sometimes the proper way to frame the choice is not as between life with or without dignity, but as between a life of dependency and death with dignity. When the time comes, PLEASE LET ME GO.).

OTHER?

Nussbaum, Martha C., Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2004) “[F}ocus on a deeper conceptual issue. This issue is, what is the relevant ’community’? The Achilles heel of all communitarian arguments is their disregard of this all-important question. No group is fully homogeneous. Even in the case of small religious or ethnic communities that are renowned for their homogeneity of values, that renown is typically based on a false and romanticized notion of the group in question, as Fred Kniss has eloquently shown in his important study of American Mennonite communities. All communities contain differences about norms and values, and also differences of power. Frequently these two types of difference are connected: what gets to parade as the ‘values’ of the ‘group’ are, frequently, the values of the group’s most dominant members. Thus, for example, most of what we think we know about the ‘values’ of most ethnic and religious groups in history really represents the views of male members of those groups, rather than the views of women, which may be impossible to recover from the silence of history. Other dissident and relatively powerless groups—the young, the elderly, those who hold unpopular religious , political, or moral views--may not win recognition as part of what the ‘group’ stands for. Differences of power also affect who is permitted to count as a group member and who is not.. Groups frequently define their boundaries in ways that stigmatize and exclude; thus , rather than acknowledging the presence of a dissident or minority subgroup, they may simply refuse to recognize these people as members of their body at all.” Id. at 274-275 (citations omitted).).

Sterry, David Henry & R. J. Martin, Jr., eds., Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professional Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex (Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2009) (See Toni Bentley, “Meet, Pay, Love,” NYT Book Review, Sunday, August 23, 2009.).

A GOOD QUESTION

Gjelten, Tom, Bacardi and The Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (New York: Viking, 2008) (Interesting read. "Some exiles opposed contact with Cuba so rigidly as to suggest they had no sympathy for the position of ordinary Cubans who could not afford to take morally pure stands against the Castro regime. Was there something about living long and comfortably in the United States over time that had narrowed the exiles' thinking, making them less Cuban and more Americans? Jose Marti, writing from New York in 1881, considered whether the 'colossal nation' that was his adopted home contained 'ferocious and terrible' elements. 'Does the absence of the feminine spirit, source of artistic sensibility and complement to national identity, harden and corrupt the heart of this astonishing people?' he wondered." Id. at 365. That is a good question for all Americans to ask themselves, is it not?).

A LITTLE KEYNES

Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1973, 2007 (From Paul Krugman's "Introduction to New Edition": "As an intellectual achievement, The General Theory ranks with only a handful of other works in economics--the tiny set of books that transformed our perception of the world, so that once people became aware of what those books had to say they saw everything differently. Adam Smith did that in The Wealth of Nation: suddenly the economy was not just a collection of people getting and spending, it was a self-regulating system in which each individual 'is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.' The General Theory is in the same league: suddenly the idea that mass unemployment is the result of inadequate demand, long a fringe heresy, became completely comprehensible, indeed obvious." "What makes The General Theory truly unique, however, is that it combined towering intellectual achievement with immediate practical relevance to a global economic crisis.... Until The General Theory, sensible people regarded mass unemployment as a problem with complex causes, and no easy solution other than the replacement of markets with government control. Keynes showed that the opposite was true: mass unemployment had a simple cause, inadequate demand, and an easy solution, expansionary fiscal policy." Id. at xxxvii.).

Meltzer, Allan H., Keynes’s Monetary Theory: A Different Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1988) ("Keynes's basic beliefs have a large influence on the problems he considered and the way he addressed them. In the philosophy that he learned from G. E. Moore and shared with many of his closest associates, the highest good came from states of mind--contemplation, beauty, truth, and love. Pecuniary motives were at a much lower level and the pursuit of wealth or money unattractive. This broad view of the purposes of life was joined by two others. One was the values learned as a child--the so-called presuppositions of Harvey Road--under which persuasion by an intellectual elite was to be the means of improving mankind. The duty of the intellectual elite, in this view, was to lead public opinion and shape society's rules by discussion within the elite of civil servants, intellectuals, and molder of opinion and by changing public opinion. The other influence was once again Moore, who taught that there were no fixed definitions of food and evil. "Good" depended on the circumstance in which an issue was to be decided." Id. at 59.).

A MORNING'S REFLECTION

The most recent The New York Review of Books arrived in yesterday's late afternoon mail. This morning, over coffee, I did my usual initial, and slow, survey of its pages just to take in its landscape. That landscape, of course, includes announcements (advertisements really) from the various publishers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group--i.e., Knopf, Doubleday, Pantheon, Schocken, Vintage, Anchor, Nan. A. Talese, and Everyman's Library--; The Library of America; Cambridge University Press; Columbia University Press, Duke University Press; The Johns Hopkins University Press, The University of Chicago Press; Fordham University Press; Nebraska University Press; Princeton University Press; Stanford University Press; etc., just to name a few; plus the three-page Independent Press listing) of recent publications. And, because this particular issue is the Fall Book issue, the landscape is quite rich and textured even for the NYRB. Yes, I did smuggly engage in a few moments of self-congratulation as to the books I had read already. I did make mental notes of the books I had not yet read but owned and waiting to be read, as well as of the titles ordered but yet to arrive. Then . . . I stepped back and took in the larger landscape seeing all the the books not read by me, not owned by me, or not on yet even ordered for purchase by me. And I was--and still am-- overwhelmed. Overwhelmed not by the seemingly infinite number of books published which will go unread by me, but by the vast number books I would want, should want, and ought to want read if only I had the time. Yet, given the vastness of the landscape of the worthwhile printed word, there is not sufficient time to make a meaningul excursion into--let alone across the landscape. I am reminded of how poorly read I am. Reminded of the narrow limits of my education. I am reminded of Socrates. "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance." And I reminded of the fact of my own ignorance.

LABOR DAY IS NOT ABOUT END OF SUMMER

Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

Rodgers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1974, 1978) ("'There are many ways to accommodate change,' John William Ward has written. 'A favorite one is man's happy ability to keep talking one way while acting another.' It is an unimpeachable historical observation and more than a reflection on human foolishness. The groves of thought and language are deep ones, particularly at the levels of morals, and even in the midst of change conscious values are not easily wrenched from the familiar ruts.... But it is also true that change intensifies fixities as men struggle to reaffirm the threatened. Not only inertia is at work in such instances, but the mutation of doubt into conventions of faith--the more versatile, the more reassuring, and in some ways the more potent in their ideal remove from the confusions of everyday life. American history has had its ample share of examples. From the rhetoric of republican simplicity and frugality by which the Jacksonians salved their practical experiment in restless speculation, to the doctrineless religious revival of the faith-shaken Eisenhower years, to the hollow versatility of the term 'peace' in a war-torn nation, stress has repeatedly hardened anxiety into ideals, generated words to cling to even as one strode off into the forbidden and the unknown." Id. at 241.).

VARIED READINGS#8

Alter, Robert, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2004) (I don't read the bible as a 'religious' text, but rather as poetry. I am reminded of a comment of John Fowles on point. See John Fowles, The Journals:, Volume 1 edited by Charles Drazin (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003). "The bible, I chanced to start reading some of the last Old Testament prophets the other day. A revelation of poetry; superb language and imagery. It is a mistake to imagine that the Bible is the same in all languages. The English translation is a work of great genius; it should be to us what Homer was to the Greeks." Id . at 140).

Armstrong, Karen, The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007) (“Because scripture has become such an explosive issue, it is important to be clear what it is and what it is not. This biography of the Bible provides some insight into this religious phenomenon. It is, for example, crucial to note that an exclusively literal interpretation of the Bible is a recent development. Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life. For centuries, Jews and Christians relished highly allegorical and inventive exegesis, insisting that a wholly literal reading of the Bible was neither possible nor desirable. They have rewritten biblical history, replaced Bible stories with new myths, and interpreted the first chapter of Genesis in surprisingly different ways.” Id. at 3.).

Balakian, Grigoris, Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide, 1915-1918 translated from the Armenian by Peter Balakian with Aris Sevag (New York: Knopf, 2009).

Cohen, G.A., Why Not Socialism? (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (“Because motivation in market exchange consists largely of greed and fear, a person typically does not care fundamentally, within market interaction, about how well or badly anyone other than herself fares. You cooperate with other people not because you believe that cooperating with other people is a good thing in itself, not because you want yourself and the other person to flourish, but because you seek to gain and you know that you can do so only if you cooperate with others. In every type of society people perforce provision one another: a society is a network of mutual provision. But, in market society, that mutuality is only a by-product of an unmutual and fundamentally nonreciprocating attitude.” Id. at 45 (italics in original). Perhaps the ugliness of the healthcare debates, especially the part attacking the poorly understood “public option”, simply reflects that we Americans are not much of a society (or a society in decline) due to our lack of network of mutual provision.).

Flint, Anthony, Wrestling With Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City (New York: Random House, 2009) (See Dwight Garner's review, "When David Fought Goliath in Washington Square Park," NYT August 6, 2009.).

McCann, Colum, Let the Great World Spin: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2009) (It happened five or six times in a row. The turn of the door handle. The ping of stilettos on the bare floorboards. A different hooker each time. One even leaned down and let her long thin breasts hang in my face. ‘College boy,’ she said like an offer. I shook my head and she said curtly” ‘I thought so.’ She turned at the door and smiled. ‘There’ll be lawyers in heaven before you see somethin’ so good again.’ “ Id. at 25.).

Nehring, Cristina, The Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Harper, 2009) (“Love at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been defused and discredited. Feminism is partly to blame, but only partly. We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence. The result is that we imagine we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.” Id. at 7.).

AMERICAN HISTORY, and FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Slaughter, Thomas P., Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1991) (“The book looks more broadly at some of the ways that law functions as an expression of culture and how it represents the interests of some groups against perceived threats posed by others. Sometimes the line between politics and law is unclear; the treason trial resulting from the Christina Riot is one such case. Law is always affected by social prejudices that are embodied in legislation and actions of judges and juries. Tolerance for particular kinds of violence, the presence or absence of sympathy for victims, and the degree of identification with perpetrators all play roles in communities’ responses to violent acts.” “The story told here illustrates some of the ways that sufferance of violence responds t broader social patterns. I explore connections between physical brutality toward other humans and the ways we define who really belongs to our community and who does not—“us” and “them”….” Id. at xiii-xiv. “If the two hundredth anniversary of the Christiana Riot calls for an observance in the year 2051, the sponsors and participants should ask themselves why. Why remember a “tragedy”; why not let the past go? One plausible answer, which occurs to me after writing this book, is that we have yet to learn any number of lessons taught by this story. The first commemoration of the riot reconciled whites on both sides; the second “forgave” blacks for resisting the law and killing a slave owner in order to be free. Perhaps we all can someday acknowledge the continuing injustices that lead to such violence. If some child goes hungry, cannot read, or has no reason to hope, we should not be surprised by what happens next. When we define community narrowly to exclude others unlike ourselves in some sense—if we build better schools, housing, and hospitals for “us”—then we share the burden of violence committed by “them.” If we beat our children “for their own good,” kick our dogs when we have a bad day, or perform experiments on animals because they are genetically similar by somehow different from “us,” we forge additional links in the chain that binds us to our violent past.” Id. at 186.).

TWO WORTHWHILE READS ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT

Posner, Eric A., The Perils of Global Legalism (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2009) (“The premise of this book is that law and legal institutions can obtain prestige among the public when they function in a highly effective manner, especially when they function more effectively than political institutions do. The prestige of the law often leads to legalism, which is a view that loses sight of the social function of law and sees it as an end in itself, one that thinks of moral and political problems in legal categories and asks lawyers and judges rather than politicians to solve them. In the United States, legalism has been a powerful way of thinking for almost two hundred years. Legalistic think has favorably disposed Americans to international law where, however, legal institutions have always been extremely weak and unreliable, despite the many efforts (since World War I, led by the United States) to construct and strengthen them.” Id. at xii. “So international law is a peculiar type of law that exists but lacks effective legal institutions to manage it. Legalism has its global counterpart, global legalism, which is a contradictory faith that both acknowledges this problem—in a phrase, the problem of “aw without government”—but also believes that international law can nonetheless carry out its functions and deserves loyalty beyond national interest-base cost-benefit calculations. The reasoning is as follows. True, world government does not exist, and the reason is that nations refuse to yield authority to supranational institutions that they cannot trust. But nations can yield authority that authority to international law that, after all, they have agreed to. If the authority of international law merely rests on nations’ consent, then why shouldn’t a nation withdraw its consent if it believes that it can do better by violating the law? The answer is that if states do that, international law will lose its authority, and thus its ability to constrain nations to ac in the general interest. International law is effective because state defer to it; they defer to it because it is effective.” Id. at xiii. This is a worthwhile read. Eric Posner does very good work, which is not to say that I agree with the analysis, and is well worth any law student investment of time.. Also, see Siebert below for what I think is a contrasting perspective.).

Siebert, Horst, Rules for the Global Economy (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (“In this book, I analyze the institutional arrangement that deal with global economic issues. The principal question to which my study tries to give an answer may be put in the following way. Under which conditions do international rules come into existence? That is to say, under which circumstances do national approaches prove no longer sufficient to solve economic problems, so that sovereign states are prepared to cede part of their sovereignty to international rule systems? And, finally, do international rules contribute to an improvement in the human condition?” Id. at ix. What Siebert does in this book is to layout a transaction-costs approach to answering the two questions raised. Those readers familiar with Coase’s The Problem of Social Cost, will comprehend the basic argument. This is a very worthwhile read for students of international law and those concerned with international trade, international environmental protection, international human rights, that is, just about any issue where you have reached that point to enlightenment where you know that international cooperation is a necessity.).

VARIED READINGS#7

Beha, Christopher R., The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (New York; Grove Press, 2009).

Caldwell, Christopher, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West (New York: Doubleday, 2009) (See Fouad Ajami, "Strangers in the Land," The NYT Book Review, Sunday, August 2, 2009).

Ciorciari, John D. & John B. Taylor, The Road Ahead for the Fed (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2009) (Of course, so many problems, and in so many areas of concern, are caused and compounded by the failure of decision makers to think long. “The effort to think long, to think ahead, to consider future consequences, is especially important at a time of crisis when attention is understandably focused on the immediate. Further, I believe that the effectiveness of immediate measures is substantially improved when people can see that long-term issues are being kept in mind and dealt with sensibly.” From George P. Schultz, “Think Long,” reprinted here at 3.).

MacMillan, Margaret, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: A Modern Library Chronicles Book/The Modern Library, 2009) (“On the evening of September 11, 2001, the American writer Susan Jacoby overheard two men talking in a New York bar. ‘This is just like Pearl Harbor,’ one said. ‘What is Pearl Harbor?’ the other asked. ‘That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,’ the first man replied. Does it matter that they got it wrong? I would argue that it does, that a citizenry that cannot begin to put the present into a context, that has so little knowledge of the past, can too easily be fed stories by those who claim to speak with the knowledge of history and its lessons. History is called in, as we have seen, to strengthen group solidarity, often at the expense of the individual, to justify treating others badly, and to bolster arguments for particular policies and courses of action. Knowledge of the past helps us to challenge dogmatic statements and sweeping generalizations. It helps us all to think more clearly.” Id. at 165. Also see David M. Kennedy, "What History is Good For," The NYT Book Review, Sunday, July 19, 2009).

Schmidle, Nicholas, To Live or To Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan (New York: Henry Holt, 2009) (See Joshua Kurlantzick, “Eyewitness: Pakistan,” The NYT Book Review, Sunday, July 11, 2009).

Shell, Ellen Ruppel, Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) (Ellen Ruppel Shell may not put it precisely this way, but I will. We may not always get what we pay for when we pay value to get value. Yet we do get what we deserve when we try getting things on the cheap. It doesn’t matter whether it is a car, clothing, food, or even an education. Also see Laura Shapiro, "Nothing for Nothing," The NYT Book Review, Sunday, July 19, 2009).

SOME BOOKS TO READ BEFORE SUMMER ENDS AND CLASSES BEGIN

Blom, Phillip, The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 (New York: Basic Books, 2008) (See the book review in The Economist, November 8, 2008).

Brendon, Piers, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 (New York: Knopf, 2008) (see the review, "Little Britain," by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the NYT, Tuesday, November 11, 2008).

Brinkley, Douglas, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: Harper, 2009) (See both Janet Maslin's review, "Mother Nature's Son With Big Stick (and Rifle)," NYT, Wednesday, July 22, 2009; and Jonathan Rosen’s review, “Natural Man,” in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, August 9, 2009).

Fennell, Lee Anne, The Unbound Home: Property Values Beyond Property Lines (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2009) (Even at full price, this book would be a very worthwhile investment for any serious law student.).

Goetzmann, William H., Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism (New York: Basic Books, 2009) (From the “Introduction”: “This book is the story of the search by American intellectuals for cultural self-definition. In some sense it is intended to be a kind of existential epic with those very special people—the intellectuals—as protagonists engaged in the Sisyphean task of forever confronting the new and making it meaningful to society. Intellectuals pursue their tasks--often esoteric and wildly impractical to the common man—because they feel ‘cultural anxiety,’ or a compulsion constantly to redefine the context of reality in which they find themselves. They assume the burden of first sensing, then grappling with, and finally organizing the new, which is of value to civilization itself. More than mere custodians of knowledge, they stand for most of their lives face to face with the terrors and ambiguities of ultimate reality. And as such, in Henry James’s terms, they are the ‘hard core creators of culture.’” In the United States the role of the intellectual currently is not much appreciate. On both the political right and political left, intellectuals are deemed to be ‘elitist.’ They are members of an elite only in the sense that relatively few people have the talent, sensibility, intelligence, and especially the inclination to worry about the culture as a whole. Most Americans prefer to remain caught up in the everyday concerns of living a ‘normal life,’ pursuing limited if special interests, and advocating causes whose origins and meaning they scarcely question.” Id. at xi. Though Professor Goetzmann makes a strong case for the presence of the intellectual tradition in American life, I would argue that the American intellectual tradition and American intellectuals are, and have always been, outnumbered and outgunned by the American anti-intellectual tradition and anti-intellectuals. Though always marching forward, the American intellectual tradition has always been under attack and had to watch it back. Nowhere is this more evident than in American colleges and universities where the “corporatization” is the spirit of the day. Also see Jedediah Purdy’s review, “The Coast of Utopia,” NYT, Sunday, February 19, 2009.).

Linowitz, Sol M. & Martin Mayer, The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the End of the Twentieth Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1994).

Meredith, Martin, Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, The Boers, and The Making of South Africa (New York: PublicAffairs, 2007) (see the review, "A Scramble for Power and Treasure in South Africa," by Janet Maslin in the NYT, Thursday, November 29, 2007).

Vollmann, William T., Imperial (New York: Viking, 2009) (See Lawrence Downes, “Desert Odyssey,” NYT Book Review, Sunday, August 2, 2009. Also see Charles McGrath, “An Author Without Borders,” NYT, Tuesday, July 28, 2009).

Yovel, Yirmiyahu, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009).

VARIED READINGS#6

Adler, Matthew D. & Eric A. Posner, New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2006).

Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge & London: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2009).

Burns, James MacGregor, Packing the Court: The Rise of Judicial Power and the Coming Crisis of the Supreme Court (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) (This brief synthesis of the political history of the United States Supreme Court is very nicely done, making a strong case for its bottom line thesis: "[Chief Justice] John Marshall was wrong: it is emphatically the province and duty of the American people, not the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court, to say what the Constitution is. A national reappraisal of the all-powerful court chosen by judicial roulette is crucial if American democracy is to meet the rising challenges of the twenty-first century." Id. at 259.).

Canaday, Margot, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("Unlike comparable European states, which were well established before sexologists "discovered" the homosexual in the late nineteenth century, the American bureaucracy matured during the same years that scientific and popular awareness of the pervert exploded on the American continent. This study examines three of the "engines" of the twentieth-century state--the Bureau of Immigration, the military, and the federal agencies that administered welfare benefits--to demonstrate how federal interest in homosexuality developed in tandem with the growth of the bureaucratic state. In emphasizing the relationship between state formation and homosexuality identity, I do not only seek to put history of sexuality into closer dialogue with political and legal history, but to complicate what has now become a standard interpretation within the field of gay and lesbian history as well. Namely, that extreme state repression of sex and gender nonconformity in the mid-twentieth century was a result of the sudden visibility of gays and lesbians during and after World War II." Id. at 2. "The state did not, I argue, simply encounter homosexual citizens, fully formed and waiting to be counted, classified, administered, or disciplined.... Rather, the state's identification of certain sexual behaviors, gender traits, and emotional ties as grounds for exclusion (from entering the country, serving in the military, or collecting benefits) was a catalyst in the formation of homosexual identity. The state, in other words, did not merely implicate but also constituted homosexuality in the construction of a stratified citizenry." "Homosexuality is thus a legal category as much as a medical or psychiatric one. This study not only sets the federal regulation of homosexuality in longer historical view, but also offers an account of the bureaucratization of homosexuality--something forged, in short, through legal and administrative processes. To uncover those processes is to challenge the law's own tendency to authorize homosexuality as somehow pregiven or even natural in its constitution." Id. at 4.).

Crawford, Matthew B., Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) (See Francis Fukuyama’s review, “Making Things Work,” in the NYT Book Review, Sunday, June 7, 2009).

Fredriksen, Paula, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

Grafton, Anthony, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009) ("Sit in your local coffee shop and your laptop can tell you a lot, especially if you wield your search terms adeptly. But if you want a deeper, more local knowledge, you will still have to take the narrower path that leads between the lions and up the stone stairs. There--as in great libraries around the world--you will use all the new sources, all the time, You will check musicians' names and dates at Grove Music Online, read Marlowe's Doctor Faustus on Google Books or EEBO, or savor the idiosyncrasies of British justice as exhibited in the online proceedings of the Old Bailey. But these streams of data, rich as they are, will illuminate rather than eliminate the unique books and prints and manuscripts that only the library can put in front of you. For now, and for the foreseeable future, if you want to piece together the richest possible mosaic of documents and texts and images, you will have to do it in those crowded public rooms where sunlight gleams on varnished tables, as it has for than a century, and knowledge is still embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable manuscripts and books." Id. at 323-324.).

Hardin, Russell, How Do You Know?: The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) (This is very much a worthwhile read for law teachers and law students. From the Preface: "We often say of someone's action that it is irrational. I wish to take a charitable view and suppose that people are not generally irrational according to their own assessments of what they are doing. They seem to be irrational according to some second-party assessment of even a putatively objective account of their interests, and of the means to achieve their ends...." "For explaining human behavior and choice we need an economic theory of knowledge, meaning economic in a very broad and even loose sense. The theory would not be about what the philosophical epistemologist's criteria for truth claims should be, but rather about why we come to know what we know or believe. We can use such a theory to make sense of many behaviors and beliefs, such as religious, moral, and pragmatic beliefs, and of limits on popular knowledge of science. In politics, such a theory makes sense of some aspects of liberalism, cultural commitments, extremism, and voters' lack of knowledge, and it undercuts the median-voter model of party positions in a democracy. Here I present a theory of ordinary knowledge and then apply it to many contexts. Such a theory can explain many seemingly systematic failures of individual choice." Id. at xi.).

Hardin, Russell, Indeterminacy and Society (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2003).

Hardin, Russell, One For All: The Logic of Group Conflict (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 1995) (I shake my head in amazement when I hear or read supposedly well-educated people talking about the post-racial American society now that an African-American has been elected president of the United States. I understand the hopefulness of those who are simply being hopeful. Others, however, are not being hopeful. There are being unrealistic at best, and dishonest at worst. Why? Because they are not acknowledging the continued importance to individuals--be they white, black, brown, yellow, red or purple--of identity and identification. Hardin, writing more than a decade before the 2008 Presidential election, is on point. "The literatures on personal and ethnic identity commonly run two matters together: identity in some objective sense and subjective identification...." "Those who tout the identity of members of some group often seem to intend a normative assertion about the rightness or goodness of identification on the part of those who share the identity. Identity, however, is often not at all objective. Or, rather, one should say, what objectively defines membership in some group is not the proclaimed ethnicity or other characteristics of its members, because this characteristics is often not objectively definable, For example, most of the so-called Muslims, Serbs, and Croats of Yugoslavia have little to distinguish themselves from each other, other than that they use two different alphabets for their joint language and those who are religious belong to three different faiths...." "If we did not have identifications, that is, commitments, it would not matter so much that we have the quasi objective identities we have--I as an Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Huguenot-Hillbilly-Texas-American, you as a Tutsi, Serb, or whatever...." "As nations are imagined communities, so too are individual identities in very large part only imagined. A distant colleague asserts her strong identification with the culture of the place where she was born. She left that place as a small child and has never returned. Her grandparents represent four different ethnic groups who were blended to create her parents and then her. None of them was from the culture with which my colleague identifies. I might as well have declared myself a hillbilly, although I left the hills as a child and never expect to return to live there again. The hills and their culture do not motivate me. In some sense, I have stronger objective grounds for identifying with the hills than my colleague has for identifying with the culture of her birth--my parents before me and theirs before them were also hillbillies. Yet, I have the thinnest of commitments to most of my objective identities--the strongest is probably to the life of trying to understand such issues and to teaching, which involve an identity that I acquired rather than inherited. I have so little commitment to my putative ethnic identities that I know anything about some of them only from casual hearsay, and I may have got some of them wrong. Many Serbs must share my lack of ethnic identification; many others are willing to kill for theirs. Objective identity tells almost none of the story--indeed, it may only tell the victim's story, as many groups have suffered horrendous abuse because they were objectively identified as worthy of suppression or extinction." Id. at 7-8. Can this really be a post-racial America unless it is a post-identity America? Does anyone really think we have entered a post-identity America? Listen to talk radio. Go to one of those "pride", or XYZ-day, parades. There the under sides of identity are very much in evidence. It takes a certain type of persons to step away from group identity. Persons of that type are rare.).

Heclo, Hugh, On Thinking Institutionally (Boulder & London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008) (This is a thoughtful essay. "The messages of the popular culture tell us one thing. The lessons from ordinary life--if we take time to think about them--tell us something else. And it turns out that the lessons from what we see in daily life have a commonsense wisdom that rings true. Striving to make yourself the celebrity star in your own life leaves you striving in an empty house of mirrors. Has the satisfaction proven to be just out of reach? Like the Great Gatsby, has the dream eluded us so far? 'That's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . ... And one fine morning ...' " Id. at 9 (citing the last scene of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby). "Accommodation to the perceived demands of the times can incrementally produce a redirection of institutional mission itself. The modern university [the modern law school within the modern university?] is a good example. In the past one hundred years, the university's basic educational work on behalf of the young adults has been enlarged to cover myriad research agendas, professional training, lucrative sports programs, combating racial and gender discrimination, government contracting, adult education, and on and on. At the same time a strong case can be made that in responding to the demands of business and student consumers, the university's basic mission--to prepare broadly educated citizens for life--has been redirected to training workers for the job market." Id. at 61 (italic added).).

Hedges, Chris, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: PublicAffairs, 2002) ("I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.... It is peddled by mythmakers--historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists, and the state--all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty. It dominates culture, distorts memory, corrupts language, and infects everything around it, even humor, which becomes preoccupied with the grim perversities of smut and death. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of our place in the planet are laid bare when we watch those around us sink to the lowest depths. War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface within all of us. And this is why for many war is so hard to discuss once it is over." "The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble. And those who have the least meaning in their lives, the impoverished refugees in Gaza, the disenfranchised North African immigrants in France, even the legions of young who live in the splendid indolence and safety of the industrialized world, are all susceptible to war's appeal." Id. at 3-4.).

Holmes, Richard, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (New York: Pantheon, 2008) (See Christopher Benfey's review, 'Science and the Sublime,' in The NYT Book Review, July 19, 2009.).

Hulsman, John C., & A. Wess Mitchell, The Godfather Doctrine: A Foreign Policy Parable (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("The age of American global dominance is drawing to a rapid and definitive close." Id. at 1.).

Husak, Douglas, Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2008) (This is a thoughtful book and a worthwhile read for all law students, especially those future assistant district attorneys who are so confident that they are on the side of right, truth, and justice. “What is worrisome about delegating so much authority to prosecutors? Surely the objection cannot be that prosecutors fail to use their power to punish even more individuals than are sentenced at the present time. From the perspective of a legal philosopher, the answer is simple. Even when exercised wisely, this discretionary power, unchecked and unbalanced by other branches of government, is incompatible with the rule of law. This deterioration in the rule of law produces injustices. Because real power in our criminal justice system is not exercised in conformity with any principles that commentators have been able to formulate, no one is able to answer the question that legal realists like Oliver Wendell Holmes identified as fundamental to understanding what the law is. According to Holmes, the law consists in ‘prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious.’ Without endorsing the whole school of jurisprudence Holmes sought to defend, he clearly articulated the central concern of laypersons who make inquiries about the law. Holmes recognized that experts who profess to know the law should be able to make a fairly accurate ‘prediction that if a man does or omits certain things he will be made to suffer in this or that way by judgment of the court.’ But these predictions become notoriously unreliable in a system in which real power, and the decisions that govern the fate of individuals, is wielded with so much discretion.” Id. at 27 (citations omitted). “Thus I take for granted that those who teach and theorize about the criminal law would be unable to answer the simple and straightforward questions I have borrowed from Holmes. If knowledge of the criminal law consists in the ability to make reliable forecasts about what conduct will be punished, it follows that no one knows the law. Experts in the criminal law cannot make accurate predictions about potential offenders because the fate of such persons is not a function of the law at all. The real criminal law, as Holmes would construe it, is formulated by police and prosecutors.” Id. at 31.)

Kirn, Walter, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (New York: Doubleday, 2009) ("Percentile is destiny in America." Id. at 5. From the jacket cover: "Lost in the Meritocracy reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never look back--or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy.").

Lincoln, Abraham., Lincoln on Race and Slavery edited and introduced by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., coedited by Donald Yacovone (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009).

Markovits, Daniel, A Modern Legal Ethics: Adversary Advocacy in a Democratic Age (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) (This is a worthwhile read for law students and young lawyers. From my perspective, however, it is also a sad and disheartening read. Why? Though it certainly was not the intent of Professor Markovits for the readers to draw this conclusion, in the final analysis one is seemingly compelled to acknowledge that being a lawyer is pretty much incompatible with living a truly moral life. Yes, to be effective lawyers, lawyers must lie, etc. It would be too much to expect for these capacity and willingness to lie as a lawyer (what Markovits calls “the lawyerly vices”) to not migrant and inflect the nonlawyer aspects and areas of the lawyers’ lives. Lawyers may be able to compartmentalize their lives in many ways (e.g., be a bulldog lawyer, yet be a warm and affectionate spouse or parent). Yet, I doubt that many lawyers are so good at compartmentalizing that the capacity to lie, etc., as lawyers will not increase their tendency to lie, etc., elsewhere (e.g., lie to their spouses and children). One might refer to this tendency as 'lawyerly-vice drift'. Anyone who has ever practiced law for more than a few years knows first-hand how difficult, if not impossible, it is to stop being a lawyer (or, stop thinking like a lawyers) when engaged in nonlaw activity. “Just as social roles give their occupants access to forms of first-personal moral life from which others are excluded, so also do roles exclude their occupants from the more ordinary forms of first-personal moral life that they displace.” Id. at 251.).

McGlone, Robert E., John Brown’s War Against Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2009)

Mehlman, Maxwell J., The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2009) (In reading this book I had thoughts of a different meaning of 'the perfect is the enemy of the good'. "Thanks to biomedical enhancement, in six months, you can be transformed. Your eyesight can become 20/5, so that you can see something from 20 feet away as clearly as a person with normal vision sees it at 5 feet. You can increase your muscle mass by 40 percent; improve your cognitive function so that you can remember better, solve harder problems, and cope better with emergencies; elevate your mood; sustain your erection; and surgically reshape your body so completely that even close friends will have trouble recognizing you." Id. at 1. "[T]he distribution of favorable genes is random only to a limited degree. As we shall see, prize children can be bred in much the same way as prize cattle, and new reproductive technologies like sperm and egg donation and preimplantation genetic diagnosis are increasingly giving parents the ability to select offspring with favorable characteristics. Talent, in short, is becoming less and less 'natural.' As genetic science advances, it may well give rise to genetic manipulations that actively design a child's genetic endowment. At that point, natural talent will all but have disappeared." Id. at 70-71.).

Raz, Joseph, Between Authority and Interpretation (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009).

Schweik, Susan M., The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York & London: NYU Press, 2009) (This book is part of the NYU Press's The History of Disability series. The shortcomings of this flawed and disappointing book are, I think, captured in the book's "Conclusion". "This book has told the story of a petty ordinance, barely enforced, small-minded, and obscure. I have aimed to show how large and how ongoing the implications of that story are. The law, remembered powerfully by one social movement alone as a legend and a lesson about disability, turns out to be about much more: about class antagonism, the distribution of wealth, and the routine suppression of resistance; about authenticity and masquerade; about how distinctions between genders and race and between Americans and others have been sorted out by Americans (and others); about bodily vulnerability and animality; about political action." Id. at 289-290. If The Ugly Laws is about a petty, barely enforced, small-minded and obscure ordinance, why should the readers find a book-length discussion of interest? Then, we are informed that The Ugly Laws is about almost everything: class, distribution of wealth, suppression, resistance, authenticity, masquerade, race, gender, Americans and foreigner, and on and on. Are ugly laws the best vantage point from which to view those other things? Or does so trying make ugly laws seem relatively trivial to those not already involved in the cause? Often times, less is more. In short, The Ugly Laws is an insider’s book for insiders. Fine. For non-insider, however, the treatment of the subject seems small, forced, whiney and, as a consequence, unappealing and unconvincing. This is unfortunate, as the broad subject of The Ugly Laws is a worthy subject, a subject waiting for legal and/or economic historians to tackle.)

Thompson, Mark, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

Tuck, Richard, Free Riding (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2008).

Walbert, Kate, A Short History of Women: A Novel (New York & London: Scribner, 2009) ("'I am just trying to Do something,' Dorothy says, though Caroline is busy looking for dinner inspiration, for anything other than pasta. 'You don't care to understand. It's like everything. Conversation, for example, is now just approximations of opinions, etcetera, etcetera. I'm just trying to be real when everything is an approximation.'" Id. at 45. See Leah Hager Cohen's review, 'Feminine Mystique,' in The NYT Book Review, June 14, 2009.).

Wallace, David Foster, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Boston & New York: Little, Brown, 2006).

Wilson, Mark, Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior (Oxford & New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford U. Press, 2006) ("Teenage Victory. Returning to our main themes, in our teenager's thinking we plainly witness the reentry of the "great ideas" worship discussed in connection with the Darwin critics of 2,ii: it is only the pure grasp of important concepts that matters, not the fussy details of how they are applied in concrete circumstances. If we are honest with ourselves, we should recognize the insidious magnetism of this conceit. Most of us would like to know everything there is to know, but, as this state is plainly unattainable, we cultivate rationales for skimming off the essential cream of a subject, leaving the more objectionable aspects of toil to the little fellow. In this fashion, we fall into a form of intellectual self-regard that generally carries foolishness and error in its wake: the attitudes of those who know little of substance but fancy themselves to be great judges of intellectual capital when it is presented to them ("I can recognize a good idea when I see it" is the characteristic mantra of the self-important). Scions of wealth who ascend to great offices through family ties commonly develop arrogancies of this ilk: they persuade themselves that they enjoy some distinguished "intuitive insight" that guides their decisions faultlessly onward, much to the chagrin of the better informed underlings forced to endure such whimsies. Through his pulp fiction philosophizing, our ward has come to cherish unmoored conceptual attainment of exactly this undesirable type." Id. at 509.).

Wimsatt, William C., Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2007).

VOEGELIN

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 27: The Nature of the Law and related Legal Writings edited by Robert Anthony Pascal, James Lee Babin &John William Corrington (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1991) (From the essay, 'Two Recent Contributions to the Science of Law': "Lawyers are a noble and arrogant race. Filled with understandable pride by the practical importance of their profession, they all too frequently believe that if they master the law dogmatically, they are sufficiently equipped to deal with it scientifically--which they are not." Id. at 87, 93-94.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 28: What is History? and Other Unpublished Writings edited with an introduction by Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1990).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 29: Selected Correspondence 1924-1949 translated from the German by William Petropulos, edited with an introduction by Jurgen Gebhardt (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 2009).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 30: Selected Correspondence 1950-1984 translated from the German by Sandy Adler, Thomas A. Hollweck, and William Petropulos, edited with an introduction by William Petropulos (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 2007) (From at letter to Robert Heilman, dated February 25, 1952: "Locally we are making an experiment that you would enjoy. The Dean [Cecil G. Taylor] has organized, with the assistance of two younger men, a Colloquium on Humanities. Every two weeks a group of fifteen students meets with two faculty members and the organizers of the show to discuss some great books, as for instance Machiavelli, Locke, Mill, Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, St. Augustine, etc. It is a small scale imitation of greater experiments that you know so well. On our smaller scale, however, there comes more clearly into view the essence of the situation: The A&S College does not give the liberal education which it is supposed to give, for the good reason that the faculty is not too liberally educated itself. Hence, [the] next step, a special enterprise is made to supply this education at least in homeopathic form. And this diluted dose is to be administered by the same faculty which cannot administer it in the ordinary course of their activity. This situation became painfully obvious when the choice of personnel had to be made. The Dean agrees now, in private, that the best result of the enterprise will be that at least some of the faculty members will be compelled to read the books which they are supposed to discuss with students. Under this aspect, perhaps, the effort is not entirely wasted." Id. at 104-105.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 31: Hitler and the Germans translated, edited, and with an introduction by Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1999) ("Or the professors--I will not here, for heaven's sake, defend the professors. When in the early 1930s, after Hitler had come into power, a whole series of professors, not only Jews, were relieved of their posts, none of the others, who were not removed, ever refused to occupy with pleasure one of the posts vacated through this dismissal. Since I was myself dismissed in 1938, I have always a particularly keen eye for people who became tenured professors after 1933. So, there is this kind of aiding and abetting and says: 'No, I won't do that. Whoever is dismissed, I won't take that place.' That does not happen." Id. at 235. "Thus, this kind of cooperation is participation in crime, which falls under the notion of accessory. The system cannot maintain itself if people in individual situations do not cooperate but offer resistance on moral grounds. Where that does not happen, we have precisely the condition of moral degeneration." Id. at 236.) .

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 32: The Theory of Governance and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1921-1938 translated from the German by Sue Bollans, Jodi Cockerill, M. J. Hanak, Ingrid Heldt, Elisabeth Von Lochner, and William Petropulos, edited with an introduction by William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 2003).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 33: The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers 1939-1985 edited with an introduction by William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 2004) ("My second question is prompted by the problem of pluralism. Today, pluralism has two meanings that have to be distinguished. The one leads to the Aristotelian problem of stasis: In light of individual interests and the understanding of the common good, various opinions exist as to how public business should be conducted. The other meaning, which is preferred by American intellectuals, is that of the freedom of all kinds of opinions, including that of ideologies. There is of course a limit to this second kind of pluralism: The fundamental rights and freedoms are not a suicide pact! There is no license for being so pluralistic that the divisive issues destroy the consensus." Id. at 171-172. "We just have to put up with the fact that there are people who are not sufficiently literate to handle the problems with which we have to deal. I have always had to explain to the students at the beginning of my seminars all my life: There is no such thing as a right to be stupid; there is no such thing as a right to be illiterate; there is no such thing as a right to be incompetent. It is usually taken for granted you have a right to be all these things and will still be regarded as a wonderful person." Id. at 419.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 34: Autobiographical Reflections, Revised Edition with a Voegelin Glossary and Cumulative Index edited with an introduction by Ellis Sandoz (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 2006).

A COMMENT ON READING

Morgan, Edmund S., American Heroes: Profiles of Men and Women Who Shaped Early America (New York & London: Norton, 2009) (From the essay "Dangerous Books": "He was a man who hated change in any form. And there is no more insidious instrument of change than a library in which professors or students or people in general are allowed to read the books." "In fact, in view of what books have done to change the world, it is strange that those who fear change have not succeeded in burning them all long since. The trouble with books is that people will read them. And when they do, they are bound to get new and dangerous ideas. Libraries are the great hothouses of change, where new ideas are nursed into being and then turned loose to do their work. And the ideas are not always benign. One thinks at once of Karl Marx, laboring through the musty volumes of the British Museum and emerging with those notions that turned the world upside down. Or the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris--how much, one wonders, did its volumes contribute to the French Revolution?" Id. at 24. "Ezra Stiles, as you can see, was a dangerous man. But the danger lay less in his own radical views than in the freedom he wanted for others, the freedom to read and from reading to think and speak the thoughts that dissolve old institutions and create new ones. That kind of freedom is as dangerous today as it was them. If we allow young men and women to read and think, we must expect that their thoughts will not be our thoughts and that they will violate much that we hold dear." Id. at 34. "Dangerous Books" was written in 1959. In 2009, fifty years later, reading and books are still dangerous in the ways noted by Professor Morgan. The enemies of reading and books might perceive the threat to be less immediate or pressing today, however, since there has been an mushrooming of the number diversions that distract many from reading (e.g., reality television, the internet and social networking, talk radio). Reading and books are less of a threat when few read, fewer still read serious books. It shall be interesting to see how higher education evolves (or devolves) as nonreaders and nonreaders of series books become teachers. Entropy is not limited to the physical world. From the essay "Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight": "Historians, most of whom teach in colleges and universities, know something at first hand of student fashions and students enthusiasms. Students as a class are surely fickle. Few historians, I believe, would be ready to turn over the choice of a college president, or even of a faculty member, to their students." "Unhappily when historians read the letters of an eighteenth-century student, they do not always employ the same perspective. . . . By examining a larger number of student letters, we may gain a similar perspective on them. It is not even necessary to read very far in order to observe the rapidity with which students feeling vibrated from enthusiasm to discontent and back again." Id. at 190.)

CAPITALISM?

Gage, Beverly, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror (Oxford & New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009) ("[Ligi] blamed the apparent obfuscation of his radical commitments on 'my poor lawyer of mediocre height, but with brains more mediocre,' who 'urged me to deny everything that I had said in the beginning, but to what advantage? For the fear of a few months of prison perhaps?'" Id. at 250 (italic added).).

Krugman, Paul, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 (New York & London: Norton, 2009) (‘What does it mean to say that depression economics has returned? Essentially it means that for the first time in two generations, failures on the demand side of the economy—insufficient private spending to make use of the available productive capacity—have become the clear and present limitation on prosperity for a large part of the world.” Id. at 182.).

Lewis, Michael, ed., Panic!: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity ( New York & London: Norton, 2009) ("Financial panics have become almost commonplace; events that are meant [?] to occur once in a millennium now seem to occur every few years. Could this be because the financial system was built on an idea that badly underestimates the risk of catastrophe--and so conspires with human nature to create them?" Id. at 8.).

Posner, Richard A., A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009) (Perhaps Posner says little more than what a careful and diligent reader of The New York Times, or The Wall Street Journal, or The Economist, would be unaware, he does tie it together in a very pragmatic manner. And, given his audience and his attempt to write a short, and nontechnical, book, this is a worthwhile read. Though, be one a liberal or a conservative, one might take issue with Posner on certain points. There is one glaring shortcoming, however. In highlighting the role or contribution of various professions (e.g., economists, bankers, politicians,) to this failure of capitalism, Posner does not discuss the legal profession. He mentions deregulation, poor supervision by the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and Congress, but he does not raise that the legal profession may have been asleep at the switch, if not complicit, in this economic meltdown. On another point: "The Republican Party flaunted the anti-intellectualism of its supporters, deriding highly educated people who speak in complete sentences as 'elitists'--an attitude that sorted badly with the strong intellectual tradition of conservatism. It is a self-defeating strategy of conservatives to argue that all intellectuals are liberal and therefore conservatives should think with their guts rather than their brains. The economic crisis in which the nation finds itself cannot be solved in the gut." Id. at 308.).

Stiles, T. J., The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Knopf, 2009).