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).

DOCUMENTING SOME OF THE EVIL IN THIS WORLD

Megargee, Geoffrey P., ed., United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1922-1945: Volume I, Part A & Part B: Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA) (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U. Press, 2009).

LEARN TO THINK

Wallace, David Foster, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2009) ("As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your head." "What you don't yet know are the stakes of this struggle." "In the twenty years since my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand these stakes, and to see that the liberal arts cliché about 'teaching you think' was actually shorthand for a very deep and important truth." " 'Learning how to think' really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.". "It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience." "Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed." Id. at 50-55. This is short volume is the late David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College.).

VARIED READINGS#5

Adler, Matthew D. & Eric A. Posner, eds., Cost-Benefit Analysis: Legal, Economic, and Philosophical Perspectives (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2001) (This is a very worthwhile read, especially for those interested in administrative law and regulation. The conclusion of Gary S. Becker, "A Comment on the Conference on Cost-Benefit Analysis," sums it up well. "Cost-benefit analysis has a strong and clear place in a social planner model of political choices. But that model is of little value in explaining actual regulations, taxes, and subsidies. Yet, even when political decisions result from competition among interest groups, benefits and costs help explain which policies are adopted. Moreover, information about the true benefits and costs of different programs sometimes determines whether policies muster enough political support." Id. at 313, 316.).

Aron, Raymond, The Opium of the Intellectuals translated from the French by Terence Kilmartin (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957) ("Human actions are always intelligible. When they cease to be so, their authors are put outside the pale of humanity, they are regarded as lunatics, strangers to the species. But intelligibility does not come under a single heading and does not guarantee that the whole, each single element of which is in itself intelligible, makes sense to the observer." Id. at 136. "Communication between French and American intellectuals is all the more difficult because their situation is in many respects diametrically opposed." "The number of university graduates or professional writers is higher in America than in France, both absolutely and relatively, since it increases with economic progress. But the typical representative of the American intelligentsia is not scholar or writer but an expert--an economist or sociologist. The Americans put their trust in the technician, not in the cultivated man. . . . [T]he simple, global fact remains that the novelist or philosopher, who holds the centre of the stage in France does not impose the stamp of his personality or his vocabulary on the American intelligentsia." Id. at 228-229 (italic added).).

Bales, Kevin & Ron Soodalter, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 2009) ("Certain things we know to be true. We know that slavery is a bad thing, perpetrated by bad people. We also know that slavery not only exists throughout the world today but flourishes. With approximately twenty-seven million people in bondage, it is thought to be the third most profitable criminal enterprise of our time, following only drugs and guns. In fact, more than twice as many people are in bondage in the world today than were taken from Africa during the entire 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade. And we know that slavery is alive and more than well in the United States, thriving in the dark, and practiced in many forms in places where you'd least expect it." Id. at 3. "This time there is no moral panic; most Americans are simply clueless. Id. at 11.).

Bodin, Jean, Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime translated with Introduction, Annotations, and Critical Readings by Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz (Princeton & London: Princeton U. Press, 1975).

Coleman, James S., Foundations of Social Theory (Cambridge & London: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 1990) (“‘Social theory,’ as taught in the universities, is largely a history of social thought. An unfriendly critic would say that current practice in social theory consists of chanting old mantras and invoking nineteenth-century theorists. Meanwhile, however, societies have been undergoing an organizational revolution. Just as the forests and fields of the physical environment are being replaced by streets and skyscrapers, the primordial institutions around which societies have developed are being replaced by purposively constructed social organization. Given those changes, we may wonder: Are we going where we want to go? Can we modify the direction? How do we choose a direction? But before we can ask these questions, we needs to know where we are going, and for that, we need a robust social theory. Such a theory requires a strong foundation, and that is what this book is intended to provide.” Id. at xv.).

Gomez, Laura E., Manifest Destinies the Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: NYU Press, 2007).

Greene, Julie, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009) (See David Oshinsky’s review, “They Dug It” in NYT Book Review, March 27, 2009.).

Kolakowshi, Leszek, Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown translated from the Polish by P. S. Falla (New York & London: Norton, 2005) ("It may seem that after the demise of this multi-national machine, intellectually inept but efficient as an instrument of repression and exploitation, Marxism as a subject of study is buried for good, and that there is no point in digging it out from oblivion. But this is not a good argument. Our interest in the ideas of the past does not depend on their intellectual value, nor on their persuasive power in the present. We study various mythologies of long-dead religions, and the fact that there are no longer any believers does not make this study any less interesting. As a part of the history of religions, and of the history of culture, such study gives us insights into the spiritual activity of mankind., into our soul and its relations with other forms of human life. Inquiry into the history of ideas, whether religious, philosophical or political, is a search for our self-identity, for the meaning of our mental and physical efforts. The history of utopias is no less fascinating than the history of metallurgy or of chemical engineering." Id. at v-vi. "But we may safely predict that Marx himself will become more and more what he already is: a chapter from a textbook on the history of ideas, a figure that no longer evokes any emotions, simply the author of one of the 'great books' of the nineteenth century--one of those books that very few bother to read but whose titles are known to the educated public." Id. at 1214.).

Miller, James A., Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009) ("In many respects this is an archival project. My purpose has not been primarily to appeal to a sense of retrospective indignation about a particularly sordid episode in twentieth-century American racial history (although, to be sure, any sober account of the case invariably provokes such a reaction), but to explore the ways in which the shifting lexicon surrounding the Scottsboro case sheds light upon shifting and enduring American attitudes towards race and justice." Id. at 6.).

Peters, Gretchen, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2009) ("Eight years after 9/11, the single greatest failure in the war on terror is not that Osama bin Laden continues to elude capture, or that the Taliban has staged a comeback, or even that al Qaeda is regrouping in Pakistan's tribal areas, it's the spectacular incapacity of western law enforcement to disrupt the flow of money that is keeping their networks afloat." Id. at 167.).

Schama, Simon, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (New York: Knopf, 1977) ("The major liability of the Patriots was not weakness of numbers, Nor was it ... a half-heartedness in pursuit of their professed aspirations to a form of representative government. On the contrary, it was rather an unheeding attachment to the letter and the spirit of those ideas, which diluted the concentration of their strength and compromised the effectiveness of their organisation. For in their determination to reconcile democracy with their mission of national renewal, they were, at least until the eleventh hour, obliged to accept the historical structure of institutions. Politically radical, they remained institutionally conservative. Or, put another way, they aspired to be democratic federalists. The unfortunate paradox of all revolutions, certainly all pre-twentieth-century revolutions-as de Tocqueville pointed out--is the contradiction between liberty and power. Those which inherited a highly centralised and autocratic apparatus of state institutions stood the best chance of survival but also ran the greatest risk of extinguishing the liberties for which the revolution had been undertaken. Such of course was the case in France, and conceivably in Russia a century later." Id. at 102).).

Schelling, Thomas C., Choice and Consequence (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 1984).

Schelling, Thomas C., The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 1960, 1980).

Shachar, Ayelet, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Cambridge & London: Harvard U. Press, 2009) (This is an interesting, albeit most frustrating, read. Though sensitive the issue of global inequality, I am doubtful that birthright citizenship as a form of property-interest is the best means for analyzing and addressing that issue. Even if it ultimately is a productive means of analysis, etc., I don't think the theoretical underpinning are sufficiently developed. The project has, I think, started at the wrong end and at the wrong level. I would take it from the global to the domestic, focusing on (to use the United States as the example) not on nation citizenship but state, city, community residency. Why might a state, a city, or even a gated-community want to define residency in certain ways, and way which do manifest inequalities and the just the sort of birthright lottery Shachar is concerned just on a less grand scale. Conservatives will not be convinced by the arguments presented (but they are not the intended audience). I would not suggest that it all comes down to economics, but I think incorporation of more economic analysis would eliminate much of the unhelpful, touchy-feely notions contained in the book. Still, it is worth the read.).

Sunstein, Cass R., A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2009).

Tett, Gillian, Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe (New York: Free Press, 2009) ("These days . . . I realize that the finance world's lack of interest in wider social matters cuts to the very heart of what has gone wrong. What social anthropology teaches its adherents is that nothing in society ever exists in a vacuum or in isolation. Holistic analysis that tries to link different parts of a social structure is crucial, be that in respect to wedding rituals or trading floors. Anthropology also instills a sense of skepticism about official rhetoric. In most societies, elites try to maintain their power not simply by garnering wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of both what is said and what is not discussed. Social "silences" serve to maintain power structures, in ways that participants often barely understand themselves let alone plan." "In recent years, regulators, bankers, politicians, investors, and journalists have all failed to employ truly holistic thought--to our collective cost. Bankers have treated their mathematical models as if they were an infallible guide to the future, failing to see that these models were based on a ridiculously limited set of data" Id. at 252. Also see Paul M. Barret's review in The NYT Book Review, Sunday, June 14, 2008). A question I ask myself, and try to raise in my courses, is this: "What were the lawyers doing when this or that problem was developing?” Many more members of the legal profession need to own up to their lack of interests in wider social matters, their lack of holistic analysis, etc., and their inability to see beyond the immediate litigation, transaction and, yes, billable hours.).

Umrigar, Thrity, The Weight of Heaven: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2009) ("Out of the blue, he remembered something his grandma Benton had once said to him in one of her boozy moments. The old lady, gin on her breath, had bent toward the startled eleven-year-old boy and said, 'You know the most dangerous force on earth, darlin'? It ain't the atom bomb. It's a man who is truly free. That's who you gotta watch out for.' " Id. at 363.).

HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 19: History of Political Ideas, Volume I: Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity edited with an introduction by Athanasios Moulakis (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1997) ("What we call political ideas are, in a well-consolidated period, the ideas of those who walk in the light, or at the best of those who have a chance to raise their heads sufficiently high to make their voices heard. The thoughts and attitudes of the vast silent masses are almost unknown." Id. at 70. Of course, in this day of the Internet, blogs, social networks, twittering, etc., it is understandable that many of the vast mass gain the false impression that they, if not everyone, has a 'heard' voice and that there is no longer silent masses. This is not so. If nothing else, the sheer volume of Internet traffic in these arenas creates so much (what economists call) noise that individuals and most groups do not register as more than a barely audible whisper (if being kind) and an annoying buzz (if being honest). The old saw remains true: There are only [fill in a relatively small number, say 400] people in the world who matter. What are the chance of you, me, or anyone we know being one of the four hundred? Taken individually, we are insignificant and what we think or say has little, if any, political weight.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 20: History of Political Ideas, Volume II: The Middle Ages to Aquinas edited with an introduction by Peter von Sivers (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1997) ("In the work of Siger [de Brabant, a thirteenth-century philosopher] we find the sentence: 'you shall wake, study, and read that out of the remaining doubt you are driven to further studying and reading, for life without letters (vivere sine litteris) is death and the grave of the vulgar.' " Id. at 190-191.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 21: History of Political Ideas, Volume III: The Later Middle Ages edited with an introduction by David Walsh (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1998) ("There is no guarantee whatsoever that the introduction of a constitution in a country will produce constitutional government; it may just as well produce a revolutionary shambles. Freedom of speech, for instance, is considered an essential of constitutionality; and it is appropriate, indeed, as an instrument of government when the society is firmly integrated, for in that case it will produce the conditions for understanding governmental policies that we call consent, while its abuse will be unimportant because social resistance against it is strong enough to prevent disrupting effects. If a society is less well integrated, freedom of speech may produce not public opinion, pressure on the government, and consent--which is its purpose as an instrument--but a degeneration of the society into a wilderness of distrust, disloyalties, and revolutionary chaos, as we have seen it do in the period preceding the fall of France and, with still more disastrous effects, in the marvelously constitutional Weimar Republic." Id. at 145. Query: Is early twenty-first-century America a 'firmly integrated society'? Or, are we degenerating into "a wilderness of distrust, disloyalties, and revolutionary chaos"?).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 22: History of Political Ideas, Volume IV: Renaissance and Reformation edited with an introduction by David L. Morse and William M. Thompson (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1998) (On Erasmus: "One must say of him what must be said of so many intellectuals after him: that he was fundamentally right in his emotional revolt but totally wrong in his intellectual response." Id. at 96-97. On Thomas More: "The work of More is the first evocation of a people who set themselves as the standard of mankind. Again, More is not the cause of the sequel in pragmatic history; but , again, here we get the first glimpse of an international and intercivilizational field of politics on which everyone has an ideal like the Utopians and feels entitled to lay down the principles of justice for everyone else, with the ensuing rationality of warfare in the service of the ideal. In the Utopia we can observe in formation a complex of sentiments and ideas that in the following centuries became a decisive factor in Western history, and this seems to be its true historical importance, The actual atrocities of Western colonial imperialism, of National Socialism, and of Communism mark the end of a curve, of which the beginning is morked by the playful atrocity of the humanistic intellectual." Id. at 130. One wonder what Voegelin would said about those American intellectuals known as the Neoconservatives. Have not the neoconservatives set themselves as the standard for America, and for mankind? Has neoconservatism not let to significant missteps on the part of the United States in international politics? Perhaps, like Erasmus, neoconservatives were fundamentally right in their emotional revolt totally wrong in their intellectual response.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 23: History of Political Ideas, Volume V: Religion and The Rise of Modernity edited with an introduction by James L. Wiser (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1998) ("The English development received its specific color through the prevailing higher degree of centralization of the state. . . . Parliament had become an institution of considerable representative prestige, and the early rationalization of the legal system had favored the growth of a lawyers' class with a social weight of its own on the national scale. . . . The supremacy of the king in the Church of England made the crown responsible for the semi-Protestantism that could not satisfy the Calvinist dissenters and for the extension of royal prerogative in temporal matters, encroaching on the domain of the lawyers. These were the tendencies that crystallized in the seventeenth century in the peculiarly English alliance of lawyers and dissenters against the crown and determined the structure of the English Revolution." "Beyond the more immediate political effect, however, the alignment had far-reaching consequences for English intellectual history, consequences that affect the structure of Western politics to this day. For the association of legal and religious struggles has fostered the English and, with ever greater intenseness, the American habit of injecting legal categories into conflicts of ideas and historical forces. It is the habit--which grates so much on the nerves of the rest of the world--of treating such clashes as legal issues and, consequently, branding the opponent in a historical conflict as "aggressor" or "criminal," "outlawing" his ideas, and burdening him with the "guilt" of the disturbance. . . . Since the habit, like all bad habits, can easily be acquired by others, and since, in fact, the Soviet government in turn defined as "aggressor" anybody who was at war with the Soviet Union, it seems that any future war will be a war between criminals." Id. at 27-28. On La Boetie: "And quite realistically he also understands that the tyrant will not favor studies that are apt to arouse critical consciousness in the student. The few who think will be effectively isolated if the tyrant preserves a low general level of literacy among the subjects. Without public discussion, the few will not event know each other. Thus, the tyrant destroys the liberty 'to act, to talk, and as it were even to think; for the few will be locked up in their phantasies.' " Id. at 36. On Calvinism and hicktowns: "The reform movement is essentially a town movement; and it could unfold its possibilities much better under the conditions of town life than under those of a large, populous, territorial realm. The Swiss towns, and later the New England settlements, have become the great instances of Calvinist discipline, not because the Swiss or New Englanders were more religious than other people, but because medieval town life, with small communities on a small territory, was conducive to close supervision of the people and enforcement of discipline. Petty snooping, petty rules of conduct, and their enforcement were features of medieval town life without Calvin--just as today hicktowns are hells of supervision by interested neighbors. . . . Only the peculiarly terroristic atmosphere of a small town permits the tight control of the people that the Reformers intended; in large territories like France the attempt at its realization will provoke the resistance of a more widely differentiated population. . . . Id. at 49-50. In a footnote, Voegelin makes this observation: "Small-town situations, however, can be created through improvement of communications in large territories and through dependence of large populations on centrally controlled institutions. Technological "progress" with its effect of tightening controls over large territories and populations has produced in modern nations a hicktown atmosphere without which the rise and maintenance of terroristic regimes would hardly be possible." Id. at 50, fn. 21. I don't think anyone has yet explored or articulated the hicktown potential of aspects of the Internet, tracking of website visits, social networking, global positioning systems, etc. Yes, the Internet facilitates communication and the flow of information, but it is not without a downside. Might we be on the eve nightmare? Hicktown meets Orwell's 1984. "We have discussed the earlier forms of antiphilosophism in Eramus, Luther, and Calvin. By the time of Hooker, among the English disciplinarians, antiphilosophism had become a point of honor. Fanatical scripturalism made it impermissible to discuss problems of faith and politics in other than biblical terms. To quote Aristotle, the patres, or the scholastics was an attack on true religion; any attempt at systematic thinking was proof that the author relied more on reason than on the word of God. To be philosophically ignorant was the mark or the right-minded citizen; to be philosophically educated was not only heretical but bordered on treason and called for governmental action. This interesting trend . . . was checked due to the resistance of Hooker; but it has remained a powerful component, nevertheless, in English, and even more so in American, public life. Philosophical illiteracy is still considered something like a civic duty, even in broad sectors of the academic world; and concern with philosophical problems still makes a man suspect. . . . The point deserves special attention because this Puritan heritage has become one of the fatal handicaps in American democratic leadership of Western civilization and of the world at large. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make the treasure of democratic ideas appealing to the educated classes outside the Anglo-Saxon area unless it is conceptually linked with the tradition of Western philosophical thought and, thus, can be made intelligible for people who live in this tradition." Id. at 92. ).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 24: History of Political Ideas, Volume VI: Revolution and The New Science edited with an introduction by Barry Cooper (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1998) (On the speaking "metaphorically of the cancerous growth of the rational-utilitarian segment on modern civilization": "We must recognize the atmosphere of power in which the advancement of science moves, because there are certain peculiarities incidental to the process that otherwise would appear as sheer lunacy. The source of these apparent lunacies is the utilitarian rationality of science. The idea of power through science has a rational core. If we have knowledge of causal relations we can form means-end relations, and if we have the means we can achieve the end. Hence, knowledge in this sense is eminently useful. This rational, utilitarian core in itself is of necessity to be found in all human existence, both personal and social. Utilitarian rationality determines a segment of life in primitive as well as in high civilizations, and in itself is not the specific determinant of any particular society. Under the impact of the modern advancement of science, however, this core has acquired the characteristics of a cancerous growth. The rational-utilitarian segment is expanding in our civilization so strongly that the social realization of other values is noticeably weakened. This expansion is carried by the mass creed that the utilitarian dominion over nature through science should and will become the exclusive preoccupation of man as well as the exclusive determinant for the structure of society. In the nineteenth century this idea of utilitarian exclusiveness crystallized in the belief that the domination of man over man would ultimately be replaced by the dominion of man over nature, and that the government of men will be replaced by the administration of things. At this point we have to be beware of the error into which critics of the totalitarian movements have fallen so frequently: the error that an idea is politically unimportant because philosophically it is stark nonsense. The idea that structure and problems of human existence can be superseded in historical society by the utilitarian segment of existence is certainly and plainly nonsense. It is equivalent to the idea that the nature of man can be abolished without abolishing man, or that spiritual order can be removed from existence without disordering existence. Any attempt at its realization can lead nowhere but to the self-destruction of a society. Nevertheless, the fact that the idea is nonsensical has not in the least prevented its becoming the inspiration of the strongest political movement of our age. Here we can see in the raw the fascination of power that exudes from the new science: it is so overwhelming that it eclipses an awareness of the elementary problems of human existence. Science becomes an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man." Id. at 208-209. This was written before the invention of the Internet, and before the Internet and being always connected became idols. The twenty-first century is beginning to evidence of the emergence of new creatures, what I heard as aptly labeled as 'posthumans'. Creatures who, though encased in human form, are completely incapable of being disconnected to their electronic gadgets and Internet connections for more that three minutes and, as a consequence, are incapable of unmediated (i.e., non-electronic) interaction with humans.).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 25: History of Political Ideas, Volume VII: The New Order and Last Orientation edited with an introduction by Jurgen Gebhardt and Thomas A. Hollweck (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1999).

Voegelin, Eric, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Volume 26: History of Political Ideas, Volume VIII: Crisis and The Apocalypse of Man edited with an introduction by David Walsh (Columbia & London: U. of Missouri Press, 1999) ("The insight into the spiritual process that occurs in Helvetius will shed some light on the significance of genetic, sensualist psychology, as well as on the complex of philosophical assumption attached to it, for the political evolution of Western society. The tenacity of faith in this complex of ideas is certainly not caused by its merits as an adequate interpretation of man and society. The inadequacy of a pleasure-pain psychology, the poverty of utilitarian ethics, the impossibility of explaining moral phenomena by the pursuit of happiness, the uselessness of the greatest happiness of the greatest number as a principle of social ethics--all these have been demonstrated over and over again in a voluminous literature. Nevertheless, even today this complex of ideas holds a fascination for a not inconsiderable number of persons. This fascination will be more intelligible if we see the complex of sensualism, utilitarianism, and so on, not as a set of verifiable propositions but as the dogma of a religion of socially immanent salvation. Enlightened utilitarianism is the first in the series of totalitarian, sectarian movements, later followed by Positivism, Communism, and National Socialism." Id. at 63. And what are the totalitarian, sectarian movements of the early twenty-first century?).